Just a note before I begin.The memoir writers group that I belonged to while living in Toronto is back in business after takeing off some of the summer.They meet each Monday at the Lillian Smith Library and are an interesting and talanted group of writers.So,once again I will be posting entries based on the topics selected for writing assignments by this group,starting with one of Monday's topics,"the grass is greener."
The grass is greener.It seems I'e heard that since I was very small.When I was a small boy,what the saying brought to my mind was cows.My father would sometimes stop along the roadway when we were out driving to look at the cows.I don't know what his fascination with cows was.I suppose it was just an appreciation of the pastoral scene,something he associated with peace and well being.But I always remember the cows that would graze by the fence and how one or two of them would stick their heads through the fence wire to munch on the grass on the other side.For some reason,they were very determined to get the grass at the farthest edge of their reach,even though they were standing in an ocean of grass.Some of the fences were electric and some of the cows would even brave the current for the grass on the other side.I have no idea if it was just such a scene that brought this saying into being,or if I just took things very literally as a child.
The disturbing thought is that we humans may just be as dumb as cows.At least we seem to behave so much like them.I've come to the conclusion that living in Canada is all about the grass being greener someplace else.When I came of age there was very little work for young people in my hometown.So I got in my car and drove over 3000 miles to Alberta where I could make a living.It wasn't easy and those first few years had their trials.I wondered many times if I was really better off there and gave a lot of thought to going back.There were after all some people who seemed to be munching contentedly on New Brunswick grass.But I never returned for any length of time until 2009,when I thought maybe I could make it there.Times were a bit busier and my life in Alberta had stopped being especially satisfying.Really the grass never was greener here.But I still seem to be as dumb as a cow about some things.I've lived in Toronto,Edmonton and now I'm back in Calgary where I wake up many mornings thinking"damn,I hate this city"as I look around at it's familiar sights.Maybe someplace else would be better.
Wednesday, 12 September 2012
memoir chapter one-continued
My sister seemed very small when we were living in that house in northern New Brunswick.my mother would put her outside in a little pen that was built beside our house,for fear that she would run out on the road.I'm not certain if that was because she actually had strayed near the road,or just because she was so much smaller than me,but I was allowed to wander about in the yard.At the age that we both were at the time,sixteen months difference seemed a huge difference even to me.I veiwed my little sister as a baby,even though I myself must have been very small.She was small enough that she didn't talk much while I could carry on a conversation,at least with older children and adults.But I'm certain that ability was not so well developed as I imagine today,and thus,the quality of memory is somehow different because of it.More on memory later.While I could dress myself with minimal help from one of my parents,my little sister was dressed by my mother.I can still recall her slipping a little baby into a snow suit,and that is why she seemed so small though she was only slightly more than a year younger than myself.
My sister never did stray out onto the road,at least when we lived in Redmondville.And that is a good thing as ,surely there would have been no hope with the way cars went speeding by our house.But that is not to say she was never in any danger from the misadventures of early childhood.At some point during the year or so we lived there,she found and swallowed a screw.Actually,what she swallowed I would call a bolt-long and thin with a square end.I saw it a few years later when my mother was showing us both our baby books and I was amazed not just that such a thing could pass through a small child,but that it could be swallowed in the first place.At the time,as I recall my father was away to a funeral,likely in Springhill.I don't recall how we got to the hospital,but I do remember being there.The halls there were wide and the room was very cool as we waited.The doctors had taken my sister and I didn't know where she was.I don't recall being concerned or having any appreciation of danger associated with this event.Mostly I sent my time trying to escape and explore the hospital,which was unlike any place I'd ever been before.My mother certainly seemed uptight as we waited for what seemed like a long time.Every time I would try to wander off she would herd me back into the waiting room and make me sit down on one of the seats until I would try to sneak off again.Eventually we went home and left my sister at the hospital.She wasn't there long.It was simply a matter of waiting for the screw to do what food does naturally.But in those days you weren't allowed or encouraged to stay overnight at the hospital.Back at home I remember my mother calling several people on the phone.One was most likely my father,and the other my grandmother who lived on the other side of the province.She explained how we were waiting for the screw to pass through my sister,and as I listened,I tried to imagine what this would look like,how it was accomplished.It was simply a concept that my mind could not accomodate at the time.We went back to the hospital and after a couple of times,we brought my sister home with us.My father returned too,after a few days and we were all together and safe again.It must have been a very stressful time for my family,though I didn't seem to have much grasp of any danger related to the incident.I guess when you are small,your mind works very differently than when you're grown.
