The athlete

I’m far from an athlete; I’m just not the competitive type.  You hear that champions are obsessed with winning.  General Patton said in his famous speech to pre-D Day soldiers, “I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for the man who lost and laughed.” Football coach Vince Lombardi said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” I couldn’t live that way!  Even if I won, I’d be full of dread thinking ahead to the day when I finally lost.

In Grade 3 we had a sports day.  There were seven events, stuff like throwing bean bags into a target bin and doing a broad jump, and every time you succeeded in an event you’d get one of seven coloured ribbons.  When it was over I only got three, and everyone else I saw had at least four!  I cried.

I remember in Grade 7 how they’d let the kids choose their own teams.  Which meant that I always got chosen last. (If I’d just been second-last I wouldn’t have minded.) On one occasion both teams insisted that the other one take me!  Now that’s just mean—they were drunk with power.

I’m not a fan of sports on TV.  You can have the Olympics, though I like seeing local pedlars selling flags of dozens of nations then. (They also do it during the World Cup soccer championship.)

I’m not a huge fan of sports movies either. When an underdog team gets their act together and pull off a last-minute come-from-behind victory, I’m left wondering, “How did the other team feel?” Terence Rafferty, reviewing White Men Can’t Jump in The New Yorker, wrote: “Only two kinds of people usually enjoy sports movies:  children, who like fairy tales, and businessmen, who like motivational lectures.”

My favourite sports movie would be Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham.  It’s about a minor-league baseball team where veteran catcher Kevin Costner is put in charge of Tim Robbins, a pitcher with major-league talent but a remarkable lack of self-awareness.  The story is narrated by Susan Sarandon, an intelligent groupie attracted to both of them. (This was back when actresses over 35 were occasionally cast in sexy roles.) There’s a funny scene where Costner teaches Robbins cliches to say in interviews, like “I’m taking it one day at a time,” and “I want to be good for my team.” There’s also a funny moment when Robbins is dancing with five women at once.  Lots of good dialogue, like when Costner and Robbins are quarrelling and Sarandon says, “Don’t be such guys!”

Some American cities spend a fortune on subsidies for big stadiums to benefit teams that are already huge corporations making millions, ostensibly because it’ll stimulate the local economy.  I think it’s more that they’re afraid if a major-league team leaves town they’ll look small and alienate people who usually don’t care about politics…

Some of the people who hate Bernie Sanders keep saying about him, “He’s not a Democrat!” as if that were the last word.  No matter that at the crucial moment when the Senate voted to invade Iraq, Sanders was a truer Democrat than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who both voted yes while he voted no.  It occurred to me that these people view the Democratic Party as a sports team where specific policy positions matter less than obeying the ruling clique.  Real lazy thinking.

Fire

My back yard is next to a fire station. (Occasionally you can see them hurrying out.) I noticed they have a special bin there for medical waste.  The building has a tall tower, and I've often speculated about the great view of the city from the top.

When I was young, I lived in a small town in New Brunswick with a volunteer fire department.  They had a machine a bit like a foghorn that would make a huge sound when an alarm got triggered.  The sound came in two tones and the number of blasts in either tone indicated the alarm's place in code.

Firefighters are a special breed.  In Japan firemen get a lot of fancy tattoos. (The only other Japanese group with this conspicuous practice is the Yakuza gangsters.) In the Michael Moore documentary Sicko he brought a New York fireman whose health had been damaged on 9/11 to Cuba to get the medical care he couldn't afford at home.  The Havana firefighters held a special ceremony for him.  No doubt firefighters around the world feel a strong sense of camaraderie. (Unlike soldiers, they don't have to fight each other.)

I remember Vincent Price on The Carol Burnett Show in a sketch where he showed her how to make a conventional dinner table scene scary.  She said "What happened to the maid?" and he lit a candle with a really big flame and said "I fired her!" My mother didn't like horror movies, but she did like Vincent Price! (He knew how to be scary in a funny way.)

A tour of my bedroom

I shall start the tour of my chamber at the door to the outer hallway, at the northwest corner.  On the north wall, western side, is the closet, which contains some of my clothes, a cowboy hat and my collection of Classics Illustrated comic books.  The doorknob is a bit loose, and I’m afraid that if I close the closet door it’ll get stuck, so I always leave it open!

On the eastern side of the north wall is my dresser, which contains my other clothes.  It came from my grandfather’s home in Campbellton, New Brunswick, after his death almost forty years ago.  There’s also a bookcase with some records and outsized coffee-table books.

On the long east wall are two windows.  It’s summer so I’m now leaving the windows open, even at night. To the north there’s a chest full of extra blankets and stuff.  In the center there’s a bookcase that’s mostly empty, but it still has quite a few back issues of Lapham’s Quarterly.  Next to it is my main desk, with my computer and a study lamp.  There’s also my Gund stuffed doll of Julia, the autistic Muppet on Sesame Street.

At the southeast corner is my bed.  It’s big enough for two people, with two pillows and such, not that I’ve ever needed that.  Sometimes I’ll lie on my bed and watch films or read Ebooks on my computer.

On the south wall there’s a small bookcase which contains stuff like my foreign-language dictionaries in Chinese and Japanese and Portuguese.  The southwest corner has the only vent for summer air conditioning (which we never use anyway) and heating.  There’s also another blanket chest there.

