Sunday 4 November 2012

memoir chapter II-continued.

For the longest time it seemed I was no more than vaguely aware of changing seasons.Everything I recall seems to be in the warmer months,at least in the first few years of life.I was still very young,but I still don't recall any real snow memories,where there was snow all over the ground.But summer ended and autumn came.It grew cooler and all of the machinery being used to build our neighborhood disappeared.There was no working all year around there and then,like they do today in Alberta.I don't even recall that anyone really worked on any of the houses being built around us then either.One day all the machines and the men running them were just not there any more,but the neighborhood was still far from finished.

It grew cooler though,before all the machines left.My father and I would still walk about in the neighborhood sometimes,going even as far away as Killiam Drive,which seemed very far away to me.All of the streets were still lined every few feet by those pot bellied kerosene lanterns which were lit up at night.But my father showed me if I placed my hands on the bottom part of the lantern,the metal was cool,and had frost on it.Car windows would frost up too,and one time we went for a walk through a piece of woods,I believe it was on Whitney Street,for that street did not go all the way through then.There were a lot of huge puddles and they were covered over with just the thinnest covering of ice.The moon was full and very pale with a white ring around it.It looked very cold.I don't remember anything about the leaves changing colors that year,but Halloween came and I can recall that people my mother called spooks came to our door,once it had gotten dark out.The Kerosene lamps were still  on the ground and gave the streets a surreal sort of a glow,so it was very spooky.I still had no real Idea what Halloween was all about though,except that when the spooks came to our door,we gave them candy and they would go away.Then some more would come and you would repeat the procedure.This went on all night it seemed,until I fell asleep.Because we had lived in the country,Halloween had never really happened before.Well,it may have happened,but no one ever came to our door when we lived in the country,as far as I can recall.

So summer and fall of my third year came and went.Christmas must have happened,but I don't recall much about it,except that we did go out into the woods and cut down a tree.My father took an axe and after some time walking in the woods he cut down a tree and put it in the trunk of the car.We took it home but I don't recall decorating it or even bringing it into the house,or much else about that Christmas.

And so 1964 turned into 1965.In a couple of months I would turn four years old,and I recall that birthday quite clearly.It was the beginning of a time which I recall with increasing clarity.

1965.In 1965,the average cost of a new house was $13,600 and the average yearly income$6,450.There were a lot of new house being built around us,and people for the most part were likely very close to the average income in our part of town.Gas cost about $.31/gallon,a loaf of bread about $.21 and the average monthly rent about $118.

A person born in Canada had a life expectancy of 68.76 years at birth.Canada ranked seventh in the world in that respect,while Sweden ranked first at just under 72 years. The list of popular names remained unchanged for boys over 1964(1.Michael,2.John,3.David,4.James,5.Robert).The most popular names for girls in 1965 were,1.Lisa,2.Mary,3.Karen,4.Kimberly,and 5.Susan.The name Albert rounded out the top hundred names for boys,while the name Melinda was the 100th most popular name for girls.

On the world scene,Lyndon Johnson was President of the United States,and Harold Wilson was Prime Minister Of The United Kingdom.Here in Canada,Lester Person defeated John Diefenbaker to become the Prime Minister of Canada.

In August,1965,rioting broke out in Watts and 34 people were killed.The Gateway Arch was completed in St.Louis,and Pope Paul VI became the first pope to visit the United States.The voting Rights Bill guaranteed the rights of African Americans to vote,Hindi became the official language in India,and Rhodesia declared it's independence.In 1965,the Iron Lung was replaced with the respirator.Canada received a new flag in 1965,the Maple Leaf,which my father would sometimes call "Pearson's bastard flag."The mini skirt appeared in 1965,and what my father would say about that is unprintable.America sent it's first troops to Vietnam.

Winston Churchill died in 1965,as did Nat King Cole and T.S. Eliot.Malcom X was shot to death in Harlem.

Born in 1965 were Sarah Jessica Parker,Ben Stiller and J.K.Rowling.

Popular films of 1965 were "The Sound Of Music",Gold Finger","Mary Poppins" "Cat Ballou"and "My Fair Lady",which won an Academy Award for best picture.

Lastly,The Oxford English Dictionary introduced 368 new words,including Shake and Bake,Motown,biohazard,grunge,jet lag and Zamboni.Likely no one noticed the extreme irony of the term jet lag and Zamboni being introduced in the same year.

In 1965,I turned four years old and had a birthday party at our house in Moncton.



