"Delicious Darren"

I have to give the credit to "G", one of the women with whom I swim, because she coined the term for this absolutely beautiful young man.  "How are we going to remember his name?" I asked her the other morning.  "How about Delicious Darren?" she suggested.  Perfect. 

So that is what he has remained because he really is delicious to look at -- which is more than I can say for myself and most of the rest of us in the lanes -- except for "B", the only guy who should be legally permitted to wear a Speedo in public.  After chatting with "delicious" between laps over a number of weeks, we finally introduced ourselves.  The thing about this young man is that he is so polite, something I can't say for many others at the Y.  Young men today are just so rude and disrespectful.  They don't hold the door, they don't ever say, "after you" and they don't speak when spoken to.  Pathetic.  A man held the door for me this morning, but he was middle-aged so that explained it. 

There is a chatting/pecking order at the pool.  Firstly, you have to be a pretty good swimmer for the regulars to talk to you.  Secondly, you have to have a sense of humour (sadly lacking in so many today) and thirdly, you better not swim in the "fast" lane unless you are actually fast.  There is also the matter of who talks to whom?  M talks to me because R does; B talks to me because E does; T talks to me because L does and LA shows me great respect by flipping me the bird every time she sees me.  "OMG," exclaimed someone the other day.  "That woman just flipped you the bird!"  "I know and it's a great compliment because she's a multiple Iron Man," I explained.  "She doesn't flip just anyone the bird, you know." 

G and I told "delicious" what we had decided to dub him and he laughed in appreciation.  Now, if anyone had told a young woman she was "delicious", she'd probably sue them for a million dollars. 

No one is having any fun anymore -- except I. 

The pudding

That's where the proof is in the case of one James Bartleman.  He's the 'Chipewas of Mnjikaning First Nation' band member who grew up to be the 27th Lieutenant Governor of Ontario.  Following on the heels of my recent blog, entitled "Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief" (March 12, 2017), it occurred to me that Bartleman would never have risen to such heights had it not been for the residential school he attended, yet damned to death, in a speech I had the misfortune to hear him give a few years ago. 

Not expecting him to go off on us, I had invited him to be the guest speaker at a gathering of the Royal Commonwealth Society a few years ago.  I mean, here was a guy who was well-educated, had been the chancellor of the Ontario College of Art and Design and had had a distinguished, 35-year career in Foreign Affairs before being named Lieutenant Governor.  I expected a civilized professional, not someone who would devote his entire talk to the evils of residential schools.

But that's exactly what he did.

I wanted to hide under the table at which I was seated.  Not daring to look at anyone, I kept my gaze averted from Bartleman and stared straight ahead for the half hour he raved on.  I mean, it wasn't just a reference or two, it was pure vitriol!  Maybe it was because we represented the Commonwealth -- the root of all evil in his mind -- that prompted him to give 'er to all of us trapped in our seats.  Did he think we personally had something to do with the running of the schools -- the same schools which afforded him every opportunity he had been given? 

I was shocked.  Obviously, it had never occurred to him that he owed everything to his education and subsequent hard work.  He was raised in Muskoka and had he not gone to residential school, would probably still be eking out a subsistence living on the reserve, or more likely dead.

As I have said many times, all boarding schools are residential schools and it's time natives  -- most of whom have never set foot in one -- to shut up and get on with it.   

Of course...

...she had to be a woman and a francophone to boot.  I refer to the token, politically-appointed principal of McGill University Suzanne Fortier, who bowed to money and forced Andrew Potter to resign.  How this mighty university has fallen.  Potter wrote a criticism of Quebec in the wake of the disastrous response to a recent snowfall in Montreal, where cars were stranded for many hours and two people actually perished awaiting rescue.

Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente and National Post scribbler Andrew Coyne have both written excellent and scathing reports about this debacle, so I won't go into a lot of detail, but basically Quebec politicians and McGill bagmen of all stripes frothed at their mouths over his criticism, so Fortier folded.

It's appalling that a university principal would refuse to stand behind a professor just because he expressed views a lot of people didn't like.  Hey, when people are stranded and die because you can't get a plow out, somebody's ass should be fired.  How about the Minister of Transport?  But no, Couillard instead dumped the assistant deputy minister.  What BS that is.  Montreal is the snow capital of Canada, but could not get emergency vehicles and plows out to deal with the situation? 

