The best time of my life

I guess the best time of my life was the eight months in 1995 when I was at Goodenough College in London, England, researching my Ph.D. thesis. (My sister had been there the year before and put in a good word for me!) Aside from my research, I saw about ten plays and visited lots of museums.  I did a whole lot of walking around the city and wore out a new pair of shoes in just four months.

In the later months, I got involved in a lot of activities there.  Philip Chang (a Korean-Australian law student) and I handled the video club, and we put on lots of Disney movies for the kids on Saturday afternoons. I also joined the choir (we did a Christmas concert) and collected lots of bottles and such for recycling.

My father visited me in June and my sister in September, which provided a nice change.  My father said he was proud of me: it was largely the first time that I'd lived alone.  I remember that when I was newly arrived there I bought some canned goods, then realized that I hadn't brought a can opener! (All those little things you don't think of...) 

I also remember that in the laundromat among the coin-op dryers that would automatically stop after 10 minutes or so, there was one that would keep going forever, until you stopped it!  I bought a tiny TV set but didn't watch it much. (I did watch a documentary about European silent movies on Sunday afternoons.) And I went on a couple of protest marches decrying the West's inaction over Bosnia, and went to see speeches by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Leakey.

I've visited London several times, staying at Goodenough College again.  And I'm going again next month!

Neighbors

Remember Jim Nabors?  Besides playing Gomer Pyle ("Gaw-lee!") he had a deep singing voice.  He was the guest star on all eleven season premieres of The Carol Burnett Show, which I watched faithfully.  I read somewhere that these days he grows macadamia nuts in Hawaii!  A showbiz columnist wrote about him, "He's one star who took care of his money and knows how to live well."

When I was in Britain almost thirty years ago there was a really popular Australian soap opera titled Neighbors. (Kylie Minogue started out on that show before becoming a pop star.) One of the tabloid newspapers revealed the phone number of one of the show's actors, so he started getting phone calls from England, mostly around the time the show was on in the afternoon, which in Australian time means the wee hours!  What an awful thing to do!

I haven't talked much about my own neighbors.  I guess I should get to know them better.  My grandfather once visited a neighbor who was sick, and said to him, "By God, Mac, you're looking pale!"

My first funeral

I guess I've been lucky in not having occasion to attend a funeral early in life.  My mother only died when I was over fifty (and she was over ninety), and my father is still with us, as are my two brothers and two sisters. (Frankly, I'm glad that Mother was the first to go:  losing any one of us would have been very hard for her.)

The first funeral I went to happened when I was in my late forties, I think.  It was for Catherine Cashore, one of the singers in my opera group and Italian choir.  She succumbed to cancer and the funeral was at the Holy Rosary Catholic Church just east of St. Clair and Bathurst. Just a month or two before I'd been telling my shrink that I'd never been to a funeral. (I wish I'd knocked on wood!)

I didn't know Catherine that well, but a lot of my singing group went to the funeral and I did too. I'd been talking with her once and she'd mentioned that she enjoyed the British Carry On comedies. She also liked the sitcom Happy Days, especially the character Ralph Malph.  It seems somehow important to remember those things about someone. (What you find funny shows a lot about you.)

When I go, I think I'd like a Chinese-style "tree burial," where they cremate you and plant a tree over your ashes.  And maybe I'd like jazz played at my funeral, though I don't listen to it much. Some of the earliest jazz music was played in New Orleans funeral marches! (It goes back to an African tradition of celebratory funeral music.)

Traffic Jams

I haven't had to deal with traffic jams, because I never learned to drive.  That's the great thing about a big city like Toronto--you can get just about everywhere by public transit!

I have dealt with a few human traffic jams.  They have some big crowds in London, England. Crowds don't usually bother me, but the last time I was there, I was coming out from seeing The Jersey Boys, and there was this really huge crowd all over the street because of some big event. They weren't rowdy, but its sheer size scared me!

I'm glad I wasn't in Paris at the time of the French Revolution. Those mobs must have been really fearsome!  And the crowds enthusiastically watching people being beheaded--what kind of people are that nasty?  The city of Paris is a bit like a French poodle:  elegant to look at, but one of the worst breeds for biting! (Our modern world, in all its horror, was born in Paris.)

You can also get big crowds at protest marches.  When I was in London I attended a couple of marches protesting the West's inaction over Bosnia.  In one I got to walk down Park Lane!  I also got to hear Vanessa Redgrave speaking.

Home economics & industrial arts

My first industrial arts class was in Grade 7 in a school in Mississauga.  The teachers had us do this exercise where we wrote down our name and address in a drafting style.  After a while I heard the teacher's voice behind me, saying, "Oh, that lettering! Oh, that numbering!" I realized that he was referring to my work, disapprovingly. (I never did see what was wrong with it.) There's a sort of teacher who starts off the year with a show of power, singling out one kid to impress the rest.

After class, I told him that I didn't like his approach.  He responded, "If you want my sympathy..." --which wasn't exactly what I wanted-- "you'll have to be more polite to me." How was I being rude? "I asked you a question, and you answered 'Yeah.'" (The only polite answer being "Yes"...)

I told my parents about it, and wanted them to speak to this teacher, but they said, "We're going to have nothing to do with him because he's unreasonable!" (If he'd been reasonable, of course, there wouldn't have been any problem.) Their idea of a serious solution was that I should be absent from school every Monday afternoon to avoid his class.  What they didn't understand was that I was afraid I'd get into trouble if I did that.

In the end, I failed that class.  Big deal!

Trees

"Our ancestors planted trees;

We sit in the shade"

--Chinese proverb

"Plant a tree, laddie, it'll grow while you're sleeping!"--Scottish saying

I love trees!  Back when we lived in New Brunswick, we planted dozens of trees around our house. We had an oak and a birch and a couple of maples that grew pretty big, and a pine that had grown really big by the time we sold the house!  And we planted a whole lot of conifers that we'd found out in the countryside.

We also planted some apple trees in the back yard, but one spring my brother pruned them back so severely that one of them never recovered!  We also had a neighbor who planted poplars near us, and one summer was so wet (1985) that they put out shoots into our land, which became trees too.

In front of our Toronto house we have a crabapple tree.  When we bought our three-story house twenty-odd years ago it was barely my height, but now it's just about as tall as our the house itself.  We used to have a big cherry tree and a big plum tree in the back yard--the land was once an orchard--but now they're cut down.  We ought to plant a birch or two out there.