Sources:www.wordorigins.com

            www.thepeoplehistory.com

             www.babycenter.com

           




memoir-chapter II -continued

One of the first places I remember us going to once we moved to Moncton was the beach.My father loved the beach and warm,even hot temperatures.He liked to swim in the ocean and sit in the sun on the sand and go for long walks along the shore.digging clams and cooking hem in a huge pot was one of his favorite summertime things to do.In fact,from what he told me later in life,he must have been nearly obsessed with the beach.He would,he said gather up some friends when he was young and head off,over land from Springhill to Heather's Beach,which had to be nearly thirty miles away.On the way they would raid a farmers hen house and kill a chicken or two.Once they got to the beach they would dig clams and live off of those for the remainder of the weekend.It was a time my father always spoke of fondly.

Moving to Moncton gave us the oppurtunity to go to the beach when my father was on his days off.The beach was at Shediac,a bit east of Moncton,on the road to where you used to catch the ferry to Prince Edward Island.Shediac holds itself to be the worlds lobster capital,and everywhere there was evidence of that fact.Big piles of lobster traps everywhere,lobsters painted on the sides of buildings that housed restaurants featuring lobster.There were even lobster shells laying all over the beach and all up and down the roads that were anywhere near the beach.

It took a while to get to the beach from our house as we did not have the roads we have today.You had to drive out on the old Shediac Road,through some farm country and past a golf course.It seemed to take forever when e were kids.When we came to a T intersection,you could get to the beach by turning right.The ocean was straight ahead,and if you turned left instead of right,you would go to where my father worked and where we used to live,after passing through all the little seaside villages along the coast.

The beach was a very new experience for me.I'd never seen this much water before,nor,for that matter so much sand.Everywhere I looked it was either water or sand and I could never decide which I liked more.The water was cool,but good for swimming and wading in.I loved he way the waves would come up on the shore,and made a game out of trying to outrun them.It was a game I could play for hours and I liked it nearly as much when the waves did manage to catch me.I loved the way the cool water felt on my bare feet.There were seagulls overhead too and I believed I could catch them.It never once occurred to me that they could not be caught no matter how much I ran after them,so I ran and ran and ran.The birds were a noisy lot,always squawking and squabbling over the tiniest piece of food.Eventually,I noticed that they would dig up clams,which they could not open,except for an unusual way that they had devised for doing this.Once the clam was on the sand and they could grasp it,they would fly off with it and drop it on some nearby rocks so that it would break open.Then they would descend and eat it.

Almost as much fun as the water was the sand.It was wet and flat at the waters edge,but grew drier the farther back from the water you got.At the shoreline,my feet would make their mark on the wet surface of the sand,only to disappear with the very next wave.So I would spend a great deal of energy placing down new foot prints while the waves were receding,only to watch them disappear again.Where,I wondered,did they go?A little way back from the water the sand was drier,but not really what you would call dry.It was here that we made castles using a plastic pail and shovel.The best thing about that game was that once you dug a deep enough hole,it would fill up with water from below.That water was very warm compared to the water a few feet away at the edge of the beach.I could sit in the hole I'd dug and it was a bit like a bathtub,only it was outside,and it was surrounded by castles.Building castles was about s close as a three year old could get to doing the sorts of things the men in back of our house at home were doing.It was as close as I could imagine to being a construction worker.

There was a shack at the beach too,that sold refreshments.You could buy fries and hotdogs there,as well as cold drinks.We never went to the beach when we didn't get to eat a hotdog,which is not something we ate at home all that often.Later,maybe a year or so later,my father bought a small barbeque and we would take that with us to the beach and cook hotdogs and burgers.Cooking outside was new to me too,and I loved the idea.I wondered why we didn't do it at home too.But it was a privilege we only indulged in at the beach,something that belonged exclusively to the beach,a sort of beach ritual,like building castles or swimming.

Every time we went back to the beach,it seemed to me,I should be able to find the sand castles I'd built the last time we were there.But I never could find them.They had gone away,and I couldn't understand why.I would be mildly disappointed by that fact,but it would only motivate me to get busy building some more.Still,every time we would return,the castles from the time before were gone,and I couldn't understand where they had gone.They had just vanished,and I never thought of them as being like my footprints in the waves.Their disappearance was simply a mystery to me.

sunday music/native american hymns







calgary-early light/november 4th




















Saturday 3 November 2012

op/ed-did calgary miss an oppurtunity in re-development?

I was reading the other day in one of our local rags,and by "local rag"I'm refering to one of those papers that is distributed to local transit users,whether they want it or not,free of charge,and worth every penny,that Calgary needs something "fun"to stimulate interest in our downtown area.It's a shame that I did not keep the article,as I would have liked to fully cite it,but the main idea behind it was that Calgary is lacking anything really distinctive to stimulate interest in it's city center.And while I'm not a regular reader of these pulp newspapers,and while the article was not especially well written,as is most often the case with these papers,I couldn't agree more with the sentiment.