My next questions is, what is a francophone doing as principal of a distinguished and venerable English institution like McGill?  Ludicrous.  It would never stand were an Anglophone made principal of the University of Quebec, let me tell you, which is why I label her a token.

Canada is such a loser of a country in so many ways.          

 

OMG!

Finance minister Bill Morneau has his head buried so far in the sand you can see it coming out of his a--.  The budget today shows just how out of it the Liberals, under that idiot Trudeau, really are.  How can we be looking at a deficit of $100 billion down the road??!!??!!

It's complete insanity.  God help our children and grandchildren. 

And to top it off, the government is claiming this budget focusses on women.  Oh great, let's make women the scapegoats for a shitty budget.

To top it off (sorry to say that again, but there seems no end to the topping off of the topping off!), the asinine New Democrats here in Alberta have gone wild with deficit spending.  Saskatchewan is the only province with a realistic budget, just released.  Why we don't have a sales tax in this dumb province is beyond me!?  Even a two percent tax would help erase the deficit. 

But no.  So depressing.    

I didn't like it, so I went

I refer to my whirlwind trip to Toronto last weekend to attend the funeral of my late cousin's widower.  Reading his 'Globe and Mail' obituary, I was nonplussed by the one line with which she had been dismissed:  "Predeceased by wife Betty-Anne."  After more than 35 years of marriage, that was not enough.

"I'm going," I said to B.  So I did.  Not only did the obituary laud mainly his short marriage to his most recent wife as the primary relationship, but the speech given by her daughter also went on and on about how this latest woman and he had been soul-mates who told each other every day how lucky they were to have met. 

Really?  What does that do to the long marriage he had had with my cousin?  Basically, trash it. 

I didn't like it.

Up at 4:30 a.m. to board a 7 a.m. flight to Toronto (ugh), I was welcomed by my dear son with whom I spent a long-overdue, one-on-one weekend.   That part was such a gift.  I had messaged my cousin in Ottawa to see if he would be going to represent our side of the family.  "I don't see a need for me to go," he replied.  Really?  You are the uncle of her sons, I a mere second cousin, yet you didn't think you needed to attend?  Was he not learning the same expected behaviours as I at the knee of our mothers?  His attitude meant I really had to go to support her "boys".  When I walked in they both immediately came over to embrace me and we all had a good, group cry because I still represent the embodiment of their late mother.

Tales from TO, the "centre of the universe"?  The 401 is a nightmare of 12-lane insanity.  I was terrified, in spite of the fact that my son is such a good driver he could turn professional.  Air Canada remains a crappy airline.  "Why do you serve French wine on a national Canadian airline?" I asked the stewardess.  "It's been like that for years," she replied, not answering my question. 

In spite of the fact that my last-minute decision to go to this funeral cost $1,700, I regret not a minute.  Someone had to hold up the side. 

Visited their old house, the scene of many "crimes".  We had many, many wonderful lost weekends in that house. 

 



             

Well, well, well

Having gone from knowing nothing to knowing some things to assuming others, I now find I really knew nothing.  I refer to my genes. 

As an adoptee, I lived in blissful ignorance of my genetic heritage until I was about 29, when a pregnancy awoke wonderings about my birth family.  What would I give birth to?  What genetic forces were at play?  I had no clue.  Pre-internet, I had to do arduous library research to find my birth mother and when I did, learned she had died of lung cancer at 49.  But she was a smoker, so I have avoided that fate. 

A few years before he died, my great uncle informed me that my great-grandmother had been a Mohawk from the Tyendinaga Reserve in Napanee who had married off-reserve and moved to Kingston, where my mother and her siblings were raised.  He had great stories about this woman and her skills, about how..."she had no teeth, smoked a pipe and was the only one who could chop wood in the frozen winters.  We learned so much from her," he had said when he told me about this great-grandmother. When her husband died, he added, she immediately moved back to the reserve..."to be with her people".   

