Scenes from a birthday...........

Here are a few snaps from my "blank"-fifth birthday.............

Mrs. Deutschlander

I was seated -- most unfortunately -- beside "Mrs. Deutschlander" yesterday at a dinner.  Not a Canadian citizen herself, she and her professor husband sang the virtues of every country other than Canada the whole evening.  Yours truly could not resist pushing back.  "So, after 16 years here, you are not Canadians, "I said.  "Why is that?" 

"Well, we will be moving back to Germany any day now," she said.  Not fast enough, I thought.  I hadn't realized just how stupid, uninformed and provincial I was until Mrs. Deutschlander filled me in.  Every thought and opinion I proferred was met with...."No, zat's not correct.  You are completely wrong."  Oh, I thought I was just giving my views on....Africa....Alberta....Italy....Spain....unions....Greece.....guilds.....health care.....But I apparently was completely mistaken and ignorant on every count.  "Have you ever lived in Greece?" was her retort.  "Vell we have and you are wrong."  Me, the World Bank, the United Nations, Mark Carney and the International Monetary Fund -- all ignorant and misinformed.   

"Italy is not finished," she pronounced.  Hey, I thought it was -- and, by the way, it is.  "Italy vill always be faboolus," she stated.  What about Greece?  It vill always succeed, she pronounced.  The lawyer and his wife sitting on the other side of her choked.  Later on, when he said, "I congratulate you for biting your tongue so often with our tablemate," I took it as a compliment. 

And as to her husband?  Well, he has been doing "research" at the University of Alberta for 16 years on biophysics and stress on the joints.  Unwisely, I chirped, "It seems to me that stress on the joints is directly related to what we stuff into our gobs."  Well, that went down very badly -- especially with the tubby Mrs. Deutschlander.  (How she could natter on about nutrition with her ample bosom and torso spewing over her belt was a complete mystery?....But I digress.)  What a boondoggle they are reaping in Canada. 

I could go on about all the other things she hectored me about in her many riveting homilies -- like the "fabulous" Christmas party they give every year to show off their "real" tree with "real" German candles -- but I won't.

Unfortunately, one thing into which I did jam my club foot was baby formula.  I was talking about the difficulty of finding baby formula without additives and singing the joys of breast-feeding when the young woman opposite me snapped, "I formula-fed my baby and she is as healthy and happy as can be,"  Oops!  How does one recover from that?  I asked her which formula she used so I could learn from her.  Kind of a weak defence, but I never did find out why she could not breast-feed.  After a while I suspected it was misplaced "convenience". 

 Happily, this dinner afforded me an opportunity to see another side to Calgary.  Many of the wives were seconds and all very high-powered.  This one was the CFO of a bank, that one was the president of an oil company, the other was a prominent lawyer.  And the outfits and jewellery!  Unreal.  "Where did you get that jacket?" I asked one very well-turned-out wife.  New York, Armani.  Well, naturally.

Not a wine snob, I zoned out when the representative of a French winery kept stepping up to the micophone after every course to inform us in excruciating detail about which wine we had just tasted.  The wine eulogies were a bit too elongated for someone who buys the cheapest house brands available, but all good for The Ranchmen's Club, to which the products had been donated.

Keeps our fees down.

All in all, a facinating evening.

Writing

Ernest Hemingway said his greatest novel consisted of one sentence:
"For sale, baby shoes, never worn."

How brilliant is that.  Perfection.

A while ago I wrote a short story about a woman who changed my life.  I have already written about the man who transformed me, Northrop Fry, but this woman did too.  Here is my tribute to her:
________________________________________
Perfection Masked

Going into grade eight was a big step. Because we lived over the school boundary, we couldn’t go to the nearer school, but had to take a streetcar for grades seven and eight and venture into the tough, French part of town. It was a fair hike from the stop to the school and we were often waylaid by the French girls and beaten up because we were middle class and they weren’t. It made you feel guilty about being middle class and English. We were trespassing through their territory and they made sure we paid for the privilege of the thoroughfare they permitted.

Once there, we were safe and supervised in the segregated girls’ schoolyard. When we first came to York Street Public School, we went into grade seven and were treated shabbily by the grade eights. It seemed unfair that you just got out of grade six where you were the senior students, only to be dumped into grade seven where you were again relegated to the lower rung of the pecking order. But now that we were the grade eights, we ruled. It was our turn to treat the grade sevens shabbily. The big question was what form you were going into? In those days (1950s) kids were streamed according to the IQ tests we had to take. There were A, B, C, D and shops classes. A was for the smartest kids. The minute you were told which stream you were in, the groups formed up and you pretty much ignored, from that moment on, anyone who was not in your stream. The relief I felt when I found out I was put into 8-A was huge, but it was immediately tempered by the fact that I knew I would be one of the dumber 8-A kids; all the others were brains.

