Mirrors

When I was in London, England, twenty years ago, I was in the Victoria & Albert Museum's glassware section once.  I was thinking, "There's an Englishman walking toward me," but it turned out I was walking toward a mirror!  I wonder if many people have had that experience? (It happened with the southern belle in the Civil War novel Cold Mountain.) I suppose it's a sign of maturity.

The medicine cabinet in our bathroom has three little doors in front of it, each with a mirror surface.  I've found that if I open them at the right angles, I can see the top of my head!

When European explorers found new lands, the indigenous people they met were often afraid of the mirrors they sometimes carried. The latter felt that if something could capture your image, it might capture your spirit too. First Nations people in Canada often dreaded cameras for the same reason.

There's an epigram in Classical Greek about an aging courtesan dedicating mirror:

Lahis, who laughed at Greece, with young lovers crowding 

Her door, dedicates this mirror to Aphrodite:

For what I used to see, I no longer can,

And what I do see, I no longer want to!

When I was twelve

I didn't have an easy time when I was twelve.  In school, I was the sensitive kid who was expected to ignore the meaner classmates. But I got angrier and angrier, and around this time I started getting into fights.

At this time I saw The Sword in the Stone, the Disney animated movie of T.H. White's book about King Arthur's childhood under Merlin's tutelage.  That movie meant a lot to me because I identified with the young hero. (I also liked the slapstick remake of The Three Musketeers that year more than I expected.)

This was in 1974, at the time of the energy crisis, when gas stations attracted long lineups of hoarders anticipating shortages. In the long run, the energy crisis was actually the best thing that ever happened to the Western world, because it got people serious about conversation, at least for a while. (Shame that the lesson got unlearned in the '80s!) What if they'd rationed gasoline, as some people wanted to do?  It was also the year of Nixon's resignation speech, which I heard on a car radio in a Cape Breton Campground.

And it was the year when Mikhail Barishnykov defected from the Soviet Union in Toronto.  We saw the Bolshoi Ballet tour he'd abandoned a few weeks later in Nova Scotia:  they had to change the program, and Mother's said they seemed demoralized.

That was the year of the college fad of streaking (running around nude). One hit single was the depressing song "Billy, Don't Be a Hero." And I recall hearing some funny Cheech & Chong routines on the radio.

I also failed a swimming course that fall, which was very discouraging.  I should have quit it, but I didn't want to be a quitter!

Daydreamers

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time in dreams.  I haven't done that so much in recent years, but I've had a few idle fantasies.  I think I'd like to go to China and get a job introducing western movies to Chinese audiences.  I don't suppose there's any demand for such people (my sister says all China wants to see movies like The Fast and the Furious) but I think I'd be good at it anyway!

And recently I was thinking that if I had a wife or girlfriend we should visit the state of Maine and climb up Mt. Katahdin at the northern end of the Appalachian Trail.  It would also be fun to climb the mountains in Maine's Acadia National Park or Cape Breton.

If I were rich, my big indulgence would be travel.  I was fantasizing about travelling on a cruise ship around the world, though that might get boring eventually.  I've recently been dreaming at night of visiting Russia, which is odd because in daytime I'm not interested in it.

Now if I were a billionaire, I'd buy some land in the Laurentians and hire sculptors to build an equivalent of the grotesque statues in Italy's Bomarzo Gardens.  It would be great to build a statue of Glooscap, the hero of Micmac nation legend, to be seen from a distance sailing away on his whale.  And I'd also like a statue of Humphrey Gilbert at the prow of his ship pointing upward, about to hit a rock face! And one of King Lear ranging on the moor...

The tchotchke that won't go away

I've accumulated a bit of junk over the years.  I got a cheap dance trophy or two from the Arthur Murray people.  I also got a Creech action figure from the Spawn comic books. (I wonder where it's gone?)

I won Creech some years back in a trivia contest at  a Rue Morgue magazine horror movie screening at the Bloor Cinema:  I think it was for an Edgar Allen Poe movie with Vincent Price, maybe The Masque of Red Death.  The question was what was the top-grossing B-movie of 1976, and I guessed that it was Grizzly because they mentioned that it was a blatant Jaws ripoff!

My mother liked to collect antiques.  Once we were driving through the United States and stopped at an antique shop so she could look around. (She didn't buy anything.) There was a sign telling people not to bring their garbage inside, and I quipped, "They have enough junk already!" Sometimes the joke writes itself...

One of our antiques is a mantelpiece clock whose wooden case includes some classical pillars.  It was probably made by German-Canadians, because it came from Kitchener back when it was called Berlin, before World War I came along and the residents proved their patriotism by renaming the town after Britain's big general.

We also have some Hummel figurines of little kids, from a line that's mentioned in The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste.

Dancing

I'm told that back in the jazz age my grandfather criticized the shameless way young people danced, and his wife reminded him that when he was young he'd danced in a graveyard once!

About 15 years ago I took ballroom dancing lessons at the Arthur Murray studio in the Royal York neighborhood, for about a year.  It cost a fortune, but I had a pretty good time.  

My instructor most of the time was Cynthia, and we got along pretty well. (She came from New Brunswick, like me.) Sometimes she wore a maple-scented body cream that made her smell like maple syrup!  Whenever she offered criticism, she'd call me "sweetie." I liked the way she smiled when I did it right.  When I did something particularly well, she'd ask, "How did that feel?" I resisted the temptation to answer, "I have a shrink to ask me how I feel!"

I learned dances like waltz, rhumba and salsa.  Swing was the hardest:  small steps just don't come naturally to me!  Since the man takes the lead that gives him a responsibility:  if the woman doesn't make the right steps, that means he isn't leading her clearly enough.  Posture is very important too, and I found that when I wasn't sure what to do that affected my posture.

Cynthia said I'm a gentleman, which meant a lot to me.  The students and instructors would have these dancing parties every week, and I'd make an effort to dance with every woman in the place.  When there was a new girl, I'd dance with her first.  I did things that way not so much to be a gentleman; I have Asperger's Syndrome, and if I hadn't had a scheme like that I couldn't have decided whom to dance with at all!

Sometimes a couple would take lessons together, then at the parties they'd only feel comfortable dancing with each other.  I felt sorry for them:  half the fun is from dancing with a whole lot of people!

Poetry

When I was young we had the big book The Golden Treasury of Poetry, illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund, who did several children's books. (I think we still have it around somewhere.) It included a wide range of poems, including story poems like Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle" and Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish."

One of my favorite poets is the well-named Robert Frost. Another is William Butler Yeats. I like poems that are short enough to memorize, like Frost's "Dust of Snow":

The way a crow shook down on me

A dust of snow from a hemlock tree

Has given my heart a change of mood

And saved some part of a day I had rued.

Or his "Nothing Gold Can Stay":

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief.

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

I haven't written much poetry at all, but I am interested in translating poems (the hardest form of translation, of course). I recently got the notion to translate some of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology poems into Scots dialect, like Robert Burns' poems. And one project that I've started is translating Luis Vaz de Camoes' epic Portuguese poem The Lusiades into English:  I'm about halfway through the first canto.

Some poems mean a lot to me. Like W.H. Auden's "September 1st, 1939" ("I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn:  Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return"), Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son" ("Life for me ain't been no crystal stair"), Yeats' "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," Whittier's "Barbara Freitchie," Walt Whitman's "There Was a Child Went Forth Each Day." I could go on and on...