Looking through windows

When I was little, I'd sometimes look out the back window at nothing in particular.  My mother said it ran in her family and called it "foxing," like a fox staring out of his den.

When I woke up in the morning I'd open my curtains and look out the window at our front yard. (We lived in a small town in New Brunswick and our front yard was pretty big.) In late September and October, the temperature would get cold enough for frost at night, and in the morning when I looked out the window I'd see a light white blanket over the green grass, which soon thawed.  In hindsight, that's one of the things I miss most about life in New Brunswick.

When I first lived in Toronto, twenty years ago, I had a room in a house just south of the Wychwood Barns.  Back then they stored their old buses and streetcars there and you could see them from the window.  When they got rid of the electric trolleys, they all came there, too.  The advantage of living there was that they patrolled the Wychwood Barns a lot, so the nearby houses were pretty safe from burglars.

Today, when I look out the window of the west side of my room, I see the tall tower of our neighborhood fire station.  I've always wanted to climb that tower and see the view from the top.  It's near St. Clair West, and I'm sure you can see the downtown skyscrapers from there.  But I imagine I never will see that view.

Bargains

I'm not the sort who's always alert to the best bargains.  It goes back to when I was little.  I didn't get an allowance, and I didn't need one, because I rarely spent money.  I was slow to get into consumer culture.

But I must say that my father is alert to them. (I guess it comes from being a Depression kid.) When he buys an appliance he's almost certain to buy the cheapest model in the store:  you have to fight him before he'll buy the second cheapest.  My sister says it's a way to avoid making a complicated decision.  On the other hand, of course, you could also avoid the decision by buying the most expensive model.

Father's also a rather stingy tipper, so I try to be more generous with my tips.

So I really don't know much about the value of money.  I'm unemployed, and still living with my family.  I still don't spend that much.  I occasionally travel, but most years I don't. (It's nice to live in a big city that many people travel to.) 

In recent years my main indulgence has been singing lessons with Giuseppe Macina.  And he only charges fifty dollars a lesson.  He gives good value for money:  some teachers charge twice as much, but that doesn't mean they'll be twice as good. (And he's a colorful character.)

Talking to yourself

Sure, I talk to myself.  But I don't think I do so audibly or moving my lips or anything, so I'm not afraid of being thought crazy.  I have heard people talking to themselves in the street--that's one feature of life in a big city.  I guess I feel sorry for them, but I do tend to keep my distance.

My mother used to sing to herself a lot.  That used to bug me, especially when she sang a song repeatedly.  But now I wish I'd been more tolerant of it.  She knew a lot of songs.

As craziness goes, I guess talking to yourself is a mild form.  There's a big difference between barking and biting.  Even religious craziness doesn't scare me that much.  I'm more scared of patriotic craziness, like in an online forum discussing the Bradley Manning trial when someone says, "The government didn't do one thing wrong!" That's a matter of faith.

Of course, when a whole group goes crazy, as in wartime, the people who stay sane may look crazy just because they don't fit in. I've always been a bit of a misfit myself.

Hoarding

We used to keep a lot of old magazines like The Saturday Review down at our cottage.  Mother resolved that she'd get around to reading them someday, but she never did.  We also had a lot of comic books, but Father burned most of them just before our cottage was sold.  I guess I should have intervened to save them, but I was too proud:  I was sick of whining about things like that.

In recent years, I've been buying stuff on Ebay.  I have a big collection of Sunday funnies, many of which I remember from childhood. (In Canada, of course, Sunday comics usually appear in the big Saturday papers.) Collecting Li'l Abner, I've finally noticed that the Lower Slobbovians talk in a Yiddish accent. (That was over my head at the time.)  I've also bought some comic books, including a lot of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge and Classics Illustrated.  I've mostly stopped now.

But our big hoarding has always been books.  We own thousands of them, and about ten years ago Father started selling them online through ABEbooks.  He's still buying new ones, often finding them at Goodwill or library sales or this neighborhood buy & sell owned by an Iranian-Canadian.  We just assembled a new set of bookcases in our living room.

We also have a lot of VHS movies and vinyl records.

Clouds

I guess I like cloudy skies.  I've always thought of heaven as a place with an overcast sky rather than a blue one.  I also have a soft spot for fog and mist. (We used to get it in my New Brunswick hometown more often than here in Toronto.)

As clouds go, there's something to be said for a cumulonimbus thunderhead with its dark, top-heavy look. (I read about different cloud types in the Boy Scout handbook.) I was on a plane once and saw a thunderhead whose shape reminded me of Godzilla.

I also like a mackeral sky, which you can get at sunset if the clouds appear at just the right place above the sun.  And a jet trail can be interesting.

Seeing the sun or the moon through light cloud can also create an unusual sight.  But I don't recall ever seeing a "sun dog" image.

To tell the truth, I find blue skies a bit boring.

I used to play the piano when I was young.  I played some of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, which are pretty nice, thought they tend to sound the same.  One of them is called "The Fleecy Cloud." It's kind of complicated because you have to play four notes against six.  But I think I managed to play it.

Things that scared me

[Note:  this is a subject I submitted.]

When I was four, I saw the movie The Great Race, which includes a scene where Tony Curtis swims across a lake at night, climbs into a dark tower and challenges a baron to a swordfight.  That scene scared the daylights out of me!  I also remember seeing a movie of Oliver Twist where the scene where everyone chased him and yelled "Stop, thief!" made me freak out.

I also remember hearing the the story of Hansel and Gretel on a record and getting scared. (But most people must have been scared by that story.)

At the beach near our cottage seaweed sometimes formed big clumps and I was afraid to go near them.

