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'd 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...

Speculation

"There are two times in a man's life when he shouldn't speculate:  when he can't afford it, and when he can!"--Mark Twain

The TV show Upstairs, Downstairs had some good dialogue, especially between Mrs. Bridges the cook and her scullery maid Ruby.

Ruby: "I'm not one to speculate..."

Mrs. Bridges: "I'll speculate you, my girl!"

In the developed world, our economy is top-heavy with speculation.  I think they should put a tax on stock purchases and currency exchange.  Even one-tenth of one percent would raise billions to spend on all the investment governments have been neglecting, like health care and a Green New Deal.

I've never gone in for gambling.  Money aside, it's a waste of time.  If you lose you look like a sap, and even if you win it's a bit like stealing.  And financial speculation is basically gambling.  The pros basically get their profits out of the pocket of the amateurs.

As for investing in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, you'd have to be insane to take your chances on that!  Nobody really knows the true value of those.  It's different when you're rich and can afford to lose it all, though it's really the same as Las Vegas.  Don't fly higher than you're ready to fall...

Cartoons

It's hard to believe that I used to like The Flintstones. (I had no taste when I was a kid.) The show had terrible writing, and all those cheap Hanna-Barbera effects like a car driving past the same three buildings again and again, as if in a circle.  And of course, it was a ripoff of Jackie Gleason's far superior sitcom The Honeymooners.

But Rocky and Bullwinkle had better writing.  I can still watch it today!  My favourite part is Bullwinkle as Mr. Knowitall, doing things like "How to Get Into a Movie Theater Without Buying a Ticket." (Cartoon characters didn't have to be role models back then...)

My favourite cartoons, of course, were Warner Brothers.  When I was young I would have said that Bugs Bunny was my favourite cartoon character, but now I'd choose Daffy Duck, especially his later curmudgeonly persona. One Froggy Evening and Duck Amuck are true classics!

When I was young the local university had a program where they showed National Film Board shorts on Sunday afternoons.  Some of the NFB cartoons are amazing, especially considering that many appeared at a time when animation standards were declining, as evidenced by The Flintstones.

Libraries

I love libraries!  I remember the Sackville, Moncton and Halifax libraries, and the Mount Allison and York university libraries.  I sometimes dream about them today.  I’d spent forever reading the latest newspapers and magazines there.  I also learned to read microfilm scans and go through old issues of papers like The New York Times. (I sometimes read newspapers that were published on the day I was born!)

One of the big things I miss during the pandemic is going to the library.  Toronto has a superb library system!  You can request a book at one branch and have it sent to a branch that’s close to you.  There’s also a Kanopy system that gets you access to a lot of online videos.

The library branch that’s closest to my home is Davenport, but it’s one of the smaller ones.  A bigger branch that’s also close to me is Wychwood, which is now undergoing renovations anyway, and its reopening may come not much later than the general system’s reopening.

I have a friend who works at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s library.  Something like that would be a dream job for me!  About 15 years ago I did have a temporary job at the Reference Library in the Human Resources department.  It didn’t lead to anything else, but I did enjoy it, though the place was a bit dusty.  Lots of sorting files and unearthing stuff from the regional systems that got taken over with the metro amalgamation.  I also shredded a lot of files, which is fun.