Secrets

My family had a few secrets.  I didn't learn till I was in my late 30s that I wasn't born in a hospital as I'd always thought.  My mother actually gave birth in the car on the way to the hospital!  Oh well, who wants to have been born inside a hospital anyway?  

Another was my mother's age.  I didn't learn till just before her death that she was about ten years older than my father!

Have you noticed that some science fiction movies have the cliche of the government hiding a big secret?  Like the '70s dystopian drama Soylent Green, where the secret is that the food substance allowing the burgeoning population to survive is actually recycled human corpses!

I once saw a fine French movie directed by Bertrand Tavernier, titled Life and Nothing But...  Philippe Noiret plays an officer in the French army just after the Western Front carnage of World War I, whose job is to take the list of missing French soldiers and see if he can identify any of them among the unidentified dead, to give their families "closure."  He finds one corpse that he can identify, but finds out that this soldier was a bigamist, and he meets his two wives, neither of whom know of the other.  In the end the officer lets him stay unidentified so that his secret won't come out and the widows won't be hurt even more than they already have been. (My apologies if you didn't want it spoiled!)

Alienation

What can I say about alienation?  Democrats just now are blaming their loss to Trump on people who were too alienated to vote for them, but won't take any responsibility for alienating them in the first place! If the Democratic primary had been an election for president of the Teamsters union, the government would have made them redo it.  As far as I'm concerned, Hillary Clinton deserved to lose even more votes than she actually did.

Remember the movie Alien?  It had one of the scariest trailers ever! (I remember seeing the trailer as a teenager.) It led to the sequel Aliens, which has this scene with Sigourney Weaver in a hospital bed and Paul Reiser comes in and tells her a whole lot of exposition, then at the end of the scene she suddenly gives birth to an alien mutant, and she wakes up from what turns out to have been a nightmare!  My question is, does that mean that the exposition was just a dream too?

I don't care for that kind cinematic cheap trick with an attention-grabbing scene that goes against the "rules" and turns out to be "just kidding." (There was a nightmare scene like that in The Fly, which came out around the same time.) Another example was in that Batman movie The Dark Knight, with a scene where Commission Gordon gets killed, when the "rules" say they can't kill off a regular character like him.  But later it turns out that he faked his own death to protect his family.  Just kidding!

Libraries

I like libraries.  It would be nice to have a job as a librarian.  Back in the 1980s, when I was a student, I spent a lot of time at Mount Allison University's octogonal-shaped library, especially the ground floor where they kept the magazines and newspapers.  I dream about it often.  And in the '90s I frequented the Scott Library at York University and the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto.

Toronto has an excellent public library system, one of the strong points of living here. (I often go to the Wychwood library near St. Clair & Bathurst.  I actually live closer to the Davenport library, but it isn't as big.) I especially like the system where you can order a book from a faraway branch and they'll ship it to the branch nearest you.

I like the children's book collection here at Lillian Smith.  I've looked at several books I remember from my youth, by authors like Edward Ardizzone (Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain), M. Sasek (This is London) and of course Toni Ungerer.

Libraries not only promote reading but serve an important social function.  Selia has mentioned that branches like Lillian Smith often provide a quiet place for homeless people to hang out.

Butterflies

I don't think of butterflies much.  Chopin wrote a nice piano piece called the Butterfly Etude, which was too hard for me to play.  An etude is a study piece that you play to improve your technique, but with Chopin's etudes you have to be an expert to play them in the first place! (I guess experts play them to stay experts.)

There's also the butterfly stroke in swimming.  I could actually do that stroke at one point, when I was about fifteen, but I haven't swum much for decades.

And there's Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly.  It's about a fourteen-year-old geisha who "marries" an American naval officer and has his baby, but he goes off and marries an American woman.  What a creep!  Butterfly waits for him to return, but when he comes back and reveals the truth, she commits hara kiri.  There's a nice Humming Chorus in it. (I performed in the chorus when the Toronto City Opera did it.)

Did you know that Stephen Leacock named his town Mariposa after the Spanish word for butterfly?  And the French word for bow tie, "cravat papillon," literally means butterfly tie!

Elementary school

I spent my first school years at Central School in Sackville, N.B. (They had a klaxon sounding period changes.) I could already read in Grade One so I was a bit advanced.  One thing I remember is that in Grade Three we had a class devoted to space.  In that grade a guy called Timmy Long had perfect attendance that year. (I think he's on the town council now.)

One of the things I remember is that when a kid threw up in class--I don't think I ever did--the janitor would come in and pour dustbane all over the mess.  I also remember the Sports Day in Grade Three.  They had seven events and in each one where you succeeded you'd get a ribbon in one of seven colours.  I only earned three, while everyone else I could see got at least four!  I cried.

I also remember some of the Lippincott Readers we used.  There was one story about how the American constitution was devised (a nice Canadian subject!), and I managed to remember that the first new states were Vermont and Kentucky.  And there was a story about the childhood of Swedish singer Jenny Lind.  And one about a young refugee in Chicago who'd just lost his whole family in a big forest fire, and swiped a rich guy's coat but returned all the money inside. (He just wanted the coat.)

When I was 17

When I was seventeen, a lot happened.  I was learning calculus and finite math, and went to Halifax and then Montreal to take the SATs.  In June I travelled on an airplane for the first time when my parents and I visited Britain and France. I kept a journal of it, but today I'm embarrassed to read what I wrote when I was that young!

I read quite a few books that year for the first time. Stuff like I, Claudius, Watership Down, Brave New World, To Kill a Mockingbird, Billy Budd and Poe's stories.

I also saw movies like Superman, Hair, Norma Rae, The Wiz, The China Syndrome, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The big movie event that year was the release of Apocalypse Now, but I didn't see that for a couple of years.

This was in 1979, the year of the Iranian revolution. (If you ask me, the Americans had it coming!) It led to a new Energy Crisis, with hoarders making long queues in front of gas stations like in 1973.  A lot of people blamed President Carter for responding weakly and not providing "motivating" leadership, but they were slow to say what he should have been doing.  Now that I think about it, I realize that they should have rationed gasoline.