Spare change?

When I was little, being a beggar sounded like the lowest level of misery to me.  Today I get Ontario Disability Support Payments, because I have Asperger's Syndrome, so it's kind of like I'm a beggar after all.

One thing that makes me angry is the movement for welfare "reform." Some people want to imagine poverty as a moral problem and convince themselves that people don't really need welfare--just kick their ass and make them get a job!

One of the worst things that politicians have done, especially in the United States, is turn working people against the poor.  I think it started after Rolling Stone magazine did a big 1988 poll of baby boomers. (Martin Luther King, the generation's most admired figure, was on the cover of that issue.) One thing they found was that the social issue that concerned this generation the most--even more than drunk driving!--was catching welfare cheats.

Sure, some people will try to paint the 1990s welfare reform as a success.  Yet most of the people who found work at that time would have done so anyway. (Beware the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy.) It resulted in millions of invisible victims, many of them children.

The Principal's office

I wasn't one of those kids who got sent to the principal a lot.  But there was an incident when I was twelve.  It started in Mrs. McMullen's science class.  She bore a grudge because my father, a university professor, had given her husband a failing grade, as a result of which he couldn't graduate.

In science class we usually did experiments in teams of two. But one day there was this complicated experiment involving Bunsen burners where pairs of teams had to work together as a team of four.  Mrs. McMullen teamed me and my partner with Duane and Glen, the two people she knew good and well I didn't get along with!  I warned her to put us with another team but she wouldn't listen.

The other two proved impossible, and I ended up hitting Glen.  Mrs. McMullen sent me straight to the office, while there were no consequences for Glen. (Later on we were playing volleyball in gym class, and when it was my turn to serve he called out, "Hit the ball as hard as you hit me!") The principal actually wasn't so angry about it.

I eventually told my mother about it, and her second reaction was to get mad at the teacher. (She actually wrote a letter to the New Brunswick Department of Education!) But her first reaction was to get mad at me.  The next time I got into similar trouble, I didn't tell my parents at all and they only found out when the school phoned them.

Just seeing the trailer of Silence of the Lambs gave me nightmares!  In one of them I was back in school and the principal was Hannibal Lecter!

Starting Grade One

I started school in 1968. (I remember the klaxon that sounded every hour or so to indicate changing periods.) I could read comic books at age four, and I quickly got through the pink pre-primer before going on to the green primer.

I remember that we first learned to print letters, then learned the cursive script.  It must have been a challenge for some of the kids to learn the second way when they'd just figured out the first!  I guess that's a challenge that today's kids don't have to deal with...

In our reading courses we had American texts like the Lippincott readers, so there was a lot of American history:  stuff like Kit Carson and the guy who wrote the poem about the night before Christmas.  For some reason, I remember reading about the childhood of the American singer Jenny Lind.  And there was a third-grade story about a young man who'd lost his whole family in a forest fire and swiped a rich man's coat, but when he found all the money inside he mailed it back to him. (He just wanted a coat!)

In Grade 3 we had a course about space!

Superstitions

Am I superstitious?  Not really.  When I see a subway escalator that isn't moving I don't walk on it, not because it's uncomfortable but because it just doesn't feel right!

When I was young I read Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat, a funny children's book describing superstitions. (A lot of U.S. schools have banned it!) I learned that if you think a witch is putting a hex on you, you should put a bunch of pins in a pot of water and bring them to a boil, then she'll come to you in pain and agree to lift the spell.  And if a baby is born with two teeth already formed in his mouth he'll be a genius, but if he has just one he'll become a vampire!

In the theatre world it's considered bad luck to wish someone good luck, so people say "Break a leg!" for the opposite effect. (In opera they say, "Toi, toi, toi!")

They say that the Vietnamese are very superstitious.  After they occupied Cambodia and found the Khmer Rouge killing fields full of bones, some of them were afraid that ghosts would come after them! (Which I can understand.)

In 1665 there was a plague in London and people superstitiously blamed the cats and killed a lot of them.  But it was really being spread by the rats and mice, who no longer had the cats to keep their numbers under control...

Doughnuts

When I was young we had a deep fryer you could make doughnuts in. (But we didn't make them very often.)

When I was about fourteen Tim Horton Doughnuts came to Moncton. (My favourite flavour back then was vanilla dip.) Back then they had eclairs and even bowties, which are like eclairs on speed!  They don't have them any more, and I have to admit they weren't very healthy.  But I wish I could find them again.

Last week I bought a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts, just to be different, but I didn't care much for them.  They need more flour and less sugar. (My sister said they're like Froot Loops!) Makes me appreciate Tim Horton's.

Did you know that in three-dimensional geometry a doughnut shape is called a torus?  I have a theory that the universe is shaped like a doughnut! (Someone said it's shaped like a potato chip...)

