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.)