Getting into that stream also meant the first breach with my female cousins, who had been placed in the B stream. One of the boys actually ended up in D – to everyone’s horror. Now, of course, he is the one with money, thanks to a successful career doing things for others that are actually useful. He can build or fix anything, while the rest of us pay others to merely put up a towel rod. Up until that time, the six of us operated as one big family, due largely to the fact that we all lived within a two-block radius of each other with our mothers totally in charge. This efficient and resourceful matriarchy was presided over with authority and confidence by my diminutive grandmother, from whom the pecking order descended. With three aunts and an uncle, we ate dinner wherever we happened to be at six o’clock. It was like having three mothers and one aunt – my uncle’s wife being the odd one out because she was not blood. Up until I was streamed ahead of some of my cousins, we took all family holidays together, with our fathers and uncles driving from one end of the country to the other. How that qualified as a holiday for those beleaguered and besieged husbands, who toiled in stuffy, unventilated offices without air conditioning all year ‘round, beats me to this day. Imagine spending your two weeks a year with three or four kids crammed into a hot, stuffy car, all the luggage piled on the roof and your back-seat driving wife worrying and shrieking beside you. “My God Henry, there’s a car coming!” To add insult to injury, we didn’t have much money, so roadside lunches, courtesy of the Coleman stove, and cramped cabins at night passed for luxury. I can remember one of my long-suffering uncles sneaking a little rye in the evenings and chain-smoking just to calm down before facing the dreaded packing of the car the each morning.

When it was objectively proven, by means of the IQ test, that I was smarter than some of my cousins, a gap appeared in our relationships. I almost felt guilty about getting into the A stream and sensed a decided chill from then on within our extended family – especially at family gatherings when my rye-drinking uncle made it known how proud of me he was at the expense of his own daughters. But we soon entered a new world, regardless of which grade we were in – a world of boys, more serious sports, hairspray, lipstick and sanitary pads. The chances that I would have stayed close to my cousins, outside of family feasts, were becoming more remote. So grade 8-A I entered.

Getting into 8-A meant we had Miss Anderson for home room. Let me try and describe Miss Anderson. She was tall and ramrod straight. She had to be 65 because our year was her last of teaching before she retired. I had no idea what 65 looked like because she was older than my mother and younger than my grandmother, but to us she was definitely old. She had grey hair, carefully curled in two determined little rows just above the nape of her neck; they never moved. She wore grey wool suits and sensible black, stocky shoes. Her makeup was rigid, her lips thin and her rouge obvious. She never smiled. I knew she was the real deal and I fell immediately in awe of her. She controlled the class simply through demeanor. She never had to raise her voice and never had to send anyone to the principal. She was never in a rush, never hurried anywhere and never chatted. To this day I can see her at the front of the class – queen of her domain, unchallenged and always correct. In her class there was no talking and the hush was so pronounced it literally rang in my ears. I had no way of knowing at the time, but a cliché was in the works because she was to influence the rest of my life.

I had a lot more on my mind that first day than Miss Anderson. I was in a whole new world, with classmates who had come from other schools much different that the WASP environment I had known. There were Jewish kids and I had never met a Jewish person, ever. All the Jewish kids were smart and fearless. There were also poor kids; I had never met a poor kid. There were a couple of Chinese kids and I had never met anyone who was Chinese. There were no black kids. Selflessly and (I thought) valiantly, I became a milk volunteer and helped out at noon with the soup program. The thing about Miss Anderson was that she had no favourites, none. She didn’t care if a kid was Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, rich or poor. If they got the marks, that was all that mattered. The other thing that I loved was that no one was a teacher’s pet in her class. I had never been a teacher’s pet. I was skinny with buck teeth still not fixed by the orthodontist and I had naturally-curly hair, which I could not keep long because it would not behave. I still remembered four-year-old kindergarten, when Miss Earl never picked me to beat the drum because I wasn’t cute and blonde. The whole year, I didn’t get near the drum and it pained me. I had to be content with the triangle and occasionally the tambourine.

I now know that Miss Anderson was a victim of the First World War along with the millions of Canadian sons who were killed fighting it. Doing the math, I realize she must have been born in 1895 and by the time the thousands upon thousands had joined up eagerly and patriotically to commit heroic acts in the mire of blood and guts, she would have been 19. Those young men and her young man were not like the young man I overhead the other day at a local soccer match who, beer in hand, said, “I’d sign up because I haven’t got a job, but I don’t like the odds of coming back.” There were so many killed in that First World War that young women like Miss Anderson had no one to marry, so they had to work and dedicate themselves to being teachers or nurses or secretaries. I thought back then that Miss Anderson wasn’t married because she wasn’t pretty enough. I could not see the young Miss Anderson inside this old woman, but she must have been there. I certainly could not see her as a toddler or a teenager. It seemed to me that she had just appeared as Miss Anderson: teacher without peer. But, of course she must have had other dreams. Perhaps she had said farewell to a love or a fiancé who went gallantly to war and never returned. Had he, Miss Anderson would have been “Mrs.” Someone. She would have disappeared into the anonymity of a Canadian household, been a dutiful wife and mother and would not have touched the lives of as many children as she had. She would have gone to church, held tea parties for her friends and neighbours, raised her small, Protestant brood in a good, Christian home, done her washing on Mondays, her ironing on Tuesdays and her shopping on Wednesdays. She might even have had a touch of sherry on the weekend, but would never have become drunk. Never. But because her fiancé had volunteered to fight for King and Country, Miss Anderson had been liberated to impart her secrets to us. Her brilliance as a teacher would never have shone and so many of us would have been the lesser for it.

