Westerns

The first movie my mother remembered seeing was a western. (This may have been back in the silent era!) She found it really sad.  Afterward she said to the girl she was with, "Didn't you find that sad?" and the other girl said, "No, it was badly acted!"

I wasn't always interested in westerns.  When I was little, trailers for upcoming westerns scared me.  But I've seen some on video.

A lot of westerns are boring, but there are some I love.  One is John Ford's The Searchers, with John Wayne on an obsessive quest to find his niece, captured by Indians.  It's a western with a sense of tragedy. (Other John Wayne westerns I like are Stagecoach--one of my favorite romantic movies--and True Grit.) I also like the western star Gary Cooper:  he's one star who doesn't date!  And Jimmy Stewart made some good westerns too.

Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch also has a sense of tragedy.  That one's about an outlaw gang who flee the U.S. and get involved in the Mexican revolution, with lots of graphic violence.  Robert Ryan as the gang's turncoat is actually the most sympathetic character!  There's a great shot where a bridge blows up and horses and riders fall into the river in slow motion:  it looks like a classical painting.  Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West are grandiosely entertaining.

TV westerns were mostly before my time.  I used to watch Gunsmoke reruns on Sunday mornings.  I suppose Little House on the Prairie counts as a western, but I always found that show cheesy and shameless, though it's based on a wonderful series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  And there's a wonderful miniseries of Larry McMurtry's great western novel Lonesome Dove, with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones at their best.

The first time I voted

My first vote was cast in Sackville, N.B., in the federal election of 1980.  That election was called on short notice, and I turned 18 during the campaign, so it took some special measures to get people like me on the voting list. (I remember a Ben Wicks cartoon from that campaign where a guy sitting in front of the TV with a can of beer answers the phone and says, "Sure, I'll vote for you!  Who are you?" I suppose I should feel sorry for him, yet he seems happy.)

My voting precinct was in the town's Catholic church.  I read somewhere that North American Catholics like to build churches on the highest hill in town, and this one is at a high elevation.  It was in the safe Liberal riding of Westmorland-Kent, but I voted for the N.D.P. candidate. (I think he was the head chef at the university's dining facilities.)

I now live in the Toronto riding of St. Paul's.  I'm a faithful N.D.P. voter, and in recent years I've done volunteer work on local N.D.P. campaigns. (I also worked for Olivia Chow's mayoral campaign.) But if I lived in Elizabeth May's riding, I'd vote Green for her.  I'd like to see an electoral alliance between the Liberals and N.D.P. and Greens to defeat the Conservatives, followed by introducing proportional representation so there'd be no need to repeat the alliance.

Non-partisan appeals urging people to vote have always struck me as lame.  If they don't care, they don't.  But I personally would never fail to voter.  One person's vote may not mean much, but there's always the chance that it'll make some difference.  What I find depressing is people who actually have a candidate they prefer, but just don't feel motivated enough to go to the trouble of voting for him.

Cult TV shows & movies

When they aired the David Lynch TV series Twin Peaks in 1990, I was onto it right from the start. (1990 was an annus mirabilis for TV, with shows like The Simpsons and the PBS documentary about the Civil War.) I liked all the details like the cops returning to the station house and finiding a tray stacked with doughnuts.  There was violence in it, but it was emotionally honest violence.

One cult show I discovered on DVD is Freaks and Geeks from 1999.  That's a show about high-schoolers set around 1980, with a real sense of its time. (It's not like the superficial 1950s atmosphere of Happy Days, where they'd just put classic rock & roll on the soundtrack and insert references to '50s TV shows into the dialogue.) And the father was played by Joe Flaherty, one of the funniest people in the world.  It's a shame he didn't have as big a career as most of the other comedians on SCTV.

I've never really got into Star Trek.  But I have watched some British cult shows from the 1960s, like Doctor Who and The Avengers and The Prisoner.

