First Grade

What do I remember about Grade One?  I remember the teacher singing "We are marching to Pretoria." And being introduced to Christina Rossetti's poem "Who Has Seen The Wind?" (At least I think it was Grade One.)

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you.

But when the leaves are trembling

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I.

But when the trees bow down their heads

The wind is passing by.

When you think about it, that poem is really about God.  Only in later years did I learn that it was a product of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art and poetry in Victorian Britain. (The author was married to another Pre-Raphaelite poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.)

I'm glad I've managed to memorize a few poems.  Back in pre-literate times they'd pass on culture in the form of memorized songs and poems.

One I remember is a Sappho poem, translated by Isak Dinesen. (Or at least she used this translation in Out of Africa.)

The moon has sunk, and the Pleiades,

And midnight is gone.

And the hours are passing, passing...

And I lie alone.

And I remember one by Robert Frost:

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.

And another:

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 gives way to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

STAR WARS

Want to hear an embarrassing '70s memory?  Back in the summer of 1977, they played the disco version of the Star Wars theme on the radio so much that I thought that was the theme! (This was before I saw the movie itself.  We lived in a small town, and the movie only reached us well into the fall.)

The series overall I can take or leave, I guess. (It owes a lot to the Flash Gordon serials.) It got pretty cheesy in Attack of the Clones when they escaped by putting gum in their handcuffs!  I didn't dislike Rogue One as much as some people did, but the ending (spoiler alert!) reminded me of something from when I was little.

I was one of five kids and we'd sometimes put on these Biddle Family plays.  The one rule about them was that everyone had to die in the end, so we'd die in all these different ways.  Anyhow, Rogue One had everyone dying in the end, which reminded me of the Biddle Family. (It also reminded me of the grimly purposeful war movies of the 1940s, but that's another story.)

Quentin Tarantino's western The Hateful Eight is another movie with a Biddle Family ending...

Fridays!

For me, Fridays used to be the night for watching All in the Family and later The Mary Tyler Moore Show.  Since it wasn't a school night I'd stay up and watch The National at 11:00. (Today I hardly ever watch TV news...) The Tommy Hunter Show was also on Fridays, but I only watched the closing credits while waiting for something else to come on.  And I used to watch South Park late Friday night.

Today my big Friday ritual is doing the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle, which comes online Friday at 10:00 P.M.  I like Saturday because it's usually the hardest puzzle of the week. (I also do the Friday puzzle on Thursday night.) I also read Dan Savage's sex advice column Savage Love on Fridays, or at least skim through it.  Not that it's been very useful to me...

Friday is also the day when they release most of the new movies, so the newspapers have movie reviews then.  But I never go to a movie on the opening night; it's better to wait till the crowds are smaller. (Even then, I don't seem to have time for movies any more...)

Civil rights

I've been interested in the gay civil rights issue for a long time, despite being straight. Back in 1977 I was hotly against Anita Bryant's successful campaign to deny job protection to gay teachers in Miami, though less from being pro-gay than from being against fundamentalist Christians wanting to rewrite the law to match a religious agenda.

And I've always been for same-sex marriage. (Back in the 1970s, I recall the advice columnist Ann Landers predicting that it would eventually be allowed because it gave couples access to things like joint tax returns.) I remember presidential candidate Richard Gephardt dismissing it as "not feasible" 15 years ago--that's leadership?  Some liberals tried to come up with a dim compromise called civil unions, but in the end the courts decreed it just as with interracial marriages.  By the way, the liberals who keep saying that Barack Obama was stronger on gay civil rights than any of his predecessors are like someone comparing a normal man to a long line of dwarfs and calling him a giant!

I also believe in civil rights for the transgender community. About a decade ago Democrats introduced a gay civil rights bill in Congress but excluded trannies.  It would be one thing if doing that would tip the balance in favor of passing it--then I'd say, "Get this much today, get the rest tomorrow.  But President Bush had promised to veto the bill anyway if it got to him, so they had nothing to gain!  This was compromising for the sake of compromising, and that's weak.

Anyway, we all have some prejudices. (That's the price of having an identity!) Courage is in having fears but overcoming them, and wisdom is in overcoming your prejudices.

The beginning

My earliest memory, possibly, is of a tire swing with water sloshing at the bottom of it.  Or maybe it's from when we had three French-Canadian kids living next door to us, including one called Rene.  But we pronounced his name "weenie," and it's that name I remember. (I would have been one or two.)

Some novels have good opening lines, like Gabriel Garcia-Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude: "As Colonel Aureliano Buendia faced the firing squad, he remembered the time his father had taken him to a neighbouring town to see ice..." And there's the dialogue at the start of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: "'Tom!' No answer. 'Tom!' No answer..." Malcolm Lowry submitted a short story to a Cambridge student magazine with this opening line: "The first murder I ever committed was in a windmill..."

