Fireflies

I’m a fan of anime.  One of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen is the 1988 animated Japanese movie Grave of the Fireflies, directed by Isao Takahata for the famous Studio Ghibli.  It’s about a Japanese boy and his little sister struggling through World War II.  Their mother was killed in a bombing raid, and their father, an officer in the disintegrating Japanese navy, is probably dead too.  Then they live with their aunt, but she scolds them for being parasites and pride eventually drives the boy to leave with the girl and try to survive on their own, making a home in a cave.  The movie makes it clear at the beginning that they’ll die, so that isn’t a spoiler.  (At times we see the boy’s ghost.)

All this sounds grim, and a lot of it is.  But it’s all the details that make it compelling. (The title comes from a scene where the girl collects fireflies in the night, but the next day they’re dead so she buries them.) There’s a scene near the end set to the song “Home, Sweet Home” that brings me to tears, because at this point I see that a movie that seemed to be about death is really about life, not unlike the famous Japanese movie Ikiru.

It’s based on a 1967 short story by Akiyuki Nosata, who was a boy in the hungry times in 1940s Japan whose little sister died.  (He must have felt a certain “survivor’s guilt.”)

This sort of story is more effectively told in animation than it could be in live action.  When we see photographs or films of the horrors of war, we instinctively keep an emotional distance from what we’re seeing, like when we look directly into the sun and our cornea naturally closes.  Drawings somehow get around this.  Another example is Maus, Art Spiegelmann’s comic book telling the story of how his Jewish parents survived the Nazi holocaust, with Jews shown as mice and Nazis as cats.

I’m grateful to Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert for first exposing me to the film on their movie review show!

Pizza

I usually like pizza, so long as it doesn’t have onions or tomato slices.  There used to be a pizza place around the corner from our house, but it closed during the covid lockdown and now there’s a felafel place there instead.  My three preferred toppings were pepperoni, pineapple and ground beef.  I’d always tear off the crust first and eat that while letting the rest of it cool, to avoid burning my mouth.

On the other hand, I can’t eat the stuff they sell at the Pizza Pizza chain—it literally makes me sick!  I wish I knew what they put in it that disagrees with me so badly…

I remember seeing an episode of The Brady Bunch involving competitive jumping frogs, with a moment when the frog got into the pizza! (I watched that show at the time, with no idea that it would become a camp classic…) The reason I remember it is that just as they were showing it, the broadcast got interrupted to report the death of Lyndon Johnson.

When I was young I read a thing about pizza in a Mad magazine paperback reprint. (This was from 1960 or so, when pizza was the new thing…) It had cartoon advice like “When you’re driving home with your pizza and get stuck in a traffic jam, you can always set the passenger seat on fire to keep the pizza warm,” and “If a policeman stops you, you can bribe him with a slice.” This included “How to eat a pizza pie,” which showed three methods, each of them ending with “…getting icky sticky gook all over your $49.50 charcoal-grey suit”! $49.50 would be a good price for a suit today.

Habits

The habit I can’t break is going on Twitter and looking for a quarrel. (My handle is Captain Snark.) I do searches for Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, two of my heroes.

I don’t usually block Tweeters I don’t like.  I sometimes post, “The first one who blocks, loses.” (I’ve also said, “The first one who cusses, loses.”) In a worst-case scenario, I’ll mute instead of blocking. But there’s one exception.  There’s a musician called Corbyn Besson who’s a member of the boy band Why Don’t We.  When I search the name Corbyn I’ve sometimes got fan posts concerning him, so I’ve blocked hundreds of Corbyn Besson fans—I’ll bet some of them are bots set up by Why Don’t We’s publicity machine.

It annoys me when people say about Jeremy Corbyn “He lost twice!” as if that were the last word about him.  Most people would consider the 2017 election a standoff, considering that the ruling Conservatives lost their majority.  And the main reason for the 2019 defeat was the disastrously ill-timed proposal for a second Brexit referendum that future leader Keir Starmer pushed through.

People say that about Bernie Sanders too.  Their position seems to be “The Democrats rejected him twice, therefore he couldn’t win, therefore they were right to reject him!” When I post that line of circular logic, I accompany it with the emoji for rolling eyes.  It’s incredible that some people keep repeating things about Sanders that are easily debunked.  Like “He doesn’t care about African-Americans” or “He hasn’t accomplished anything in Congress but renaming a couple of post offices.” (When they say that, I post “Google ‘amendment king.’”) It particularly annoys me when they keep calling his supporters “Bernie Bros.” That’s a cynical soundbite that Nixon would be proud of, invented by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to depict them as white males!

Clintonites have some nerve blaming her 2016 defeat on Sanders!  Firstly, Bernie could have double-crossed the Democratic Party and defected to the Green ticket, and might even have won!  But he played it safe and campaigned for her, and actually delivered an even more solid majority of his supporters than she’d delivered for Barack Obama in 2008.  They complain that he stayed in the race too long, yet it’s normal for candidates to continue their campaign all the way to the Convention.

Secondly, two can play the blame game.  During the 2016 primaries the polls almost consistently showed Clinton leading Donald Trump by the same dicey narrow margin that she’d have in the fall, while giving Sanders a much wider, safer lead.  Was defeating Trump less of a priority before Hillary clinched the nomination? (Incidentally, if you can believe that she and Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination “fair and square,” you can believe anything!)

