Dancing

I'm told that back in the jazz age my grandfather criticized the shameless way young people danced, and his wife reminded him that when he was young he'd danced in a graveyard once!

About 15 years ago I took ballroom dancing lessons at the Arthur Murray studio in the Royal York neighborhood, for about a year.  It cost a fortune, but I had a pretty good time.  

My instructor most of the time was Cynthia, and we got along pretty well. (She came from New Brunswick, like me.) Sometimes she wore a maple-scented body cream that made her smell like maple syrup!  Whenever she offered criticism, she'd call me "sweetie." I liked the way she smiled when I did it right.  When I did something particularly well, she'd ask, "How did that feel?" I resisted the temptation to answer, "I have a shrink to ask me how I feel!"

I learned dances like waltz, rhumba and salsa.  Swing was the hardest:  small steps just don't come naturally to me!  Since the man takes the lead that gives him a responsibility:  if the woman doesn't make the right steps, that means he isn't leading her clearly enough.  Posture is very important too, and I found that when I wasn't sure what to do that affected my posture.

Cynthia said I'm a gentleman, which meant a lot to me.  The students and instructors would have these dancing parties every week, and I'd make an effort to dance with every woman in the place.  When there was a new girl, I'd dance with her first.  I did things that way not so much to be a gentleman; I have Asperger's Syndrome, and if I hadn't had a scheme like that I couldn't have decided whom to dance with at all!

Sometimes a couple would take lessons together, then at the parties they'd only feel comfortable dancing with each other.  I felt sorry for them:  half the fun is from dancing with a whole lot of people!

Poetry

When I was young we had the big book The Golden Treasury of Poetry, illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund, who did several children's books. (I think we still have it around somewhere.) It included a wide range of poems, including story poems like Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle" and Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish."

One of my favorite poets is the well-named Robert Frost. Another is William Butler Yeats. I like poems that are short enough to memorize, like Frost's "Dust of Snow":

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.

Or his "Nothing Gold Can Stay":

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 goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

I haven't written much poetry at all, but I am interested in translating poems (the hardest form of translation, of course). I recently got the notion to translate some of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology poems into Scots dialect, like Robert Burns' poems. And one project that I've started is translating Luis Vaz de Camoes' epic Portuguese poem The Lusiades into English:  I'm about halfway through the first canto.

Some poems mean a lot to me. Like W.H. Auden's "September 1st, 1939" ("I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn:  Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return"), Langston Hughes' "Mother to Son" ("Life for me ain't been no crystal stair"), Yeats' "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," Whittier's "Barbara Freitchie," Walt Whitman's "There Was a Child Went Forth Each Day." I could go on and on...

The best time of my life

I guess the best time of my life was the eight months in 1995 when I was at Goodenough College in London, England, researching my Ph.D. thesis. (My sister had been there the year before and put in a good word for me!) Aside from my research, I saw about ten plays and visited lots of museums.  I did a whole lot of walking around the city and wore out a new pair of shoes in just four months.

In the later months, I got involved in a lot of activities there.  Philip Chang (a Korean-Australian law student) and I handled the video club, and we put on lots of Disney movies for the kids on Saturday afternoons. I also joined the choir (we did a Christmas concert) and collected lots of bottles and such for recycling.

My father visited me in June and my sister in September, which provided a nice change.  My father said he was proud of me: it was largely the first time that I'd lived alone.  I remember that when I was newly arrived there I bought some canned goods, then realized that I hadn't brought a can opener! (All those little things you don't think of...) 

I also remember that in the laundromat among the coin-op dryers that would automatically stop after 10 minutes or so, there was one that would keep going forever, until you stopped it!  I bought a tiny TV set but didn't watch it much. (I did watch a documentary about European silent movies on Sunday afternoons.) And I went on a couple of protest marches decrying the West's inaction over Bosnia, and went to see speeches by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Leakey.

I've visited London several times, staying at Goodenough College again.  And I'm going again next month!