Memorable event

I remember 9/11 because I was personally affected:  I was going to fly to England that night, but the flight was cancelled because so many American planese were landing at Pearson and other airports in Canada.  In the end, I left two days late.  I couldn't help recalling how some Americans had celebrated the levelling of Baghdad just ten years before. (Bad, bad karma!)

And I remember the morning after Trump's election two years ago.  I knew Hillary Clinton's weaknesses but had expected her to win anyway--I'd given up doubting.  I recalled meeting a psychologist called Liljana who was interviewing me for her doctoral thesis. (I have Asperger's Syndrome.) She was a Serb living in Croatia who had to flee to Canada when the ethnic wars destroyed Yugoslavia.  She told me that when the war started nobody could believe it:  they all thought someone would stop it!  I guess that's how I felt after Trump's election.

(I felt the same sort of disbelief back in 1995 when I heard that O.J. Simpson had been acquitted.  I was living in London at the time and hadn't paid the trial much attention.)

Beauty

Beauty isn't everything, but it sure isn't nothing!  Of course, female beauty is something that women notice twice as much as men!

I once read a book of Italian folktales, and one of the stories had a villainess called the Ugly Arab Woman.  Yet of the actual Arab women I've seen, a lot of them are really gorgeous, like George Clooney's wife Amal. (She's a human rights lawyer, so I suppose she has inner beauty too.) I have a feeling that in the Middle East they have a deeper understanding of beauty than we do in the West.

Ever see the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty?  There's an evil fairy called Maleficent, and one of the good fairies says about her, "I don't think she's really happy." But there's this big climax where Maleficent turns into a dragon--right at that moment, I'll bet she was happy!

And there's another Disney movie, Beauty and the Beast.  The ending I'd like to see is one where Belle marries Beast and gives birth to mutants!  Friends visit them and say, "What cute little mutants you have!"

Aside from redheads, I find that women look more beautiful in black & white photos than in color...

Bicycles

I haven't ridden a bicycle for years.  Walking is good enough for me.

In Denmark they have this nifty recumbent bike with three wheels and an egg-shaped streamlined cover around it.  I'll be you could mount a mast and sail too!

It's a shame that most Americans associate bicycles with children.  If grownups started using bikes instead of cars, it could revolutionize their way of life!

I once saw this Italian movie The Bicycle Thief, about a man whose livelihood depends on his bicycle being robbed of it, then him and his sone going on a long search for it.  That's a movie I'm never going to see again--too sad for me!

I remember this commercial for Chef Boyardee's Beefaroni where a kid on a bike zooms into an alley, then half a dozen kids on bike come zooming out!

I also remember an episode of the religious puppet show Davey and Goliath where he met a girl and let her ride on his bike's handle bars--though he knew that was dangerous--and they got into an accident.

Snowball fight

I can't think of much to say about snowballs.  I like the moist snow that falls in big flakes that allows you to make snowballs and snowmen.  But it quickly freezes and becomes icy snow, which I don't like.

I remember learning that snowballs with a rock inside are dangerous!  That's something I never tried...

I remember seeing Abel Gance's silent movie Napoleon.  In one early scene, when he was at military school, the cadets had a snowball fight.  Napoleon's group was outnumbered, but thanks to his tactical skills they gave the other side a licking!

In Orwell's Soviet allegory The Animal Farm there's a pig called Snowball who clearly represents Trotsky. (His name must come from the expression "as much chance as a snowball in hell.") And I think the comic strip Steve Canyon had a Chinese guerrilla leader called Princess Snowball.  (On second thought, she was Princess Snowflower!)

Oblivion

The word "oblivion" comes from the Latin word for forgetting.  The other day was the Armistice centenary and was thinking that the Latin for "Lest we forget" is "Ne obliviscemur."

A few years ago I saw an old photograph of some ancestors of mine from about a century ago.  They were wearing silly hats and having fun--somehow that seemed more real to me than your typical posed studio portrait.  But we didn't know their names.  I was wondering, "A century from now, will people be looking at our photos and wondering who we were?" I suppose that's how life is:  even the people who remember you will be dead someday.

About twenty years ago I saw a funny movie Living in Oblivion, about a group of people filming a low-budget art film.  The first part is about the director (Steve Buscemi) having a nightmare, imagining everything that can go wrong in a day of filming.  The second part is about the insecure lead actress (Catherine Keener), who's been having an affair with the leading man--clearly based on Brad Pitt!  In her nightmare their affair becomes common knowledge on the set, causing her great embarrassment.