Calgary has seen a lot of development in the three years I was absent.It's skyline grows more impressive every year,if by impressive you mean that it is becoming more inundated with steel and glass corporate phallic symbols and the odd new condo building.Much of the old Victoria Park neighborhood has been redeveloped.Instead of the old houses-old affordable accomodations,I might add-new high rise condos are sprouting out of the ground.The East Village,immediatly north of Victoria Park is slated for similar redevelopment in the coming years.And north of that,just across the river,Bridgeland,where the former Calgary General Hospital stood has seen redevelopment as well.The problem with Bridgeland is that it was a wonderful oppurtunity for Calgary to redevelop within an older community in a way that was distinctive but complimentary to the existing neighborhood.They missed the boat.Where are the brownstones,or Tudors,or French Chalet style condos.Well,they are not there.Instead there are a number of boxy,ultra modern glass and concrete buildings,which do not look like they belong.They have managed to acheive visual uniformity though.

With all that land to redevelop,extending from the Stampede Grounds,all the way north to 16th Avenue,for all intents and purposes,one might ask if Calgary is missing one oppurtunity after another to build something that will set itself apart and make it noteable among world cities.During the early part of this century,when all the talk about recreating these connected communities began,I suggested that perhaps Calgary could,as part of the redevelopment put on a World Exposition.Montreal did that over forty years ago.Vancouver did that somewhat more recently.So,does Calgary want to join the big leagues or not?A World Exposition would make Calgary a showcase for the world for a number of months.Moreover,a Worlds Exposition would leave our city with a lasting infrastructure as a heritage.Useable facilities for the future.Unfortunatly,I don't think anyone in Calgary has the vision to do that.It seems a far different city than when I first came here in the 1970s and plans were announced to bring both an NHL hockey team and the Winter Olympics here.Both those goals were accomplished but the hockey team seem to have fallen on hard times and the Olympics is more than 20 years in the past.So I ask our community leaders,what have you done for this city lately?And,how large do you want to live?As building has already started in these neighborhoods,the oppurtunity to incorporate a Worlds Fair into the plans may have disappeared.Or,perhaps not.The point is,though,that such ideas don't even seem to be part of the conversation.

At a more grass roots level,there is downtown Calgary,such as it exists right now.I'm afraid I have to agree,it is not an especially "fun"place.Much of the reason for that I believe has to do with the automobile culture,which you would expect,perhaps to be prominent in an oil producing province.Downtown Calgay,to my eye at least seems to consist of expressway like streets that lead out of the city center,to the far off suburbs.They are neither appealing to the eye nor,evidently conducive to storefront development.They are not,given the speed and traffic flow,especially pedestrian friendly.Consequently,there tends to be pockets of development connected by not much of anything.So you find yourself walking down concrete canyons where many of the shops are indoors,either above or below street level.And some of what is at street level is not especially attractive.Calgary is known for it's 80 or 100 year old "heritage buildings"that have received a minimum of maintainance over their lifetime,and thus have to be torn down or restored,when in fact the will to do either seems missing.In most eastern cities,to say nothing of Europe,there are beautiful old buildings that have been very well kept and are still prestigous bussiness adresses,as well as local landmarks.What does Calgary have that is uniquely Calgary?A tower that no longer towers over much of anything and certainly doesn't offer the view it once did.And The Stampede Grounds which is to say the least in need of some modernization.

So where do we go from here?Well,as much as I would still favor a Worlds Fair,I seem to be a voice crying in the wilderness.But we could start a little smaller I suppose.Recently the Public Library has been conducting surveys as to what we would like to see in the new Public Library.Well,firstly.I must say it's long past time this city had a new library.Libraries are not optional in any city that would like to consider itself world class.In the late 1970s Calgary's library was merely unsightly.Now it is a complete eyesore both within and without.It is not anything approaching reader,writer or researcher friendly does not let in outside light and is more or less an afterthought in terms of being integrated into the community where it is located.So.if you want to show that we can undertake distinctive development,the Public Library is a great place to start.It needs to be a unique and innovative building within the context of it's location.It needs to be conveniant and easy to access from both downtown and outlying communities.It needs to attract commercial development into its overall complex.Yes,the library is an excellent oppurtunity to show some imagination that has to date seemed rather lacking in Calgary.I'll be disappointed if Calgary doesn't get that done right,especially after all of the public consultation.

Where do we go after the library?Well,how about some more downtown green space.toronto seems to have parks every few blocks,while Calgary seems to have few by comparison.How about a park dedicated to rock climbing,for instance.How about a park dedicated to street performers and the visual arts.How about a few more streets that could be dedicated solely to pedestrian traffic and shopping.How about some horse drawn stage coaches down the Stephen Avenue Mall,for instance.Those are just some of my ideas and I'm sure that there are people in Calgary who have much better ideas than mine.

Yes,I'm in full agreement.Calgary needs to create an atmosphere of fun in it's inner city.Because,aside from the Calgary Stampede,I don't know that this city is noteable for much else.

calgary/another foggy morning