Thinking about Miss Anderson (I later somehow learned her Christian name was “Mabel”) as a young woman in her late teens, I began to picture an enthusiastic teenager, an active adolescent and a product of middle-class, southern, Protestant Ontario. Queen Victoria would still have been on the throne in her girlhood, she would have had endless possibilities ahead of her and would not have imagined saying goodbye to her lover, never see or feel him again. When she realized her fiancé would not return to claim her as his bride, she knew she had to devote herself to her craft and her vocation. She had to subjugate her personal will to duty; she had to deny her womanhood, her beauty, her sexuality and her charms. Only 19 or 20, she would have to live her life as a spinster, without ever being able to partake in the communal life of the married woman. She would never be able to join in the life of her church, to make sandwiches or pour tea. These privileges were the exclusive realm of the married woman. Mabel Anderson would have been a virgin at 65. All her life, she would only have been permitted to attend Church services and then forced to retreat to her home. Bridge parties, cocktail parties and Saturday night dances would have been off-limits. A respectable widow had more social dispensations than Miss Anderson. But she accepted all this and knew she had to teach her fatherless children. It was the same after the Second World War, when the baby-boomers arrived – her new charges. I was one of these.

Looking back, I imagine a Miss Anderson who probably had tea and toast for breakfast during the school week. Maybe on her birthday she deviated and had an egg. Her fridge would have been impeccable and after emerging with the egg, boiled or poached would have been the pressing decision facing her. Boiled meant no fuss with the pot, poached meant a bit of clean up, so she probably chose boiled, in spite of the fact that she really preferred poached. When she had been sick as a little girl, a poached egg on toast might have been what her mother had always prepared and it was comfort food for her to this day. Her mind might have shifted back sixty years to the small southern Ontario village house she shared with her mother, father and three brothers. She might have been the only girl, but if the eldest, was probably treated like a boy by her father because he would have expected a male first. When later her brothers came along, her father would still have treated her like a boy and she probably liked it because she was so smart. Her mother would have faded into the background of the household and become the only “female” in the home; everyone else was male. Not that Miss Anderson would ever have had any deviant traits. She remained a girl, but with the expectations given a boy.

In my imagination now, on that morning, as she awaited her egg, she might have enjoyed a reverie so comforting that she closed her eyes to sink more fully into it. Her life so rich and full as a child had been reduced to that of the spinster she had become, after her fiancé had been lost to the Great War. Maybe she had taken a voyage to Europe many years ago and when she visited the graves at Vimy, she might have wondered if he were near, under the soft grass and headstones of the Unknown Soldier.

While I was living my childhood life of 13 years, Miss Anderson was living hers. While I thought a year was a long time, Miss Anderson must have been 52 years old when I was born. The years must have been so long for her.

That last year in grade school, the kids in my class quickly sorted themselves into groups and I gained entry into the strange and wonderous homes of my new friends. I encountered mothers who smoked and was shocked.  Some had a cocktail before dinner.  Scandalous.  When I went after school to my Jewish friends’ homes, I marveled at what they ate and what they didn’t eat. Garlic entered my world, never to depart. I was insanely jealous of girls with pierced ears. Why was this practice verboten in our family? I also wonder now about the kids who never invited you back to their place after school. Why not? Looking back I wonder if someone’s mother might have been an alcoholic and dead drunk at 3:30 in the afternoon. I also wonder if some of my friends were abused in some way and so could not take any chances with their fathers, uncles or grandfathers. Child abuse did not just appear in the last 20 years.

One patent advantage of meeting new girls was that some had older brothers. As the elder in my family, I had only a younger brother who was mostly absent from my aura and a pain in the neck to boot. After he committed suicide years later in his early thirties, I felt badly I had treated him so shabbily at times when we had been children. But all this had not come to pass in that last year before high school and so I plunged happily into friendships with girls whose brothers I had crushes on. Sometimes I really didn’t much care for the girl, but was stuck on her brother, so her house after school was a preferred destination. Not that a boy only one or two years older ever looked sideways at a younger girl, but just to be in the same house and ignored was a heady thrill. Clearly, we were becoming predatory females in our packs and already devising strategies to engage the superior males. Many years later, when I met one such dream brother at a party, I recognized him immediately – even though it had been 35 years since I had last annoyed him. Funnily, I still had the crush. He, for his part, had no idea who I was, but when I reminded him we, tripped down memory lane with gay abandon. Would I have ever picked him as a permanent mate? No, but the old feelings were still there and regardless of the fact that I had made more success of my life than had he, I still looked up to him as the teenage god and football hero he had been.