At the end of the movie they're imagining their futures.  The director sees himself winning an Oscar and using his acceptance speech to settle old scores, while the actress sees herself waiting tables and serving a customer who says, "Didn't I see you in a movie once?"

Eggs

"May all your duck eggs have double yolks!"--Tommy Makem

Does anyone intentionally soft-boil an egg?  Seems to me, that's what happens when you wanted to hard-boil the egg but weren't patient enough to finish the boiling!

I remember when I was a kid the Agriculture Minister Eugene Whalen got into controversy when his marketing board lost about a million eggs.  It's funny what you remember.

I was thinking that I could eat omelet for dinner every day!  But I guess it would get boring after a while...

I remember that when my mother made an omelet there'd sometimes be big pieces of shell in it.  I heard there's some cooking school in Paris where they spend the whole first day teaching you the right way to break an egg!

I've always wondered, How do farmers know when an egg is going to hatch and when it's just a regular egg?  There's this cartoon in The Far Side where a farm wife collects the eggs from the henhouse, only to see a hen leaving the farmhouse with a baby!

Remembering things wrong

When I was young I saw the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man.  There's one scene in it where this bully forced Nick Nolte into a fight.  My memory told me that Nolte ended up knocking the guy out cold.  But when I saw it in recent years, it turned out that was an exaggeration:  Nolte did lick the guy, but he was still conscious afterward.  Yet I can't help feeling the scene would have been better my way!

Sometimes I think about those simple ways things could have been better.  Like on the TV cartoon Underdog. (What kind of superhero goes by the name Underdog, of all names?) The theme song goes, "Speed of lightning, roar of thunder!  Fighting all who rob or plunder!" It seems to me that the song should have gone "Fighting all who rob and plunder!" I'm a born editor.

My mother was always remembering things wrong. But that was her kooky style. (Do you know people like that?) What bugs me is people drawing the wrong lesson from their wrong memories, like those who still claim that Bernie Sanders didn't support Hillary Clinton in her fight against Donald Trump, which he clearly did!

Lakes, ponds and quarries

When I was growing up in Sackville, N.B., we lived near a quarry pond.  There was a brook that flowed into it and one that flowed out. (On one occasion my brother John dammed up the brook flowing in and for a little while the place became really quiet.  In the winter it froze and we could skate on it.  I still dream about it from time to time.

The place was fairly picturesque.  Sometimes the fine arts students from the nearby university would come there and paint the scene.  We increased the beauty by introducing some lupin flowers from the land near our cottage and they spread over the area.  Some were white, some blue, some red, and hybrids soon appeared.

Do you go down to visit Lake Ontario?  My parents and I used to do that back when we had a car.  We mostly went to the beach at Sunnyside, but a few times we went to the one at Mimico.  One place I've enjoyed visiting is the Leslie Street spit.  I like that it's a work in progress, with new landfill continually expanding it in several places.  I remember one time when we visited in April, and it was so cool that big snowflakes started falling!  Funny what you remember...

The dump

Time for a corny joke!

Q:  Where does the Lone Ranger take his garbage?

A:  To the dump, to the dump, to the dump-dump-dump...

I saw this 60 Minutes report once about the garbage system in Cairo.  Most of the people there are Moslems with high cleanliness standards, so they let the Christian minority handle their garbage.  It's easier to stay clean when there are other people less fussy about it!

Ever see those trash dumpsters near construction sites?  I remember the movie Purple Rain, where Prince had this flamboyant rival (Morris Day, who stole the show). In one scene the rival got accosted by his girlfriend, so he had his assistant throw her into a dumpster!

I also remember this movie Moonlighting, where Jeremy Irons was leading a group of Polish workers in London renovating a communist official's apartment. (He heard that the Solidarity movement had been suppressed, but didn't tell the others because he wanted the job finished first.) In one scene they were filling a dumpster with all the rubble from their work, but their neighbours all took to putting their own garbage in it, so it got overloaded, and when the dumpster got taken away half the rubble got left behind. Some neighbours! (I've just been reading a book about Polish history.)

The F-bomb

Scottish soldier in World War II: "The fucking fucker's fucking fucked!"

My parents were in Britain in 1966 and saw the live talk show where Kenneth Tynan used the F-word and caused an outcry...

I once saw a funny Irish movie, The Van, about Colm Meany and his friend operating a fish and chips van.  In an early scene he's learning to fry chips, but ends up burning a whole batch.  Just then his wife asks him for an example of a simile, and he says, "me chips are burnt as fuck!" I like the way the Irish twist the English language around to serve their purpose, like James Joyce's "Yes I said yes I will yes!"

