Hydro

"Hydro" comes from "hudor," the Greek word for water.

If you ask me, bottled water is the big marketing con of our age.  Until I move to a place like China, I'm going to trust the water from the tap!  I'm just glad I don't live in Britain, where Margaret Thatcher privatized the water utilities out of sheer ideology and Tony Blair's New Labour preserved privatization out of sheer cynicism. (Privatization was bad for the British people.  But denationalization would offend the Big People.)

Barbara Ward once said that 1% of the money the world spends on armaments would be enough to provide clean water for everyone in the world.  But leaders aren't just afraid of their country being weak, they're afraid of looking weak!

Someone said that clean water will be the oil of the 21st century.  Which means that Canada will dominate the world, since we have more lakes than any other country.  Which may mean that the Americans will finally take us over, since they're so wasteful of water and their leaders prefer conquest to conservation.  Here's a prediction:  if the USA takes over Canada, we'll stay much the same but they'll be transformed!

Telling lies

Some French philosopher spent a whole day in bed wondering, "If I benefit from telling a lie, should I do it?"

I haven't told a lot of lies.  I might lie to someone who was unreasonable, and would clearly handle the truth in and way that just made things worse.

I remember this really lame public service ad put out by the Mormon church with singing and dancing kids telling real kids not to lie.  The predicted that if you do you'll feel bad and "start to cry." Well, that's my problem.  If I tell a lie it's up to me to handle it without feeling guilt.  And if I do handle it that way, the Mormons won't like that:  they want me to feel guilty and cry!  But I won't let them, so there!

Last call

I've never experienced a barroom's last call late at night.  Like my parents before me, I never drink alcohol.  I never even got into tea or coffee either.  But I have a weakness for Pepsi-Cola. (It's my vice.)

I do stay up late quite a bit.  The internet never sleeps, and there's always something new to read.  Sometimes The Huffington Post will have an article on something I feel strongly about, like Private Manning's court-martial. (I consider her a hero.) Then I'll start posting comments and replying to other people's posts, and that may keep me up for hours!

I also play computer games pretty late.  There's one game called Hot Shot, involving firing a ball from an angle you choose, so it'll bounce off points until you've eliminated all the red ones.  You get a few new points to use at midnight, so I play it just after then.

And just after midnight the King Features Syndicate webpage, comics kingdom.com , shows the day's new comic strip episodes.   Dilbert is the only daily strip I still read in the newspapers, but I read several online, like Funky Winkerbean and The Phantom.  But what attracts me enough to pay for a subscription here is their reprinting of classic strips like Rip Kirby and Brick Bradford and Johnny Hazard.

East Asians

Chinese culture interests me.  I've taught myself to read the Chinese language with the help of a dictionary.  People are intimidated by it but in some ways it isn't as hard as you may think. (The grammar is pretty simple.) I especially like its writing system, which matches a picture or two to a whole word.  I've also learned some Japanese and in some respects it's more different from English than Chinese is.

About fifteen years ago my sister and I visited China on a three-week tour.  We went to places like Beijing and Shanghai (which reminded me of Manhattan) and the place in the northwest with the ceramic warrior statues.  You can see the place modernizing somewhat unevenly. (On one road I noticed a road sign with a picture that said "No tractors.")

We also walked on the Great Wall, which is a pretty steep climb:  it was made for soldiers, not tourists.  They also took us to a really loud silk factory, like in the movie Norma Rae.  Those workers will be going deaf!

We were on a cruise ship on the Yangzi River north of the Three Gorges Dam, but some of us got food poisoning.  Overall, however, the food was pretty good:  they served us the best spinach I've ever eaten.  We hardly ever met beggars--I imagine the police keep them away from tourists.  But there were a lot of pedlars, not that I blame them for shaking us down.

If I visit China again, it won't be as a first-class tourist.  I don't like being a rich man in a poor country.

Mysteries

When I was about fourteen I went through a Hardy Boys phase for a couple of years.  This was a series of books about two teenage detective brothers figuring out mysteries and catching crooks. (Many of the early books were written, uncredited, by a Canadian called Leslie MacFarlane.) My favourite character was their sidekick Chet Morton.  

I also read several Encyclopedia Brown books by Donald Sobol.  You'd read a short mystery and be challenged to guess the answer before looking it up at the back of the book.  It bugged me that I seldom guessed the answer.  There was one mystery where I guessed that the kid couldn't have banged his knee on the coffee table like he claimed because it should have upset the house of cards on it, but you'd have to be pretty dim not to figure out that one.

I don't care so much for mysteries today.  Some of the Agatha Christie movies are fun. (I think she was Catholic--what is it about Catholics that gives them a talent for writing mysteries?) I enjoyed Umberto Eco's medieval mystery novel The Name of the Rose, and ought to read it again someday.

I wouldn't make a good detective.  Life is a mystery to me, and more I learn the more mysterious it seems to get.

Street names

My hometown of Sackville, N.B., has a Union Street.  Only in recent years did I realize that it must have been named for the 1926 union of Methodist, Congregational and some Presbyterian churches that formed the United Church of Canada. (Sackville had been an important Methodist centre.)

You can learn something about a town from its street names.  Sackville has Lansdowne, Lorne and Dufferin streets, all named after Governors-General of Canada.  One of its oldest streets is Charlotte Street, which probably honours Charlotte of Mecklenburg, wife of George III when Sackville was a new community.  We lived on West Avenue, but it wasn't named for being on the west side of town (though it was) but after someone called West.

I live on Greensides Avenue, which is a rather bland name, like something a real estate developer would come up with.  Two of the newest streets in my neighbourhood are called Acores and Minho, presumably named with the Portuguese immigrant community in mind.

Some street names have a particular charm.  I remember from my visit to St. John's, Newfoundland, a street called Strawberry Marsh Road.  I wish I could think of names like that!

Fridays!

Of course, Friday is the last day before the weekend, so people have good feelings about it. (I remember being in a good mood on Thursday night because it came just before Friday.) There was a period when I actually watched some soap operas--was I ever that young?--and Friday would always be the most exciting day because they wanted to keep people watching after the weekend.

I used to watch The Brady Bunch on Friday nights. (There, I admit it, I watched The Brady Bunch!) Another Friday night show was All in the Family, which I really enjoyed.  The Tommy Hunter Show was on Fridays too, but I never watched that.  Sometimes I'd see the show's closing credits, with the guitar on a chair, while waiting for something I did want to see to come on next, like The World at War. (Another Friday show where I only watched the closing credits was Police Story.) It used to be the only night when I'd stay up late enough to watch The National on the CBC at 11:00.

Today, Friday night for me is the night of the New York Times Saturday crossword puzzle.  They keep their hardest crosswords for Saturday, so my favourite puzzles are then.  They come online at 10:00.

Another thing I do online on Fridays is read Dan Savage's sex advice column.  I'm hoping it might be useful to me someday.

Corn

When I was young, August was corn on the cob season.  We'd often buy fresh corn at a place called Larry's Fruits and eat it at our cottage.  We had a pressure cooker we could cook it in. (Maybe we still have it around.)

I sometimes burnt my mouth eating corn on the cob.  Today I usually prevent that by pouring cold water on the corn before serving it.  I've also noticed that it's convenient to roll cobs on top of an oblong butter dish.

When we started a garden in our back yard, corn was one of the things we always grew.  Corn stalks and husks make for a lot of stuff to put in the compost. (It's occurred to me that a garden's primary function is to produce compost, and the food is just a byproduct.)

Now that we have a city garden, it isn't suited to corn.  Even if you managed to grow cobs of any size, the raccoons will just get it.  Anyway, one inconvenience about growing corn is that it needs thinning early on, removing many of the little stalks so the rest can grow bigger.  For me, thinning is the hardest part of gardening because it's hard to tell which ones to keep. (You have to do it with root crops too.)

Corn comes from Mexico.  It's only safe to plant when the danger of frost is over, and I've heard that the First Nations figured out that it's safe when the new leaves on the oak trees are the size of a mouse's ear.  Seems very clever to me.

Singing in a choir

I was in the local United Church junior choir for a couple of years when I was young.  I could take it or leave it. (I enjoy singing more today.)

When I was in Grade Six, I missed a lot of school.  My parents didn't mind, but the teacher wasn't happy and spoke to me about it.  If I promised to stop missing school, I'd soon be breaking the promise and that would mean trouble, but if I said I'd continue it that would mean trouble right away.  So all I could do was say nothing and stare blankly.  He actually got my hearing tested! (It was perfect.)