Wow!  I have Indian heritage, I thought.  All wrong!  For some unknown reason, this woman lived on the reserve, but she was not native.  All this I have now discovered thanks to a reality check from "23 and Me".  And what is my genetic profile?

One hundred percent European, with 94.2% British and Irish!  As to Native?  0.0%.

OMG!  The birth-family folklore has now been trashed.  Did my great-uncle know?  Obviously not, or he would not have told me all about her.  Yes, she lived on the reserve, but she was as pure white as the driven snow.  Why would she have lived on an Indian Reserve?  And what about my birth father?  He was said to have been of German and Austrian descent, but with only 1.5% of my genes in that pool, this is now another fanciful fabrication.

So, the myths have been exploded and I find I am a pure-bred Anglo.  The other thing I have discovered is that I possess none of the genes for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or breast cancer -- all good news.  But make no mistake, as a tax-paying Canadian, I will continue to take issue with the natives who insist on doing everything in their power to oppose every wealth-generating initiative in this wonderful country.   

But for today, it's Happy St. Patrick's Day to all my genetic kin!   

Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief

So, Conservative senator, Lynn Beyak, is now being vilified for saying out loud that residential schools may have actually done some good for some students.  Hell, vilified?  If the elites could string her up on the nearest tree, or horse whip her, they would in a heart beat.

Frankly I agree with her.  There is no way every minute of every day was torture and hell for every student.  The organizations that ran these schools did so with the best of intentions.  The fact that bad things happened at times is just real life in any boarding school. 

What about Britain, where upper-class parents are not trusted to raise their own children in the "British" way?  Does no one think children were abused at these schools?  Of course they were.  And even public day schools, such as the ones I attended, were rife with the strap, administered by the principal, and regular beatings in the school yard for anyone and everyone.  Did teachers or parents do anything to object?  No.  That's just the way it was.

My question is, what would have happened had native children been left to grow up on the reserve?  For one thing, they would have had no written language (because natives did not develop writing) and would have remained as isolated in poverty and misery as those living on these desolate and miserable reserves remain today.  I have a status, off-reserve friend and he bemoans the fact that natives did not integrate into mainstream Canadian society.  "Why oh why didn't we all get off the reserve?" he laments.  Why?  Because the Indian Act and Reserve system are the mechanisms by which the money flows to native leaders. 

That's why.

Senator Murray Sinclair, himself a native, compared the senator who spoke up to the Holocaust and Hitler's atrocities.  Really?  Sinclair is the same guy who headed up the travelling six-year "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" -- the one that cost taxpayers $60 billion and paid natives $4.172 billion. 

I'll say this about that commission:  It might have been about "reconciliation", but it certainly wasn't about "truth".  Truth is objective.  Listening to hundreds of subjective accounts of school "survivors" does not mean anyone got anywhere near the truth. 

Thanks in part to residential schools, we now have many Indian doctors, lawyers and other professionals.  The ones suffering are those living in squalor under Indian chiefs on God forsaken reserves.  It's tragic.     

Where I stand

Dear Editor,

In spite of the lofty rhetoric espoused for "International Women's Day", women often remain their own worst enemies.  It begins with the "mean girls" in elementary school and just carries on from there.
............................
This was another of my letters, published yesterday in The Calgary Herald and it pretty much sums up where're we're at.  While everyone was falling all over themselves, taking stands and spouting off in print, in the House, on tv and by mouth, I was pointing out how little progress had actually been made.  I don't count myself in that still-struggling hoard, because I have done very well on all fronts.  I received a good education, had a great career and raised a family and step-family -- all while staying in the workforce.

In the late sixties, my generation was the first cohort of "women's lib".  The pill had come along to rescue us from the ever-constant fear of unwanted pregnancy so many girls went a bit crazy until a lot of us figured out this anything-goes-free-love-BS was not working for women.  Oh sure, the guys were having a ball, but instead of our having as liberated a time as they, we felt taken advantage of.  Because we were.

While I knuckled down and began my career, others hit Woodstock and went off the rails with sex an' drugs an' rock an' roll.  People "turned on, tuned in and dropped out", as Timothy Leary ill-advised, to the sad detriment of many.  It was undoubtedly my conservative upbringing, but I smelt a rat.  Turns out there was a rat to be smelt. 