I was reading about the time Loretta Young and Ethel Merman were making a movie together. (At least, I think it was them.) Loretta introduced a swear jar where anyone who swore had to contribute a dime.  Ethel got exasperated and finally said, "Loretta, here's ten dollars.  Now go fuck yourself!"

I remember seeing this website twenty years ago by someone who didn't like the anime Sailor Moon. (He said, "Belle would get higher than 30 on an algebra test.") But the funniest part was a group of emails he'd received and posted.  One was a hostile letter full of censored obscenities, no doubt including the F-word, and was signed, "From your loving mother!" The host said, "I don't think my mother knows half the words he used!"

Life-changing event

I've been posting on a blog entries in my diary from fifteen years ago.  In the fall of 2003, I wanted to take another acting course with the TDSB night school program.  I'd taken a couple recently and enjoyed it greatly.  One effect this had is that when I saw Lawrence of Arabia again, I noticed how Peter O'Toole listened when the other actors delivered their lines!

That fall I noticed that the TDSB also offered an opera course.  This interested me greatly, but it was on the same night as the acting class and I gave the latter priority for now.  But in the end the drama class was cancelled, so I got to take the opera course after all.

I've been in the Toronto City Opera chorus ever since, only missing a couple of their annual seasons.  Our next production will be Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, with a Pop Art look.  It looks like I'll be dressed as an Andy Warhol type.

Sometimes I wonder, What would have happened if that drama course hadn't been cancelled?  Would I never have got involved with the opera group?  Our would my nature still have led me to it?  But I don't spend much time on moot questions.

That's me on the lower far right of the photo!

Adolescence

Among our vast collection of used books, we have a textbook titled Teenagers, evidently for health class in '50s high schools.  Some of it looks pretty funny today.

There's this one illustrated section showing "Why young people fail to keep jobs." One of the illustrations, captioned "No sense of responsibility," shows a guy working in a garage, who thinks, "I know I'm only supposed to be cleaning this motorcycle, but nobody's around so I think I'll take a little ride on it!"

In another section there are illustrations related to a school dance where readers are supposed to evaluate the "social maturity" of the characters.  One illustration in the "After the dance" section shows two couples driving home, and the boy doing the driving says, "Oh, you girls stop screaming!  The road is clear this time of night, and I want to see what this car can do in the way of speed!"

There are also some illustrations about accident prevention.  In one a girl thinks, "I can't swim, and there's already one non-swimmer in the boat.  Oh well, I'll go anyway." In another a guy says, "Here's a gun for your school play.  I don't think it's loaded!"

Strange fads

Back when I was twelve, the big college fad was streaking--that's running around naked.  Another fad from the '70s was the Pet Rock.  The guy behind it said you could train your pet rock to fetch, by throwing a stick then throwing the rock after it.  He guaranteed that the rock won't return without the stick!

Does anyone else remember deely boppers?  I think they're a hair band with two antennas sticking out of it with flowery things on the end.  I recall they had a very brief heyday with young girls in the early '80s.

Every generation has its fads, of course, especially with college boys.  In the '50s there was panty raids and stuffing people into a phone booth; in 1939 there was swallowing goldfish; and back in the '20s there was a craze for sitting on the top of flagpoles!

Does anyone remember when dirty dancing like the lambada was a craze around 1990?  Then in the mid-'90s there was the macarena...  And don't get me started on clothing fads like earth shoes and painter's pants!

Flowers

I can't tell a lot of flowers apart.  Sure, there's the sunflower and the rose and the orchid and the tulip and the pansy and such.  Bit I couldn't tell a petunia from a zinnia to save my life.

I think my favorite flower is the sunflower.  This even though some list that said everything different flowers stand for argued that the sunflower stands for haughtiness.

The way to tell an artifical flower from a real one is by looking up close:  the real flower will have tiny veins while the artificials one will have a crosshatched pattern.

I remember going into a flower shop when I was little and the smell bothered me. (Some scents I was sensitive to back then.)

Back in the 1988 U.S. presidential race, just before the Iowa caucus, Richard Gephardt ran an ad ridiculing his rival Michael Dukakis for advising farmers to grow flowers instead of corn, as well as blueberries and Belgian endives.  Well, it was pretty good advice, but the farmers didn't want to hear new ideas.  Heaven forbid that a presidential candidate should actually give people good advice--his job is to tell the voters what they want to hear!

MAD magazine

When I was little, we had some Mad magazine paperback reprints, though my mother really didn't approve of such humor.  In hindsight this was classic stuff:  I've reread them in recent years and appreciate the humor more as an adult.

There was one where '50s parents are lecturing their teenage kids, about the ridiculousness of young people's clothes, dancing and language.  Then they show the parents when they were young, back in the '20s, wearing raccoon coats and dancing the Charleston and saying things like "Twenty-three skidoo, small change!"

