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.