But he did get to me, and in June I made a resolution to myself that in this last month I'd have perfect attendance.  I actually went to Sports Day, even though I knew I was going to hate it and I did.  But in the end it was no use:  I had to miss another day.

I should mention that if I went anywhere outside on a day when I'd missed school and any of my classmates saw me, they'd make an issue of it sooner or later.  Sure, it was none of their business, but it did get to me, and I got anxious not go anywhere on days when I'd been absent.

Now on the night of this June day I'd missed, we had choir practice.  It's true that this was the last rehearsal before the year-end concert, but it wasn't like I was doing a solo.  A lot of kids were in both the choir and my class, and I did not want to expose myself to their gleeful critiques.

One of my sisters said, "I think Jamie should go to choir practice anyway." (She was thirteen and I was eleven, and she'd got to the stage where she decided she knew everything about what was best for me better than I did.) So my parents started putting pressure on me to go.  It was finally my other sister who tipped the balance, and I went.

When I was at choir practice, Ann didn't lose any time saying, "Why weren't you in school, Jamie?" If that had been the only thing it wouldn't have mattered.  But she blabbed around about it, of course, and the next day at recess I had to deal with other kids making an issue of it.  I could not deal with this at all.  I ended up saying "Look, I just couldn't miss it!" which of course didn't do any good:  they wanted their pound of flesh.  I picked a sliver out of wooden plank and felt really, really stupid.  I knew what the consequences would be, but I took the path of least resistance and walked into it anyway.  And for what?

I'm still a bit resentful today.  It wasn't like my relatives were pressuring me into this to benefit themselves. (That's just the way of the world.) But they thought this was for my own good!  If there were consequences that I wanted to avoid, that just proved I was too sensitive.  It was bad enough that when people were deliberately nasty to me I was expected to act as if it didn't hurt me and call that a solution.  But now I was supposed to make decisions beforehand as if the nastiness I faced wasn't going to hurt me!  I wish I could have lived in two different worlds and gone or not gone to one regardless of the other, but these worlds did overlap and I couldn't just ignore that there'd be consequences I couldn't deal with.

Ideal holiday

I remember one year when I was sick with a cold at Christmas time (like in the old song). I mostly just stayed in bed and watched TV, including the movies Stalag 17 and The Man Who Came to Dinner.  And yet it was one of my favourite Christmases.  Go figure!

I guess my idea of a perfect Christmas is just doing nothing.  I'm long past caring about gifts; if anything, they're an inconvenience to me.  I suppose Christmas is the children's holiday, while New Year's is for grownups.

TV comedies

When I was little, I watched sitcoms like Green Acres. (Eddie Albert did a great slow burn.)  Later I watched All in the Family faithfully on Friday nights.  I also watched MTM sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show. (Newhart's therapy group was really funny!) I watched Happy Days but always found Laverne & Shirley unfunny.

In the 1980s I watched Cheers, which holds up pretty well. (I've been watching it recently on Netflix.) I haven't watched many sitcoms in recent years.  I've seen Seinfeld in short bits but never watched a whole episode from start to finish.  I've never watched Friends,whose concept always struck me as deeply uninteresting, or Two and a Half Men.

Recently I've been watching some comedies on video.  I took up The Simpsons, and it's brilliantly written, at least in the early seasons.  I love Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, perhaps because I have Asperger's Syndrome and David's character seems to have it too.  I've watched a lot of South Park, though I'll be the first to admit that it's vulgar and uneven.  But its Fat Albert parody and the boy band satire are hilarious.

I miss the variety show.  When I was young I enjoyed The Red Skelton Show and The Carole Burnett Show.  Skelton used to do a funny pantomime as a glass blower, so I've always thought of glass blowing as funny.  And Carol Burnett did these skits with Ed and Eunice and Mama where Eunice lived this petit bourgeois life of not-so-quiet despair.  This premise shouldn't have been funny, but it was!

National parks

When I was young, my family often visited Fundy National Park in southeastern New Brunswick.  We liked the nature trails and camped out there.  We also visited P.E.I. National Park for the beaches, and Cape Breton Highlands National Park.

Near my hometown of Sackville, N.B., there was Fort Beausejour National Historic Park.  It had a museum with exhibits about the 18th-century colonies.  Back in 1755 it was the French fort on a ridge, looking southeast to the British Fort Cumberland on a parallel ridge.  When war broke out it was the first British conquest.  Brook Watson was there, a young man who'd lost his leg to a Havana shark (there was a famous painting of this) and later became Lord Mayor of London.  We heard stories about how the British cattle wandered across the icy Missiguash River onto the French side and Watson swam across and brought them back, then later he impressed some hostile First Nations warriors by taking a dagger and repeatedly stabbing his wooden leg.

We also visited Fort Louisbourg National Historic Park in Cape Breton. (My mother came from the nearby town of Louisburg and remembered playing in the ruins when she was little, before they started restoring the place.) Now they have guides there playing 18th-century French settlers.  Fort Louisbourg has an important place in American history due to the 1748 campaign where New England militias came together to take the fort, the beginning of the United States Army.

Magazines

When I was young, we got quite a few magazines.  My grandfather gave us a gift subscription to National Geographic every year until his death, and we collected the maps that came with it.  We subscribed to Reader's Digest too, though that was pretty right-wing. (I remember they did an article praising Mobutu, the dictator-thief who ruled the Congo.) But I did like their Notes From All Over.  We also got The New Yorker, and the Boy Scout magazine Canadian Boy.

And we subscribed to Time magazine, which was (and is) incredibly tendentious.  After Nixon resigned, they put his successor Gerald Ford on the cover with the headline "The healing begins." (A note of wishful thinking there.) I recall that their letters section was particularly slanted in their choice of the last letter on a subject, presented as the implicit last word.  For example, after a 1978 cover story on the coal miners' strike, the last letter said, "Jimmy Carter's mishandling of the coal strike is yet another argument for nuclear power." They killed two birds with one stone then.

In high school we got a magazine aimed at teenagers called Today's Generation, and it was unbelievably right-wing!  One thing that really bothered them was the "Day of Protest," a one-day general strike the unions staged in 1976 to oppose the federal government's policy of wage controls.  This angered them so much that they had editorials in two consecutive issues attacking the union movement's "bully-boy tactics."

Don't get me started on the lameness of The New York Times' Sunday magazine.

Future books to read

I have an ambition to read every novel that's been made into a Classics Illustrated comic book.  I started doing this last year, and I've already read Last of the Mohicans, Waterloo and the first half of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. (He told the story in two books.) The one I'm dreading is Les Miserables, which is really long and sounds pretty shameless.

I've read a lot of Charles Dickens novels, but I still haven't got around to Our Mutual Friend or Dombey and Son.  I heard Marilynne Robinson's Gilead in audio book form, and now I want to read more of her novels, especially Housekeeping.  I haven't read much of George Eliot--just Silas Marner--and I want to read The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch someday.  Last year I read Mark Twain's travel memoir The Innocents Abroad, and now I want to read his frontier memoir Roughing It.  I recently read Herodotus' history of the wars between Greece and Persia, and now I want to read Thucydides' history of the Great Pelopponesian War and Xenophon's Anabasis.  Seems like whenever I get a book read I end up with two new books I want to read!  I couldn't imagine ever running out of books to read.

Natural disasters

I haven't had much experience of natural disasters.  Back in 1972 we were travelling in the United States and encountered what was left of Hurricane Agnes. (By that point it was just a storm.) In 1954 my newlywed parents were sailing to Britain on the Empress of Australia when they caught up with the remnants of Hurricane Hazel in the Labrador Sea.  My father got seasick quite a bit, while my mother lay down until she got over it.  She told me that they kept the tablecloths from slipping by making them wet.

I've never been in an earthquake, though once I was in the Robarts Library on the fifth floor when I felt what later turned out to be a tremor in Toronto!  At the time I had a vaguely uncomfortable feeling and had to stop work for a minute.  But I only realized what it was when I heard about it on the news.