I also remember "TV Shows We'd Like to See." For What's My Line: "How did you guess the identity of our mystery guest so quickly?" "I peeked!" For the Anacin commercial: "What do doctors take for headache and pain relief? How should I know, I'm only an actor!" When Loretta Young makes her grand entrance in the flowing dress through the doorway, her dress gets ripped in two!

I recall lots of other stuff!  In Edgar Allen Poe's version of Dennis the Menace, Dennis burns down the house with his parents in it! ("No more spanking--nevermore!") And the spoof of interior decoration magazines: "The whole room is set off by the colourful drapes.  The whole apartment is set off by dynamite." They made fun of Bobby Darren and Dick and Jane books a lot. And there was one cartoon of a guy watching The Late Show, then The Late, Late Show, then The Early, Early Show!

Picnic

Back in the 1950s there was the movie Picnic, based on William Inge's play and directed by Joshua Logan. William Holden plays a drifter stud who comes to a small town on the Fourth of July and electrifies the women!  Holden was a bit too old for the role, but it's still a fun film, in a very '50s sort of way.  The best scene was him and Kim Novak doing this sexy dance.

I've also seen Picnic at Hanging Rock, an Australian movie directed by Peter Weir. It's about a Victorian girl's school having a picnic on this Australian hill, and several of the girls disappear forever. (The mystery never gets explained.) It's kind of about the repressed sexuality of Victorian times.  I particularly remember this shot near the end, of a poster with photos of the missing girls, being worn away by the elements.

Casablanca

The first time I saw Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, I saw it on a double bill with another Bogart movie, To Have Or Have Not, which I was also seeing for the first time.  I actually preferred To Have or Have Not!  It's based on a Hemingway novel, but it's basically about nothing but the sexual chemistry between Bogart and his co-star (soon to be his wife) Lauren Bacall. Yet darnit, that's enough!  It's sort of like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was really just about the friction between stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

On the subject of Casablanca, Roger Ebert pointed out that at the end Bogart could have got on the plane with Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid, because he'd just shot the Nazis who would have stopped him.  Sort of like in The Wizard of Oz when the Good Witch could have told Dorothy at the start of the movie instead of the end, that she could get home just by clicking her heels!  Every movie has some point you don't want to think about...

I once saw the movie Hideous Kinky with Kate Winslet as a British divorcee raising her kids in Casablanca or somewhere in Morocco in the '60s. (The kids had a habit of yelling out, "Bugger, bastard and bum!" They looked fun.) She was into Islamic mysticism, and really wanted to meet this big Sufi leader so he could reveal to her some big secret about life.  When she finally met him, he said, "Go home and raise your children."

There's also the poem "Casabianca":

The boy stood on the burning deck,

Then he got the hell out!

Aunts & uncles

I'm an uncle.  I have four nieces and one nephew, ages 17 to 29.  The first one was a bit thrilling, but I got accustomed to them.  I haven't seen much of them recently.

I have a Chinese friend who'd call my parents "Uncle" and "Auntie." That's an Asian thing, treating your friends as family.

Did you ever meet a bully who'd force you to the ground and twist your arm, and tell you, "Say uncle"? Or is it just a boy's thing?

On Welcome Back Kotter, Gabriel Kaplan would start the show by telling a joke about his uncle.

There was a Mad magazine article once with definitions for children.  One of them was, "An aunt is to give you clothes for your birthday, instead of toys." Another was, "An uncle is to pinch your cheek, and you can't pinch back.

Second acts

In a self-pitying moment, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "In American lives there are no second acts.  I disagree.  The most interesting American lives in particular are distinguished by their second acts.  It goes back to the age when pioneers had little to keep them in the east, so they went west to make a fresh start.  And even to the immigrant forefathers making a fresh start in the New World!

I think of Washington and Eisenhower going from General to President.  Or outstanding ex-presidents John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter.  Or someone like Vito Corleone going from godfather in the first part of the movie to his son Michael's adviser in the last part.  Or the silent movie actress Louise Brooks writing important essays about Hollywood in her later years.  Even Fitzgerald's life had an interesting second act:  the sadder but wiser writer of The Last Tycoon, "Babylon Revisited" and the letters to his daughter Scottie.

I also think of Ulysses Grant, whose life had five acts!  In the years before the Civil War he was largely a failure in military and civilian life; in the Civil War he became a triumphant general; as U.S. president he was a well-intentioned failure; as ex-president he was a failure on Wall Street, ending up deeply in debt; in the last act, dying of cancer, he wrote a courageous memoir whose sales restored his family's fortune, which has stood the test of time.

(P.S.: Actually, someone said that what Fitzgerald really meant is that American lives only have a first act and a third act!)

