Epitaphs & Losing your marbles

Back in the ‘70s I recall listening to the CBC radio comedy Dr. Bundolo’s Pandemonium Medicine Show.  One skit they did was about pet funerals!  One of the lines was “Have you considered an appropriate epitaph—something like ‘He ain’t around, he’s in the ground.’”

William Butler Yeats’ epitaph is his own lines “Cast a cold eye/On life and death,/Horseman, pass by.” Remember Kathleen Kennedy, JFK’s sister who married an English nobleman and was killed in a plane crash? I’ve always liked her epitaph “Joy she gave, joy she has.” I also like Cecil Day-Lewis’ own epitaph “Shall I be gone long?” Robert Frost suggested for his epitaph “He had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” And Dorothy Parker suggested “Excuse my dust.”  Benjamin Franklin’s epitaph is lines he wrote when he was young:

The Body of B. Franklin, Printer

Like the Cover of an old Book

Its contents torn out,

And stript of its Lettering and Guilding,

Lies here, Food for Worms,

But the Work shall not be wholly lost:

For it will, as he believ’d,

Appear once more

In a new & more perfect Edition,

Corrected and amended by the Author.

I think I’d like a Chinese-style “tree burial,” where they cremate you then plant a tree over your ashes.  If they want to put up an inscription plaque it should be the Chinese proverb “Our ancestors planted trees, we sit in the shade.”

Our other subject this week is “Losing all your marbles.” Just now I’m reading Alexandre Dumas’ mega-novel The Count of Monte Cristo.  It’s about a guy who gets framed and becomes a political prisoner for fourteen years.  Then he makes an incredible escape and finds a huge treasure.  Eventually he sets about getting even with the people who got him sent up.  He does that by cleverly manipulating things so that they ultimately destroy themselves!  The worst of his enemies has the worst fate, going insane in the end.  You’re bound to wonder, Is what the hero does to him worse than what he did?  In one of the Kill Bill movies, the Japanese sword-maker warns a vengeful Uma Thurman, “You may think of revenge as a road, but it’s more like a forest.” That movie came out about the same time as 9/11, which prompted a pretty rash vengeance campaign by the American government… 

The Trans-Canada Highway

 

I grew up in the town of Sackville, at the southeastern corner of New Brunswick.  The nearby Trans-Canada Highway came near there around the time I was born.  It was just a few lanes wide and didn’t get expanded into a freeway till the mid-1990s, by which time I no longer lived there.

Driving west, you’d ascend Beech Hill and go a length through the woods to Memramcook, where the road descended to a river valley with a gravel quarry.  Then you’d go back uphill and soon get to the Moncton area, where you’d enter the city or go even further, on routes that took you to west to Fredericton and northwest to Quebec, or southwest to St. John and west to Maine.

Driving east, you’d go past the Tantramar River with its tidal dam, and a group of radio towers that were used by the Canadian Northern Service back then for shortwave broadcasts. The land is flat and marshy there, and the railway runs parallel to the road.  Then you’d climb a ridge to Aulac.  The National Historic Park at Fort Beausejour was there, along with a tourist information centre and a place that sold apples every fall. (I think they have an EV charging station there now!)

There one branch of the Trans-Canada Highway goes east to Northumberland Strait.  Our summer cottage was in that direction, and further on was the ferry to Prince Edward Island. (There’s a bridge there now, but it was only built after I left.)

The other branch goes south to Nova Scotia.  You’d descend to more of the marshy flatland, and the Missaguash River that forms the boundary between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.  Then you’d climb another ridge to where Fort Lawrence was, and another tourist information centre.  This was in the Amherst area where you could enter the town. (In the late 1980s, we often went to Amherst to rent videos.  There was also a Dairy Queen there.) But you could go further south to Truro, and from there south to Halifax or east to Cape Breton Island, which we regularly visited in the summer.

That was then, this is now.  I never learned to drive, but now I live in a big city near a streetcar line.  My household went carless ten years ago.  The Trans-Canada Highway doesn’t even reach Toronto!

