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.