Airports

When I was little and Father took me and my siblings off Mother's hands for a while, he wouldn't know what to do so he'd drive us up to Moncton airport so we could watch the planes take off and land.  On one of those occasions I got really quarrelsome, and I don't remember why!

Visiting an airport is fun when you aren't the one flying and don't have to worry about being on time and such.  Besides Moncton, I've also been to Halifax airport several times, which is some distance from the city.  And I've been to Toronto's Pearson airport quite a few times.  As well as Heathrow, which is a bit of a monster.  

When you're actually flying you sometimes have time to kill in an airport concourse.  I'm often looking for places then to get rid of cash before flying to a new country.  And after you arrive you may be waiting for your luggage to appear on the carousel.  I've read that when you arrive at Lagos airport in Nigeria, you have to grab your luggage on its first carousel turn, otherwise someone else will!

Ever see the Aiport disaster movies of the '70s?  They're kind of fun in a shameless way.  One thing that bugged me about the second one was that they had an overnight flight going westward, when they only go eastward in real life!  If I could be any movie character, I think I'd be Al Petroni, the veteran pilot played by George Kennedy in all the movies.  In the first one he managed to lift a jet off a runway in the nick of time.  When his assistant said "The manual said that can't be done!" he replied, "That's the good thing about a 707.  It can do everything but read!"

A very strange day

I never seem to experience days as particularly strange.  I visited Japan 15 years ago and that seemed a rather strange country, more so than China. (Maybe it's because most Chinese are still rural peasants that they seem understandable to me.  In the future, when China has attained Japan's level of economic development, will that country seem strange too?) And Korean society is also pretty strange, especially the totalitarian northern half.  And Russians can be very strange too, as can Americans.

Do some people strike me as strange?  To tell the truth, most people seem a bit strange to me. (I guess that means I'm the strange one!) And when everyone seems strange, nobody stands out as more so.

I've seen some strange movies too.  I once saw a strange Quebec movie about a family, titled C.R.A.Z.Y.  I really can't describe it, yet I knew it was something great!  I saw this series about the history of cinema by Mark Cousins, who had an Ulster accent and a real eye for unusual films!  A while ago I saw the movie Boyhood, filmed over a decade where the character matured along with the child actor, and was thinking, "This is the kind of movie Mark Cousins would like!"

Beatniks and hippies

When I was little I was afraid of Canadian Indians and hippies.  Back then the big hippie song was "The Age of Aquarius." One day I got curious about my astrological sign and looked it up.  What a surprise I got when it turned out I was an Aquarius!

In recent years, I went to a Halloween costume party as a beatnik.  I wore a blazer and turtleneck, shades over my glasses, a fake beard from Malabar Costumes, and my mother's beret. (She'd stopped wearing it after seeing that video of Monica Lewinsky meeting President Clinton while wearing a beret.  It must have reminded her of the time in her youth when berets were associated with "fast girls"!) I also did the thing where you trace a square with your fingers.

Of course, back at the time there were different degrees of bohemianism.  There were some hard-core hippies, who were into free love and communes and such, but of course most of them were dilettantes going through a phase, who overestimated their own daringness.  But it's the same with every generation of youth. (Every generation is fated to turn into their parents...)

Remember Rocky and Bullwinkle?  Bullwinkle as Mr. Know-It-All once talked about "How to be a beatnik" and said, "Beatniks are found in unemployment lines, health food stores, and especially coffee houses!" (Mr. Know-it-All is my favorite part of the show.)

I was in Seattle once in a store selling all sorts of curious items, and one was a 1960s sign saying "Hippies use side door"!

New technology

How has new technology affected me? Well, our home has now been online for twenty years, so I'd hate to imagine what my life would be like without the internet.  It's like having the world's largest library in your room!  I was reading this book of predictions from 1980, and nobody predicted it.  Predictably, Arthur C. Clarke came closest.

 

There was a lot of new technology back in the 1950s, the age of modern conveniences and "keeping up with the Joneses." My parents first had a TV set when they were newlyweds in England in the mid-1950s.  They remember eating crumpets on Sunday afternoon and watching the BBC show Brainstrust with intelligentsia figures like J. Bronowski, Robert Boothby and A.J.P. Taylor.

 

When I was young we only got two TV channels (along with two other poor signals). I was in my teens when we got cable TV in the '70s, and in my early twenties when we got a VCR and started getting a wide array of cable TV channels in the mid-'80s.  It's just a few years ago that we got our first widescreen TV, but television technology doesn't mean so much to me now.  Most of my TV watching is on Youtube. (Just now I've been listening to The Goon Show, a British radio comedy Father remembers from the '50s!)

