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...