I remember one Warner Brothers cartoon set in "the Town of Doughnut Center (What a hole!)"

That photo at the top is from the TV show Twin Peaks.

Rats

My mother was really afraid of rats and mice.  If you just said the word "rat," that alone would frighten her!  We'd euphemistically refer to them as "little creatures."

Our house used to have a problem with mice.  At night you could hear them skittering around the ventilation ducts. On one occasion I spotted a little mouse on the stairs and managed to catch it in my glasses case! (I released him outdoors.)

I collected some full-page episodes of the Sunday comic strip Prince Valiant and put them on the floor of my closet where they were safe.  But my sister was doing some cleaning and moved them so they were up against the wall, where the mice did manage to get into them and take a big bite. (I haven't told her because it wouldn't do any good.)

There's an area in Mizoram, in northeastern India, with this rare form of bamboo (illustrated) that flowers every 48 years.  And that's a problem because when it does it'll attract rats from all around, who'll feed on the blossoms and reproduce.  But then the blossoms run out and you have this big rat mob that eats everything else, causing famine!

I remember the Woody Allen comedy Sweet and Lowdown with Sean Penn as a jazz guitarist whose idea of fun was to say, "Let's go to the dump and shoot rats!"

Clowns

When I was little I seem to have described some grownup (not to her face, at least) as having "a face like a clown." Kids can be brutally honest!

Several years ago I saw the documentary Capturing the Friedmans, about a father and son convicted of child sexual abuse in a fairly dubious trial.  Anyway, the most interesting person in it was a brother who worked as a clown for hire.

I read somewhere that clowns have an honour code that keeps them from plagiarizing other clowns' acts.  Think of that--honour among clowns!  I've also heard there's a clown college in Florida or somewhere.

I think the word "clown" comes from "colony."  It goes back to Rome 2000 years ago when the longstanding residents made fun of the new arrivals from the empire's colonies for being less sophisticated, much like hillbillies and Newfies today. So the word came to connote silliness.

Two centuries ago in London there was a famous circus clown called Joseph Grimaldi.  That's why the circus nickname for clowns is Joeys! (When I have few memories about something, I pad with useless information...)

Some real people get seen as clowns.  Dan Quayle comes to mind, when he was U.S. vice-president a generation ago. And back in the '70s Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was seen as a sort of clown. (It didn't seem so funny to people who actually lived there, of course.) And some people even saw Hitler as a clown, before he took power...

Children's books

When I was little, we had tons of children's books!  Little Golden Books were the best.  They had stories like The Pokey Little Puppy and a tugboat or dump truck as an animate character.  We also had Rand McNally Elf books and Tell a Tale books and Wonder Books.  I remember stuff like Random House children's versions of The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland.  They already had some "product placement" books promoting Band-Aids or the Good Humor Man.

One of the stories we had was Bertram and the Ticklish Rhinoceros, about a kid called Bertram who had to deal with a wild rhino following him home and wrecking things. Near the end there's the line "Bertram's father slapped him good," meaning that he slapped the rhino, but I thought it meant that he slapped Bertram!

At school we ordered SBS books.  I got stuff like Erich Kastner's Emil and the Detectives, about some German kids catching a bank robber, or the novelization of the Disney comedy A $1,000,000 Duck, or a book about the variety show comedian Flip Wilson.  Several times at the end of the year they'd run out of one of the books I'd ordered and send me a completely different one instead.

And we borrowed lots of children's books from the library.  I read most of the Dr. Suess books, as well as stuff like Edward Ardizzone's books about Tim, a boy who went to sea, or the Scottish boy Wee Gillis.  I could go on forever...

One thing I should mention is that I don't care for children's books that show animals wearing human clothes!

Favorite plant

I suppose my favourite tree is birch.  It's a very Canadian tree, with papery bark for canoes.  We had a birch growing near our old house in Sackville, N.B.  I heard that a Russian back in the Soviet era was thinking of defecting to the West, and someone warned him, "You'll miss Russia's birch trees!"

I also like oak. (We had one of those back in Sackville too.) The oak is just about the last tree to grow new leaves in the spring, and the last to shed them in the fall:  such slowness appeals to me.  The First Nations figured out that when the oak leaves are the size of a mouse's ear, that means it's safe to plant corn.

My favorite flower is probably the sunflower.  It grows so tall that when it finally opens up, you can feel you've grown something!

One plant I like is the cactus.  When we moved into our new house over twenty years ago, the others were going out to buy some houseplants, and I asked them to pick up a cactus.  I should have gone with them.  You see, my sister (who didn't even live there!) did go and noticed that there was one plant where you could buy two for the price of one cactus, so they brought two of them instead.  And I got stuck with two houseplants I had no interest in, and never did get that cactus.