Scars

When I was almost twenty, I had an operation to remove a stomach ulcer.  I was living in England at the time and had the operation at a hospital near Canterbury.  It was harder on my family than on me. (Someone said, "No young man thinks he is going to die.") I had some major blood transfusions, and I suppose I might have got AIDS like Arthur Ashe, but I didn't!  Just like when my mother didn't take the headache pills that might have been thalidomide...

The operation left a scar down the front of my abdomen, all the way down to my navel. (I can show it to people who are interested.) The sutures also left pinpoints.  I was reading that Dolly Parton had an operation like mine and disguised her scar with a butterfly tattoo!

Do I have emotional scars?  I guess we all do, but in my case they don't seem worth talking about.

I like Howard Hawks' gangster movie Scarface with Paul Muni and George Raft.  Brian de Palma's remake with Al Pacino wasn't nearly as good.  I remember that around the time when the remake was released, I had a dream where I returned to my hometown as a famous criminal!

PEANUTS

Charles Schulz' Peanuts is a classic comic strip.  When I was little we had a lot of the reprints.  I think my favorite character of all is Lucy, just because she's such a monster!

I've also seen many of the TV specials.  They aren't quite as good as the strip, but they're still pretty fun, at least the early ones.  I like the jazzy music and stuff like the sounds indicating adult voices.

In recent years, I've been buying the complete run being published by Fantagraphics.  I have it all the way to the end of 1984. (The strip isn't so good after that time.)

On Youtube you can find Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown, a Peanuts special as directed by the violent Sam Peckinpah. (It was made by a student animator who went on to work on The Simpsons.) I find it really funny, but it's definitely not for all tastes!

Trudeaumania

When I see the name Trudeau in a headline I still think of Pierre before I think of Justin.  That comes from being of a certain age.

I remember that on the day to the 1968 election (when I was six) my sister and I walked down to the post office and she asked whether I preferred Trudeau or Stansfield.  To me they were nothing but two names, and I chose Stansfield because it sounded more familiar to me.

When I was eleven we went on a class trip to Ottawa where we got to meet our MP (and cabinet minister) Romeo Leblanc.  He even arranged for us to meet Trudeau briefly!  One of the girls kissed him.  I'm ashamed to admit that I poked him in the back.

Trudeaumania was the Canadian equivalent of the Kennedy cult in the U.S.  If you ask me, J.F.K. was an oddly overrated president whose biggest legacy was the escalation that led to the American invasion of Vietnam.  And I'm not so sure that he would have got out if he'd only lived longer.

I thought that Trudeau's opposition to the Meech Lake Accord was petulant and short-sighted.  And don't get me started on the October Crisis! (I remember one schoolboy joke from the time: "When did the alphabet have only 23 letters?  When they couldn't find the F.L.Q.!")

Motorcycles

I've never ridden a motorcycle.  I've seen the biker movie Easy Rider, which is pretty dated, though Jack Nicholson has a good role.  I remember the scene where Dennis Hopper said "We did it!" but Peter Fonda says "We blew it." That's how I felt when I completed my Ph.D. thesis.

I've also seen the biker movie The Wild One.  The movie itself is dorky in a '50s way, but Marlon Brando is way cool!  There's a famous bit where someone asks "What are you rebelling against?" and he says "Whaddya got?" (It was actually banned in Britain for over ten years.)

Twenty years ago my sister Moira was teaching English in the Czech Republic and was trying to explain to the kids what a "biker" was, so I mailed her a photo of Brando in that movie.  If you ever see the Gene Kelly musical Les Girls, it climaxes with a ballet version of The Wild One! (In the '50s there was a fashion for movie musicals to climax in a ballet number.)

I read somewhere that in engineering terms, Harley Davidson can't hold a candle to its Japanese competitors.  But that brand has the advantage of badass lifestyle marketing.  The Hell's Angels are so conformist that every member has to ride a Harley!

A very old person

My mother lived to be 94.  She kept her true age a secret, and I only found it out just before her death. (She was a decade older than my father.)

In her last years, I could see she was "slowing down." She took a lot of naps in the daytime.  When I had a button come off, she'd used to sew it one for me, but then she couldn't do it any more.  That must have been a disappointment for her, as I think she really liked being useful in that way.

And I remember how when we were eating out I'd help her walk to the car.  She'd hold on to my arm for dear life.  Now that I think of it, when I was little I must have held her arm that same way!  The circle turns.

Someone said that for some people, after you mother dies you get more like her.  I wonder if that's happening with me?  I've been taking more daytime naps than I used to.

Gym class

Some kids like gym class.  Can't say I did.  What really bugged me was when they let us kids choose our own teams, which always meant that I got chosen last. (If I'd just been chosen second last, it wouldn't have bothered me.)

I remember at the start of one year the gym teacher warned us against chewing gum in gym class, and told us about this girl who choked on her gum and the gym teacher had to cut her throat so she could breathe until the doctors removed it.  When he said this, we all laughed, including me.  That's the sort of thing boys of eleven or twelve find funny.

I remember one time when we were given ropes to climb.  The gym teacher said, "I know that all of you can get all the way up, but I'll only expect you to get halfway up." I got on the rope, swung for half a minute, then finally got off.  It looked so easy when he did it!

I remember one school gym where someone managed to hit a volleyball up into the rafters and they couldn't get it down.  If you looked up, you could still see it up there.  Something creepy about that. (Presumably it's still there today!)

Learning foreign languages

I'm a bit of a language geek.  English is the only language that I speak fluently, but I can read several with the help of a dictionary.

Of course, I learned some French in school.  I remember the CBC kid's show Chez Helene, where they sang French songs like "Il Etait un Petit Navire." And I started learning Latin when I was a teenager.  Once you know enough of those two languages, other Romance languages become easy to learn, like Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.  I like comparing the same word in different Romance languages, like a public square becoming "place" in French, "piazza" in Italian, "plaza" in Spanish, and "praca" in Portuguese.  Or the ending that's "-nia" in Italian, "-gne" in French, "-~na" in Spanish, and "-nha" in Portuguese.

I recently started learning Portuguese because I'd met this Brazilian girl....  I haven't seen her lately, but I'm still interested in the language.  I bought a whole lot of Portuguese pamphlets about lives of the saints, which are easy to translate because they're written for children.

I've also learned some Chinese and Japanese.  Chinese interested me from my youth, because of its complex writing system.  I got interested in Japanese because of anime.  In recent years I've even been learning some ancient Greek, so I know that what Archimedes really said was "Heureka!"

My sister Moira is the German expert in our family. (That language is full of tricks, like English. "Lass singen" means "Keep singing," while "Lass das singen" means "Stop that singing"!)