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!

Growing older

“Upon the hoary head is placed the crown of wisdom”—Book of Proverbs

I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.  Ol’ rocking chair’s got me!  Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits. 

There’s a fairy tale where the Good Lord handed out  a span of life to each species. (It’s in the Grimm Brothers collection, but I think it goes back to the Middle East!) He was going to give everyone thirty years, but none of them were satisfied.  The Horse, the Dog and the Monkey had hard lives and wanted fewer years, while Man was just getting started and wanted more, so God took some years from the others and gave them to the human race.  So Man lives his own life for the first thirty years, where he’s young and carefree; then for eighteen years he lives like the Horse, working hard and receiving little gratitude; then for twelve years he lives like the Dog, barking and annoying everyone; and for his last ten years he lives like the Monkey, a plaything who receives no respect and gets  ridiculed and put on the shelf.

I’ll say this much for growing old:  it’s a problem that I know I can’t do anything about, and I prefer that to problems where I have a sense that I should do something, but I’m not sure what…. (It’s the same with the weather.)

What are the good things about getting older?  One is that it’s easier to ignore things.  Bill Cosby said, “You know you’re getting old when your glasses are fogged up, and you don’t care!” And it gets easier to say, “I just don’t know.” When you’re younger it feels wrong to be passive and bemused; you’re supposed to be proactive and figure things out!  When I look at something like the Ukraine War, I wouldn’t claim to know what to do about it.  I guess I accept sending weapons to Ukraine to defeat an aggressor like Putin, but I’m not ready to actively support that policy.  I just don’t know enough about it.  Anyway the policy doesn’t require popular support, just acceptance.

I turned sixty last year. Yes, I’ve always looked younger than my age.  I’ve been thinking about the people who were that age when I was young—by now the great majority of them have passed on.  I remember seeing Ray Bolger on Front Page Challenge, talking about The Wizard of Oz and mentioning “Judy Garland, who is no longer with us.” Now that’s a classy euphemism for someone being dead!  Some of those old movie stars were so classy—like Dorothy Malone, who won an Oscar for Written on the Wind and kept it in storage!  (If you ask me, she should have won the Oscar for The Tarnished Angels instead, but I digress…)

It’s odd how age can affect your taste.  Ever see Charlie Chaplin’s speech at the end of The Great Dictator where he appeals to the people of the world to work together to create a world where dictators aren’t thriving on division?  As I get older, that speech gets to me more and more.  Just the other day I was listening to it again and it brought me to tears!  It has “from the heart” sincerity and a certain desperation:  the movie was released in 1940, when World War II was already underway, effecting even greater horrors than people feared, and a messy aftermath that we’re still living with today.  It’s like a message for future audiences.  Someone on YouTube took a TV ad from Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and combined its visuals with that speech—they went together surprisingly well.

So how do I feel about old age?  I think I’m actually getting better at life!  I’m still hoping for a girlfriend someday.  But what would please me the most is finding something to work at, where I could really contribute to society and give some return for all the benefits I’ve received.  It’s a paradox that I want to start working at a time when so many are anticipating retirement.

In The Once and Future King, Merlin tells the boy who’ll become King Arthur, “Whenever you feel down about life, learn something new.  That always helps!” That’s a good approach to old age too.  You aren’t too old if you’re still learning… 

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!