After school, I met some mothers who actually baked and encouraged us to munch happily on cookies and milk. “Hi girls, I’ve just baked some peanut butter cookies, come on in and enjoy them,” one of my friend’s mothers would say. In our house, cookies were frivolous and superfluous, containing no food value. They were baked only for church bazaars. “Don’t touch the baking in the tins under the sink,” my mother would admonish. “They’re for the church bake sale.” When we tried to sneak a few, tags taped to the tins would warn us off with the message “Do not eat!”

Nevertheless, our house was a regular destination. I now realize that not everyone had had the idyllic childhood I had, with breakfast, lunch and dinner appearing regularly and on time, laundry always fresh and the house clean and tidy. A chemical engineer and scientist, my father did not permit white sugar in our home. The closest we came to dessert was when my grandma came over for dinner – a woman with a purse stuffed with candies and the possessor of the sweetest tooth of anyone I knew. When this lady strode under the lintel and pierced our home, my father cordially allowed cream puffs; they had, he said, “marginal nutrient value” in the cream part. I once asked him why we could not have white sugar and he replied, “Do you know how much sugar cane it takes to produce a teaspoon of sugar?” No, I said. After telling me, he added, “Do you think, dear, it would be normal or healthy to eat that many canes of sugar?” I pictured little children on sugar plantations chewing hopelessly on large canes and grudgingly accepted this explanation. Years later, when I watched a documentary called ‘Big Sugar’, I realized he had been right. Malnutritioned toddlers with no teeth made me think of his ‘no white sugar’ policy in our home, a policy that left me without a sweet tooth and incapable of baking to this day. So, after-school snacks at our place were crackers and cheese or fruit – a practice I see preached from the airwaves of new-wave nutritionists today. Clearly, my old-fashioned parents were well ahead of the curve on this one.

Back then, Miss Anderson encouraged unspoken, but decidedly unfriendly, competition. We had math quizzes and were called upon to stand and solve them on the spot. For someone who still counted on her fingers, this was a daunting challenge. Every Friday afternoon, Miss Anderson would post on the blackboard the names of the students who had scored 100% on the quizzes; mine never appeared. We also had spelling bees, but the most dreaded agony of all was the parsing of the sentence. Randomly, we had to stand up and parse out-loud sentences she would write on the blackboard. They were usually long, tortuous and convoluted, penned by authors like Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy – sentences with clauses of all kinds, adjectival, subordinate, independent, dependent, relative, restrictive and non-restrictive. We had to find the subject of the sentence, the predicate and they had to agree. In our own exercises, we had to identify particles, we had to spot dangling construction, we had to weed out wordiness and we had to eliminate slang (unless, of course, it was used in dialogue). We were horrified daily by dangling, elliptical and misplaced modifiers. Her lessons meandered confidently through the mysteries, beauties, terrors and delights of English grammar and I fell madly in love with my native tongue. Using the dictionary became a joy – an indispensable tool. As Miss Anderson pointed out, “Intelligent people establish the dictionary habit early in life because they know that leaving spelling, pronunciation and meaning to chance is folly.”

When I look back, I think fondly of the wonders of punctuation, the difference between that and which, the joys of the rhetorical question, the tricks of the squinting modifier, the horrors of the straggling sentence, the eloquence of the subjunctive mood, the inscrutability of the vocative, the obscurity of tautology and syllabication and the thrill of upside-down subordination. Miss Anderson was expert at all; there was nothing she did not catch. At first I struggled and fought hard to find the subject of a sentence, coming upon it as often as not at the very end of a long sentence. And let’s not forget “needless shifts in construction.” Back then, a transitive verb stumped me as thoroughly as did a gerund. Now I am able to bore with abandon victims at cocktail parties by informing them that a gerund is a verbal noun. “Shouting upsets the baby,” I will declare, pointing out that “shouting” is the gerund. Some people pretend they know this; many walk quickly away; still others are fascinated. The fascinated I admit are few, but when I meet one, we set off into a world of glorious veneration of our mother tongue. All this was the gift of Miss Anderson. She was akin to a skilled doctor, with her black bag of grammatical rules and remedies – an expert in her field. She cared not for our corp, only for what she could “cure” in our minds – for what she could impart of our native tongue and its delicious intricacies, for what she could implant forever into our brains. My father, the scientist, began to make sense to me.

