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.)