Li'l Peggy Atwood

CBC Radio One between 9 and about 10:06 PM every night is my version of porn. We talk a lot in my circles about radio crushes (voices of interest include Eleanor Wachtel, Elvira Kurt, and Anthony Germain, though this last one is more of an obsession for someone I know) but my relationship with Paul Kennedy's voice on Ideas is nothing like that. It's a love that is pure. Listening to him is like having a bedtime story read to you by a favourite grandparent. And as if that wasn't good enough, after the 10:00 news I get to listen to the provincial weather forecast. I don't know what it is about hearing the nightly low for places like Perth County and Sarnia, but it makes me feel sleepy. I love that the Toronto-Hamilton forecast always starts it off and usually Ottawa is somewhere near the end, my two homes bookending each other with random symmetry that totally delights me. And I love when they give the forecast for Algonquin Park because for some reason I always picture Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven all holed up in there somewhere, wind blowing outside their tents, all of them shivering and dozing. It makes me feel cozy and lucky to be in my own warm house.

All of which is to say, I was listening to Ideas last night, which was a rebroadcast of last year's Massey Lectures, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, by Margaret Atwood. The fact that old Peggy dreamed up a whole series on debt way in advance of the current madness is pretty much all the proof you need of the fact that she is some kind of creepy oracle. I know some people hate her deadpan delivery but it kills me dead.

But what I especially loved about last night's essay was her description of being a terrible and terrified babysitter, saving her penny earnings in the same tin as milk tops and marbles and other little tchotchkes that had as much value to her as the actual money, prizing pennies with dead or bearded Royals over the ones of bald-faced, still-living George VI. It's such a great illustration of how totally subjective money actually is, but it's also hilarious to imagine Margaret Atwood as a kid hoarding her change. The woman whose warped and wonderful mind brought us The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye was a child once too. I bet she was a weird one. I bet she was scrappy.