Best present moment ever

What was my best present moment?  Well, the best eight months of my life was researching my Ph.D. thesis in London, England, in the mid-1990s.  I did do a lot of research, but I found time to do a lot of other stuff.  I went to a Proms concert in Albert Hall.  I even went on a couple of protest marches for Bosnia, and heard Vanessa Redgrave speaking in Trafalgar Square. (That's a once in a lifetime experience.) And I saw a dozen plays, and the silent movie Sunrise accompanied by a live orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall!

I had a lot of enjoyable experiences.  I actually enjoyed food shopping because I felt independent.  And there was the time I wanted to find this statue of John Bunyan.  I found the spot on a map but when I went there I couldn't see it.  Then one day I was riding in the top half of a Routemaster bus, and there was the statue!  They'd put it outside a church at the second-storey level.

I also enjoyed visiting Hampstead in the north. (There was the Everyman Cinema there, where I saw movies like Vanya on 42nd Street.  You could get there by subway, but I preferred the bus.  Once I went on a walking tour of that neighbourhood where they showed the house that was the model for Admiral Boom's house in Mary Poppins, and a place where you could see part of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral.

Early radio

When I was growing up in Sackville, NB, we only got a few AM radio stations.  There was a station in the nearby town of Amherst and a CBC station in the city of Moncton. (FM radio was something we heard about.) In the morning we'd listen to The World at Eight on the CBC.  In later years I'd listen to The World at Six more.

I recall a phone-in talk show on the Amherst station.  There was a woman who often called in with a rather strident voice, who often said, "That is what I was born and brought up to do!" People made fun of her a lot.  Also, a guy from the local supermarket would call in and say what their current specials were.  Looking back, I wonder if they got into trouble with the CRTC, considering how they were blurring the line between programming and advertising.  You could phone the station to request music for them to play, and when I was sixteen I successfully requested Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good."

My hometown was surrounded by flat marshland, and the Canadian Northern Service had several radio towers transferring shortwave signals long distances.

Fruit trees

Back when I lived in Sackville, N.B., we planted several apple trees in our back yard. (One of them was the Lodi variety, I recall.) One spring, my brother decided to prune these trees, but he did a terrible job, removing all their new growth.  One of the trees never quite recovered, and died a few years later.  One problem with pruning is that when you cut off the wrong thing, you can't go back and uncut it.

Since then I've learned to prune trees pretty well.  You want to remove the branches that are growing inward or downward, and leave alone the ones that are growing upward or outward.  Also, if two trees are close you should trim them so they won't get into each other's space.

We now live in a house on Greensides Avenue near St. Clair West.  It came with a big cherry tree and a big plum tree in the back yard.  There was also a crab apple tree in the front that was about my height when we bought the place, but in the twenty years since then it's grown really big.  Also, the cherry tree produced a couple of offshoots which I replanted in the front and side yards, and have also grown big.  The land had an orchard a century ago, and we're continuing the tradition.

One year--I think it was 2000--the cherry tree in back produced cherries literally by the bucketful.  But now it's getting old.  We recently took off a big dead limb and I don't know how long the rest will survive. (The plum tree is getting old too.) 

One thing I like is blossom season in the spring.  The cherry trees have nice white blossoms, while the crab apple blossoms are purplish.

Candy

When I was little I recall that a box of chocolates would have greater variety than today.  My favourite is nougats, though some people consider them boring.  I've never liked caramels.  I like strawberry creams and coffee creams and such.  I also like Ferrero Rocher bonbons.

I've never understood the appeal of candy corn or kisses, nor of that British delicacy the caramel-coated apple, which has always struck me as gilding the lily.

When I was little, I loved Roald Dahl's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  The original movie version with Gene Wilder I liked, though the Oompa-Loompa songs were too preachy. (I've sung "Candy Man" at karaoke.) The recent remake I haven't bothered to see, though Johnny Depp is an actor I often like.

That Forrest Gump line about life being a box of chocolates actually stands the book version on its head!  Winston Groom's novel begins with the sentence, "Bein' an idiot ain't no box of chocolates." If they couldn't be faithful to that line, you'd think they'd have left it out!

Baking bread

When I was fourteen my sister and I got interested in baking bread. It happened when we bought a copy of Betty Crocker's Cookbook, which had a whole chapter of bread recipes.  We made stuff like pumpernickel rye bread and raisin bread and corn bread.

I got interested in baking again in my mid-30s after we bought a bread machine.  I have a cyclical system to ensure variety, since baking can get boring sooner than you expect.  I try to bake once a week, with a cycle of twelve loaves.  The first, fifth and ninth are whole bread (which has the nicest smell while it's baking); the third, seventh and eleventh are multigrain bread; the second and eighth are raisin bread (my sister's favourite); the sixth and twelfth are rye bread (actually a combination of rye flour with white and whole wheat); the tenth is cheese bread; and the fourth is plain white bread.  I like to use honey and molasses to make whole wheat, multigrain and rye.  It's a challenge balancing the amount of flour with the amount of water so the loaf will be big, but not big enough to crowd the skylight on top of the mini-oven. (More flour makes it smaller, more water makes it bigger.)

Buffet restaurants

I think my favourite part of buffet restaurants is the salad bar. (I remember that back in the 1970s the first restaurant I went to with a salad bar was Ponderosa Steak House.) I always like to get some lettuce with chickpeas, purple cabbage, shredded carrots, corn and a deviled egg if they have them.  And my only dressing is Thousand Islands.

I sometimes go to east Indian buffets, but my main buffet restaurant is Chinese food at the Mandarin.  Of course, it's a challenge not to overeat.  I sometimes ask for chopsticks, which I know how to use. When you're finished there and they're processing your bill, they give you a hot towel and a fortune cookie.  Have you ever noticed that you never get a fortune cookie saying "You have an attitude," or "You will break your ankle"?

Early TV

When I was little we got just one TV channel. It was a Moncton station whose logo was a lobster. (We'd also spent a year in Britain, and I remember seeing Rolf Harris on TV, along with Tintin and Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men.) 

Then, when I was seven, we got a CBC channel.  Or rather, we got a CBC affiliate from Saint John that didn't always carry the regular network's shows, much to our annoyance. (I think the station, like half of New Brunswick, was owned by the Irvings.) We also got two channels with a poor-quality signal: a Radio-Canada station--the French CBC--in Moncton, and a full-fledged CBC station in P.E.I.

We got a wider range of channels for a year when we lived in Mississauga in the mid-'70s, and got cable TV.  Then we returned to New Brunswick and went back to two full channels and two weak ones for another three years until cable TV came to our town. Even then, it was another five years before we got PBS!

All this we were seeing on a black and white Silvertone TV set.  I remember seeing the butterfly at the start of CBC colour broadcasts, which we couldn't appreciate on our TV.  We only got a colour set in the '80s!  But I'm just as happy with that:  you hear about young people who've seen nothing but color shows all their life, and are uncomfortable watching classic black and white movies as a result.

Fireworks

When I was little and saw firework displays, there was one type I couldn't stand.  It's these missiles that go off with an especially intense explosion, producing a really bright light and a really loud noise.  I didn't mind the light, but couldn't stand the noise!  So I'd take to plugging my ears whenever they set off a new one, just in case it was another one with the intense noise.  My enjoyment was compromised.

Loud noises have always bothered me.  Even today, a loud noise in the street sometimes literally makes me jump.  Balloons make me uncomfortable because I'm afraid they'll burst loudly.  I don't know how people at rock concerts can bear the loud noise. (I read that a Ted Nugent concert in Kansas City prompted noise complaints from farmers twenty miles away!  They say he's deaf in one ear.) I guess young people want to be overwhelmed by something.)

Romances

I'm not a big fan of romantic movies.  Movies like Love Story and Titanic are shameless, manipulative adolescent fare.  But there are a few that I particularly like.  One is the John Ford western Stagecoach.  The main story features John Wayne as a gunfighter heading to a deadly confrontation and Claire Trevor as a saloon girl who's been thrown out of town.  Their developing love, combined with fear of loss, is very believable.

My favourite animated Disney movie is Lady and the Tramp, with a romance between a dainty, house bred female dog and a shrewd male street dog.  The story involves discovery, decency and courage.  There's a cute scene where they're eating the same spaghetti noodle.  It's a '50s movie in the best sense.

More recently, there was the movie of John LeCarre's The Constant Gardener.  As well as international intrigue involving a pharmaceutical corporation, it has a great love story.  It's about Ralph Fiennes being initially uninterested in his wife Rachel Weisz' causes, then living for the same cause she lives for, then dying for the same ideal she died for.

