Cheers for Charity, that beautiful, balancing bovine
Hail to thee, Brookview Tony Charity! She was the sainted cow whose honorary steel sculpture with a wreath of maple leaves now stands silvery and high above the irate homeowners of Charity Crescent in Markham.
Minor question: Are homeowners ever anything but irate? Do they ever gather to say, “We are loving this new stoplight.”
“This new park is a feast of greenery. Our youngsters and oldsters shall frolic.” No, it’s always, “We don’t need no water fountain, it brings in the nogoodniks.”
Toronto appears to favour public art that is 13 ways of looking at a tombstone. I always think war dead and various notables deserve something livelier, something passersby notice and consider. Could we improve on those aren’t-Idaring metal girders and pebble-dash Gumby Goes to Heavens on University Avenue?
The splendid developer Helen RomanBarber, now building homes in Cathedraltown on her late father’s Romandale Farm, paid tribute to a fabulous creature. As the Star reports, Charity was No. 1, the world’s most productive milk cow in the glossy big-shoulders 1980s, the crème de la crème of the notoriously demanding dairy world.
Clearly a beast of great charisma, Charity was named the greatest North American show cow of all time.
I see the photographic appeal instantly. When you look at Charity’s pale curves and magnolia belly, her two patches of black and the understated glam of her tail, you can only deplore the other cow contestants. Of No. 5 for instance, Har- vue Roy Frosty of Berryville, Va., I can only say I’m not sure I’m even looking at a cow. It’s more like driftwood on legs. Is that fake tan on her udder or just a dusting of Poudre T. LeClerc?
But prizes mean little compared to the deliciousness Charity rendered her fan club. Had Robert Louis Stevenson known her, he would have dedicated his poem, the aptly titled “The Cow”: “Thank you, pretty cow, that made/ Pleasant milk to soak my bread,/Every day and every night,/Warm, and fresh, and sweet, and white.”
Charity was loved. As Deborah Valenze writes reflectively in Milk: A Local and Global History, “If one locus in the contemporary world still finds economic value in chivalry and tenderness, it’s the dairy barn.” Cows that have names give more milk than cows without names, she reports.
That said, who names their cow Thrulane James Rose or indeed Quality B C Frantisco? I’d go with Arabella or Buttercup. Perhaps the names toughen them up, like naming your baby Barkfast or Chunce, or even Delaney. Anyway, cows that are treated affectionately produce 257 more litres of milk each year.
Am I touching the hearts of hostile Markhamites even a little?
I am primed to love Charity, given that I drink a litre of skim milk a day and live mostly on cheese: cheddar for normal, Comté for special and Délices de Bourgogne with grapes for sheer debauchery.
I love the art of the barnyard and the deceased game of the 17th century Dutch Golden Age. There’s a portrait of a rabbit in Elizabethan dress in a bathroom, sheep in a hallway and various oils of cows, chicken and bison elsewhere.
As a family, we are carnivores trying to cut back. Humans owe animals a debt for millennia of pain, and the modern slaughterhouse is an awful place. The industrial dairy cow has been bred into an almost unrecognizable machine, a freak of nature, a distended thing attached to pumps and drains.
As for pigs, have you seen Okja on Netflix? Annoying as animal activists can be, they do have a point, however badly expressed.
So, yes, I am a specialized taste. I wish my neighbourhood had a cow. The houses of Charity Cresent are generic barnlike McMansions. I don’t know how its citizens find their way home, so featureless is the new-build.
They need that silver ungulate on stilts so that even on a moonless night, errant teenagers can use it as a beacon. Follow that cow! They fling their arms and find Charity. They fall safely into their beds.
Every neighbourhood should have some stellar objet d’art, a sculpture based on an item of little regard.
The Beaches gets a sculpture of a squirrel with distemper splayed on the pavement for children to play on, what fun. Beachers can trip on it and complain. Rosedale gets a ceramic maze, High Park a rubber school bus.
Give us a bean, a strip of bacon, a battered iPhone, a bad hat. Startle us with the ordinary.
They need that silver ungulate on stilts so that even on a moonless night, errant teenagers can use it as a beacon. Follow that cow!