Forts

I grew up in Sackville in southeastern New Brunswick.  Nearby was the National Historic Park of Fort Beausejour near the Nova Scotia border.  Back in 1755 this was a French fort facing British Fort Lawrence on the Nova Scotia side.  Then the British conquered it and renamed in Fort Cumberland.  Later, during the Revolutionary War, some American rebels attacked it but couldn't take it.

Those forts are interesting historical places.  My mother was born near Fort Louisbourg in Cape Breton, and I've visited it several times.  But I don't remember visiting Fort York in Toronto.

I used to do research at the University of Toronto's Robarts Library, whose design is so brutalist and intimidating that someone nicknamed it Fort Book!  Have you ever seen those British puppet cartoons like Stingray and Thunderbirds?  Those puppets would look at home in Fort Book!

A letter

People don't write many snail-mail letters any more. (I had to mail someone a cheque the other week and we didn't have any stamps in the house!) But I like the feel of having something on paper that you can even save.

Some twenty years ago I spent eight months in London, England, researching my Ph.D. thesis.  My sister Moira wrote to me a lot.  A few years ago I was searching for something in my room and found a big stash of these letters!  Rereading them took me back to that time.

I must say that Moira is very good at writing letters.  I remember a couple of years before I went to London when she was teaching English in the Czech Republic.  I wrote in one letter to her that I'd never done anything really adventurous, not like what she was doing now.  She wrote back, "Adventure isn't all it's cracked up to be!  The best adventure is getting some work done." Can't disagree.

These letters she wrote were full of funny details, like "P.S.:  Stay away from those London School of Economics loonies!" And her handwriting was very neat. (I'd also saved a letter from my father, but his handwriting is barely legible!)

Pickles

Whenever I eat a Big Mac, I remove the pickles first. Did you know that in England a Big Mac has relish instead of pickles?  If they got rid of pickles, would I notice?  Probably not.

In September my mother used to use fresh tomatoes to make chow chow pickles.  I always like the smell when it was being cooked.

Can't think of much to say about pickles.  Back in my hometown there was a guy called John McNichol who was nicknamed Pickle.  My grandfather called the CBC newscaster Knowlton Nash "Old Picklepuss."

There's a British actress called Vivian Pickles.  She played Mary, Queen of Scots in Glenda Jackson's TV series Elizabeth R.  And I've heard she had a funny role in the cult movie Harold and Maude.

Vandalism

I remember that when I was a teenager we had some little poplar trees growing on our front lawn.  We went away on vacation for a week or so, and when we came back someone had hacked them down!  I've always resented that.

When I was in school, textbooks experienced a lot of vandalism.  A book with the title Language Arts would get changed to "language farts." Someone wrote in the front of one book, "In case of fire, turn to page 37." On page 37 he wrote, "I said in case of fire, fag!" Someone else wrote, "In case of fire, throw in!"

In college I used a desk on which someone had written, "Washington owned slaves and blew dope and they won't admit it." I also recall seeing a garage door on which someone had scrawled, "Mr. X was here!"

In my hometown, there was a street sign near the high school that said "Dufferin Street." (There were several streets named after Governors-General.) Some high-schooler added a bit of paint to turn it into "Bufferin Street"!

There's a Calvin & Hobbes episode where Calvin saw Suzy drawing on the sidewalk with chalk and joined her.  He said "Gee, I've never been a real vandal before!" and she said "It isn't vandalism!  The stuff washes right off." So Calvin lost interest, of course.

Punk rock

When I was a teenager, I liked punk rock.  Not that I listened to it much, but I liked the whole idea of it.  Dare to be negative!

I didn't have a lot of heroes in my adolescence, but Johnny Rotten was one of them. (And Sid Vicious' version of Sinatra's "My Way" is a classic!) The movie Sid and Nancy has some good lines: "How do you spell 'holiday'?" "S-H-I-T!"

Not that I'd ever want to pierce my ears or nose or get tattooed or such.  I don't get the appeal of body art.

I was visiting Great Britain in June of 1979, just at the time of the Wimbledon tennis tournament where John MacEnrone's loud-mouthed tantrums got him the nickname "Superbrat." I liked him.  I guess he had a punk appeal for me.  Like my favorite Frank Zappa song, around the same time, which went, "You're an asshole, you're an asshole..."

I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker where a young musician made a phone call and said, "Hello, Mom?  Punk Rock is dead and I'm coming home in 15 minutes!"

Native Canadians

I read that the Canadian government is considering a new holiday to commemorate the abusive residential schools.  I think they should call it Healing Day. (They could have it on the first Monday in August when provinces have all these different names for the holiday!) But the Beothuks will never heal:  they should build a memorial to them next to our Jewish Holocaust memorial.