Cell phones

I've never owned a cell phone.  Once I borrowed someone's cell phone to call home and she had to show me which buttons to push.  There are people who own iPhones and things so they can go online and play computer games and stuff when they're out and about.  But I don't dare do that!  I already spend too much time on my computer at home.  The last thing I want is to be online all the time.

Sometimes I hear someone speaking on a cell phone and my first instinct is to wonder whether he's talking to me.  At first I'm nervous, wondering if it means trouble for me, but then when it turns out he isn't talking to me, sometimes I feel a bit disappointed.  I suppose I'll have to start carrying a cell phone in case I need to call home, but I'm not eager.

Coincidences

Do you believe in coincidences?  I suppose they can happen, though sometimes they're hard to swallow.  Is it really a coincidence that back in 1981 the Iranians released their American hostages on the same day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president, and that Washington was sending missiles to Iran just a month later?  If you believe that's a coincidence and not the result of a back room deal, you can believe anything.

It's also a remarkable coincidence that in 1988 an American warship in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian airliner, and just six months later an American airliner got blown up over Scotland. (I was living in Glasgow at the time.) It's always seemed to me that this is the sort of "tit for tat" response that the Iranians would have been capable of.  But I suppose it could be a coincidence.  You can never ignore theoretical possibilities.

Grandparents

My mother's parents died before I was born and my father's mother died when I was only seven.  I did know my father's father a little.  We lived in Sackville in southeastern New Brunswick, and occasionally visited him in my father's hometown of Campbellton on New Brunswick's north shore.  He died when I was 21.

My grandfather was a postal worker who sorted mail on trains.  He was a veteran of World War I, where he was one of the Canadian soldiers sent to Russia at the time of the Bolshevik revolution.  He only talked about it once with my father, and said, "Thank God there was a revolution!" (He usually avoided profanity.)

He was involved with youth groups like the Boy Scouts, and knew a lot of boys who became soldiers in World War II, sometimes receiving letters from them.  My father remembers hearing about the D-Day invasion on the radio and how concerned his father was about all the young men in harm's way.  He knew some soldiers in the Royal Quebec Fusilliers who were deployed to Hong Kong just before the Pearl Harbor raid and were doomed to a brutal captivity.  We were watching No Price Too High, a documentary about Canada's role in World War II with footage of a sergeant overseeing rifle practice in Hong Kong, and Father recognized him as one of the soldiers my grandfather knew.

Encyclopedias

When I was a kid we had several encyclopedias.  One was an Art Linkletter picture-book encyclopedia.  I recently read that some of its artists also worked on the notorious EC horror comics that prompted a big hysteria in the 1950s.  Their illustration of Macbeth certainly scared me!

We also had the World Illustrated Encycopedia from around 1960.  The entry on communism is pretty funny.  Under the heading "What makes people communists?" they said things like "In rich, peaceful countries a communist is often a person with a sort of mental illness." My brother nicknamed this encyclopedia "the Book of Lies."

And we had an earlier encyclopedia that my mother had had when she was a girl.  It was called The Book of Knowledge and was originally published in Britain around 1910.  We had a Canadian edition published around 1930, substantially the same but adding a few articles on Canadian history and World War I.

The Book of Knowledge is a curious artifact of the Edwardian age.  One of its sections was called "The Book of Golden Deeds," and told stories of heroes for kids to look up to, like Father Damien.  There were children's stories with some illustrations by famous artists like Arthur Rackham.  And there was a section called "The Book of Wonder," answering children's questions like "Did any of the Apostles go to Britain?" or "Will the last man die gasping for air?" I think we still have it packed away downstairs.

We also had a 1930s edition of a British encyclopedia called The World Book, which had a whole volume devoted to the Dominions. The entry on flags shows Germany's flag with a swastika!

Today I love to read Wikipedia, where one page will have links to other pages.  When I read one entry I'll often open a link to a second one, then to a third...

Swimming

When I was fourteen, I joined the local swim team.  My older brother and sister had been on it the year before and I thought I'd feel more mature.  But I should have known that they had an A team and a B team, and I got put on the B team, where most of the others were eleven or twelve.  As a result, I ended up feeling less mature.  But my mother was a big believer in it, and I didn't dare quit.

I remember one time when we registered for races at an upcoming meet.  I asked whether I was ready to race in the breast stroke category-- I hadn't been previously-- and the person said yes.  But then the day of the meet came and my name had been removed from that category.  When I asked about it, the coach explained that my kick wasn't legal. (I don't remember whether it was supposed to be above the surface of the water or below.) It turned out that I'd asked the wrong person whether I was ready, because the right person wasn't there.

All this made me feel stupid on several levels.  It was stupid of me to think I was ready when I clearly wasn't.  It was stupid of me to ask for an explanation when I should have just known I wasn't good enough.  And it was stupid of me to think I was getting somewhere and participate in this swim team that clearly didn't need me.

I continued with the swim team for the rest of the season, but I didn't enjoy it.  Today I rarely swim.

Euthanasia

I have nothing against euthanasia.  If someone wants to die, I suppose the courts should make sure he's making the decision freely and isn't being pressured into it.  If it's a question of whether to unplug my life support, I'll leave it up to my descendants.  If I had to make the decision, I'd definitely consult the doctors.  I don't have much to say about this subject because my expertise is so limited.

Recurring dreams

I often dream of our old home in Sackville, N.B. (Sometimes I feel like I'm trespassing on the house's new owners!) In some of these dreams it's May and I'm starting the garden in our back yard.  And I also dream of the summer cottage we used to have near Northumberland Strait, and various places in the Sackville area.

Many of my dreams involve travelling, on a train or on a ship. (I've sometimes dreamed of sailing on the Titanic.) I often dream of visiting London:  in this dream I sometimes go to a non-existent museum that's an amalgam of all the London museums I've visited.

Back in the 1990s I spent years working on my Ph.D. thesis.  Today I sometimes dream that I'm still trying to finish it, without much hope.  And I also dream of taking university courses.  Some people dream of sitting final exams, but in my dreams I tend to be in the middle of the course and feeling clueless about it.

My mother died a year ago and I sometimes dream about her.  In some of these dreams I hold her hand.  In one I said to her, "We miss you!"

Entitlement

In rich countries like the United States and Canada, people often take their good fortune for granted.  They think that because they make a lot of money, that proves that the deserve it.  Some Americans will refer to the U.S.A. as the richest country in the world, with the clear assumption that their country's riches are clear evidence of virtue rather than luck. (Never mind that the United States largely sailed through World War II without much economic destruction, then had a generation of world dominance while their rivals were rebuilding.)

But what bugs me is the person who attacks the "culture of entitlement" among poor people, forgetting that most of the latter have always gone without advantages that he often takes for granted.  Poverty is a complex problem that can seem to have no solution, so some people are tempted to reduce it to a moral issue. "Those people don't really need welfare, they're just lazy.  Cut them off welfare and they'll get by somehow.  And if they don't get by, it's their own fault."

So-called welfare reform angers me, because its victims (including many children) are out of sight and out of mind.  People talk about the reduction in the number of welfare recipients as a success in itself, ignoring that the number who need welfare hasn't been reduced by the same amount.  People say "I don't want my tax dollars spent on those people!" and don't care about the consequences.  That tells us a lot about today's society.

Joie de Vivre

I don't know much about the joy of living.  I recall reading in Two Years Before the Mast about a party in Mexican California where a girl would sneak up behind a boy she liked and break an egg over his head. (It wasn't a regular egg, but one filled with cologne water.) And a boy would sneak up behind a girl he liked and put his sombrero over her head.  Those people knew how to live!

I guess that here in the well-off Protestant developed world we associate joie de vivre with the poorer, more Catholic societies to the south.  Places like Rio de Janeiro at Mardi Gras time.  People express their joie de vivre on weekends and holidays, then go back to scratching out a living on weekdays. (Here in North America we also have New Orleans.)

But maybe you can find it closer to home if you look harder.  In my neighbourhood, for one weekend in July they have the Hispanic-centred Salsa on St. Clair street festival, with the street closed to traffic.  It's very noisy, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for living in an interesting neighbourhood.

Strawberries & raspberries

When I was growing up in Sackville, N.B., there were a lot of raspberry plants near our house.  They'd come ripe around late July and we'd pick a whole lot.  Some of them we'd put into pies, others we'd make into drinks.  We had a recipe for raspberry shrub in our copy of Betty Crocker's Cookbook, which you made by boiling raspberries and adding ginger ale and frozen lemonade.

