By Caitlin Kelly
Having been basically mugged on Facebook this week by someone determined to professionally sabotage me, I’m a little sour on social media right now.
It was real shock to me, and has left me sickened by how vicious someone can choose to be.
So with July 1 (Canada Day) and July 4 coming up, I’m laying down tools for now.
See you in a week or so.
Stay cool!
By Caitlin Kelly
I wrote this post in 2012…and so lucky it all holds true, still.
I’ve updated it a bit to reflect a few changes.
I was born in Vancouver, Canada; moved at the age of two to London, England for three years; grew up in Toronto and also lived twice in Montreal, in rural New Hampshire, Cuernavaca, Mexico and — since 1989 — in Tarrytown, NY, a town of about 10,000, founded in 1648, that’s 25 miles north of Manhattan, whose lights we can see from our street.
As an ambitious writer, I wanted to be close to New York City and have ready access to its publishers, agents, editors and fellow writers.
I could never have afforded an apartment in NYC — or even in Toronto — like the one I bought, with a stunning and unobstructed tree-top view of the Hudson River, with a pool and tennis court. The building is red brick, from 1965, and not the least bit pretty. But the landscaping is and the location and the views.
So here I am, all these years later. Before this, I typically moved every few years. Between 1982 and 1989, I changed cities three times and countries (Canada, France, U.S.) as well.
Some reasons why I’m so happy here:
The Hudson River
This is the view from our apartment balcony. Tarrytown sits on the river’s eastern bank, and the river is easily accessible, for boating, or a picnic, bike ride or walk by the water. Sunsets are spectacular and the ever-changing skies mesmerizing.
The reservoir
A five-minute drive from home is a large reservoir with otters, ducks, swans, cormorants, egrets and turtles basking in the sun. You can lounge on a bench, skate in the coldest winters and safely walk around it in all seasons.
Mint
This great gourmet store and cafe is a treasure, filled with delicious treats offered by owner Hassan Jarane, who I also profiled in “Malled”, my book about retail. (You can see our funky street lamps in the window reflection.)
The Tarrytown Music Hall
Built in 1885 as a vaudeville hall, this 843-seat theatre hosts a wide range of concerts, mostly rock and folk. I saw British singer Richard Thompson there last year playing a two-hour solo set, and my fellow Canadian Bruce Cockburn. I can bop down on a Friday afternoon and snag a ticket for $25. Soon re-opening, I hope!
Phelps Hospital
Yes, seriously. Having had four surgeries there and having been too many times to their emergency department, (broken finger, my husband’s concussion, a bad fall), I know it well. Small, friendly, well-run. It’s a little weird to like a hospital, but I’m really glad it’s a 10-minute drive from our door to theirs.
Bellas
Our local diner, recently and attractively renovated.
Horsefeathers
A local indie since the 80s, great burgers and the best Caesar salad I’ve eaten anywhere.
The Warner Library
Its magnificent carved bronze doors come from an estate in Florence. Built of Vermont limestone with tall ceilings, enormous windows and a lovely quiet elegance, its reading rooms are airy and filled with light. It opened in 1929, a gift to the community from a local businessman, Mr. Warner.
Easy access to Manhattan
It’s a 38-minute train ride or 30 to 40 minute drive by car. I love being able to spend a day in the city — as we all refer to it — and come home broke, weary and happy. I can be at the Met Museum or see a Broadway show or just stroll Soho without stressing over the cost of airfare or hotel. Living in Manhattan is terrifyingly expensive and the air here is always about 10 to 15 degrees cooler and fresher.
The Rockefeller State Park Preserve
Yes, those Rockefellers, one of the wealthiest founding families of the nation. They donated this 750-acre piece of land, open to everyone, whose gently rolling hills, forests and lake feel like you’ve escaped to Devon or Vermont but only a 10-minute drive from my home. The lake is 22 acres and 180 species of birds have been seen there.
They shoot movies here!
Thanks to its small, low-scale downtown with a well-preserved set of Victorian or earlier buildings, Tarrytown offers a perfect streetscape for period films, often set in the 1940s or 1950s. I missed seeing Keanu Reeves and Julia Roberts when they were here, (“Mona Lisa Smile” was partly filmed here), but almost saw Matt Damon when they were shooting “The Good Shepherd”, one of my favorite movies. If you watch it, a scene where he is to meet his sweetie outside a theater — that’s really the Tarrytown Music Hall!
Goldberg Hardware
Greg’s great-grandfather founded the place and he lives upstairs. It’s extremely rare now to find a third or fourth-generation merchant still doing business and thriving, even with a Home Depot not far away. Also mentioned in “Malled.”
