Self-love

Just when you start to think that people aren’t so bad after all, along comes the guy who sends you right back to square one.

Most of us have a fairly good opinion of ourselves. It’s generally unwarranted, but what can you do? It’s the way we’re made.

But some people take their love of self to the level of art. Beyond imagining, really. You’ve seen them yourself. Big ideas, but not a shred of talent.

.

He’s filled with all those glittering schemes,

Narcissus falling in love with his image in a pool (Caravaggio, 1573-1610)

Each glorious plan that never palls;

Embraces fright’ning wild extremes,

and dreams

His name will ring down History’s halls.

.

He walks the world in ten-league boots;

He’s seen to strive for dangerous fame,

But really seeks the safe pursuits

whose roots

Are found in cowardice and shame.

.

Some might say that “cowardice” is a bit strong. They’re wrong. “Cowardice” is mild, in my estimation.

.

But cowardice in heart and mind

Is born of our genetic clay,

And maybe “shame’s” a bit unkind;

you’ll find

It’s not his fault he’s made that way.

.

His fault is practising deceits:

He’ll take the swift-descending track

To darkening lanes and base retreats,

and streets

That end in empty culs-de-sac.

.

Right. “Practising deceits”; that means lying, doesn’t it? And that’s what he does. So whose fault is it, then? Mine? Yours? And yet — and this is the most irritating part — these are the people who succeed, nine times out of ten, proving the old adage: “BS baffles brains.”

Needles

How to thread a needle.

Up to now the received wisdom was that you moistened (okay, licked) the thread and thrust it through the eye of the needle. Right?

Wrong. You should lick the needle, then slide the thread through the eye. Works perfectly every time.

I cant even FIND the needle, let alone lick it.

But how about the needle in your sewing machine? Eh? How do you work that? Imagine being seen as you are bending over your sewing machine, your head pressed against the fabric you were working on, apparently sucking your machine’s needle. Try to explain that, especially to people who already think you’re a bit of a nut.

The illustration is of the first sewing machine, invented by Elias Howe in 1845. Can you see this in your sewing room?

—————

Illustration from  Frank Puterbaugh Bachman (1918) Great Inventors and their Inventions, American Book Co., New York.

Very Early Spring

We were going shopping this afternoon, at one degree below zero with an aggressive wind, and the lady, my better three-quarters, was hatless for chrissake, hatless! simply because the hat she was wearing was a dark blue with a turquoise trim and it didn’t go with her ensemble which was something or other that didn’t go with blue and turquoise, which also don’t go that well together at the best of times.

Bet on it, the Inuit know about “early spring”

Further to walking in the early spring, you would think that after more than half a century of Canadian winter — because that’s what it is; “Spring” is just a euphemism — you would know how to dress. Hats, certainly. Gloves: Forget dress gloves, you wear mitten gauntlets. Shoes: Stout, to protect you against the cold pavements. Scarves to protect you against the wind. That’s it; dress like that and you’ll laugh at winter … er, early spring.

Yet, every year, my hands drop off in the cold, and my hat isn’t sufficient, my shoes are the wrong shoes, and I don’t know what a scarf is … and every early spring I’m reminded.

Pencils

We all have our own freakishness (Freakacity? Freakinity?). You have yours, I have mine. I don’t know what yours is, but mine is mechanical pencils.

Sadly, though, it’s no longer as in the old days, say, at graduation time, when a traditional pen & pencil set cost as much as $25. Now, for $25 you’ll get a wooden pencil you have to sharpen yourself, and a pen holder (nib extra; user must supply own ink).

From bottom: Lamy (French), Caran d’Ache (Swiss), Faber-Castell (German), Porsche (German). Ten years ago pencils like these cost you fifty to sixty dollars. Today, anything you’d want to be seen holding will run you three figures. The silver Caran d’Ache was $180; wonderful pencil, great balance, smooth action, just the right lead advance so you don’t keep breaking the lead.

Today, pen & pencil sets are Expensive (note the capital “E” denoting “obscenely expensive”). Made with rare woods, and sterling silver or gold fittings, there are fountain pens, for example, priced from $600 (Faber-Castell) to $800 ( Caran d’Ache). The very thing for your graduating son or daughter — provided they’re going into law or dentistry or some other career gold mine, and will be able to repay you. A mechanical pencil alone can run three or four hundred dollars (sigh), but oh! they’re really worth the $400! Unfortunately I don’t have $400.

But there is a tactile pleasure in a top-of-the-line pencil, one that’s worth a bundle. Generally they have a greater diameter than an ordinary wood pencil, and your fingers sense that difference with satisfaction, even though it’s measured in fractions of a millimetre. They also come in varying lead diameters — .07 mm, .05 mm, and .03 mm — to suit your taste and graphic requirements. Expensive mechanical pencils are heavier than cheap mechanical pencils; they have a balance that seems created for your very own hand; you know unequivocally that you are holding a worthy instrument, a valuable tool to add substance and significance to your words.

