Back to school

I've always imagined the year starting in September rather than January.  Every year I'd start school hopint that things would be better this time, but they never really were. (I wish you could just got to school and learn, but in practice it's just as much about fitting into a group!)

One thing that depresses me is the rise of "back to school" clothing sales.  So what if your clothes aren't brand new like the other kids'?  What's so terrible about wearing hand-me-downs?

I sometimes have a dream where I'm in school again. (After seeing the trailer for Silence of the Lambs, I had a nightmare where I was back in school and the principal was Hannibal Lecter!) In this dream I sometimes remember that I'm finished with school and don't belong there.  It's like there's part of me that'll never leave school...

I recall Matt Groening's comic strip Life in Hell doing a serious about school.  He had this message for high schoolers: "After you graduate, you can leave this place.  But your teachers have to stay here."

Hospitals

I was born on February 5, 1962, on the same day as actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. (That day there was a big planet conjunction and solar eclipse that had some astrologers predicting the end of the world!) I always thought I'd been born at Sackville Memorial Hospital--in Sackville, N.B.--but in my late 30s my parents revealed that the birth happened in our car while Father was driving Mother there.  It was a blue Ford Consul from 1957 or so.  Oh well, who wants to have been born in a hospital anyway?

I was in Sackville Memorial Hospital when I was fifteen for ulcer trouble.  I was hospitalized again in Canterbury, England, four years later, and underwent surgery to remove my ulcer.  I can show you the scar...

My mother spent her last week in the hospital at Yonge and Queen, after falling downstairs.  When she died it happened so fast that I was still asleep.

What's your favorite medical TV show?  Mine is the 1980s series St. Elsewhere, about a run-down Boston teaching hospital.  My favorite characters were the fussy surgeon Mark Craig and his goofy assistant Victor Erlich.

History

History is my favorite subject.  I actually have a Ph. D. in history! (My thesis subject was the western Chinese treaty port of Chongqing in the early 20th century, and its British community.) I also organize a history discussion group through meetup.com .  We talk about history books and screen DVDs of historical movies. (This week we're showing Cabaret!)

I was talking to Margo from Russia in that group, and she told me that when they teach history in Russian schools they start with the Greek historian Herodotous and his famous book about Persia and its wars with Greece! (I actually read that book a few years ago.) Here in Canada, at least when I was young, they don't start teaching old world history till high school; before that it's just Canadian history.

I've actually read parts of Edward Gibbon's seven-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Someday I'm going to return to it and read the whole thing!

People who don't know history are prisoners of their own time. (The United States has a very dramatic, entertaining history for a fairly young nation, yet that subject interests few Americans!) The more we learn of history, the more familiar our ancestors look.

Sequels and remakes

Remember the Dr. Suess book The Cat in the Hat? (I avoided the movie version--they cast Mike Myers in the title role, when anyone can see William H. Macy has a greater resemblance!) Well, I actually preferred the sequel The Cat in the Hat Comes Back!  Maybe that's because a lot of it took place outdoors in the snow.

I've read the whole series of Jalna books by Mazo de la Roche.  It's sort of a European- style family saga, set among the Canadian squirearchy.  The first books start in the middle chronologically, then she wrote a combination of prequels and sequels! (Upper Canada College and the Royal Winter Fair are recognizable without being named.) They made a TV series of it in 1972, which was widely considered a disaster, but my mother liked it.  Few Canadians read the books these days, but they're still popular in France.

Some movies come in series.  Even before Star Wars and Harry Potter, there were movie series like the 1930s detective Charlie Chan.  I always liked Warner Oland in that rold, even though he was actually Swedish. (Such casting would be considered insensitive today.) They showed the movies in China, and when Oland visited that country Chinese people were surprised to learn that he wasn't one of them!  He'd captured the essence of Chineseness.

Clocks

In my hometown of Sackville, N.B., they used to have a revolving clock next to the town hall.  It was a Centennial project from 1967 built by the Lions Club.

Digital clocks seem to be replacing the round analog ones.  In New York City once I saw a digital clock showing the time not to the minute, not to the second, but to the tenth of a second!  Just looking at it put you into a hurry.

Analog clocks got their round shape from sundials.  I once read of a sundial inscription that said, "Let others mark your pain and showers, I'll only mark your sunny hours!"

As I get older, I realize that there's nothing more precious than time.  Money you can sometimes accumulate in unbelievable amounts beyond what you can ever spend.  But time has a tighter limit:  I'll be very lucky to get 100 years, and I've already used up over 50!  I couldn't imagine living long enough to read all the books I'd like to read someday.

The fog

I used to like misty fog when I was young because the air felt alive. (Or maybe that's just nostalgia.) 

When my parents lived in London in the mid-1950s--my father was earning a doctorate at Imperial College, and they lived in Chiswick--they still had fierce "pea souper" fogs full of chemicals.  They caused several deaths, and they say that the fog alone could make runs in women's nylons!  They've told me of seeing a bus that had a man with a flashlight walking ahead of it to make sure that the way was clear.  They disappeared in later decades, because of the decline in London's heavy industry.

 

Ever see a foghorn on a ship?  When I was little I was fascinate by them.  I saw some cartoon where someone got thrown into a foghorn, and that got me wondering, if you went down into a foghorn, what realms would it take you to?

When I was young I read a Carl Sandburg poem that started, "The fog comes on little cat feet..." There was a jazz singer called Mel Torme, nicknamed "The Velvet Fog."

John Wayne

I remember seeing John Wayne's last public appearance.  It was the Oscars show in 1979, and he announced the best picture winner. (It was The Deer Hunter.) You could see that he wasn't long for this world.

John Wayne died that June, when my parents and I were visiting Britain.  They showed some of his movies on British TV, as they sometimes do after a movie legend dies. (They did the same with William Holden a couple of years later.) That's where I first saw True Grit and Stagecoach, the movie that made him a big star.  Stagecoach isn't just a great western, it has a great romance between him and Claire Trevor.

One of my favourite westerns is The Searchers, directed by John Ford and starring Wayne. (They made a lot of great westerns together, including Stagecoach.) He plays a man whose niece gets captured by Comanches, who pursues them in an obsessive quest for over a decade, and turns into something of a monster:  will he rescue his niece or kill her for living the Indian life?  It's one of the rare westerns with a sense of tragedy.  There's a great closing shot where an indoor camera sees him outdoors, framed by a door, and the door closes on him!  I've seen it half a dozen times.

New shoes

Remember that thing they have in shoe stores that has a seat on one part and a foot measurer on the other?  that way the salesman can sit down while measuring your feet.  When I was little it seemed really nifty to me.

When I was about twelve I got a pair of North Star sneakers, and I ended up wearing nothing but North Stars for a few years.  I'm not sure why exactly I got so crazy about them. (I also recall Dash sneakers from when I was even younger.)

Today my shoe size is 8 and a half, like the Fellini movie.  Sometimes I have to look a bit for a new pair, because some brands only seem to come in 8 and 9 and such.

Twenty years ago when I spent eight months in London researching my Ph.D. thesis, I bought a new pair of shoes just before leaving.  But I managed to wear them out in just four or five months, literally ending up with a hole in one of the soles. (I did a lot of walking about in London.)

I was just reading in Ten Lost Years about a Depression kid who got relief shoes, but they were oversize boots like Li'l Abner wore.  When he was playing outdoors another kid said, "He has relief boots!" leading to a fight.  Nastiness comes so easy to some kids...