The school year progressed routinely, with me remaining one of the dumber kids in that oh-so-smart class. One of the other kindred lesser lights was a very quiet boy who sat behind me, near the back of the class. When I saw him on television many years later, I was shocked to see that he had become one of the most successful national CBC broadcasters and journalists in the country. But maybe I should not have been so taken aback because although quiet, he did manage good marks. Did Miss Anderson also influence him in his vocation, as she had me? I decided she had.

For Miss Anderson, her last year must have been unfolding with both relief and dread. For 45 years she had not had to think about anything. She had greeted each new flock of children as they entered her world and perfunctorily bidden them farewell when they departed – all enhanced by her skill and dedication, whether they had known it at the time or not. She had most likely lived with her mother until the latter had died years earlier and so consequently lived alone in a tidy apartment. She must have had cousins scattered throughout southern Ontario, but had not kept in contact with them. Her brothers would have married conventionally and their wives would have taken no interest in the remote Miss Anderson: spinster/teacher. With families of their own, they had nothing in common with her. Their families were personal; hers were universal. Their children were special; hers were ordinary. She had seen so many, but had never been influenced by their parents, their wealth, or lack of it, whether or not they were wards of the Children’s Aid, or spoiled and privileged. Her charges were little people and it was her duty to try and make something of them in spite of themselves.

“Maybe I should take another trip to England,” she might have wondered aloud as March turned into April. In her staff room there were posters featuring England and France, the fresh idea of the new art teacher, Miss Thompson, who said she thought the room needed cheering up. Miss Thompson could usually be counted on to be annoying. In fact, the posters almost made Miss Anderson recoil from such a trip. When she entered the staff room, the other teachers were now soliticious of her. Nearing retirement, Miss Anderson was patronized at times by young women she knew would only teach until they married. “Hi Mabel, sit down. Would you like some tea? I’ve just made a fresh pot.” These new teachers were not the dedicated yeomen, of which she had been one. And why were all the principals men? Miss Anderson had reached the pinnacle of the teaching ladder, but would not have been offered the job of principal. Such positions were offered exclusively to men. With so much to offer, she was better off as a teacher, but it certainly wasn’t just. The principal that year was Mr. Pocock and he taught grade seven. He was so lax that he even permitted us to mark our own tests. Naturally, we all cheated.

By chance after school one day, I rode the bus with Miss Anderson on the way downtown. I had a doctor’s appointment, but she must have lived there. To see her sitting quietly just as any other passenger, was completely bizarre to me. On the bus, we were equals and she was just another rider among many others. She was not in charge here, the bus driver was; she was simply a paying passenger like I, but it did not seem right. The bus driver was as much an expert in his work as she. Both were dedicated to their respective vocations. “Transfer please,” she said to him, as she deposited her fare. He didn’t even reply, just ripped off the transfer and gave it to her without looking, as if she were a nobody in his domain. Naturally, she did not speak to me. Socializing with a student would have been preposterous; in fact, she didn’t even say hello, just took a seat. I deliberately sat well behind her, not only out of fear, but also so I could study her grey pin curls from behind and perhaps discover something new that had not emerged or been revealed in her classroom. I accomplished neither. What could she have been thinking? It did not occur to me until I saw her on the bus that she could possibly have been a person with a life outside our classroom. When I heard later that she had taken that trip to England and France after she had retired, perhaps she had been thinking about it then. Vimy and her long-dead love would have been waiting patiently for a tender reunion. It makes me weep to this day.

In the spring of that final year Miss Anderson’s transformation took place in my mind.  She announced that every Friday afternoon she would be reading aloud from 'Great Expectations', by Charles Dickens. Not having heard of the novel, all I could think of was “Perfect, we can just sit and doze for an hour every Friday afternoon and not do any work.” I didn’t wonder why she had chosen 'Great Expectations', but as she read, I began to understand. As she read, I encountered Miss Havisham, the bride left at the altar by the intended groom. In the novel, Miss Havisham is an old woman, abandoned on her wedding day and as a result has given up on life. She wears a yellowed wedding gown and haunts a decrepit house. Miss Anderson had not given up on life, we were her life. Yet, I pictured her poignantly as Miss Havisham, living alone in her little apartment, covered in cobwebs, donning her wedding dress every evening and wandering among the same wedding presents and unfulfilled dreams that were Miss Havisham’s world.

