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.