Travelling by boat

When I was about four my father, a university professor, spent his sabbatical year in Brighton, England.  We travelled there and back on the Arkadia, a Greek Line ship. (Our return voyage, I later learned, was the ship's last before it got scrapped.) I was too young to remember much, but I do recall swarthy Greek waiters serving tomato juice. (I've never liked tomato juice.)

The ship had a playroom for little kids, and I'm told that my sister Margaret staged a mass jailbreak from there, and the German governess was not pleased.  My mother recalled German sailors singing songs, and as the voyage dragged on the songs became more and more sentimental.

When I was young and lived in New Brunswick we often visited Prince Edward Island in the summer, which meant taking a car ferry across Northumberland Strait from Cape Tormentine to Borden, and later the other way.  Now they have the Confederation Bridge across the strait, but by the time it opened we'd moved to Toronto.

Twelve years ago my father and I took a cruise ship along the coast from New York to Montreal.  It was September, so there was some nice autumn scenery.  We noticed some passengers taking the elevator to go up just one floor.  At one point in Cabot Strait I could see Cape Breton from one side of the ship--actually, an island off the Cape Breton coast--and Newfoundland from the other side.

I dream about ships a lot.  In some of those dreams I've been on the Titanic, a subject that interested my even before the shameless Hollywood movie came out.  In some I'm sailing near little islands off Newfoundland or in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  While I'm still alive, I'd like to cross the ocean by ship again. (I'd also like to visit Greenland.)

June

For me, June was of course the month that school ended, when I was young.  I also associate it with lilac blossoms and such.  It's also a time when rhubarb ripens, so I associate it with rhubarb pie. I remember in June when I was twenty-two, reading the introduction to Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and eating rhubarb pie. (At least I think I did them at the same time; maybe it's a composite memory.)

I also associate Juen with good weather, when it's quite warm but not yet uncomfortably hot as in July.  But there was one June when I was fifteen, when it rained for almost the whole month (This was a time when everything seemed to be going wrong for me.)

Later on, especially in my twenties, I'd associate June with the opening of blockbuster summer movies.  I actually saw the movie musical Grease on the June night that it opened when I was sixteen!  Now that I'm older, movies don't seem so important.  But there's still rhubarb pie.

Esprit de l'escalier (or clever answers I thought of too late)

One of the first times I went out to karaoke, I went to this Scarborough pub near Morningside Avenue.  The M.C. was a funny Scotsman called Johnny Blue.  When I handed in my song selection, for my name I wrote "James 'Mensa' Matthews." (I was actually a Mensa member for a while.) When he called me up, just to have some fun with me he asked, "What's the square root of 76523?" (Or some big number.) I let it pass, but later I wished I'd said, "Sorry, it's a secret.  If I told you I'd have to kill you."

Back when I was taking ballroom dancing lessons at the Arthur Murray studio in Etobicoke, they had a Halloween costume party.  For my costume, I decided to be a beatnik.  I wore a turtleneck and blazer, and my mother's beret. (She'd stopped wearing it because of Monica Lewinsky.) And I went to Malabar Costumes and bought a fake beard and the glue to attach it with.  Since it was Halloween season, the whole staff were wearing various costumes like sailor and convict and druidess.  A guy dressed as Superman sold me the glue, and said, "After you put it on, wait a minute for it to get tacky." I wish I'd replied, "In the costume business, there's no such word as tacky."

And there there was the time a policeman came to my apartment and tried to intimidate me over a letter I'd written which he had not read.  He advised me to take a certain course of action, and I said the two words: "I did." That made him explode:  he yelled, "I'm talking to you!" I might then have said, "Actually, you're yelling at me.  Do you think my neighbors want to hear about this?" But what I did say was probably smarter.  Without missing a beat, I mentioned a second thing I'd done, just to show him he wouldn't shut me up by yelling at me.  My immediate response must have taken the wind out of his sails, because there was a long pause before he spoke again. (He soon left without saying goodbye.)

Showing out of town guests the neighborhood

I've met people from out of town before, but I've never showed them my neighborhood. (Back when we lived in a small town in New Brunswick, there wasn't much to show them.) Maybe it's going out of fashion.  But if I knew anyone in New York City, it would be fun for him to show me around his neighborhood!  I'm ashamed that I have so little to say about this subject.

Ignoring people

I was a sensitive kid.  When I was in school, other kids often bothered me.  I knew I was expected to ignore them, but ignoring people just didn't make sense to me.  Does a grownup decide to do nothing about his biggest problem and call that a solution?

In the middle grades some children star pushing the behavioral envelope.  School is a bit like prison:  people feel that status is a zero-sum game, and you increase yours by decreasing somebody else's.  One thing they're likely to figure out is that if you bother everyone you'll get into trouble, but if you just bother the sensitive kid, they may just expect him to ignore you.

And grownups did say to me, "If you ignore them they'll leave you alone.  But if you answer them they'll just bother you worse." It's one thing out on the street, but this was school.  You know, it would have been different if we made a contract where I agreed to ignore them and they agreed not to bother me.  Instead, it was up to me to be unilaterally passive and do nothing and hope they'd stop bothering me.  I was expected to do nothing about my problem as if it were doing something, and I still resent it.  They'd bother me worse if they could see they'd hurt me, therefore I had to learn to ignore them.  Did they have to learn to change their behavior?  The answer is, they'd have to learn it from someone else.  Blaming the victim would have to do.

When kids get bothered by their peers because they're handicapped or in an ethnic minority, at least then they know it isn't their own fault.  But when they bother you because you're sensitive, your feelings are the weak link.  If you act like there's no problem the grownups can tell themselves  there's no problem.  But if you won't play ball, you're the problem.

Of course, the grownups tell themselves that this is all for your own good.  But the way I see it, that makes objecting to this twice as important!