My sister never did stray out onto the road,at least when we lived in Redmondville.And that is a good thing as ,surely there would have been no hope with the way cars went speeding by our house.But that is not to say she was never in any danger from the misadventures of early childhood.At some point during the year or so we lived there,she found and swallowed a screw.Actually,what she swallowed I would call a bolt-long and thin with a square end.I saw it a few years later when my mother was showing us both our baby books and I was amazed not just that such a thing could pass through a small child,but that it could be swallowed in the first place.At the time,as I recall my father was away to a funeral,likely in Springhill.I don't recall how we got to the hospital,but I do remember being there.The halls there were wide and the room was very cool as we waited.The doctors had taken my sister and I didn't know where she was.I don't recall being concerned or having any appreciation of danger associated with this event.Mostly I sent my time trying to escape and explore the hospital,which was unlike any place I'd ever been before.My mother certainly seemed uptight as we waited for what seemed like a long time.Every time I would try to wander off she would herd me back into the waiting room and make me sit down on one of the seats until I would try to sneak off again.Eventually we went home and left my sister at the hospital.She wasn't there long.It was simply a matter of waiting for the screw to do what food does naturally.But in those days you weren't allowed or encouraged to stay overnight at the hospital.Back at home I remember my mother calling several people on the phone.One was most likely my father,and the other my grandmother who lived on the other side of the province.She explained how we were waiting for the screw to pass through my sister,and as I listened,I tried to imagine what this would look like,how it was accomplished.It was simply a concept that my mind could not accomodate at the time.We went back to the hospital and after a couple of times,we brought my sister home with us.My father returned too,after a few days and we were all together and safe again.It must have been a very stressful time for my family,though I didn't seem to have much grasp of any danger related to the incident.I guess when you are small,your mind works very differently than when you're grown.
Sunday, 9 September 2012
memoir chapter one-continued.
I already said how Redmondville was a place of mud and wood.At some point during our stay there,my father bought an old truck,bigger than a pickup.It was a Dodge of late 1940's vintage,so it wasn't really that old at the time,but its dark blue paint was faded,it's windshield cracked and it's body rusting through.To put it another way,it looked right at home in that rough country,like something indigenous to those muddy New Brunswick back roads.It sat out in the yard between our house and our neighbors trailer.I'm not certain why my father bought it,but I believe it was for hauling wood.That's the only thing I can ever recall seeing him load in the back of it.He drove off in it,and a while later returned with what seemed like a mountain of maple logs,mixed in with a few birch,with their curling white bark.
The truck seemed to be able to go where the car could not.Or,at least to those places where my father was reluctant to take it.Roads were rough in those days and there was a very real possibility of damaging something beneath the car if you went off the main roads.But there was no worry about that in the truck.
One day I went for a ride in that truck.It was not a family car.Most of the time we went anyplace it was in my fathers car,a 1960 Valiant.There was really no room in the truck and I think my mother would have considered it beneath her dignity to be seen as a passenger in such an automobile.Trucks were really not trendy in those days,like they are now.You owned a truck if you worked in the woods,or were a fishermen.Not if you went to the city often,or for that matter,even to the smaller towns.Think the opening scene of the Beverly Hillbillies here.That truck was so big I could not climb up into it.I had to be lifted in.My feet would not nearly reach the floor and there were no seat belts either,so I kept sliding off the seats,down by that great big stick in the middle of the floor that my father used to shift the beast into gear and that shook and rattled when it wasn't being used.