Add to all this a passion for paper, stationery, note pads — and you have, as I mentioned earlier, a freak, a downright geek, an absolute no-nonsense unrepentant note-making nerd.

Lake Ontario

Many people come here from relatively small localities, from what for centuries were tiny towns, villages and countries. They arrive in Canada … and are staggered by the immensity of the land, the wealth of natural resources, the vast areas that have never seen a human footprint. Even the lakes are beyond their imagining. Lake Superior sees storms that rival the North Atlantic; you could drop Ireland into it and the Irish would sink without a trace, just a few shamrocks floating on the surface of the water.

A few years ago a young friend from France came to visit us. She arrived in Kingston from which she took the train to Toronto. She stepped off the train and clutched my arm: “Is it … all the same lake?!” Lake Ontario, smallest of the five, and half the size of France.

Her trip from Kingston took almost three hours — on and on, forever, it seemed to her. I shrugged, the indifferent gesture of a native Canadian, and pointed west: “Three thousand more miles of it out that-away.” I casually chew a straw of Canadian hay. “Three times bigger than Europe. Twenty times bigger than France.” The Canadian yahoo points south. “There’s another couple of thousand miles down there that we rent to the Americans.”

•

Flying over the Rockies once, an hour or two before dawn, I looked down. Lost among the majestic mountains that seemed to span the entire world, I saw a single light, one spark of life in the darkness. Who could it be? I thought. Whoever it is, they’re 500 miles away from anything. It brought home to me the size, and potential loneliness, of the country. I was born and raised in the shadow of those great mountains, but the sight of that tiny light still made me gasp.

—————

Map © Digital Wisdom Inc.

Telemarketers

“Out-sourcing” — an expression I believe that’s unique to the present generation — is now so common that no one gives it a thought. Except those of us who are on the receiving end.

The principle behind out-sourcing is simple: A north american telemarketer gets $20 an hour, plus benefits, medical plan, six weeks paid vacation, and three months sick leave; his third-world equivalent gets a whole two-bits a day, less what he has to kick back to the manager. Ergo, north american companies go the third-world route.

Telephone, 1896

The problem is: Where is this third world? The other side of the planet, mostly. So, when you’re having supper — which is when they all phone — what time is it in their third world? Must be around two or three in the morning! Maybe they get an extra five cents for the night shift. Anyway, you don’t have to worry, it’s their phone bill, not yours.

One of these telemarketers might sue me if I told him that I couldn’t understand what he was saying because he couldn’t speak English. I suppose he might sue me for discrimination, or racism, or failing to signal a left turn or something.

“… I’m calling on behalf of … yes, but … excuse me, sir …”

All these telemarketers start the same way: “How are you today?” A friend of mine, in exasperation, decided to tell him. My friend drew up a two-minute spiel, to be delivered in a single breath, non-stop, to prevent interruptions:

“How am I? I’ve just been diagnosed as having lung cancer, and it’s metastasized to my liver and my kidneys … my uncle cut his hand off with an axe. Apparently he’d been trying to murder his wife and had missed … my aunt was pushing her walker on a slight hill, and the walker got away from her and she ran after it, and halfway down the hill she says ‘Wait a minute! Why the hell am I running after this walker? I can’t walk!’ So, despite having run down the hill, she collapsed at the side of the road and waited for the ambulance … my neighbour’s dog bit me because I refused to return his frisbee to him, so thinking the bite might be infected, I went to my doctor and the doc wouldn’t treat me — ‘It’s a dog bite, dummy; I’m a human doctor. Now, if your neighbour had bitten you …’ — so he sent me to see a vet, but the vet wouldn’t treat me because I wasn’t a dog, so I went to my lawyer, but I didn’t get very far with him because my lawyer is my neighbour and he was already the dog’s legal counsel … my neighbour, while shovelling snow in his driveway, threw his back out, and filed suit against the weather bureau for having forecasted the stuff and they were responsible for it, after all …”

Long before he got to the end the telemarketer had hung up.

How’s that for a satisfying new twist? He hangs up on you! It almost makes telemarketing calls worthwhile.

Sand

February thaw. Fingers of dirty snow draw back across the lawn, withdrawing from the street as if contact with the cement was painful. In addition to the litter that rises up from the snow, there is the Sahara of sand. Many people are not keen on salting their paths against the winter ice. “Salt stains the brickwork,” they say, and lay down great deserts of sand instead.

I wonder what these people gain. I have used salt for years, and my path in summer is unstained; you could eat off it; and the stones in my path have, over the years, acquired an attractive patina, a weathered beauty, that pleases me.

At home with the Sahara desert. There isn’t this much sand on my driveway, but it’s pretty close.

I think the attraction that sand has — and I use it myself occasionally for this very reason — is that it provides instant non-slip traction without obliging you to look for a tool of some kind to break up the ice. Admit it, you really don’t want to leave the warm comfort of your living room, do you? Outdoor activity is good, but indoor sloth is better.

Valentine

Hmm … a bit late as usual. As so often happens, many of us are so busy looking for love the day itself passes us by, leaving us empty-handed.

Fervent thoughts of love, especially those of love lost (or, one hopes, just delayed in transit), are often experienced for but a brief heart-rending moment, then become the stuff of memory, and frankly best forgotten.

All very easy to say, if you’re an octogenerian and for all practical purposes couldn’t care less. But for a young person to gain one’s love only to have it snatched away, arbitrarily it seems, can be a shattering experience.

But while we live in hope, we are often left asking the question that hovers sometime on every lover’s lips: Why?

Nice doggie, but … those teeth …

 

What’s Love, that I should singing, singing be?

Be singing ’neath your window, near your bed?

Again last night you set the dog on me.

Ni-i-i-ce doggie; should I sing to you instead?

Your icy smiles—both yours and hers—I dread:

Your teeth; her smile, with just her coral lips;

Both tell me I’ve a loveless night ahead;

Your teeth; her smile, that sank a thousand ships.

Will I e’er drink the cup that Passion sips?

Tonight? Perhaps tonight she’ll welcome me!

As ’neath her sheets this ardent lover slips…

Dream on. Her love for me comes C.O.D.

And so, old dog, just promise not to bite;

Your lovely doghouse will sleep two tonight.

Beer

Any examination of beer consumption, though it may start with a scholarly look at consumption in general, must unavoidably slope off into excess — ribald songs, naked dancing girls, orgies — the whole sordid intemperate story. Sad to relate, but that seems to be the way of things. If there is a deep end, we will go off it.

Records from the sixth century indicate that monks were obliged to perform fifteen days penance if they were “in drink” to the point that they couldn’t speak. The existence of the penance proves the need, and illustrates that monks were at least occasionally speechless from ale.

Beer barrels resting between rounds *

Clerical laws in Saxon times ordered monks to avoid drinking in public places where ale was sold. Now, ostensibly, this could be seen as a curb to ecclesiastical excess. In reality, though, it mustn’t have been too hard to bear. The monastery provided its inmates with two drinking horns of ale per day (that’s two Saxon drinking horns, the big ones, which could have amounted to three or four quarts), and on festival days, of which the calendar was nearly full, twice a day also with wine. Certainly a well-lubricated day.

A pint of the real thing.

Along the same lines is the documented story of William Lewis of Wales who died on the 30th of November 1793 at the very moment he was downing a 40-ounce flagon of ale. Well, there are worse ways to go. A man of upright habits, he read the Bible every morning, and drank eight gallons of ale every night. It was said of him — almost a eulogy, you might say — that in the course of his obviously happy life, he consumed enough ale to float a 74-gun ship. Can you ask for a better epitaph?

In the end, when the discussion of beer consumption is over, the Germans — who else? — have the last word:

“It takes beer to make thirst worthwhile.”

—————

* Photo: www.CGPGrey.com

* Photo: www.CGPGrey.com

Winter Theatre

When we arrived at the Firehall Theatre — at 10:00 a.m. — a major snowstorm was approaching our small town. Within less than an hour the winds were howling around the three-storey building. The violent clouds of snow raced horizontally past the windows, moaning along the eaves and rolling wildly across adjoining rooftops. Below, along the sidewalks, pedestrians staggered by, stumbling, struggling against the force of the wind. Beneath us, just out of the picture to the left, through the blowing snow we could see the vague outlines of the parking lot, soon (but not soon enough) to be taken over by the Farmers’ Market. In summer the farmers’ stalls will display their fruit and vegetables, but now both farmers and stalls were frozen memories, dreams buried under the mounting drifts of snow.

The Firehall Theatre in winter

The Firehall Theatre building dates back to the mid-19th century, when it was a fire hall, with real horses, and the distance to the farthest fire was measured in yards not miles. The walls are ancient brick; there is a single pane of glass in the wooden windows; and between window and wall the passage of time has created a space open to the weather. (If there were a fire, you could slip through the space and leap to safety — three floors below.) By lunchtime there were piles of snow on the floor beneath each window (on the inside).

By early afternoon there was an icy aura in the rooms that reminded me of my time in the Arctic. I found I had no feeling in my feet, and all my fingers had turned white.

But we paid no attention. We were happy. We were a part, a vital passionate part of … The Theatre! We brought life to the playwright’s words, we breathed greasepaint, we were a vibrant team, a single living entity. Okay, we were slowly freezing to death, but, ach, it’s a small price to pay for one’s art.