Favourite job

I don’t have much job experience, but sometimes I think about jobs I’d like to have.  I would have made a good town crier in the old days.  I have a loud voice and like telling people what I know.  And in Africa they have a guy called a kafo whose job is to keep a community’s records in his head, sometimes going back for centuries!  I think I would have liked doing that.  I read a book about America after a nuclear war and they had professional remembers who basically did that.

Other jobs that appeal to me are more fanciful.  I think I’d like to have a job introducing American movies to Chinese audiences and explaining their context.  Or introducing famous paintings in London’s art galleries to tourists and giving them my perspective.

There’s an A.A. Milne poem “Cherry Stones” that goes,

Tinker, Tailor,

Soldier, Sailor,

Rich Man, Poor Man,

Ploughboy,

Thief —

And what about a Cowboy,

Policeman, Jailer,

Engine-driver,

Or Pirate Chief?

What about a Postman — or a Keeper at the Zoo?

What about the Circus Man who lets the people through?

And the man who takes the pennies for the round-abouts and swings?

Or the man who plays the organ, and the other man who sings?

What about a Conjuror with rabbits in his pockets?

What about a Rocket Man who's always making rockets?

Oh, there's such a lot of things to do and such a lot to be

That there's always lots of cherries on my little cherry tree!

Earworms

  For some people the summer of 1994 was the summer of Forrest Gump.  For me, it was the summer of The North China Herald.  Back then I was researching my Ph.D. thesis on the British community in the Chinese treaty port of Chongqing, and that was one source I spent a lot of time on.  The North China Herald was an English newspaper published in Shanghai’s British concession, with correspondents in all the treaty ports, so I went through all the reports from Chongqing.  It took a long time, and in the last four years before the newspaper closed after Pearl Harbour, there was a big increase in Chongqing reports because the Nationalist government moved there.  It’s a bit like Heartbreak Hill in the Boston Marathon:  not far from the finish there’s a hill that runners have to ascend first!

Anyhow, in the later part of my work I started to hear music going around in my head, from our record album The Royal Family of Opera.  Both were Wagner pieces:  Elsa’s Dream from Lohengrin and the Prize Song from Die Meistersinger. Elsa’s Dream is what the heroine sings when she’s accused of witchcraft and faces the stake, and all she can talk about is this dream where a knight came along to save her.  And I’ve heard that Die Meistersinger is a pretty boring opera, but if you can sit through two hours, you’ll hear that wonderful aria, which the hero sings to win a music festival prize.  It’s odd about Wagner—he composed great music, but whenever I’ve gone to one of his operas, there always seems to be a point where I have trouble staying awake…

Earworms are funny.  Some of the songs that get into my head are genuine keepers, like those ABBA songs in the 1970s.  Others are just silly, like Melanie’s “Brand New Key.” And of course, some are commercial jingles or TV series theme songs, which I’m ashamed to admit I remember.  But I’d rather not say any more because if I start thinking about them, I may be unable to stop…

The Lincolns

I've always been interested in Lincoln.  Just now I’m translating a Korean children’s book about him.  And I recently saw the documentary Lincoln’s Dilemma about how the abolition of slavery came about.  It seems like everything in his life contributed to the eventual legend, like his meeting his future wife Mary Todd at a ball and dancing badly with her. (Our image of Lincoln is a country boy not gifted with social graces…)

When I was little I read a children’s book about him, in English.  I learned about all the difficulties in his life, how his store went broke and left him in debt, and one of his sons took sick and died while he was President.  He often suffered from depression, and they’d be afraid to nominate him for the Presidency now, but it arguably made him a better leader.

My mother was interested in Lincoln too.  She felt sorry for his unstable wife.  Back in Illinois she’d been a big fish in a small pond, but when they came to Washington the capital’s social elite viewed them as hillbillies.  She was a shopaholic and wore lots of fancy clothes during wartime, which many thought inappropriate. (She wore jewelled rings over her kid gloves, which the elite considered low-class.) After being widowed, she actually spent some time in a mental asylum!