We also grew strawberries in our back yard garden.  In the fall we'd put a layer of mulch and leaves over them to prevent the ground from thawing and refreezing over the winter, because that can uproot the plants. (Robert Frost wrote a poem about protecting an orchard by putting it on a north slope to prevent thawing.)

When I was older we bought a big freezer, so then we could add some sugar to raspberries or to strawberries, freeze them and continue to eat them for months onward. (We froze peas from the garden too.) But sometimes we added too little sugar for my taste.

Some time after we moved to Toronto we discovered a place called Whittamore Farm in Markham where you could pick your own strawberries and raspberries in season.  That's always fun, but we no longer have a car to get there.  We're city folk now.

The Canadian National Exhibition

I visited the Canadian National Exhibition for the first time in 1975, when I was 13 and my family was living near Toronto.  It was the biggest thing I'd ever seen! (It was near its attendance peak then.) 

We came in on a GO train that made special stops next to the exhibition grounds.  The disc jockey Mike Cooper was trying to break a world record by staying in a Ferris wheel for the whole three weeks.  I went to a show of Scottish marching bands and a Bachmann-Turner Overdrive concert where people started lighting matches! (They had a fire truck nearby.) The big song they were playing everywhere was the Captain and Tenille's "Love Will Keep Us Together."

The food building had a special where you could buy up to 25 Pepsi drinks in these tiny cups for a penny each, attracting queues.  My brother ate a falafel for the first time, and I bought a T-shirt with French comic strip hero Asterix the Gaul.  The oil industry had an exhibit devoted to "the Big Tough Expensive Job" of searching for oil in the Arctic.  On the Midway I rode a roller coaster for the first time, and didn't like it.  I liked climbing the stairs to the top of the glass-walled Bulova Tower in the middle of the Midway. (It's a shame they tore it down in the 1980s!) There was also a flea circus, an outdoor tightrope walker and a big electric train set on display.

I moved to Toronto in 1990, but I don't visit the Ex much today. (I do it every third year or so.) Either it got smaller or I got bigger, or both.  But when I do I spend a lot of time on the Midway rides, especially the bumper cars.  And I always have to look at the butter sculptures!

My favourite thing

I suppose my favourite thing is my comics collection.  I have quite a few comic books, especially stuff like Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge and Classics Illustrated, but I especially like the Sunday funnies I used to buy on Ebay.  Stuff like Steve Canyon and Prince Valiant and The Heart of Juliet Jones and Flash Gordon and Li'l Abner.

I also have a lot of hardcover reprints of comic strips like Popeye and Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes.  And I have a practically complete collection of The Menomonee Falls Gazette, which ran in the 1970s and reprinted whole weeks of strips like Rip Kirby and Modesty Blaise and Johnny Hazard and Mary Perkins on Stage.  Come to think of it, maybe I'll read them all again.  What great stories!

I also like our new bread machine.

Thursdays

When I was little, I remem her liking Thursday nights because they came just before Friday, which came just before the weekend.  When I was twelve and we moved to the Toronto area, I started to get interested in what new movies were being released, though I rarely went to the movies back then, and followed the movie ads in The Toronto Star.  Thursday was the day when they showed what new movies would be released the following day.

Back in the mid-1980s, I'd  watch the sitcom Cheers on Thursday nights. (I've been watching the reruns on Netflix, and it holds up very well.) Later, they showed "must-see TV" like Larry David's Seinfeld and Friends on Thursdays, but I'v never watched Friends--the concept always struck me as deeply uninteresting--and I've only seen Seinfeld in short bits.  But I love David's more recent sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Thursday can be a good day for food shopping because they've just brought in a big load of fresh food for the weekend trade.  And for me Thursday evening at 10:00 is the time when The New York Times puts its Friday crossword puzzle online.  I don't bother with the Monday through Thursday puzzles because they're a bit too easy, but Friday and especially Saturday are nice and challenging.

Inspiration

I wish I could find more inspiration, then I'd write a lot more.  But maybe it's right there and I can't see it!  Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge.  I know a lot of stuff but I with I could imagine a bit more too.  Maybe you can know too much, or at least think that your knowledge is more important that it really is, but can you have too much imagination?

There's this British polar explorer called Ranulph Fiennes.  Someone who worked with him says that the reason he's so fearless is because he has no imagination.  That's English courage for you.  While many Americans have just enough imagination to be afraid of everything.  Does religious faith require more imagination, or less?  I guess it requires the right kind of imagination!

Weddings

I haven't been to a lot of weddings.  Both of them were in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  One was my cousin Owen Vernon when I was ten, the other was my sister Margaret when I was 23.  Needless to say, I've never got married myself.

I'm not sentimental enough to enjoy weddings.  Some people say the weddings industry is a big ripoff, and I wouldn't want to spend a lot of money on getting married.  Your basic city hall wedding would satisfy me, assuming I'd go all the way to marriage in the first place.  And is being married really any better than living together?  I've never cohabited either, so I really don't know.

I remember that when I was 19 I got up early in the morning to watch Prince Charles and Lady Diana's wedding live.  In hindsight it seems lame to go to that much trouble to see people you don't know get hitched.  If you ask me, monarchy is silly.

Gangsters

I've never met a real gangster, fortunately, but some of my favourite movies involve them.  I love those 1930s Warner Brothers productions with James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart wearing fedoras and acting tough.  In more recent years, I've loved the Godfather movies, Goodfellas, Miller's Crossing and Donnie Brasco.  I also like the TV show The Sopranos--though the first season was the best--and parts of Boardwalk Empire.

As far as real-life gangsters go, I think we should legalize and regulate drugs and the sex trade to get rid of the violent racketeers.  But most North Americans haven't learned their lesson from the failure of Prohibition.

Gypsies

What's a gypsy?  I've never knowingly met one (I've heard of gypsy moths.) I remember hearing the Irish Rovers singing "The Gypsy Rover," about a lady of quality falling for a gypsy's charms. In my opera group I've done chorus parts in Bizet's Carmen, in which a gypsy woman leads a soldier astray and gets knifed by him in the end.  And in my choir we sang Verdi's Il Trovatore once, which also involves gypsies.  

Gypsies appeal to operagoers because we see them in romantic terms, though in real life they sometimes get discriminated against. (Some got murdered by the Nazis!) I once read a Tintin comic book that dealt with anti-gypsy prejudice.  Some gypsies prefer being called Roma, so I'll keep that in mind if I ever meet one.

Agendas

What are my agendas?  Just now, I've set out to read every novel that was made into a Classics Illustrated comic book. (I've recently read The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, King of the Mountains and Waterloo.) Sometime I'm going to put my comics  collection into better order.  

I've played several Facebook games of the Sim City type, where you build cities and it takes time to develop different resources so you have to plan.  I like that kind of challenge where it's in a virtual world and your mistakes don't hurt anyone.  

I've been slowly working my way through the book Teach Yourself Ancient Greek:  there are 25 chapters, and I recently finished the twentieth.  I've also been translating Julius Caesar's famous Latin narrative of the wars in Gaul, the one that begins with the line "All Gaul is divided into three parts..." (Actually, for my translation I prefer "Greater Gaul is divided...) I've reached the part where he's fighting the Germans, but run into a tough passage, so I'm leaving it alone a while for now.

Dirt Roads

When I was growing up in rural New Brunswick, there were still some dirt roads. (When driving on them during dry summer weather, you'd have to close the windows.) There were also roads lined with gravel, and some with a pink mcadam that wasn't full paving. (Sometimes when a road needs repairing you'll see spots worn pink, down to the mcadam layer.) Even the Trans-Canada Highway was undivided in my area back then.

Now that I live in the big city, do I get nostalgic for dirt roads?  Not really.  Some people will say you can get nostalgic for anything, but I don't miss outhouses.  Maybe the world is getting better, at least for the better-off people.

The late show movie

When I was little, the local TV station called its Saturday late show movie "Top Hat Theatre." (They also gave their Thursday night movie the imaginative name "Thursday Night at the Movies"!) But that was past my bedtime back then.  Later, there was also a channel that played the naughty Carry on movies on the Sunday late show.