Siblings--older and younger

I'm the youngest of five kids, with two brothers and two sisters. (It was in boy-girl-boy-girl-boy order.) When I was really little I vaguely recall being disappointed in my realization that I was the youngest in the family--it wouldn't have been so bad if I'd been second youngest.  But I didn't mind it so much later, though I used to hate Scrabble because I was youngest and knew the fewest words. (Today Scrabble's one of my favorite games!) I guess I had some advantages in being youngest and even got spoiled a bit.  But it's too late to change anything now, of course.

Are there good TV shows about sibling relationships?  In hindsight, family shows like The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie look cheesy.  But I saw the really great sibling show Bloodline on Netflix recently.  It's about a family in Florida who own a hotel, with a straight-arrow brother who's a police detective, a lawyer sister who has a good career in the big city but ends up returning home, a goofy younger brother who keeps making dumb choices, and a black-sheep brother who returns home after a long absence, is involved with drug smugglers and ends up compromising the whole family so the cop brother kills him. (The cop brother says as narration: "Please don't judge us.") There was also a little sister who drowned in childhood, which figures in the plot...

That's what a family show should be like!

Ditches

I read once in John Barber's Globe and Mail column that there are some streets in the remoter parts of Etobicoke that have ditches alongside them! (They decided against getting rid of them.) It's pretty cool that a city as big as Toronto still has some places with that rural touch.

When we lived in Sackville, N.B., there was a ditch next to our street that drained out through a pipe under our driveway.  In March a big pool of spring melt, with ice floating on top, would accumulate next to the driveway, unable to drain out because the pipe was still iced up.  For a long time, I wondered what it would take to accelerate the pipe's thawing, but eventually I figured out that the trick was to move off all the floating ice, so the water would get warmer.  Why didn't I realize that sooner?

In May, before planting our vegetable garden in the back yard, the first thing I'd do was to dig the surrounding ditches a bit deeper to speed up its drainage. (I do that now with our smaller garden.)  I still have dreams about digging those ditches...

When the American "founding father" was a boy, he told his father that he was more interested in farming than in book learning.  So his father put him to work digging a ditch.  He ended up realizing that books might be hard, but farming was hard too. (As a grownup, he developed a farm but hired someone else to dig the ditches.)

When Marlon Brando was a schoolboy, he scored 98 on an I.Q. test--just a pinfeather below average--and his teachers told him he was stupid.  One told him, "You'll end up digging ditches!" He actually did dig ditches for one very brief period, and later on, when filming Last Tango in Paris,

he improvised a speech about his memories of ditch-digging. (I learned of this in Peter Manso's Brando biography.)

A train ride

Both of my grandfathers worked on trains.  My father's father was a postal worker who sorted mail on trains, while my mother's father rose to the position of conductor. (During the Great Depression both of them occasionally brought home a hobo and gave him a square meal.) In my childhood we could often hear the distant horn of a train.

 

I remember when we took the train to visit my grandparents when I was six or seven. (We lived in Sackville, at the southeastern corner of New Brunswick, while they lived in Campbellton on New Brunswick's north shore near Quebec.) The detail I recall is that you could get water in these cone-shaped paper cups.

I've travelled on the train between the Maritimes and central Canada several times.  When I was eleven we went on a class trip to Ottawa and met our local M.P., fisheries minister Romeo Leblanc.  And when I was seventeen, my brother and I took the train to Montreal where I took the specialized S.A.T. exams. (My subjects were mathematics, history and Latin.) We stayed at a youth hostel.

In the late 1980s there was a time when I was going to university in Halifax, and often took the train back to Sackville.  That train route included a nice scenic stretch through the Wentworth Mountains.  Someday I want to see the Prairies and B.C. by train, or maybe even Siberia!

If you ask me, we need to get fewer people in cars and planes, and more on trains, which are more fuel-efficient.  I have a feeling that when I'm older I'll wish I'd ridden the train more often.

Obsolescence

I miss having a watch that you had to wind up every day. (It was a nice morning ritual for me.) These days all watches seem to be battery powered.  I also miss vinyl records with their crackling imperfections.

Remember rotary phone dials?  My brother used to have a phone with a picture of the medieval scholar Roger Bacon in the dial hub.  I saw this documentary Manufactured Landscapes once where they showed a dump in China with about a million phone dials! (They had to go somewhere...)

Ever been in those big high schools and such that they built about a century ago?  Back then the door to each room would have a transom window on top so they could let out the hot air.  But today buildings have air conditioning so they aren't needed now.  Too bad, they were an elegant feature.

I also remember the age of paper grocery bags.  Back then they had bags of double-lined paper for frozen foods!  And we also got milk in glass bottles instead of plastic pouches and cardboard boxes.  And there were also freezers that you had to defrost!

I suppose that when I get a little older I'll start feeling obsolescent myself.  But such is life!