He had an unusual talent for succinctness:  he said the sort of things that would cause my mother to say “Nobody could have said it better.”  Like in his Gettysburg Address, where he said “We’re here to dedicate a cemetery to the war dead, yet they’ve already dedicated it with their actions in a way our words can’t match.  All we can do is draw inspiration from them and continue their fight.”

The more I read about Lincoln, the more I admire his shrewdness.  He famously wrote in an open letter, “If I could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, I would; if I could save it by freeing none, I would; if I could save it by freeing some and not others, I would.” This may seem indecisive, but in fact he’d already decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and was waiting for the right time, which came the following month.

There have been some good movies about Lincoln.  There was the one with Daniel Day-Lewis a few years ago.  And there’s an old one, Young Mr. Lincoln, with Henry Fonda as Lincoln arguing a legal case in his early years.  There’s a great moment at the end where he says “I’m going to the top of the hill!” and walks off into a storm…

Sleep

“Death is something that makes men weep,

Yet one-third of life is spent in sleep!”

—Lord Byron

I like to sleep with the window open when the weather is warm enough. (I heard that Pierre Trudeau also did, but his wife Margaret didn’t like it.) Sometimes there’s noise outside, especially on Wednesday nights when they pick up the trash, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

On Wednesday morning I woke up to my open window and there was a funny smell in the air, a bit like someone was burning tar or barbecuing nearby.  It was the smoke from the wildfires reaching Toronto!  I closed my windows for several days, though now I’ve opened them again.

I’m hoping that this smoke in big cities like New York will be a turning point, and we’ll finally get serious about slowing down climate change.  Maybe this will turn out to be another “Where were you when…” moment, like 9/11 and the onset of covid.  Someone on Twitter was saying that supporters of a Green New Deal aren’t serious, and I responded, “Is it more serious to do nothing and hope that things work out?”

I was in London a decade ago and went to Roger Rhys’ one-man show talking about Shakespeare and such.  I’m afraid I dozed off during the show!  I sure hope Roger didn’t notice…  I also got sleepy watching the Greenland movie The Journal of Knud Rasmussen.  Something about those snowy Arctic locations makes me feel like hibernating!

Do you like lullabies?  I recently realized that many of my favourite musical pieces are berceuses.  I remember when the FM CBC had an afternoon music show titled Disc Drive and they’d sign off with the berceuse from Gabriel Faure’s Dolly Suite.

Empty nest

"In every parting is an image of death”—George Elliot

I come from a fairly close-knit family.  You know how most kids daydream at one time or another that they’re the offspring of other people and just got adopted into their current family?  I never had that fantasy!

I remember seeing a TV ad for long distance phone calls when I was young.  It showed a young woman leaving a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere to catch the bus that would take her into the city, with her rather old-looking parents smiling and waving goodbye.  I found that commercial really, really sad!  The point was that she wouldn’t be completely cut off—she could still speak with them on the phone sometimes—but that went over my head.

Another long distance commercial I recall showed a young woman sitting around on a Sunday afternoon with time on her hands and looking glum, with sad guitar music.  But then her phone rings and she answers it all smiles!

Ever see the movie Born Free?  It’s about a gamekeeper couple in colonial Kenya who adopted three orphaned lion cubs.  Two of them got sent on to zoos, but they decided to wean the third off them and make her an independent mature lioness.  I remember the first time they left her alone, and when they came to check up on her she’d barely survived and they had to return to Square  One!  I saw it just a few weeks before I lived on my own for the first time…

In my late 20s and early 30s, I spent a couple of years living on my own but often visiting home, then lived at home again for a couple of years, then moved to Toronto with my sister for three years, then at 33 I spent eight months completely alone in London, England—the best eight months of my life.  But then I came home to Toronto and my parents had moved in with us, and I’d live with them for the rest of their lives.

My mother left us about 10 years ago, my father about three years ago.  Don’t I wish I had a phone line sufficiently long-distance to speak to them now!