Philipsburg Manor
It’s fairly astonishing, in a relatively very young country like the United States, to drive past 18th. century history. A beautiful white stone house, mill and mill pond remain in town from this era. Here’s a bit of the history.
The Old Dutch Church
Built in 1697, it’s the second-oldest church — and still in use — in New York State. It’s technically in Sleepy Hollow (which is the old North Tarrytown.)
The EF Language School
Young students come from all over the world to this Swedish school’s Tarrytown campus to study English. It adds a seriously cosmopolitan flavor to our small town to overhear French, German, Italian, Swedish and Japanese spoken on our main street.
Coffee Labs
Our local coffee shop, with live music and great cappuccinos. Also Muddy Waters, a second coffee shop.
A diverse population
With a median income of $80,000, we’ve got both enormous Victorian mansions and three-family apartment houses. (Westchester county has towns nearby so wealthy their median income is more than $200,000. People like Martha Stewart and Glenn Close live out here.) But Tarrytown has remained blessedly down-to-earth, even as its Mini-Cooper count and yummy-mummy numbers have risen rapidly in recent years. We have Korean nail salons, Hispanic grocers, two Greek-owned restaurants, a Greek-owned florist and a car wash owned and run by an immigrant from Colombia. Hassan, who runs Mint, is from Morocco.
What do you most appreciate about where you live?
By Caitlin Kelly
If you’ve been reading Broadside for a while — thank you! — you know I’m generally an openhearted person.
I like people and approach new situations, professional and personal, with a sense of optimism.
Working as a journalist means I have to quickly put strangers at ease and gather useful information from them. We have to establish trust fast — something of a contradiction.
Working as a journalist also means assuming most people are not lying to me, or want to do me harm in so doing, because a journalist who publishes lies is someone with a very short career. So we fact-check when possible and seek out sources whose background and credentials are as legit as we can find.
When it comes to personal relationships, trust is also paramount, at least for me.
My first marriage, to a physician, lasted barely two years; he bailed and remarried, quickly, a fellow therapist (!) he worked with and with whom he spent a lot of personal time. I was wholly reliant on him financially, so I had to trust him. I had little choice then.
Jose and I have spent time apart. I traveled alone for six weeks in Europe in June-July 2017, as blissful as I could be. I love solo time and traveling alone, exploring to my heart’s content.
I had an amusing evening in Berlin, sharing a table with three handsome young men (all co-workers), one of whom (as part of the conversation!) took off his dress shirt.
It was all good fun, nothing more.
Trust is the basic foundation of every interaction we have, from infancy to death:
— our parents
— our physicians
— our caregivers
— our teachers and professors
— our school/college administrators
— the police
— the courts
— our clergy and religious leaders
— our political leaders
— activists
— our relatives
— our romantic partners/spouses
— our employers
— youth group leaders
— our co-workers
— government agencies whose job it is to regulate/fine/shut down offenders
If you’re a person of color, or non-Christian, or gay, you have now become a target for hatred — with more and more deaths-by-vehicle, targeted by sociopaths or a pervasive police brutality that is deeply shocking, if no longer surprising.
You can’t even go out for a bike ride or a walk trusting in your personal safety.
And, as I’ve written here before, trust can be quickly shattered, and is difficult to regain….after dating a con man in 1998, being laughed at, literally, by my local police and D.A., my worldview would never be the same again.
My family relationships, too often toxic through anger and alcohol, taught me to be wary of intimacy.
Trust also underpins every freelance personal and professional relationship:
— our friends
— our colleagues
— our clients
— our agents
— our editors
— our social media networks
I spend a lot of time (too much!) on Twitter, where I have some 5600 followers, including some very senior people in my industry.
I’ve made several very good friends with people I still have yet to meet face to face, whether in Brazil or Tennessee.
So this past weekend, we did!
SO MUCH FUN!
A gay couple, one of whom works in our industry (journalism) and her partner, came up to our home and shared a long lunch that started at noon — and ended at 5:30.
We all took the chance of getting together and hoping we would be as we are on social media — fun, funny, playful, smart, interesting.
We were and we did.
I call these Twitter blind dates, not that we want a romantic thing, but we go into them really only knowing a tiny profile photo, a bunch of tweets and LinkedIn profile. Hoping for the best!
I’ve done this many times, never disappointed.
With a retail expert who lives in Virginia.
With a travel blogger and an archeologist (2 people) in Berlin.
With a pair of travel agent sisters in Zagreb.
With a fellow blogger, in London, https://smalldogsyndrome.com/.