It was during her trip to Europe, after she had retired, that we heard through a Church-lady friend of my mother’s that Miss Anderson had indeed finally married. But not in any conventional way and not to any unadventurous widower back home. No, Miss Anderson married a man 30 years her junior – someone she had met on her travels in France. The story varied in its telling, but peeling off the luxurious and salacious embellishments, I gathered she had taken a tour of the cemetery at Vimy and afterward had begun a relationship with the son of the owners of the small hotel where she was staying. Suddenly, I could picture it perfectly. Miss Anderson, visiting her long-dead love among the unknown graves, Miss Anderson, shedding her age and cares, Miss Anderson, reverting to the young girl she had been when in love………all this must have been apparent to the young man at the hotel. She must have gone to the gravesite old and ordinary, but returned young and transformed. The world is a looking-glass and gives back to everyone a reflection of his or her own face. Unbeknownst to any of us, Miss Anderson had more than one face. The Mabel Anderson who had taught us and had betrothed her wisdom and aloofness to her unsophisticated students had other personas – personas that finally found release in France. Outside the inflexible and unyielding United Church rules which so rigidly governed her life in Canada, she had at last been able to flower. She picked up where she had left off and at 65, had started a new life with a new love. She never moved back to our town, how could she? Trying to imagine her bringing her new husband to Church or to the supermarket I realized the absurdity of the scene. They disappeared and vanished into Toronto, gone from our lives forever. But I knew from then on, perfection always masked a secret.
____________________________________

I hope you enjoyed my story.

Dogs have it right

John George Diefenbaker summed it up perfectly back on November 1st, 1971:  "Dogs know best what to do with polls (sic)." 

How right he was, judging by the Alberta provincial election results of the other day.  Everyone was way off!  I suspect a lot of people went into the booths with no clue how they were going to vote -- regardless of what they might have told pollsters the day before.  Minds were changed or made up on the spot, with voters on the left holding their noses and voting "red" PC to keep the far-right Wildrose out and those on the far right panicking and reverting to the more moderate PCs.

Apparently, it was not Alison Redford who swayed people; her personal popularity hovers at only 40%.  But I am sure she is convinced she won because of her personal popularity and the party's platform.  I think she may have another think coming.  Not that I am a fan of Danielle Smith -- someone else who needs to give her head a shake and get rid of the bigots who did her in at the last minute.  You simply cannot go around denouncing gays and telling voters you should be elected because you are a white male.  Albertans don't want that image anymore.  And frankly, cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats notwithstanding, judging by the multiculturalism that is Calgary, it's simply no longer reality.

Yes, Canada's 13th prime minister was a sharp old guy.  I would not have wanted to tangle with him in an election. 

Pythons

Well, finally got my cowboy boots.  Had wanted to get snakeskin boots at the 'Alberta Boot Company', but balked at the outrageous price -- $500, or so.  What!!??  But there is another western-wear and tack outfit here, 'Lammle's', pronounced "Lamb-lees" -- and they were having a huge sale, so in I went earlier this week.  Walls and walls and shelves of boots floored me.  Immediately attracted to a pair, I asked the sales girl to fetch them.  Not leather, I nonetheless loved them and "stole" them for $79.00.  They were beige and had gorgeous multi-coloured embroidery throughout.  Who would know they are not leather? I asked her.  "I won't tell," she said. 

But, of course, when you "steal" something, you have to get even.  I asked if they had any snakeskin boots and she said they had had a pair, but had sold them, "but I can get a pair from our Stephen Street store and call you," she added, helpfully.  Do, I said and walked out with my fake, but gorgeous, boots.  The phone rang this afternoon.

"Hi Mrs. Marley-Clarke, this is Amber at Lammle's.  The snakeskin boots came in this afternoon and we will hold them for you for a week, give us a call."  Before going there, I called to see what the price was.  $149.  What??!!!  Cheap!  What colour?  Brown and green. 

So I bought them.  They are gorgeous.  Python.  Green and brown. 

I also bought B a leather sports jacket, just so he doesn't balk at my extravagance. 

You have to "get into" Calgary.  It's a great city!   

 

  

A few perks for turning "blank"-five

When people find out (because I tell them) I am about to turn "blank"-five, they say the nicest things -- or tell the kindest lies. "You can't be 'blank'-five! You certainly don't look it." All very nice, but now and then someone puts their $$$ where their mouth is.

Like today.

We went to "Classic Jack's Grill" on 17th Avenue for lunch and over came the manager. Jamie is the same guy who "comp-ted" our drinks the other super-busy Friday night because we actually had to wait five minutes for the waitress. Who does that??!! So it was "hail fellow well met" and next thing I know, he is sitting down chatting with us. When he learns about my upcoming (hideous) birthday, he promptly fills out a $50 gift card for a visit to his other restaurant in the SW and comp's part of our meal today. Not only that, he gives us a discount card which, when filled out, will give us a free lunch. As I said, who does that?! He even insisted that we let him know when we plan to go because he wants to go with us and "make a night of it".

Only in Calgary.

Oh, and by the way, deciding what to wear, had a hunch I might be able to get into a pair of silk, cream trousers I have not been able to wear for a few years. Fit perfectly.  What a good day!

Calgary portrait

So, life in Calgary is agreeing with us. We are both healthier and happier. People are so young and enthusiastic here. I absolutely love it! Here I am in my living room on the weekend, feeling better than ever:

One thing that makes one feel at home is having one's "stuff" around. Our living room here is the same as our living room in Ottawa. When you have your "stuff", as George Carlin called it, you are home.