I’m still hoping that Bernie will run again next year!

As you can see, I’m a bit opinionated…

Closets

Can’t think of much to say about closets.  There was the time in Grade 7 when the art teacher made me go into the closet until I was less angry… (It was a nice big closet!)

I’ve been having trouble with my closet.  The knob isn’t working right so I can’t close it lest it won’t reopen.  I got into the habit of leaving it open but a few weeks ago I got careless and closed it, and it was stuck that way.  We had to call over my brother John to be the handyman and get the door open, which he did by unscrewing the hinges!

I was thinking, maybe we should just remove the door permanently.  Then I got to wondering, why do closets have doors?  Because people don’t want to look at all the clothes they have stored there?  Maybe clothes manufacturers invented closet doors so that people wouldn’t notice that they had too many clothes, and keep buying them…

Science experiments

I’ve never cared for science experiments at school.  We knew exactly what was going to happen, but we were expected to pretend we didn’t, then write up the results as if we were learning it for the first time, in the name of developing a “scientific mind.” And we were even expected to come up with a “source of error,” and suggest why the results shouldn’t even be believed anyway!

In Grade 8 they showed us a British film about school lab safety. (It started with a slapstick western involving dynamite, complete with a Native American saying “White man speak with forked tongue”! No relation to the rest of the film, but it grabbed your attention.) Then it showed a big doofus played by one the Carry On movie actors, making every mistake in the book. (“My microscope bulb’s burnt out—I’ll use the sun!”) One section was titled “Hoxygen Horrors.”

In Grade 7 I had a science teacher who shall remain nameless.  My father was a university professor and had given her husband a failing grade, with the result that he couldn’t graduate.  So she bore a grudge against me.  We did these experiments in teams of two, but one day we were doing a complicated experiment with Bunsen burners, so the teams doubled up into teams of four.  Now she paired me and my partner with two nasty guys she knew good and well I didn’t get along with. (I pleaded with her to reassign us, but she wouldn’t listen.) The result was that I ended up hitting one of them, and got sent to the principal’s office.

When I told my mother about it, her second reaction was to be mad at the teacher and the school. (Her first was to get mad at me.) My parents wrote a letter to the New Brunswick Department of Education about it!  They even pulled me out of the school for a week, then lost their nerve.

Later on during gym class we were playing volleyball and it was my turn to serve.  The guy I’d hit shouted “Hit the ball as hard as you hit me!” Later on, I heard that he was still struggling to finish high school, but I’m not sure it was the same guy.

The tenacity of life

“If at first you don’t succeed, try again.  Then quit.  No use being a damned fool about it!”—WC Fields

I turned 60 this year.  I guess I’m oldish.  I’ve been thinking about the people I saw when I was young who were that age, and by now the Grim Reaper’s caught up with almost all of them!

I’ve had a pretty good life.  But I still want to contribute more to the world.  I haven’t worked much over my life, and I’m not proud of it.  I hope it isn’t too late to do more.

Langston Hughes wrote a famous poem, “Mother to Son,” comparing life to a staircase.  There’s one line, “Don’t you set down on the steps/ ‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.” Sometimes I feel like I’ve been sitting on the steps of my life…

A few years ago Greta Thunberg was complaining about the problematic world older people were bequeathing to the younger generation.  I couldn’t help recalling that fifty years ago, many of us were saying the same thing about the world we were being left.  I guess it’s every generation’s fate to turn into their forebears.  We turned into our parents and our children will turn into us.

Treasure

When I was young I read a fable about a farmer who was dying.  He told his sons, “I have a treasure buried on my land,” but didn’t tell them where it was. After his death, they dug up every inch of the land to find the treasure, but found nothing.  But their digging left the land in such good shape that it produced big crops, and they made a fortune after all.  That father understood motivation!

I’ve always been interested in gold rushes.  I was reading Pierre Berton’s book about the Klondike gold rush, and there was one fact I noticed.  Thousands of prospectors went there, and the total amount of money they invested in their adventure—travel expenses and food supplies and equipment—was even greater than the value of all the gold the place produced! (That gives you an idea of the odds they faced.) People made fortunes without going there, just by selling them supplies.  There’s a country song that goes “All the gold in California is in a bank in the middle of Beverley Hills, in somebody else’s name.”

I read that pirates burying treasure is a cliche, like walking the plank.  Captain Kidd’s the only pirate known to have buried his treasure.  With most pirates, if they made a big score they’d spend it as soon as they could because they didn’t know how long they’d live to enjoy it.

When I was young, we had a treasure for the eyes.  Every fall we’d get the Christmas catalogues from Eaton’s and Simpson Sears.  It was fun to look through them and feast our eyes on the wares, especially the toys and candy. (The clothes didn’t interest me much.) Indeed, I mention this because just the other night I was dreaming about the catalogues’ candy pages!

Yet it didn’t occur to us to want the stuff bought for us.  My parents didn’t raise materialist kids!  In fact, when they asked me what I wanted for Christmas I could rarely think of anything in particular…

Anyone remember the Buried Treasure treat?  It was a cone-shaped combination of ice milk and sherbet that would have a little figure inside that would appear once you finished it, a bit like a Kinder toy or a Crackerjack prize.