In the 1980s the CBC showed a lot of classic Warner Brothers movies on the late show.  For me they were a revelation, way better than the MGM factory.  Angels With Dirty Faces introduced me to James Cagney and the Dead End Kids.  They had a lot of movies with Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart, including The Maltese Falcon!  There were also musicals like Green Pastures and westerns like They Died With Their Boots on.

I'd watch these movies while waiting till David Letterman's show started.  I lived in the Maritimes then, so while the movie began just before midnight Letterman would start just after 1:30.  This gap was long enough that the movie would usually be over by the time for Letterman. (Most movies were shorter back then.) But I missed the ends of G-Men and Dark Victory and The Life of Emile Zola.  I've seen all of G-Men since then, but not Dark Victory because I can't bear to watch any movie with Ronald Reagan in the cast.

Changing seasons

I like the weather when summer turns into fall.  I remember that when we lived in Sackville, New Brunswick, and had a big front yard, in September or October I'd wake up and in the morning and see a white covering of frost on the lawn from the cold weather the night before.  But then it would get warmer and the frost would melt.  Living in the city now, that's one of the only things I miss about the country.

I'm over 50, but I never get tired of watching the seasons change.  It makes you feel like part of the earth.  They say April has a lot of suicides, and I suppose some people see a new year starting and don't want to be part of it.  I could never imagine feeling that way!

Sensitivity

I admit that I'm the sensitive type.  When I was young, people sometimes said to me, "You're too sensitive!" From their perspective my sensitivity was the weak link, but from mine it was the central fact, so I sometimes resented them.  Now that I'm a grownup and my feelings can't be dismissed as easily, it doesn't seem so important.

I'm especially sensitive to loud noises. (They literally make me jump.) Balloons make me uncomfortable because I worry that they'll burst at any moment.  My taste is sometimes sensitive too:  I can't eat onions or tomatoes.  I used to dislike steak but now I don't mind it.  And I can't stand the noise you make when you saw styrofoam.

When you're sensitive it's important to be emotionally intelligent and respect people, or they may hurt your feelings.  I remember losing an online friend after he sent me an email taking issue with something I'd written in a public forum post, and I responded angrily and he got hurt.  I hate losing friends!

The deaths of famous people

I remember when I was in Grade 3 and the teacher told us that Coco Chanel had died. (I'd never heard of her.) About the same time I remember hearing on the news about Igor Stravinsky's death.  I knew he was a composer, but didn't realize just how great he was back then.  And in Grade 7 the teacher told us that Betty Grable had died, whom I hadn't heard of either.  And about that time I read in the newspaper about the death of Bud Abbott of Abbott and Costello fame.

Where were you when you heard of Elvis Presley's death?  I remember hearing it on the radio. (My sister Moira was in Germany, and saw the headline in a Dutch newspaper!) And I remember hearing of the deaths of Maria Callas and Joan Crawford at about the same time.  I heard about Princess Diana's death just after I'd returned from England, so I was recovering from jet lag at the time.  And I was troubled by the Americans celebrating Osama bin Laden's death:  it's the Charlie Sheenization of the U.S.!

Celebrity deaths rarely get to me. (It's easier to keep an emotional distance from people you don't personally know.) Sometimes when I read about some old timer's death I'll think, "I thought he was already dead!" I wonder if people will think that when they read about my death?

New York City

I first visited New York City when I was ten.  I've visited it a few times since then, but I always felt like I was just scratching the surface.  I imagine you'd have to live there a while to actually know the place. (I lived in London, England, for eight months and got to know it pretty well.) I'd especially like to see the non-touristy areas like the outer boroughs.

I like some of the museums, of course.  My favourite part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the section with the American paintings and sculptures.  Central Park is colourful, at least in the daytime.  I only visited the World Trade Centre once before its destruction. (I could take it or leave it.) And I liked the Cloisters, and walking on the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge.

And of course, there's the theatre.  Thirty years ago I saw Kathy Bates and Anne Pitoniak in the play Night, Mother.  More recently I saw the musical Chicago there.  New York could use something like London's National Theatre, with government subsidy.

My sister Moira doesn't care so much for the city.  She says her only reason to visit there would be to eat a big New York breakfast, and there are places that serve it here in Toronto.  I can understand that feeling.  I remember seeing a digital clock in Manhattan that showed the time to the tenth of a second! (Just looking at it would put you in a hurry.) That's the New York touch.

Childhood playacting

I grew up with four siblings, and we used to put on what we called Biddle Family plays.  The one rule was that everyone had to die in the end.  So if you refer to a show like Hamlet or King Lear having a "Biddle Family ending," people in my family will know what that means.  We'd also do fairy tales with the good guys becoming bad guys and vice versa.

In school, they sometimes had up perform scenes based on what we were learning. (This was a fashionable approach at the time.) I didn't really get the point of it.  Later, in high school, they'd put on a musical show every year.  In hindsight, I might have tried out for that, but I had different priorities then.  In more recent years, I've joined an opera chorus and taken acting classes, but at that time it didn't interest me.  The road not taken.

Ethnic cuisine

Italian food I've eaten from childhood, so I don't think of it as "ethnic." (I once saw a 1930s movie where Shirley Temple was learning to eat spaghetti, which was still seen as ethnic by most Americans back then.) There was an episode of All in the Family where a neighbor served up Vichy Soisse soup and Archie Bunker said, "I'm going to eat something American--spaghetti!"

I discovered Chinese food when I was about fourteen.  I've even learned to eat it with chopsticks!  And I discovered Indian food while living in Glasgow, Scotland, in the late '80s.  Believe it or not, Glasgow's a big centre for Indian cuisine these days.  I especially like naan bread.

After moving to Toronto, I discovered Ethiopian food.  You don't use a knife and fork for that:  they serve it on a bed of soft bread which you tear off to wrap the food inside when you hold it in your fingers.  It's very spicy.

They say that when people are over thirty it's unusual for them to develop a taste for new foods.  But I hope to find some more yet.

An affair to remember

I remember the York University commencement in the spring of 2000, when I was given my Ph.D. in history, for a dissertation on the Chinese treaty port of Chongqing and its foreign community in the early 20th century.  Since this was a doctorate, I got a round red cap to wear instead of the regular mortarboard.  Elaine and Fabio, whom I'd been in class with years before but hadn't seen in quite a while, were also getting doctorates.  Opera singer Teresa Stratas got an honorary degree and gave a memorable speech.

Writing the thesis had been a difficult experience for me.  By the time it was over, I felt like a mother who'd given birth to a handicapped child. (My apologies to any real-life mothers of handicapped children who feel offended by the comparison.) It felt like the scene in Easy Rider where Dennis Hopper says "We did it!" but Peter Fonda says "We blew it."

At the commencement I met Marilyn Zivian, York's assistant dean for graduate studies, who'd attended my final examination.  She now mentioned that she'd loved my dissertation.  I'm glad someone did.  And yet, for all the grief I went through, I wish I could do something like that again.

My funniest situation

When I was in Grade 9 Social Studies, they tried to teach us about "values." On one occasion the teacher asked us to imagine a situation where we're on one side of a wide freeway full of speeding cars and see a girl being beaten up on the other side.  Should we run across the freeway to rescue her and risk getting hit by a car?  I found the premise rather improbable, and said so.  The teacher was not pleased.

I also remember in Grade 6 when a teacher started a discussion by saying, "You're lucky you have chores.  Can you see why that's so?" Considering that he was the one making the proposition, shouldn't it have been up to him to defend it? (But this time I was too prudent to say so.)

And in Grade 5, I saw a school debate over the proposition that children over 12 should be allowed to smoke a pipe.  One pro argument was that the First Nations smoked peace pipes, so this could promote the peace process; another was that cleaning up the ashes would create jobs.

Board games

When I was little, we had a lot of Parker Brothers board games.  There was Monopoly, of course, through we never seemed to finish a game.  There was Clue, which I always found pointless.  There was the world conquest game Risk, in which my brother John would always put a lot of armies on Iceland, at the border between Europe and North America. (He called Iceland "the homeland.") I preferred to focus on Australia, since it was a small continent that was easy to occupy completely.

And then there was Scrabble.  I used to hate the game because I was the youngest in the family and knew the fewest words.  But now that I'm older, I appreciate it as one of the best board games ever. (I've played a computer version of it, where I managed to tie the computer once, and lose by just two points another time!) When they invented Trivial Pursuit we also bought that, and I'm very good at it except for the questions about sports and cocktails.