Me and the Stanley Cup

So, here we are hanging out with the Stanley Cup at last weekend's hockey tournament:

And here is the famous Tiger Williams, bugging the little kids:

The great Bryan Trottier:

And finally, Mr. Hockey himself, Gordie Howe:

What a great event!

Now, that's hockey

Tiger Williams' nose still looks like it was flattened by a steam roller, Lanny McDonald's moustache is now grey, Bryan Trottier is still crazy, and Mark Napier is as gorgeous as ever. Enjoyed these stars and many other old-time NHL-ers this morning at a fabulous charity game here in Olympic Park in support of alzheimer's.

And who was also there, front and centre? None other than "Mr. Hockey" himself, Gordie Howe! What a great guy. When I read about this event, I knew we absolutely had to go. And it did not disappoint.

The first big thrill upon walking through the arena doors was the Stanley Cup sitting there for all to touch and admire. Thank God I had grabbed the camera on the way out the door. Both B and I had our pictures taken beside it. Its handler was never far, but I was nonetheless amazed at how accessible it was. Fans were able to get right up to it; we were no exception.

Taking our seats, I spied Gordie across the ice and walked all around the arena to get close to him. Stood right behind him, but the glass separated us. Hopeful, I pounded on it, trying to get "Mr. Elbows" to turn and look at me. No luck, but I did get a great profile shot of him and will post it soon. Theo Fleury was playing, Sheldon Kennedy, Curtis Joseph, Jamie Macoun, Marty McSorley, Gary Roberts...big, big names from the days when I actually knew and watched hockey. And skate! Man, these guys can still fly! Absolutely beautiful to watch such talent having such a great time -- without checking, just great hockey.

It was boundless entertainment and so Canadian.

When the light went on

It was in "Religion 101" class in 1965, Carleton University when the light went on in my 18-year-old adolescent brain. Although I had liked English in high school and was a pretty good writer, I had no clue about literature, save the mandatory Shakespeare, the predictable "The Lord of the Flies" and the usual prescribed poets. That all changed when our professor announced one Friday afternoon (I even remember the day of the week) we had a special guest lecturer and in walked Northrop Fry.

I had no clue who he was. All I thought was, "Great, I can pretty much zone out for this guy." He was very tall and very patrician, with an abundant shock of grey hair, thick glasses and a three-piece suit. I now know he was 53 years old because I now know this is the centenary of his birth; he looked older, but when you're 18 who doesn't. Our professor sat down and the U of T Professor began to speak. But when he began to spin his tale of our world, I snapped out of my dead "zone". I became mesmerized pretty quickly.

Northrop Fry was a renowned literary critic and writer and what he laid out amazed me. He began pretty well at the beginning of time and without notes, wove his way through history, literature, psychology, sociology, science, religion, politics......you name it.....to the present day. He described the civilized world in terms of the literature it had produced and I was dumbfounded. Oh, so this is what it's all about, I said to myself. It's all about people, what they wrote about and what they passed down -- it's all about society, civilizations and tribes and how they all wrap together to get us where we are today. And Fry did it quietly in an hour. Suddenly I knew English was what I had to major in.

All this came back to me this morning as I listened to our beloved CBC and Jian Ghomeshi, who was doing his "Q" from Moncton. Who knew Northrop Fry had grown up in Moncton? But as Ghomeshi began to interview the woman who headed up the annual "Fry Festival", I stopped what I was doing, sat down and listened closely. It all came back to me, as I realized just how privileged I had been to actually be in the presence of the brilliant Professor, "Norrie" Fry -- the man who changed my life.

Fry insisted on teaching at least one first-year class every semester -- even when he was very famous. Thankfully, I was one of the lucky ones to have heard him before I knew what I was doing. He turned my world into a sort of crystal, enabling me to see clearly the many differing facets that make up the whole. How very lucky I was.

The Stampede without The Stampede

Have been musing about going to The Stampede. I mean, seriously, here we are in Calgary and I have not been able to wrap my brain around tolerating The Stampede. First off, I hate crowds. I also hate parking and walking. I went nowhere near The Ex, the Tulip Festival, Winterlude, the Blues Festival, the Folk Festival....or anything else resembling a "love-in" when we lived in Ottawa. Hideous.

As I have told you, we are now members of The Ranchmen's Club. Low and behold, I actually read the newsletter the other day and learned they have many Stampede-related events to enjoy. The one that grabbed me was the BBQ, chuckwagon races, grandstand show and fireworks. Hey, we just show up at the Club, valet-park the car, chow down on the food, get into a bus, hit The Stampede, slide into reserved seats, enjoy the show and get bused back. I'm there. The only fear I have is a horse dying during the chuckwagon races, happens every year. Spare me that one.