But the one thing I held onto was never to be beholden to a man for money.  "Dear, may I have $2?  What do you want it for?"  No, that would not work for me, still wouldn't.  But joining groups, protesting and damning men was never my thing because I saw no return in such an approach.  I just kept working and when my kids came along I just kept working.  Aligning myself with hostile women's groups -- or any group -- did not seem a good plan at any point along the way.  Instead I worked my tail off for some of the most successful men in any workplace.  Ministers of the Crown, private sector executives, public service managers -- you name them, I worked for them.  And by the way, they were not interested in your personal life, your marriage or your kids.  Have a problem?  Hire someone. 

It paid off because I kept getting ahead and making more money while the protestors became mired in ghettos such as "women's and gender studies".  Instead of working in the real world, many highly-educated women did a 'Timothy Leary' and dropped out to study why they weren't getting ahead.  Duh?  It all remains a boring, never-ending cycle of nowhereness. 

If I have one piece of advice for women it's never quit the workforce to raise children -- even if every cent of your salary goes to child care.  Hang in there because if you don't, when you're forty you'll regret it.  Women who tell me it's a privilege to be able to stay home and rear their children are frauds because such women "want it all" without working.  Not only did they take up a seat in an institute of higher learning at great expense, they also betrayed the very rights my generation worked so hard to achieve. 

When I retired I made a list of everyone who had mentored me over 40 years.  Guess what?  There wasn't a woman on it.  But a "mean girl" list would have been long indeed.  In my opinion, stick with the winners.  Usually male.  Protest all you like, but I have yet to meet a woman whose placard-waving has turned her into a successful man. 



 
 


 

Debtors' prison

That's where we'll be heading with yet another trip by B to the US.  Unfortunately for us, his grandchildren live there and more unfortunately, we have been unable to fly them here for a visit.  For one reason or another, they never seem to be able to get here, which is a shame because to them, Grandpa is some old guy who schleps into town every now and then from.........who knows where?  Some place called "Calgary" in some other place called "Canada".  They have no idea of our life here in one of the most beautiful places on earth. 

There are no Rocky Mountains in Houston. 

Over the years, we have spent an estimated $25,000 after-tax dollars (which means we had to earn $50 K) to visit his daughter, her husband and their children in the US.  That's a sh-t-load of money and when you consider the dismal exchange rate sits at around 30%, it now costs $1.30 to buy one US dollar.  Scandalous.  And obviously, money spent on getting there means we can't do much of anything else.  So, I sit and stew looking at four walls and snow banks.  And I'm not including trips to Spain and Calgary when I do the math.

But that's the price exacted for B to have a relationship with his grands and them to have one with him.  Having had very involved grandparents for my kids and step-kids, I know how valuable such relationships are; that's why we moved to Calgary.  Not to be egotistical, but I think it a real loss they do not know me because I have a lot to offer children.  Heck, not just children, but most people with whom I interact.  But alas, it is not to be because, a) we really can't afford the airfare for both of us to fly there and, b) because I find I have nothing in common with that part of the world and the people who inhabit it.

Let's face it, there are Americans and then there are Texans.  While a few of the former might have a clue where Canada is, the latter haven't.  They have a concept of Canada, but don't really give a toss about anyplace except Texas.  Canadians are viewed as a quaint curiosity by the average Texan, who also regards Canada as a commie country.  And as for the affluent women I have met there?  Think 'The Real Housewives of Atlanta', only white.

While I fully and proactively support his visits, and am usually the one who suggests them, I don't have to like the situation.  It's all very frustrating, but as I always say, it's not cancer, Nancy, so shut up.      

Seriously?

How can Alberta be taken seriously when our premier looks like a harridan.  (I am not using a question mark because this is a rhetorical question.)  Anyone with a mess of dyed-blonde hair hanging in clumps and strings, as hers does at all times, is simply neither professional, nor credible.  Something happens to a woman when she makes the decision to dye her hair blonde.  Unfortunately, she becomes a "dyed blonde".   

And how she can hoot with laughter when this province is going down the tubes is both beyond me and an insult to all Albertans.  I rest my case: