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.

First memory

When I was little, we had a tree in our yard with a tire swing on it. Rainwater gathered at the bottom of the tire, and possibly my first memory is of pushing the tire and making a sloshing noise.  Another very early memory involves three French-Canadian boys living next door to us, called Patrick, Daniel and Rene.  Rene we called Weenie, and it's that nickname that I remember.  Both these memories go back to the time when we lived on Lansdowne Street, before we moved to West Avenue, so I wasn't yet two years old.

Many of my earliest memories come from my father's year-long sabbatical in Brighton, England, when I was about four.  I remember our crossing the Atlantic on a ship called the Arkadia.  And I remember a lot of smells from that time, like diesel fumes and coal fumes, grocery and butcher shops. (When I visited Britain years later I recognized these smells again.) And I remember reading comics at that age.

I only have vague memories about big events like Martin Luther King's assassination and Nixon's election and the moon landing.  But I do remember going down to the post office on the day of Canada's 1968 election.

Too much/not enough time

We just entered daylight savings time again.  It reminds me of when I was younger, in my student years.  When the clocks went back in the fall, I appreciated getting the extra hour because I was concerned about not having enough time. (But losing the hour in the spring didn't bother me so much.)

I suppose I haven't done much with my life since finishing my Ph.D. 15 years ago.  Being unemployed, I don't worry about not having the time to do what I really want.  Yet I never feel bored.  That's what being well-read does for you.

Now that I'm older, time passing quickly seems an overrated pleasure.  You ought to experience life fully, and how can you do that if the years keep flying by?  Maybe it's better for time to pass slowly, just so you know you've really experienced it.

Blondes

There's no blond hair in my immediate family, though I'm told that my hair was blond when I was newly born. (I did have an aunt with red hair.) When I was little and read Archie comics, I preferred Veronica to Betty, and now I realize that's because Betty's blond hair put me off.

Blondes have a stereotype of being dumb.  Even I know a dumb blonde joke or two.  Some people make fun of "ginger" redheads, but at least they don't get seen as dumb.  If you ask me, blond hair and tanned skin don't really go together.  I really don't think about hair that much.  It puzzles me that girls spend so much money on hair dyes, presumably to grab the attention of boys like me.

Going to a play

When I was little, I saw the J.M. Synge play Playboy of the Western World, which caused controversy in Ireland 100 years ago with its "stage Irish" paddywhackery.  It's about a stranger who arrives in an Irish village and announces he's killed his father, which make him a hero to the villagers--until Dad shows up alive.  (The Irish dialogue was a bit hard for me to understand.) I also saw Ionesco's absurdist one-act play The Lesson, about a teacher who ends up killing his pupil.  There's a line at the end where he orders about seventeen coffins for his victims.  I did not get it.

When I lived in London in the mid-1990s I saw a whole lot of plays.  You can often get good seats for just ten pounds or so on the morning of the show.  Once I even managed a front-row seat for the cut price, for Alan Bates in Ibsen's The Master Builder. (When you sit that close you can see spittle coming out of the actors' mouths!)

Some people collect theatre programs, but they don't interest me.  During that London stay I saw about ten shows but never bought a program, and so saved ten pounds, the price of a cut-rate ticket!

I always go to the theatre when I visit London or New York.  When I was in London in 2012 I saw quite a few musicals:  Carousel, Sweeney Todd and The Jersey Boys. (I could have seen The Jersey Boys in Toronto, of course, but I greatly enjoyed it anyway.)  I also saw two one-man shows.  Simon Callow as Charles Dickens was a tour de force, but when I saw Roger Rees talking about performing Shakespeare I dozed off.  I hope he didn't notice me!

There's usually something worth seeing at the National Theatre or the Old Vic.  During that visit London had an "open doors" event like Toronto in May, and I got a backstage tour of the Young Vic!

August

I sometimes have a dream about August.  My parents and I are visiting our old home in Sackville, New Brunswick.  I tell them that it's time to return to Toronto because it'll soon be September, but nothing happens.  It isn't that they want to stay, it's that they're too indecisive to go.  And I get angry about having to wait.

For me, August is a time of fresh peaches, blueberries and corn on the cob.  It's a time when summer's coming to an end just when you're taking it for granted, and a new school year is about to start. It has a certain bittersweetness.

In the first few years after I moved to Toronto, in the early 1990s, I'd visit Sackville in May and August.  I'd help plant our back yard garden in May, and peas and such would be ready to harvest in August.  My last such visit was in August, 1994. (Then the parents moved to Toronto too.) In that last summer we simplified the garden and just planted peas, and in August we harvested them all. It was the August of Augusts.

Unusual neighbors

I haven't had many unusual neighbors. (I suppose I'm lucky.) Back when we lived in New Brunswick, for a year or two--just before I moved to Toronto--there was a German chef living near us.  I think he was part of the German community in Czech Sudetenland that was forced to leave en masse at the end of World War II.  

He had a very friendly Korean wife.  She enjoyed picking strawberries so much that on one occasion she offered to do it for free, but they thought she was a crank.  They eventually moved to Kitchener, I think.

I don't really know my present-day neighbors.

Hangups

I don't have a lot of hangups.  I don't like short pants. (It's been years since I wore them.) I guess I associate them with little kids and, being the youngest in my family, I've been self-conscious about that.  I don't like the word "porridge"--I prefer "oatmeal"--because when I was in school kids used to bother me by singing "I love porridge!" That was their way of calling me a baby, since porridge is something babies eat.  I guess my least favorite word is "ignore." And I hate leaving food uneaten, even when nobody else cares if I finish it.  And when we had a cottage by the seacoast, I didn't want to swim when the seaweed in the water formed big clumps.