I will be wearing cowboy boots. Did I tell you my darling neighbour gave me a pair? What a sweetie. Told her I wanted to buy a pair and didn't she come over with a gorgeous black pair she had bought, but which didn't fit her properly. I love and have worn them a few times. But I still intend to hit The Alberta Boot Company to get a snakeskin pair.

I do love Alberta!

Bonnets and new shoes

Easter, another feast that makes me think of my mother. She kept the Stapledon/Lord family traditions alive for every occasion. On Good Friday, it was always hot-cross buns; on Easter Sunday, it was always the huge ham, festooned with pineapple rings and studded with bright red cherries. This year, I cooked the turkey I still had in the freezer from Christmas -- yes, my famous "utility" bird -- another of my mother's meat department victories. And when I remove the giblets, I always think of her. She loved nothing better than boiled giblets and bread and butter for lunch the day she was cooking the turkey. And you had to keep the water to make the gravy later; giblet and potato water made the best gravy.

Every Easter we girls were always taken to Armstrong and Richardson's, or Kiddy Kobler when we were younger, and bought new shoes. We also always wore Easter bonnets and little, white gloves to church on Easter Sunday. I remember loving the feel of new shoes. My love affair with shoes and hats started early. Wore my "Queen" hat to Mass on Sunday and -- apart from the beautiful Nigerian women, who always wear spectaclar head adornments -- I was the only woman sporting a hat.

My mother had other quirky traits. She never cooked with garlic, for example. Garlic and pierced ears were for "immigrants". Woe was me the day I came home with pierced ears! And as a young woman, when I discovered garlic, my Dad exclaimed over a meal, "This is delicious! What's in it?" "Garlic," I replied. "Oh, we don't eat garlic," said my very proper mother.

We were so different. As I said in her eulogy, "My mother was as much a surprise to me as I to her."

I must have blocked it out of my mind

Spent two full days trying to get our computer fixed. What a nightmare! Neither mail nor internet were coming in, so first I had to make a call to Shaw to see if the connection was the problem. Of course, you have to wait two to three hours to get an agent. At least they offer a feature which lets you hang up and get a callback, but you still have to wait around. After an hour on the phone with a technician, crawling around on the floor, tracing wires, unplugging and re-plugging them, it was determined the connection was not the problem. "You'll have to call the Norton antivirus people 'cause something is blocking your mail," he finally said. "Thanks, I already know that," I said, exasperated.

Before I called Norton, I decided to make another call to Shaw to see if another technician could help. You never know. So, it was another two-hour wait and another hour of tryng-this-and-doing-that-and-checking-the-other to get to the same conclusion. Not the connection.

Then it was off to Norton. Don't need to get into the three hours of that ordeal. What gets me every time is that you have to explain the same thing over and over to one guy, then another one and then another one. Why is that?! The final step was forking over $60 to be transferred to a very "expert" expert in the Phillipines. Yep, you guessed it, after uninstalling Norton completely, he still could not fix the problem. "What about my $60?" "Oh, you'll get a call tomorrow confirming they will refund that immediately." Yeah, right.

At 11:30 that night, the second Shaw technician actually called me back on his own unheard-of initiative to say he had thought of another way to correct the problem. "Just go to 'system restore' and pick a date when everything was working and hit 'enter'," he offered. He walked me through it, I hit "enter" and presto-change-o, two seconds later everything was working perfectly! Amazing! But how can I have had to go through all that rigmarole for two days to get a solution. Scandalous.

But it was not over because remember, the Norton guy had me remove Norton, but, obviously I needed it back. After carefully weighing the pros and cons of going back to Norton, the cons had it. I called an independent computer repair company and made a "remote" appointment to get help re-installing it. At the appointed hour, "Mitch" called me back from Atlanta, Georgia (have to admit his accent was completely captivating and made the ordeal much less of a tribulation). Another "ureka" moment took place and everything was back to normal.

Until it happens again. B will be dealing with the hydra next time.

Just when I was wondering....

...what to blog about (because a couple of people have asked when a new post was coming), the phone rang. It was a young man canvassing for the Wildrose Party. He asked if I was a supporter and I demured. As I have said, in our house growing up there were four taboo subjects:
Sex,
Money,
Religion, and
Politics.
I then added that I had yet to be enumerated and he said...wait for it..."What do you mean?" "What do you mean, what do I mean?" I asked. "No one has come around yet to enumerate us." "I don't understand," he said. I said: "Are you telling me that you are canvassing for the Wildrose in the run up to an election and you don't know what being 'enumerated' means?" I almost shrieked it. "No," he said again.

"You can't be serious," I added. "You don't understand, it's not like that, I am just calling to see if you are supporting the Wildrose," he said again. Incredulous, I hung up.

So, there you have it, folks. Complete ignorance of the way the electoral system works. As I have said many times, you could not make this up.