And I haven't got into the practice of going to see a cult movie over and over, like some people do with The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  But I have seen the Marx Brothers movie Horse Feathers about ten times.  And there are classic Warner Brothers cartoons that I've seen innumerable times.

Shopping

In the mid-1990s, I lived in London, England, for eight months.  It was the best eight months of my life!  One thing I remember is shopping for food at the nearby Safeway's.  I enjoyed this because it made me feel my independence.  One way British supermarkets are different from ours is that cashiers have a chair to sit in. (That must come from Europe's stronger unions.) I remember this bell-like sound that would ring from time to time, I don't know why.  That always reminded me of the opening note in a harp melody from this TV commercial for Shirriff lemon pie that I saw in the 1970s.

Next to the regular Safeway's was an appendix store where they sold beer and wine. (Sales are less restricted in Europe than in Canada.) They also had a photo booth there.  This was part of a concrete outdoor mall called Brunswick Square, which also included a double cinema called the Renoir, where I saw quite a few art films.  There was also a place that sold restaurant equipment and such, where I got a bread knife that we still use today.  And they had a drugstore, which the British call a "chemist's" place.

In London, the big shopping area is around Oxford Street.  I went there the first weekend after arriving, which was also the 50th anniversary of V-E Day, a very big deal in Britain.  So the place was even more crowded than usual.  I should have waited till later, yet this mistake somehow pleased me, because it was my mistake!

I never visited Harrod's.

Sundays

I used to go to Sunday school.  I only lasted a few years with it, but I did notice that they never told us about Mary Magdalen.

I used to go swimming at the university athletic centre on Sunday afternoons.  At the pool they often played this Tijuana Brass record with numbers like "A Taste of Honey."

Sunday nights was the time of one of my favourite TV shows.  The Wonderful World of Disney.  Here in New Brunswick, the show was sponsored by Irving Oil.  Before the show came on, I'd watch the last minutes of Hymn Sing. (Does anyone else remember that show?) I especially liked the animated episodes.  One thing I remember is that after the Disney show's closing credits were finished, the first commercial would always be for the latest Disney movie release.  I also watched The Beachcombers and The Irish Rovers and The Waltons on Sundays.

These days, I host my Meetup groups for reading out loud on Sunday afternoons.  That's also when I host my classic book club, so I have to plan ahead so they'll be on different weeks.

Gossip

I grew up in the small town of Sackville, N.B.  Gossip existed.

It can start in odd ways.  Once this schoolboy was saying, "The only routes from New Brunswick to Maine are through Houlton and Calais." My sister said, "That isn't true!  My family visited Maine once, and we didn't go through either of those places." "What route did you take instead?" "I don't remember, but it wasn't either of those routes!" So a rumour got around that our family had a smuggling route across the border.

There was also this woman who spread the story that our mother had come to her with tears in her eyes asking her to get her own kids to play with us because we were so wild nobody else would.  I suppose you should feel sorry for such people.

Small towns can be terrible for gossip.  When Grace Metallious wrote Peyton Place, people in her hometown sensed that she'd been writing about them and weren't pleased.  So they started rumours about her, including one that she'd been out shopping in a fur coat with nothing underneath!

Speaking for myself, I don't mind if people talk about me behind my back.  It means they respect me enough not to talk about me in my presence.  I remember kids in school who'd see me coming and be reminded to talk about me. (Of course, when they quoted me they'd start by saying "He goes...") They were deliberately putting me down in front of me as a show of power, to establish that they had a higher status.  It wasn't fun for me.

A parent or relative

I had a red-haired aunt called Alma who lived in a suburb of Sydney, Cape Breton. When she was young she worked in a ship-chandler's office where they sold equipment to ships.  One of the objects in the place was a rolling pin made for use on a ship, a lot bigger and wider than a normal one.  When she got married and left the job, the chandler gave her that rolling pin as a wedding present!