In gym class we once played battleball, a game like dodgeball but with a whole lot of balls being thrown at once.  Near the end of one game everyone was out except for me and one guy on the other team.  I suddenly got afraid and ran in a panic, and he got me out easily, so the other team won and I was the Charlie Brown.

When I was little, we had a Classics Illustrated comic book of Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs, about a 17th-century freak whose face had deliberately been made grotesque by early plastic surgery.  The look of his face still gets to me today:  I bought the comic on Ebay but I still can't get up the nerve to read it again.

I used to swin when I was young.  Our pool had a low diving board and a high one.  I could jump off the low one, dive off the low one and jump off the high one easily.  But I only dived off the high board a few times.  I was afraid that when I bent over and prepared to dive, the board would snap in two just before I did.

Family cars

I was born in a car.  It was our first family car, a Ford Consul sedan from 1957 or so.  I was a long time getting born, so Mother took castor oil and had a bath.  When it finally happened, it happened so fast that Father didn't have time to get her to the hospital. (And we weren't far from the hospital, with only small-town traffic to deal with.) There was a bit of gossip about it at the time.  My parents only revealed this to me when I was 37.  Oh well, who wants to have been born in a hospital?

Our next car was a 1969 Chevrolet Brookwood station wagon.  It was better-suited than the Consul to vacations, and to our family of seven.  It had a door at the back that you could swing open horizontally.  It also had a cigarette lighter but we removed it to make room for a radio hookup.

In 1978 we got a Chevrolet Malibu sedan.  It had new-style seat belts, combining a shoulder belt with a lap belt.  Then in 1987 we got a Dodge Colt subcompact.  We took it to Scotland for a year.  Its licence plate started with the letters ANZ and someone from down under thought we were from Australia or New Zealand!

Our most recent car is a 2001 Mazda Miata.  We bought in on September 11 that year.  We've had it for twelve years, and we're going to give it up next month and not get a replacement. (Father does most of the driving, and he's now over eighty.) When this happens, we'll truly be city people.

Children's books I liked

[Note:  this subject is one that I contributed.]

When I was a kid we borrowed a lot of children's books from the library.  I read a lot of Dr. Seuss. (I actually preferred The Cat in the Hat Comes Back to the original!)  I also liked Munro Leaf's Wee Gillis, a story about a Scottish boy in a kilt.

When I was nine I started reading the Tom Swift Jr. science fiction books, but my mother thought they were too exciting for me, so I stopped reading them and didn't resume till I was thirteen. (That was the first place where I read of drone aircraft!) It was at thirteen that I started reading Hardy Boys mysteries, which I read enthusiastically for almost two years.

Some of these children's books that I read while young I've reread as an adult and appreciated more fully.  One example is Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, which are way better than the shameless TV show!  Another is L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables and its sequels.

Later I got into longer books.  I read Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Kidnapped, Charles Dickens' David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, and Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and The Prince and the Pauper.  I heard of Lord of the Rings, but thought it was about circuses!

I've never quite stopped reading children's books.  I read Michael Ende's wonderful The Neverending Story at twenty-three.  I've read quite a few of Roald Dahl's books, largely as an adult.  I recently read C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but I hated it!  Moralistic nonsense from start to finish.

Countryside around home

[Note:  I arrived late to my first memoir slam event and found the others reading their pieces on the first subject: "Countryside around home." The second subject was "Bodybuilding," but I couldn't think of anything to write about that, so I wrote a piece on the first subject instead.  They didn't complain, even when I digressed!]

I grew up in the New Brunswick university town of Sackville, near the Nova Scotia border.  We had a cottage out in Tidnish near Northumberland Strait.  Sometimes when we went there we'd bring ice cream, but by the time we ate it, it would be half-melted!  Today I still feel a fondness for half-melted ice cream.

When I was about four my father had a year-long sabbatical from his job as physics professor at Mount Allison University and we lived in Brighton, England.  This was around 1966, when it was a big mod center, but my parents didn't notice this, let alone me.  My mother remembered seeing the live TV talk show where Kenneth Tynan used the F-word, and I remember watching Australian singer Rolf Harris playing his wobble board.  I remember many smells from that time:  butcher shops, grocery stores, diesel bus fumes, London's coal smoke. (When I visited England years later I recognized the smells again.)

We also visited Expo '67, but I was only five and ended up walking too much.  I got into a foul mood, and don't even remember the immediate reason.  The main thing I remember was the train that took us onto the site.

My mother was born in Cape Breton, near Fort Louisbourg.  We often visited it in the summer.  The scenery was pretty dramatic.

Introduction

Last month I joined the Monday Memoir Writers Group.  Every Monday afternoon at 2:00 we meet in the basement of the Lillian Smith Library and draw a random card from a canister full of subjects, all submitted by us members.  We then each write a short memoir piece based on that subject, after which we take turns reading them aloud.  On a typical day there'll be nine or ten people and we'll do two subjects before quitting toward 4:00.  

I call it a memoir slam because it reminds me of poetry slams.  Many thanks to Michelle of the Out of Your Shell Meetup group for introducing me to this group by organizing an event around it. (You can find her group at http://www.meetup.com/ShynessSocialAnxietySocial/.)

I enjoy this group greatly.  I like both writing my own pieces, and listening to what the other members write.  We all have some remarkable stories to tell! And I think I'm pretty good at it.  So I decided to start a new blog to publish the pieces I've written. (I already have a blog at http://canadiancommonsense.blogspot.ca.) Here's hoping some more members do the same:  I'd certainly like to read them.

If you'd like to learn more about the Monday Memoir Writers Group (including lists of past subjects and published memoirs members recommend), it has a webpage at http://astralsite.com/memoirs.