Lately I've become interested in new board games, playing them with people who've come together through Meetup.  I've learned to play sophisticated strategy games like Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, Puerto Rico, Agricola and Smallworld. (I've even bought some of those games.) A few years ago my interests changed, however, and I haven't been coming out lately.  But I may return to them someday.

A memorable birthday party

I don't remember much about birthday parties, but I do remember a bit about some birthdays.  Like the blue shirt that I wore on my fourth birthday, or the minty taste of the valentine-shaped cake on my ninth birthday.  

I do remember my fifteenth birthday because of a scene the night before:  I'd griped to my parents about a certain adult who I felt had humiliated me in public, and their response was to blast me for being too sensitive.  Things were pretty icy the following day.  And on my sixteenth birthday I saw the movie 2001:  A Space Odyssey for the first time.  It was sobering.

Today, I'm not big on birthday parties, though I do like getting a strawberries & cream cake.  When I turned fifty a couple of years ago, I went onto YouTube and found the episode of All in the Family where Archie Bunker turned fifty. (He insisted he was just 49.) I must say that I still looked a lot younger than him.  There was also an episode of Maude where she turned fifty and blew out her birthday candles with a hair dryer!

My doppelganger

It's hard for me to imagine having a doppelgänger.  When they made James J. Matthews, they broke the mild!  Or to use a Frank Zappaesque metaphor, they threw away the shovel.

I'd imagine that two people who are very similar can become heated enemies.  Like Ed Koch and Donald Trump when they fell out in the late 1980s.  There were both New York motormouths sou wore their aggressiveness on their sleeve. Koch called Trump "Greedy, greedy, greedy!" and I think he also called him "jerky," one of the first times I heard that word. (It takes one to know one, of course.) I remember seeing both of them on Phil Donahue's talk show, where I couldn't help noticing the similarities.  Donahue's show is one of the only things from that decade that I actually miss today.

Shopping centres

When I was young, my idea of the big city was Moncton.  The first shopping centre I went to was Highfield Square in Moncton, which made a big impression on me at the time:  I dream about it occasionally.  These days I mainly remember the toy store and the bookstore.  Then they built Cumberland Square in Amherst, just across the Nova Scotia border from my hometown.

I can take shopping centres or leave them.  I actually prefer Dufferin Mall to Eaton Centre:  it has a bit more atmosphere.  When I visit a new shopping centre, the place that interests me the most is the bookstore, but they seem to be disappearing except for big places like Chapters and Indigo.

And then there are strip malls.  Some people find them tacky, but I suppose they have a certain authenticity you don't find in the big-box stores.  I read somewhere that they're disappearing.  Maybe we'll feel nostalgic for them someday.

World fairs and Expos

When I was five, we travelled to Montreal to visit Expo 67.  We camped in a place where the ground was on a slope. (Campground space was at a premium in that area.) I think we travelled through Maine.

I actually don't remember much about Expo.  I liked the train that took us onto the site.  I walked far too much for a five-year-old, and ended up turning disagreeable. (I don't even remember the ostensible reason for my snit.) I think it happened while we were standing in the queue for the mini-rail.

That Expo year there were a lot of Centennial projects around the country. (Money was flowing more freely back then.) In my New Brunswick hometown, the local high school built a new wing.  And the Lions Club built a revolving clock.  Today I sometimes spot sidewalk blocks in Toronto with the Centennial logo.

Family vacations

When I was young, we'd visit Cape Breton every summer. (My mother came from the town of Louisburg.) We spent a lot of time around the town of Baddeck, and visited my aunt in a Sydney suburb.  We also drove along the Cabot Trail and visited Cape Breton Highlands National Park.  And we visited the National Historic Park at Four Louisbourg.

Fundy National Park was the one closest to my New Brunswick hometown and we often visited there.  The place had lots of walking trails.  And we also visited Prince Edward Island.

A family of seven, we camped out in an umbrella tent, until we bought a trailer.  In hindsight it's hard to believe all the fuss we were willing to go through.  But I have good memories.

Where I was at historic moments

I remember going down to the post office on the day of Canada's 1968 election.  I was six, and when my sister asked me whether I preferred Stanfield or Trudeau, I chose Stanfield because I felt more comfortable with his name.

I remember hearing a lot about Nixon's election, Martin Luther King's murder and the first moon landing, but not when I first heard about them.  And I remember the Apollo 13 crisis:  our Grade 2 teacher took us to her house so we could see the astronauts being rescued at sea on TV.

I heard Nixon give his resignation speech on a car radio in a Cape Breton campground.  And I found out that Gerald Ford had pardoned him from a voiceover during the closing credits of The Waltons.

I remember hearing about Elvis Presley's death over the radio.  And when Anwar Sadat visited Jerusalem and spoke in front of the Knesset, I saw his speech on live TV. (It was a Sunday morning.) I was also watching the 1978 Emmy Awards when they were interrupted so Jimmy Carter could announce that the Camp David negotiations had resulted in a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt.  At first I thought it was yet another joke at Carter's expense.

I woke up early in the morning  to see Charles and Diana's royal wedding on live TV in 1981. (Today I can't believe that I cared so much about the royals back then.) And when I heard about Diana's death, I'd just flown back from England and taken a long sleep to overcome my jet lag.

I remember the 9/11 attacks, which I first heard about in an internet forum.  I was scheduled to fly to London that day, but got delayed two days because of all the US planes landing in Toronto.  It seems a really small inconvenience compared to what people in New York went through, and especially compared to what people in the Middle East would soon be going through.

Detention

I didn't get a lot of detentions.  There was this time when I was thirteen and there was this big kid who clearly wanted to get me in trouble.  After one class he started a scuffle with me.  I touched his shoulder in a non-violent way.  He then pulled up my chair, causing me to fall on the floor, then went to the substitute teacher and told her he did it because I'd socked him right between the eyes!  This substitute teacher was so incompetent that she assumed this was the true story without even asking me for my version!  So I got a detention.

That wouldn't have been so bad, except that when I came home, my mother could not deal with the news.  She actually feared that if I got one detention the school would refuse to issue me a report card and force me to repeat the year!  And she was furious at me, saying: "If you hadn't touched him, it would have been all his fault." I had no answer to that.  Later she was more forgiving, but I still resented her initial reaction.

Ethnic idiosyncrasies

I grew up in a small town in New Brunswick with few ethnic minorities.  I recall that in primary school there was an adopted Indonesian boy, yet because I was that young I didn't think of him as non-white!

When I moved to Toronto at 28, one of the first things that impressed me was the large number of Chinese people. (When I was a kid, I'd thought of all East Asians as funny.) And one thing I love about Toronto is the ethnic mix.  I have a Chinese doctor, a Czech dentist, an Arab psychiatrist and an Italian singing teacher.  I suppose this is the future of the world, and it isn't so bad.

Do I have any ethnic idiosyncrasies?  Well, I'm mostly Scottish--my mother came from Cape Breton Highland stock--and I'm teetotal and a bit dour.

Letting someone down

Back in the early 1990s my sister Moira and I lived together in Toronto.  At one time she was going to a lecture series about Dante's Divine Comedy, a non-credit course being offered at the University of Toronto.  Those Monday night lectures were the high point of her week.

One Monday in the winter season I was going out to York University on a day with a heavy snowfall.  On this day of all days, I lost my house key!  After arriving at the university, I phoned Moira and asked her to stay home till I arrived so I wouldn't be locked out.  I hoped my return wouldn't take too long.

But of course, my return did take too long.  Because of the heavy snow it took the bus over an hour just to get from the university to the subway!  I was so late that Moira had to miss her lecture waiting for me.  I felt really bad about it.

It turns out, however, that Moira has forgotten the whole thing.

A garden

We started our backyard vegetable garden in New Brunswick when I was fourteen.  We grew corn, peas, potatoes and some other stuff. (Some of our early fertilizer was seaweed we'd gathered from near our cottage.) We also composted.  Two years later, we started growing head crops like cabbage and broccoli.  We'd buy the plants already started and replant them once the danger of frost was over.

We were away in 1982 and 1989 and planted nothing in those years.  Otherwise, we kept it going until my parents moved away in 1994.  That year we planted nothing but peas, and harvested them all in August.