I've been doing some editing work for Miriam on her memoirs.  One episode has her as a cook on a ship visiting the Haida nation in B.C.  One evening she had a vision of this dog coming out of nowhere, and apparently that's common with them!

I come from the Maritimes where the main First Nation is the Micmaq.  I can see a bit of their language in place names:  "gnish" clearly means beach, and "missi" means river. (Maybe I should learn some more of it.)

I first learned of some First Nations issues from watching The Beachcombers!  There was an episode where Relic found an old totem pole and Jesse Jim was angry because he planned to sell it to a motel as a tacky tourist decoration. Another time someone talking to Nick referred to Jesse as "your Indian," which didn't go over well.  In another episode Jesse was tasket with organizing a potlach. (When they outlawed the potlach in the 19th Century, that must have been like banning Christmas!)

Favorite meal

Italian food appeals to me.  I always like spaghetti.  I also like fettucine alfredo, especially when I cook it myself.

I also like Chinese and Indian food. (We're lucky enough to live around the corner from an excellent Indian restaurant.) And I like Ethiopian food and falafels too.

One snack I like is salted peanuts.  My favorite ice cream flavors are cherry vanilla and strawberry ripple. (Too bad I can't seem to find strawberry ripple ice cream anywhere.) But I don't get the point of mint-flavored ice cream...

What food don't I like?  I've never got the appeal of ratatouille.  Don't like potato salad either.  I've never liked onions or tomato chunks either.  And I don't like unfresh fish or undercooked potatoes.

When I was young and we lived in the Maritimes, I didn't like Scotsburn's local brand of butter. (I had an uncle who, it seems, was also choosy about butter.) In Toronto today, I can't eat Pizza Pizza:  it literally makes me unwell!

Drawing

I've never been much for drawing.  I remember when I played this piano piece in a music festival competition, and the adjudicator criticized my correcting a wrong note afterward.  What he said was true, but it got to me.  My sister Moira encouraged me to draw his face in caricature style. (I wonder what I'd look like in caricature...)

I like that transparent onion-skin paper that you can use to trace a drawing.  In school it was useful for tracing maps.

Do you remember when you were little and it was fun to take pictures and draw moustaches and sunglasses on them?  The illustrations in my school textbooks often bore those marks. (Sometimes they even drew lower anatomy!) 

Another fun thing is to take some picture of a guy with a big Donny Osmond-type smile and black out one or two of his teeth.  When I was little, I sometimes drew gloves on people's hands, go figure...

Telling a joke

One of the worst feelings in the world is to tell a joke, only to be informed that it isn't funny.  By that time, it's too late to take the joke back: you've ruined the mood, and it can't be helped now!

People don't tell jokes as much as they used to.  Back in the days of vaudeville a comedian could tell a joke for about seven years until it got that the whole audience had heard it before.  Today, when someone tells a joke on TV, so many people hear it right away that it'll have a far shorter shelf life.

I used to take singing lessons from Giuseppe, who loves jokes. (Especially dirty jokes about nuns.) When I mentioned this to my sister Moira, she suggested that it reflects immaturity!  I'd never thought of it that way.  That begs the question, would you rather have a friend who was mature, or one who laughs at your jokes?

I have a good memory (for most things) and know lots of jokes.  Don't tempt me to tell them all!  I know knock-knock jokes, elephant jokes, Tom Swifties and Mommy, Mommy jokes.  I even made up a Mommy, Mommy joke on my own:

"Mommy, Mommy, why would pirates hide their treasure in the zoo?"

"Shut up and search the lion pit!"

Tactics

Am I tactful?  Not as much as my father.  But more than some people.

My problem with the issue of tact is that, in practice, it's the people of lower standing who have to be tactful with their superiors.  When the latter are tactless, it's just irrelevant!

I remember this Peanuts episode where Lucy throws a tantrum because her mother broke a promise to her as a show of power, screaming "It isn't fair!" But Linus tells her it would be better strategy to say, "I've been bad, and you were right to break my promise.  From now on I shall try to be good." What it comes down to is that it's up to children to reassure their parents that the latter's disciplinary actions were the right decision, otherwise the kids are "proving their point." Call it speaking reassurance to power.

I remember this tongue-in-cheek children's poem by Edward Anthony:

It is the duty of the student,

Without exception, to be prudent.

If smarter than his teacher, tact

Demands that he conceal the fact.

Zippers

I sometimes have trouble with my jacket zipper and have to take it back down before it'll go all the way up.  Sometimes it seems to be stuck halfway!  But that isn't much to talk about.

I'll still leave my fly unzipped once in a while. (It mostly happens when I'm wearing a belt with my pants.) I remember in school how I'd change into my gym shorts  and sometimes forget to zip them, leading to embarrassment.  I don't really get nostalgic about physical education.