My mother remembered a time when she and Alma were kids in a penny candy store.  Mother said "Let's buy two cents worth of that," and Alma said "Two cents me eyeball!" A grownup overhead them and was really amused by it, and the next time he met her he repeated, "Two cents me eyeball!"

Aunt Alma had "second sight" sometimes.  One night she had a dream where she saw her late father pointing at his ribcage, and the next day her husband had a heart attack!  After her brother died she had a dream where he appeared to her, his clothes covered in dust, and said, "I've been to Regulus." She had to look up Regulus in a dictionary, but it turned out to be a star in the constellation Leo!

Walt Disney

When I was a kid, one of my favourite TV shows was The Wonderful World of Disney.  I remember how I'd watch the last five or so minutes of Hymn Sing before the show came on, and the first commercial after the show's end would always be for the new Disney movie.

I also enjoyed the Disney comics published by Gold Key, with Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge and the inventor Gyro Gearloose. Some of their adventures involved time-travelling to ancient Greece, with the Minotaur and the Golden Fleece and Battle of Marathon. (This was the first time I read of these legends.)

I also saw some Disney movies.  Cinderella I saw at an early age, and even then I found the "Bibbity, bobbity, boo" song annoying.  I saw The Sword in the Stone when I was twelve, and it meant a lot to me at that time in my life, when school was a bad experience for me. (And I saw Mary Poppins about three times.) My favourite Disney animated movie is Lady and the Tramp, which I didn't see till I was in my twenties.

One Disney movie I haven't seen is the leprechaun movie Darby O'Gill and the Little People.  But my sister Moira saw it and hated it!

I've watched Disney cartoon shorts on video and the early ones are really imaginative, with a surprising amount of off-colour humour.  But overall, the Warner Brothers cartoons are funnier.

I keep my house key on a Goofy key ring.  I haven't been to Disneyland in California, but it's on my "bucket list."

Siblings

I'm the youngest of five children.

I remember an incident with my oldest brother when I was 13 and he was 18.  It happened in June, near the end of the school year, when we were both a bit worn down.  It happened on an afternoon when the rest of the family was out of the house and we were alone together, otherwise the incident wouldn't have happened.

I was bored, so I was watching a rerun of The Brady Bunch on our TV.  It was an episode from the first season where they were out camping.  My brother came along and started talking about the show's "mind-rotting stereotypes that are getting around your mental block." (He had a tendency to talk down to me.) Then he changed the TV set's channel to UHF, where you couldn't get any shows, pulled the dial out of the set, ran downstairs and locked himself in the bathroom.  When I banged on the door he said, "Grow up!" (Who was being immature?) I got rather upset.

The thing of it is, the show wasn't so important to me.  I was willing to talk about it.  But for him, this wasn't the time for talk, it was the time for power.  For what it's worth, when I reminded him of this incident in recent years, he was ashamed of himself.  But at the time he had something to prove, at my expense.  Sometimes teenagers dealing with younger kids have a semi-mature attitude.  They implicitly say: "I'm older and wiser than you, so it's your behaviour that's the issue rather than mine.  It's up to you to earn my respect and not vice versa!"

Coffee table books

When I was little we bought some of the Time-Life coffee table books.  We had all of the Life Nature Library series, with titles like "The Universe" and "The Sea" and "Reptiles." (We still have them all up in our attic.) We got just half a dozen of the Life Science Library series, with titles like "The Body" and "Machines," but I liked them too.  Those books had a lot of photo essays and stuff with images that must have appeared in Time and Life magazines, which we subscribed to.

We also got the Newsweek series Milestones of History, which went from ancient times to the 1969 moon landing.  I learned a lot from them, though I now notice that it had an inevitable European perspective.  A couple of images of 17th-century massacres disturbed me, but maybe kids should be disturbed once in a while.

And we got the Rand McNally world atlas series with lots of maps showing not just a country's cities and towns, but its leading agriculture and industries and its geological profile.  We got some of the series The World and Its Peoples too.