Neighbors

Remember Jim Nabors?  Besides playing Gomer Pyle ("Gaw-lee!") he had a deep singing voice.  He was the guest star on all eleven season premieres of The Carol Burnett Show, which I watched faithfully.  I read somewhere that these days he grows macadamia nuts in Hawaii!  A showbiz columnist wrote about him, "He's one star who took care of his money and knows how to live well."

When I was in Britain almost thirty years ago there was a really popular Australian soap opera titled Neighbors. (Kylie Minogue started out on that show before becoming a pop star.) One of the tabloid newspapers revealed the phone number of one of the show's actors, so he started getting phone calls from England, mostly around the time the show was on in the afternoon, which in Australian time means the wee hours!  What an awful thing to do!

I haven't talked much about my own neighbors.  I guess I should get to know them better.  My grandfather once visited a neighbor who was sick, and said to him, "By God, Mac, you're looking pale!"

My first funeral

I guess I've been lucky in not having occasion to attend a funeral early in life.  My mother only died when I was over fifty (and she was over ninety), and my father is still with us, as are my two brothers and two sisters. (Frankly, I'm glad that Mother was the first to go:  losing any one of us would have been very hard for her.)

The first funeral I went to happened when I was in my late forties, I think.  It was for Catherine Cashore, one of the singers in my opera group and Italian choir.  She succumbed to cancer and the funeral was at the Holy Rosary Catholic Church just east of St. Clair and Bathurst. Just a month or two before I'd been telling my shrink that I'd never been to a funeral. (I wish I'd knocked on wood!)

I didn't know Catherine that well, but a lot of my singing group went to the funeral and I did too. I'd been talking with her once and she'd mentioned that she enjoyed the British Carry On comedies. She also liked the sitcom Happy Days, especially the character Ralph Malph.  It seems somehow important to remember those things about someone. (What you find funny shows a lot about you.)

When I go, I think I'd like a Chinese-style "tree burial," where they cremate you and plant a tree over your ashes.  And maybe I'd like jazz played at my funeral, though I don't listen to it much. Some of the earliest jazz music was played in New Orleans funeral marches! (It goes back to an African tradition of celebratory funeral music.)

Traffic Jams

I haven't had to deal with traffic jams, because I never learned to drive.  That's the great thing about a big city like Toronto--you can get just about everywhere by public transit!

I have dealt with a few human traffic jams.  They have some big crowds in London, England. Crowds don't usually bother me, but the last time I was there, I was coming out from seeing The Jersey Boys, and there was this really huge crowd all over the street because of some big event. They weren't rowdy, but its sheer size scared me!

I'm glad I wasn't in Paris at the time of the French Revolution. Those mobs must have been really fearsome!  And the crowds enthusiastically watching people being beheaded--what kind of people are that nasty?  The city of Paris is a bit like a French poodle:  elegant to look at, but one of the worst breeds for biting! (Our modern world, in all its horror, was born in Paris.)

You can also get big crowds at protest marches.  When I was in London I attended a couple of marches protesting the West's inaction over Bosnia.  In one I got to walk down Park Lane!  I also got to hear Vanessa Redgrave speaking.

Home economics & industrial arts

My first industrial arts class was in Grade 7 in a school in Mississauga.  The teachers had us do this exercise where we wrote down our name and address in a drafting style.  After a while I heard the teacher's voice behind me, saying, "Oh, that lettering! Oh, that numbering!" I realized that he was referring to my work, disapprovingly. (I never did see what was wrong with it.) There's a sort of teacher who starts off the year with a show of power, singling out one kid to impress the rest.

After class, I told him that I didn't like his approach.  He responded, "If you want my sympathy..." --which wasn't exactly what I wanted-- "you'll have to be more polite to me." How was I being rude? "I asked you a question, and you answered 'Yeah.'" (The only polite answer being "Yes"...)

I told my parents about it, and wanted them to speak to this teacher, but they said, "We're going to have nothing to do with him because he's unreasonable!" (If he'd been reasonable, of course, there wouldn't have been any problem.) Their idea of a serious solution was that I should be absent from school every Monday afternoon to avoid his class.  What they didn't understand was that I was afraid I'd get into trouble if I did that.

In the end, I failed that class.  Big deal!