We’ve been repeat house-guests a few times, and that also requires trust — that we’re quiet and thoughtful and don’t smoke or do drugs or will break or stain or ruin things. We bring food and drink and a gift and we always send a thank-you note.
We also trust our hosts to offer us a clean, soft bed. To let us have quiet alone time. To offer good food. To not (as one did to me?!) leave a filthy cat litter box beneath my pull-out bed.
I also once house-sat for a family of four headed to Tuscany from Vermont — unpaid. I was perfectly happy to walk their small affectionate dog. I was not at all happy to also get stuck watering their large garden in a heat wave and (!?) cleaning their pool.
That friendship died with this abuse of my time and energy. I trusted them to be fair with me, and they were not.
Do you trust easily?
By Caitlin Kelly
Whew!
It seems obvious that writers write, certainly when every word adds income — and our health insurance alone (God bless America!!) is $1,500.00
The truth, as every freelancer knows, is that before I write a word about anything, I also spend a lot of time, probably 80 percent, just finding and getting the work and negotiating payment and conditions. For one recent story, I had to read and sign a nine-page single-space contract.
This week involved no writing, but lots of meetings:
— My web designer, now living in Asia and who I’ve been working with since 1995, suggested my writing skills to a client of his, a physician in Virginia, to help refresh the copy on his website. I spent half an hour speaking to the doctor, a specialist, to find out if we might be a good fit. I was a little nervous, as he might have been as well. These initial conversations are something of a mutual audition. Do we speak the same language? Do we each have a sense of humor? Did we enjoy it? I also had to name an hourly fee and rough estimate of how much time I thought it would take, not knowing if this would be acceptable. It went great, so onward!
— A former coaching client who’s become a friend needs new freelance writers so we skedded a call to discuss.
— A new design website needs copy focused on antiques, something I know well and have studied many times, hence a call to talk about some ideas.
— I’m working on a very cool story for The New York Times, (I’ve written more than 100 for them), but it’s moving very slowly. My key source lost his mother very suddenly, so I stayed away for a while. This is a story where I think personal introductions to sources will prove more fruitful. There are different ways to find and approach people, some better for some stories than others, and some just take a lot more time to pull together. None of this time is paid for, just built into the one fee we get per story.
— A calm and civil conversation with the editor I had walked away from mid-story. I’ll get a kill fee, 25 percent of the original, instead.
— Emailed an editor in England I’d hoped to be working with on a story in July, but she warned me of changes at the company.
I recently did a Zoom webinar with Jose and counted up the number of clients I worked with in 2020 — 19.
This year, already, 19!
I enjoy this variety, but I admit it’s tiring adapting to 19 different people and their needs and their individual style.
I’ve had one boss before in many staff jobs. It’s a bit easier!
By Caitlin Kelly
For some people, including me, setting and keeping tight boundaries around our time, energy, bodies, and psyche presents a real challenge.
I grew up in a bossy, often angry family that rarely, if ever, asked: “How do you feel?”
It wasn’t deemed relevant. Or I guess they assumed I’d speak up, which I rarely did.
I left my mother’s care at 14 when she was suffering from mental illness and not doing a great job with it. The stress was too much for me.
So I did set a boundary and a major one, early. But every time I hear the Cat Stevens song, Father and Son, it wrings my heart — the father pleading, “Stay, stay” and the son replying “I have to go.”
Sometimes you just do.
But it also matters when it comes to work.
Americans – with the worst/cheapest/nastiest labor policies possible — are used to working like dogs, not taking vacations or sick days, working in “at will” states where you can be legally fired for no reason at all.
So setting boundaries is just very difficult in a culture that expects us to be on and eagerly available pretty much all the time.
Last week, I walked away from a writing assignment worth $1,250 with a new-to-me editor at a major website.
I’m not thrilled about this. I have done this three times in my career, when the stress outweighed the income.
That’s a significant loss of income for us and was only possible because we have savings.
It’s not a habit of mine to bail on work!
But nor is it a habit to work with editors or others who are unpleasant or disrespectful.
I could have stayed.
I could have kept working on this story.
These days, decades into my career, I make my mental health the priority.
Setting and keeping a boundary can mean changing the dynamics of a relationship, or ending it entirely.
It comes at a cost, and has consequences, sometimes those we don’t expect or can’t foresee.
But who counts more?
By Caitlin Kelly
As some of you know, I was born in Vancouver and grew up in Toronto and Montreal — moving to the U.S. at 30 to pursue a bigger career.
I carry only a Canadian passport and have long been proud of my country, reveling in adorable videos like this.
Not this week.
Not this month.
Not this year.