Route 11 is really a coastal route.Or,at least it was in those days.Not far down the road it would be the main streets in all of the little fishing villages.But where we lived,it was a ways back from the ocean.You could not see the water even though some of the houses had lobster traps and even fishing boats up in the front yard.It really wasn't so far to the ocean.Maybe ten or fifteen miles at the most.But it seemed a long way off and,once you got there,like a very foreign place.To get there you had to take some really bad roads,some of them slick with red or brown mud,seemingly all the time.It was easy to get stuck.Moreover,once we got down by the coast,I couldn't understand what most people were saying.They were speaking Acadian French.And they seemed to be poorer by far than anyone I knew.A lot of their houses were tiny and covered in tar paper.Ot the ones that had real driveways,many of those were littered with sea shells and had broken old cars and boats where grass should have been growing.We even visited a place one time where there were chicken in the house,on the floor.It was a very different world even though it reall wasn't far from the highway.To get to such places,we usually took the truck.
The truck seemed to be able to go where the car could not.Or,at least to those places where my father was reluctant to take it.Roads were rough in those days and there was a very real possibility of damaging something beneath the car if you went off the main roads.But there was no worry about that in the truck.
One day I went for a ride in that truck.It was not a family car.Most of the time we went anyplace it was in my fathers car,a 1960 Valiant.There was really no room in the truck and I think my mother would have considered it beneath her dignity to be seen as a passenger in such an automobile.Trucks were really not trendy in those days,like they are now.You owned a truck if you worked in the woods,or were a fishermen.Not if you went to the city often,or for that matter,even to the smaller towns.Think the opening scene of the Beverly Hillbillies here.That truck was so big I could not climb up into it.I had to be lifted in.My feet would not nearly reach the floor and there were no seat belts either,so I kept sliding off the seats,down by that great big stick in the middle of the floor that my father used to shift the beast into gear and that shook and rattled when it wasn't being used.
Route 11 is really a coastal route.Or,at least it was in those days.Not far down the road it would be the main streets in all of the little fishing villages.But where we lived,it was a ways back from the ocean.You could not see the water even though some of the houses had lobster traps and even fishing boats up in the front yard.It really wasn't so far to the ocean.Maybe ten or fifteen miles at the most.But it seemed a long way off and,once you got there,like a very foreign place.To get there you had to take some really bad roads,some of them slick with red or brown mud,seemingly all the time.It was easy to get stuck.Moreover,once we got down by the coast,I couldn't understand what most people were saying.They were speaking Acadian French.And they seemed to be poorer by far than anyone I knew.A lot of their houses were tiny and covered in tar paper.Ot the ones that had real driveways,many of those were littered with sea shells and had broken old cars and boats where grass should have been growing.We even visited a place one time where there were chicken in the house,on the floor.It was a very different world even though it reall wasn't far from the highway.To get to such places,we usually took the truck.
portraits/calgary saudi festival
For most of the past week I've been trying to think of what to post on September 11th.That day is the day the world changed forever,but does anyone really know what happened.Sometimes it seems as most everything about that day has been said to the point of cliche.We've all seen the planes flying into the towers so many times we can picture it in our minds without the aid of a television.And many things,we are told flow from that date and it's events.
So many times I've heard in the last few weeks that if people really saw what war was all about they would not support it.I suspect there is a degree of truth in all of that.CNN and others give us a sanitized version,no doubt.But,are any but the stupidest of us really prepared to believe that it doesn't involve children with their limbs blown off and innocent families made homeless?No matter what the virtue of a war on terror,people suffer,and popular media still play their games.If we could see the real pictures,we would most likely grieve
the way I believe god grieves at the sight of war.
So I thought I would try to bring you something this September 11th that's a bit different than the usual,well worn rhetoric of the day.I don't know about you,but I don't really need to see more reruns of that day's events.To misquote a well known metaphor,the cell phone camera is mightier than the sword.I find it hard not to believe there hope in the world when I see a child playing ball or reaching for an ice cream cone.Yet how often,in this country do we see Arab children portrayed in that light.How often does popular media show us how Arab women can be attractive in the modesty of their attire?No,scary gets a lot more air play.CNN would have had a field day frightening people with the Catholic nuns of the early 1960's,but I digress.How often does agenda driven media show us scenes of family harmony and the absence of misogyny,like I could see at the recent Calgary Saudi Festival.It'sTime to turn off the television set and start seeing with our eyes.Because I think if we all did that,we really would support peace.
Friday, 7 September 2012
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