We started a backyard garden here in Toronto, but it's a lot smaller and took a long time to get right  You can't plant corn in the city because of the raccoons, and anyway it didn't grow very big when we tried it.  Also, it's just north of a tall fence, west of our house and east of a tall, wide plum tree, so sunlight is limited.  In recent years I've just focused on growing potatoes, with some success.  This year I may plant them more intensively.

Is that all there is?

When I was little, I always imagined things as being bigger than they really were.  When I visited New York City for the first time, the Statue of Liberty wasn't nearly as tall as I'd imagined it.  Even as a grownup, I'm not totally free of that tendency.  I'd imagined London as a huge city, but when I lived there, it took a while to get used to its small scale and how much was within mere walking distance.  And I looked at maps of the Chinese city of Chongqing when I was writing my Ph.D. thesis, then afterward when I visited the actual city, I realized that in my head I'd overestimated that city's scale too.

I don't like the saying, "Is that all there is?" If there isn't any more, look elsewhere.

Museums

When I lived in London in the mid-1990s, I got to know the museums well.  If I could be anywhere in the world right now, I'd be in the National Gallery in the section with the eighteenth-century paintings.  Right next to it is the National Portrait Gallery, which I always have to visit twice to see completely:  it's full of history as well as art.

Another London museum I like is the Victoria & Albert Museum.  It's devoted to applied art, which I like because you don't have to worry about what it means; it's enough for it to look nice.  I remember a time when I was in the glassware section and thought, "There's an Englishman coming toward me!" and it turned out I was approaching a mirror.

I like museums with historical subjects, like the Imperial War Museum (especially the uniforms), and the Museum of London, which takes you through the city's long history.  And I'm familiar with famous places like the British Museum and the Tate Gallery.

I've visited London several times since then.  And I make the whole round of museums.  I'm not sure if I can do it again.  When I visited two years ago, my legs got really sore from all the walking.

The first movie I saw

What was the first movie I saw?  I can't say for sure, but a strong contender is The Monkey's Uncle, a Disney comedy about a college inventor called Merlin Jones.  I saw it when I was three, just before my family sailed to England for a year. (I'm sure of this because when we got onto the ship we had a comic book of The Monkey's Uncle with us.) I remember that the sun was still up when we went in, but it was dark when we came out.

Another movie I saw at an early age was The Great Race, which we saw in England on my brother Donald's birthday.  The first scene was set on a fairground that looked huge when I was four, but less impressive when I saw the movie as a grownup.  And the scene where Tony Curtis swam up to the dark tower and climbed into it for a sword fight with the bad guy really scared me.

I also saw Mary Poppins, and the opening scene where the camera descended from the clouds to street level made a big impression on me.  And I saw The Three Stooges Meet Hercules too.  I think I saw Oliver Twist and freaked out during the scene where the crowd's chasing him and yelling, "Stop, thief!" And I saw animated movies like The Man Called Flintstone and some Disney movies like Peter Pan, Bambi and Cinderella. (Even back then, I found the "Bibbity, bobby, boo" song annoying.)

Snubbing

I don't recall being snubbed much.  I'm the sort of person who doesn't really care if people ignore me.  I remember one time in high school chemistry class when I was in a lab group with two other boys and we had an experiment to do.  The others performed it between themselves and talked to each other as if I weren't there!  I could have intervened, of course, but I was the kind of kid who waited for others to bring me in, which they wouldn't do.  I transferred to another chemistry class.

I'm not the type to snub people, either, unless I'm really mad at them.  When I was young i suppose I didn't observe the people around me that much.  I was often in my own dream world and wanted to be left alone, which can seem like snubbing.  I hope I've changed.

Any last requests?

What's on my bucket list?  I'd like to visit Greenland someday.  And I want to visit Disneyland--the California one, not Disney World in Florida--just for Main Street, U.S.A. (I heard it was based on Disney's actual hometown.) Also I want visit the Prado art museum in Madrid, Spain, where they have all those paintings by Velazquez and Goya.  But there's still time for that.

What if I were about to go in front of a firing squad?  My last request would be two cans of Pepsi Cola.  And I'd refuse the blindfold and try to give the firing squad my middle finger. (Mata Hari blew her executioners a kiss.) Most historians assume that Julius Caesar's last words to Brutus mean "You too, my son?" but one has argued that a better translation would be "Screw you, kid!" That's the spirit I want to show!

December

December, of course, is the month of Christmas.  I remember one year when I was sick at Christmas time and couldn't do much but stay in bed and watch TV.  The funny thing is that I enjoyed it more than I usually enjoy Christmas, just because I was doing nothing.

December also ends on New Year's Eve.  If Christmas is the big children's event, New Year's is for grownups.  In recent years I've made a point of going to bed on New Year's Eve well before midnight and trying to sleep through it.

December is also a holiday from school, and for me that used to be the best thing about it.  Also, the snow is still new so you aren't yet bored with it.  In that season it's nice just to be around home all day.

Newspapers

When I was a kid in New Brunswick, our daily newspapers were The Moncton Times and The Saint John Telegraph-Journal.  They were both owned by the K.C. Irving empire, which owns half of New Brunswick. (The McCains own the other half.) And they weren't very good:  they tended to have the same syndicated material.

When I was twelve, we moved to Mississauga for a year.  During that time, we subscribed to The Toronto Star.  My favorite Star columnist was Gary Lautens, who wrote things like "There's only one reason why a man builds a swimming pool in his back yard.  That's so he can beg his wife to go skinny dipping with him late at night." He also made a list of fun things for kids to do during the summer vacation, like "Bounce a ball against the side of the house" and "Shampoo the family cat" and "Fill up the bathtub and see if your shoes will float" and "Shave the family St. Bernard" and "Wash, wax and polish half the family car."

My family has subscribed to The Globe and Mail since it went nationwide in 1984.  When I read it in the morning the first thing I look at is the comic strip Dilbert in the business section. (I used to read their other comics, but lost interest after they dropped Drabble and Pearls Before Swine and moved the remaining strips to the sports section.) These days we subscribe to the Star too, and the first think I read there is the Jumble Puzzle.  It was tough when I was young, but now I'm better at anagrams.

Every Friday I read Rick Salutin's column in the Star.  I still can't imagine why The Globe and Mail dropped Salutin and increased Margaret Wente, whom I never read, from one to two columns a week.

A party

I'm not much for parties.  Socializing with a lot of people is a bit of a chore for me.  Also, I'm a non-drinker.  Even birthday parties aren't much of an occasion for me especially now that I'm getting older.  I haven't had a birthday cake with candles since I turned thirteen!

At the opera group I'm in, we sometimes do party scenes, which means acting festive and laughing and raising our glasses.  One year when we were doing La Traviata, there was an acting class where we were shown the question "What brings you to Violetta's party?" and possible answers like "You're homosexual, and they understand these things here" or "You've come to steal trinkets, either to sell or out of spite" or "You're a medical student who's spent all day treating charity cases at the Hotel Dieu, and now you want to see how the other half lives." Those acting classes are fun.

Date with a famous personality (not necessarily living)

If I got to date someone famous, I'd choose Giovanna Baccelli.  She was an eighteenth-century Italian ballerina in London who became the Duke of Dorset's mistress, and Thomas Gainsborough painted a wonderful portrait of her, which I've seen at London's Tate Gallery.  She wasn't a classic beauty, but they say she had a winning personality, and I think it shows in the portrait.

Humiliation

One night when I was seventeen, I decided to watch The Sound of Music on TV.  My nineteen-year-old brother watched it too, but he made it clear he didn't like it.  He kept making smartass remarks like "Why don't they live together?"

A more serious matter was the commercial breaks. (Both of my brothers disapproved of commercials on principle.) He noticed that after I'd muted the sound I'd keep looking at the picture so I could restore the sound at the end of the break without missing any of the show.  Irrational, huh?  So he pounced on me to keep my face away from the TV.

I thought, "If he doesn't want me looking at the TV during commercial breaks, I'll just leave the sound on." But no--when the break started, he'd mute the sound himself right away, then pounce on me.  He kept doing this all through the show.  It wasn't like him to be a bully, but he wouldn't quit. (If he quit, that would mean I'd won.) The only reason he kept watching the show was to keep pouncing on me.

In the last commercial break, I was giving him a fight and the parents came in. (I think I missed a bit of the show.) What bothers me is that my sister whispered to me, "Just pretend nothing has happened." All that happened was my ongoing humiliation for over two hours!  My brother got scolded, and he's ashamed of his behavior today.