A Muslim family was out for a walk in London, Ontario, a regional city. Five went out and one returned — the rest mown down by a racist piece of garbage in his truck, who hated them for being…non-white. Non-Christian.
The sole survivor is a nine-year-old boy, orphaned.
The week prior, the remains of 215 indigenous children, sent away by law to residential school in Kamloops, B.C. were found, re-opening the old wounds of how thousands of these children were torn from their families and made to speak English and deride their native culture.
To become “Canadian” — white and Christian.
See a pattern?
And now a vicious and brutal attack on a gay man in Toronto for daring to be homosexual.
Not sure how I will celebrate Canada Day, July 1, this year.
Not sure I want to right now.
I haven’t been back to Canada since September 2019 because of Covid; the border has been closed ever since unless my travel is “essential” and it’s not.
Canadians so love to congratulate themselves for being polite and civil and compassionate, traditionally welcoming far more refugees and immigrants than the U.S. and many other countries.
Their social policies are generally much more generous than those in the U.S.
And they really enjoy making sure they are so much better than those nasty, violent racist Americans.
Today? I think not.
When I last lived in Toronto, the streetcar I took to the subway was filled with Caribbean Blacks, the bus down Spadina to my newspaper job filled with Vietnamese.
That was just normal life there.
No one noticed. No one sparked violence.
Pay your taxes, get along.
There isn’t a lot useful to say here, really, beyond expressing my horror and deep disappointment in my country of origin. Sadly, I just expect daily racism and violence in the U.S. It’s baked into the DNA here.
Canada is 100 years younger.
It did not have slavery — although its racist policies have destroyed generations of Inuit and indigenous lives.
To see this hatred is deeply deeply disturbing.
I am ashamed for my country.
By Caitlin Kelly
I’m writing this at a friend’s house in Connecticut — a 220 year-old home full of history and memories.
Doves coo outside.
It’s our first visit to a friend’s home in more than a year and a half, since we are all fully vaccinated and our hostess had Covid a few months ago.
I’ve been very lucky to celebrate this day in Venice (once) and Paris three times, the most recent in 2017.
Last night for dinner, my husband Jose made his amazing short ribs and we had a carrot cake and champagne.
It’s the second year of a birthday without my mother being alive, even though we were estranged. To my shock, I found out she had left me some money, so that was a huge gift in itself.
The day of my birthday, June 6, is also one marked by two major world events — D-Day and the death of Robert Kennedy. My American-born mother cried that morning.
It’s been, so far, a good year. We are healthy and solvent and have savings and good work.
We have friends.
For the next year, I just hope for more of the same, with health always the most essential element.
I have great memories of some childhood birthday parties and a funny photo of my 12th. with a cake filled with sparklers. My high school best friend threw me a surprise party for my 16th. That was lovely.
In June 2018, I was found to have DCIS, a very early stage breast cancer. So that was a tougher birthday.
This year, cards have arrived from friends near and far.
Now I’m at an age I think….hmmmm…how many more will I be granted?
My father turns 93 in five days, so I hope for his healthful longevity.
Mostly, this year, I’m just grateful to be here.
By Caitlin Kelly
Longtime readers here know this is something I think about a lot.
The New York Times ran an editorial on this, urging Americans to seriously consider working less:
Search online “work too much” and you’ll get screenfuls of information about the harmful medical, mental and social consequences of spending too much time on the job, going all the way back to that old saw first recorded in the 17th century, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
It should be “makes Jack a dead boy,” says the latest contribution to the literature of overwork, this one from the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization.
A new study by the two groups says that working 55 or more hours a week is a “serious health hazard.” It estimates that long working hours led to 745,000 deaths worldwide in 2016, a 29 percent increase over 2000. Men accounted for 72 percent of the fatalities; the worst concentrations were in the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia, and particularly among 60- to 79-year-olds who had worked long hours after the age of 45.
Reading this book is enough to set one’s blood to boiling…but so many Americans are still too scared, too poor and too disorganized (i.e. no union) to do a thing about their terrible hours, conditions and pay.
But there’s also a peculiarly American insistence, beyond financial need, to keep proving to everyone all the time how productive you are, as if there’s some Powerful Person standing somewhere with a clicker to clock every minute you ever worked and you’ll be rewarded by….not dying?
As if working all the time for money, to burnish your professional reputation, to boost your income or status, is the only thing worth attaining or achieving.
What about:
Family?
Friendships?
Caregiving?
Travel?
Leisure?
Hobbies?
Volunteer work?
Education?
If Covid’s terrible damage to millions — destroying their long-term health or killing them — wasn’t sufficient warning that our time here is limited and we have many other ways to spend our time, what is?
Broadside 