Along the west wall is an older desk that also comes from my grandfather’s house.  There’s some junk stored in it, including some letters my sister wrote me when I was researching my Ph.D. thesis in London, England in the mid-‘90s.  I’m glad I saved them:  I reread them a few years ago and they’re still entertaining!  She also has really good handwriting, now a dying art. (I also saved a letter from my father, and it’s barely legible.)

There are also my three biggest bookcases, where I keep most of my paper books. (I’ve bought quite a few Ebooks, but that’s another story.) Quite a few of them are comics:  one shelf is almost filled with reprints of the comic strip Peanuts!

In the middle of the room, there’s also a swivel chair that I use with my computer.  It’s pretty old and the back came off, but I still like it.  There’s also a box full of old records that I use as a footrest.  And there’s a hamper where I put clothes ready for the laundry. 

Beaches

Back when I was young and lived in New Brunswick, we had a beach cottage near the Northumberland Strait, close to the Nova Scotia border.  I still dream about it a lot.  I remember how the beach had tiny clam holes and if you stamped your foot nearby a spurt of water would shoot out.

I'm not really into the beach scene.  Seaweed scares me when it comes in big clumps!  And I don't understand the obsession some people have with tanning. (It goes back to Coco Chanel in the 1920s.) But Atlantic Canada does have some nice beaches, like Cavendish Beach in PEI and Ingonish Beach in Cape Breton.  I think the "-gonish" ending comes from the Mi'kmaq Nation's word for beach. (There are also place names like Antigonish and Manawagonish.)

There's also a Parlee Beach near Shediac, New Brunswick.  I recall that in 1990 Milli Vanilli did a big concert there, and shortly afterward they were destroyed in a lip-syncing scandal.  The following year there was another concert there by the white rapper Vanilla Ice. (My sister said that white rapping should be banned, not because it's "appropriation" but because it's disgusting!) And Vanilla Ice soon became a has-been.  I came to the conclusion that playing Parlee Beach gives you bad luck...

Moving

I haven't moved house that much in my life.  I've lived at our Toronto house for almost 30 years! (They say that the writer Eudora Welty lived in the same house for almost all of her long life, and this this is conducive to writing.) Before that, my family mostly lived in a ranch house in Sackville, New Brunswick.

But my father was a university professor who had several sabbaticals, when we'd go away from Sackville for a year.  In 1965-6 we spent a year in Brighton, England, just when it was the big mod centre. (My parents noticed nothing of this, let alone me.) In 1974-5 we were in Mississauga.  We rented out our house to someone who needed it in July while the Mississauga town house we'd rented only came available in September, so we had to spend the summer of 1974 at our New Brunswick cottage.  In 1981-2, we spent the first part in rural England and the second part in Toronto.  In 1988-9, we were in Glasgow, Scotland. (But that time I was the only one still living with the parents.

I remember that just before leaving our Sackville house in 1974, we'd emptied the rooms completely, and when you walked into one and closed the door you'd hear an echo!

I moved to Toronto in 1990. (One of the first things I noticed was all the Chinese people!) For the first three years my sister and I rented a triplex apartment, then we bought our present house.  I remember the first time we visited the latter place, I thought "What are we doing here?  We'll never be able to afford this place!"

I should add that in 1995 I moved to London, England, for eight months to research my Ph.D. thesis.  It was the best eight months of my life!  If I could be anywhere in the world right now, I think I'd choose the National Gallery in London, in the section with the 18th-century paintings...

Unusual travel story

 
In the late 1980s my parents and I spent a year in Glasgow, Scotland.  In December we spent a few days at a hotel on the Scottish island of Islay.  There's a big golf course there, but since this was out of season we got a discount.  We ate lamb chops with mint sauce for the first time, and Mother like it so much that we'd often have it with lamb stew in later years.

I remember that on the day we left the news was dominated by the explosion of the Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland. (Six months before a US ship had carelessly shot down an Iranian airliner, and if you can believe that's a coincidence you can believe anything...) We drove past Lockerbie a few times and they'd put up a wooden fence between the highway and the crater, but it had narrow slits and when you passed by at 60 MPH you could look "through" the fence.

I was annoyed that day because the liberal newspaper The Guardian had published an editorial casually asserting that the Reagan presidency had been "benign." They also referred to how popular he'd been, as if popularity justified itself! (Such obtuse conformism has a desperate feel...) What's a little digression among friends.

The unusual thing?  We were driving around the island and at one point the road was blocked by a herd of cattle.  Father was ready to turn around, but I got out of the car and managed to shoo them away.  One of the cows, Mother recalled, had a particularly illucid look.  This was the time when Britain had a problem with "mad cow disease," where cattle got this disease that made holes in their brain, and they were afraid that it would spread to people who ate diseased beef...

Keepsakes

I don't have a lot of keepsakes.  Most of them are books.  We have a huge collection of old books that we've been selling online.  Some of them go back over fifty years! (A few of them my parents had when they were young...)

When I was young Scholastic Book Services (who later published Goosebumps and Harry Potter) sold a lot of book through the schools, and we got quite a few that way.  Stuff like Rabbit and Skunk and the Big Scary Rock or Look Out, Mrs. Doodlepunk!  We still have several today.  I ordered quite a few myself.  When my last order arrived at the end of the school year, there's always be one book that was sold out, and they'd send me a totally different book in its place!

I'm a bit dubious about keepsakes.  Either you remember something or you don't.  If you have a solid memory it shouldn't require an aid.  I suppose it's different for old folk whose memory is faltering.  I have a huge memory bank and hate to imagine what losing that would be like...