Encyclopedias

When I was a kid we had several encyclopedias.  One was an Art Linkletter picture-book encyclopedia.  I recently read that some of its artists also worked on the notorious EC horror comics that prompted a big hysteria in the 1950s.  Their illustration of Macbeth certainly scared me!

We also had the World Illustrated Encycopedia from around 1960.  The entry on communism is pretty funny.  Under the heading "What makes people communists?" they said things like "In rich, peaceful countries a communist is often a person with a sort of mental illness." My brother nicknamed this encyclopedia "the Book of Lies."

And we had an earlier encyclopedia that my mother had had when she was a girl.  It was called The Book of Knowledge and was originally published in Britain around 1910.  We had a Canadian edition published around 1930, substantially the same but adding a few articles on Canadian history and World War I.

The Book of Knowledge is a curious artifact of the Edwardian age.  One of its sections was called "The Book of Golden Deeds," and told stories of heroes for kids to look up to, like Father Damien.  There were children's stories with some illustrations by famous artists like Arthur Rackham.  And there was a section called "The Book of Wonder," answering children's questions like "Did any of the Apostles go to Britain?" or "Will the last man die gasping for air?" I think we still have it packed away downstairs.

We also had a 1930s edition of a British encyclopedia called The World Book, which had a whole volume devoted to the Dominions. The entry on flags shows Germany's flag with a swastika!

Today I love to read Wikipedia, where one page will have links to other pages.  When I read one entry I'll often open a link to a second one, then to a third...

Swimming

When I was fourteen, I joined the local swim team.  My older brother and sister had been on it the year before and I thought I'd feel more mature.  But I should have known that they had an A team and a B team, and I got put on the B team, where most of the others were eleven or twelve.  As a result, I ended up feeling less mature.  But my mother was a big believer in it, and I didn't dare quit.

I remember one time when we registered for races at an upcoming meet.  I asked whether I was ready to race in the breast stroke category-- I hadn't been previously-- and the person said yes.  But then the day of the meet came and my name had been removed from that category.  When I asked about it, the coach explained that my kick wasn't legal. (I don't remember whether it was supposed to be above the surface of the water or below.) It turned out that I'd asked the wrong person whether I was ready, because the right person wasn't there.

All this made me feel stupid on several levels.  It was stupid of me to think I was ready when I clearly wasn't.  It was stupid of me to ask for an explanation when I should have just known I wasn't good enough.  And it was stupid of me to think I was getting somewhere and participate in this swim team that clearly didn't need me.

I continued with the swim team for the rest of the season, but I didn't enjoy it.  Today I rarely swim.

Euthanasia

I have nothing against euthanasia.  If someone wants to die, I suppose the courts should make sure he's making the decision freely and isn't being pressured into it.  If it's a question of whether to unplug my life support, I'll leave it up to my descendants.  If I had to make the decision, I'd definitely consult the doctors.  I don't have much to say about this subject because my expertise is so limited.

Recurring dreams

I often dream of our old home in Sackville, N.B. (Sometimes I feel like I'm trespassing on the house's new owners!) In some of these dreams it's May and I'm starting the garden in our back yard.  And I also dream of the summer cottage we used to have near Northumberland Strait, and various places in the Sackville area.

Many of my dreams involve travelling, on a train or on a ship. (I've sometimes dreamed of sailing on the Titanic.) I often dream of visiting London:  in this dream I sometimes go to a non-existent museum that's an amalgam of all the London museums I've visited.

Back in the 1990s I spent years working on my Ph.D. thesis.  Today I sometimes dream that I'm still trying to finish it, without much hope.  And I also dream of taking university courses.  Some people dream of sitting final exams, but in my dreams I tend to be in the middle of the course and feeling clueless about it.

My mother died a year ago and I sometimes dream about her.  In some of these dreams I hold her hand.  In one I said to her, "We miss you!"

Entitlement

In rich countries like the United States and Canada, people often take their good fortune for granted.  They think that because they make a lot of money, that proves that the deserve it.  Some Americans will refer to the U.S.A. as the richest country in the world, with the clear assumption that their country's riches are clear evidence of virtue rather than luck. (Never mind that the United States largely sailed through World War II without much economic destruction, then had a generation of world dominance while their rivals were rebuilding.)

But what bugs me is the person who attacks the "culture of entitlement" among poor people, forgetting that most of the latter have always gone without advantages that he often takes for granted.  Poverty is a complex problem that can seem to have no solution, so some people are tempted to reduce it to a moral issue. "Those people don't really need welfare, they're just lazy.  Cut them off welfare and they'll get by somehow.  And if they don't get by, it's their own fault."

So-called welfare reform angers me, because its victims (including many children) are out of sight and out of mind.  People talk about the reduction in the number of welfare recipients as a success in itself, ignoring that the number who need welfare hasn't been reduced by the same amount.  People say "I don't want my tax dollars spent on those people!" and don't care about the consequences.  That tells us a lot about today's society.

Joie de Vivre

I don't know much about the joy of living.  I recall reading in Two Years Before the Mast about a party in Mexican California where a girl would sneak up behind a boy she liked and break an egg over his head. (It wasn't a regular egg, but one filled with cologne water.) And a boy would sneak up behind a girl he liked and put his sombrero over her head.  Those people knew how to live!

I guess that here in the well-off Protestant developed world we associate joie de vivre with the poorer, more Catholic societies to the south.  Places like Rio de Janeiro at Mardi Gras time.  People express their joie de vivre on weekends and holidays, then go back to scratching out a living on weekdays. (Here in North America we also have New Orleans.)

But maybe you can find it closer to home if you look harder.  In my neighbourhood, for one weekend in July they have the Hispanic-centred Salsa on St. Clair street festival, with the street closed to traffic.  It's very noisy, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for living in an interesting neighbourhood.

Strawberries & raspberries

When I was growing up in Sackville, N.B., there were a lot of raspberry plants near our house.  They'd come ripe around late July and we'd pick a whole lot.  Some of them we'd put into pies, others we'd make into drinks.  We had a recipe for raspberry shrub in our copy of Betty Crocker's Cookbook, which you made by boiling raspberries and adding ginger ale and frozen lemonade.

We also grew strawberries in our back yard garden.  In the fall we'd put a layer of mulch and leaves over them to prevent the ground from thawing and refreezing over the winter, because that can uproot the plants. (Robert Frost wrote a poem about protecting an orchard by putting it on a north slope to prevent thawing.)

When I was older we bought a big freezer, so then we could add some sugar to raspberries or to strawberries, freeze them and continue to eat them for months onward. (We froze peas from the garden too.) But sometimes we added too little sugar for my taste.

Some time after we moved to Toronto we discovered a place called Whittamore Farm in Markham where you could pick your own strawberries and raspberries in season.  That's always fun, but we no longer have a car to get there.  We're city folk now.