I've noticed train porters wearing shoes with zippers instead of laces.  Did you know that the formal name for a zipper is "slide fastener"?

Isn't there an amusement park ride called the Zipper?  It's like a Ferris Wheel but bar-shaped.  I've never been on it and I don't want to try it.

Caves

I haven't been in caves a lot. But I like tunnels.  In Greenwich near London, there's a foot tunnel that you can take under the Thames River, with an elevator at both ends.  When I visit London I like to go there. (They should build a tunnel like that to the Toronto Islands!)

I read somewhere that there are still a million Chinese people living in caves.

When I was a teenager I enjoyed playing the computer game Adventure, which involved finding treasures in a cave network.

Ever see the movie Ace in the Hole?  It's an acidic black comedy, directed by Billy Wilder, with Kirk Douglas as a big-city reporter demoted to a small-town paper.  One day he finds out about someone stuck in a cave and sees an opportunity for a big comeback, so for the sake of leverage with the big papers he delays the guy's rescue!  Of course, it all ends badly.  Kirk Douglas was well suited to these antihero roles.  Jan Sterling has a classic line: "I don't go to church.  Kneeling bags my nylons."

Rainbows

There are a lot of songs about rainbows.  Remember "Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz?  They almost cut it from the movie, but it stayed and won the Best Song Oscar and became Judy Garland's signature song.

Does anyone remember the TV cartoon Rainbow Brite from the 1980s?  She had a white horse like in My Little Pony and her enemy was the Star Stealer.  It was all to sell licensed merchandise, of course. (Mattel sold Rainbow Brite, while Hasbro sold My Little Pony.)

I like rainbow sherbet.  And one of the Anne of Green Gables books is Rainbow Valley.

Coming home the same day of writing this piece, I saw a really clear rainbow near my house!

Antiques

My mother used to like antiques.  When we travelled somewhere, we'd sometimes stop at antique shops so she could see what they were selling.  Once we stopped at this place in upstate New York where they had a sign saying "Don't bring your garbage in here." I quipped, "They have enough junk already!"

We have some of these Hummell figurines from the 1950s, kitschy statuettes of kids skipping along and whistling and learning to read and such.  Someone wrote about them in the book The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste. I've always wondered how we got them. (A gift from a relative, perhaps?) 

One of my mother's antiques was a Japanese jewel box with a little painting superimposed on a mirror.  I wonder when she got it?  It was probably from before World War II.

Some years back I started buying up old Classics Illustrated comic books.  I lost interest eventually, but not before getting quite a few I didn't read at the time.  Last week I took them out of their storage place and started reading them. (I've read A Tale of Two Cities and Les Miserables, and Rip Van Winkle is next.) I also have quite a few Classics Illustrated Junior fairy tale comics.  They're something of a guilty pleasure for me.

Blue jays

I've never really gone in for birdwatching.  But southeastern New Brunswick is a pretty good place for that, and some locals are into it.  Once I identified a bird in our yard as a flicker, which is related to a woodpecker.

I recall that four robins stopped in our yard at the start of spring and my mother called them Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, after the movie about swinging California neighbours.

Did you know that Ian Fleming probably took the name James Bond from the author of a book for Caribbean bird watchers?

I don't follow the Toronto Blue Jays much.  Sports like baseball just aren't my thing.  I remember that when Toronto got into the World Series, the first President Bush let people know that he was rooting for the American team. (Weasel!)

Historic sites

When I was growing up in Sackville, N.B., there was a nearby National Historic Park at the restored Fort Beausejour (later renamed Fort Cumberland by the British). Back in 1755 the French had a fort there, while the British had Fort Lawrence on the Nova Scotia side of the Missiguash River.  Then the British conquered the French fort in their first victory of the Seven Years War.  We visited it often.

We frequently visited Cape Breton Island in the summer and several times we went to Fort Louisbourg, which is near my mother's birthplace.  Now they've rebuilt it and have 18th century re-enactors like in Williamsburg, Virginia. (When my mother was little she'd play in the ruins of the fort, which hadn't yet been restored.  Years later, when we visited the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, she recognized a displayed Louisbourg cannon from back then!)

When I was seventeen we visited Britain and France.  I'd just been reading A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman's history of the 14th century, which talked a lot about Coucy-le-Chateau.  So we visited that place.

Of course, most of Canada's history is fairly recent.  When I spent time in the British city of London, there was history everywhere!  I'd walk along the sidewalks and wonder how old the paving stones were and what stories they might tell.  I've also visited China, and a lot of their history is really old--like the Great Wall, or the place where they excavated all the ceramic soldiers...