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.