To thine own self be true

Misericordia Hospital, that is. People dying can have family and friends in a room which has a fridge and even the capacity to order in personalized meals. They need not be alone or separated from those closest to them.

I can still recall back in 1998, my mother and I leaving a hospital in Winnipeg to go for lunch as my Dad was dying and we came back to find he was gone. So I can really appreciate the convenience of what the former hospital is doing for patients on their way out.

My mother and I, as well as the hospital were sorry that we were not there when he suddenly died in an emergency situation. It is usually preferable–one would think–for people to die with support and not alone or just with people they may not know or recognize.

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or another book: give it, give it all, give it now.”
–Annie Dillard

“Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Be still when you have nothing to say: when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.’
–D.H. Lawrence

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it–wholeheartedly–and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
–Arthur Quiller-Couch

“A sentence should read as if its author, had he a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.”
–Henry David Thoreau

“Only write when your pillow is on fire.”
–Elie Wiesel

totally unnecessary fire, he thought, as the fire rescue zoomed by him in this frosted-over van.

The Westminster Dog Show on the tube and Family Day weekend in AB.

The guy minus a forearm who built his own working forearm out of Lego from 18 on. Now that’s creative technological innovation.

The top CBC TV foreign reporter of all time who survived the Holocaust, got educated at UBC, and worked for CBC up till recently. Went to all the trouble spots of the past last half-century. Amazing guy, amazing life.

Any more doubts about climate change?

It had been months since he had seen his parents and home. The city skyline gradually came into sight after a long flat prairie drive. Suddenly he was passing the familiar landmarks as he entered the outlying district where he used to live. There was the drugstore where he had worked briefly, riding his bike in the deep snow delivering prescriptions. There was the bus stop where his girlfriend had tripped as they once ran for the bus. There was the hospital where his mother had worked and walked blocks to in winter in order to save busfare. There was the little hall where a September Saturday dance had once been and he had been introduced to all his friend’s grade 9 classmates from another school–opening up an entirely new world of amazing possibilities for him.

There were the two streets where he had delivered papers for several years, the building his parents had found him in upstairs when at 5 he wandered off with some strange kids and they showed him how to box, complete with boxing gloves. There was the old store which had a giant cartoon tramp painted on its side, which punned it was a long tramp to the next town. There was the bend in the road where the bowling alley he and his parents had had once bowled in, and the six-storey apartment block they had once lived in–the school a long cold walk across the open sports field in winter.

There was another newer apartment block where a student in a band he used to go see had lived in; a handsome, funny teen who had once charged the Beatles’ plane when it stopped to refuel at the airport–a few years before the student had joined one of the country’s most famous bands (later being fired) and finally being killed as an innocent hiking-passenger in a wild car ride on the same city street late one wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time-night.

There was where the bakery had been before it exploded, killing the baker and others, taking out the rest of the block’s buildings–the bakery he and his new grade 9 friends used to stop at, to eat and comically tear apart loaves of bread on their way home from school–the clothing store where his father had, on credit, bought him dark green leather loafers which never fit right and which finally fell apart–and the barber’s where he had once sat and envied the annual Export A NHL calendars of the Canadiens and Leafs on a facing wall.

Beside the deathly-still vacant lot was the street where, a few houses down, he had gone to in grade 8 with an older teen to see his friend’s uncles’ two Corvettes parked on a driveway–a consummation of his private Route 66 tv show fantasies. And there, further down the main avenue, was the restaurant he had never been in, but which he would finally go into after his 40th school reunion with those same, aged grade 9 friends. And there was the supermarket where his musical friend–now a married, computer expert for another city, had once worked as a bagboy.

He parked the car in the same store’s lot and went in to buy some better quality hamburger. Then he drove across the avenue to the parking lot beside the walk-up near the river where his parents still lived. The same building the big planes passed on their low descents to the airport. His folks were both well and happy to see him, much like the old Corgi cross who slowly got up from her bed. She was obviously very tired and quite ill–‘on her way out’.

After supper, he went to the stove, took out a red saucepan and cooked up some of the hamburger. The dog lay motionless beside him on the floor, her head up, patiently waiting. When the meat was cooked, he put some in her yellow bowl and she limped over and tried to eat. It was the least that he could do, after all this time between, for his close childhood companion.

Later that evening the dog passed away quietly and the family all said goodbye to her peaceful body on the living-room floor. In the long silence that followed that evening, he thought to himself: Everything changes. Everything passes. But inside, he was still glad that he had come home, in time at last, to do one nice, last special thing for his old, never-forgotten friend.

Way-Way Beyond Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock

Life and lifestyles today–how fast-changing everything is everywhere, all the time. ‘Give us this day our multitudinous daily changes’. The present shocks these are creating are more numbing, distracting, and confuting than anything Toffler predicted. Westerners now walk around in a perpetual haze, barely conscious of their immediate surroundings and physical realities. Nothing lasts, nothing can be trusted, no more authorities; there is no more permanence; truths are tougher to find; meanings and purpose gone out the window. No more history, no more memory, no more context; just flux and subjective floating through the chaos and absurdity of daze. We are, literally and figuratively, adrift Nowhere.

(excellent recording with Trial by Jury bonus)

(an indelible memory)

(two of the school leads)

(I and some of the male chorus dressing in Home Ec room)

(In Brigadoon, I played Jock McVeigh and was used as a ‘serving tray’ when our music teacher caught the male chorus trying out an impromptu action I suggested to them to enliven a scene. “Keep it!” he exclaimed, “We’ll use it!” )

even if it would now be considered cultural appropriation for what my school did in 1964-65 in staging the famous Gilbert and Sullivan musical. The first other language I learned some of in any depth was Japanese, not French: “Miya sama, miya sama, o n’mma no maye ni” .

Hard to believe I was once 15 in the male chorus back at Silver Heights Collegiate, Winnipeg, singing fun songs such as “If you want to know who we are”, “A wandering minstrel”, “Behold the Lord High Executioner”, “As some day it may happen that a victim must be found”, “With aspect stern and gloomy stride”, “For he’s gone to marry Yum-Yum”, ” et al.

There we were dressed in colorful costumes made by female teachers, the guys wearing the bald wigs, learning Japanese and singing songs written some 80 years before our time. The show ran in early February in the dead of winter for about 4 nights and there would have been a matinee for the school, too.

Funny thing is that I only remember us being played a short excerpt from a live recording to give us some sense of what the original sounded like–somewhat fast, choppy, and garbled. I liked our enunciated version much better.

That was the first time I had makeup put on me and my third time on stage, the first time musically. In grade 11 (’65-’66), Barry Anderson, our same fantastic music director–one of the greats of Winnipeg music history–had us do Lerner and Lowe’s Brigadoon and I, again, appeared in the male chorus as Jock McVeigh, notably as a ‘serving tray’ carried across the stage. After that, in grade 12 (’66-’67), I finally got a lead part as The Usher in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury, simultaneously playing The Mayor in the school play The Red Velvet Goat, playing the same four evenings.

Last evening as I went off to sleep, I finally (with my CD player and headphones by my bed 55 years later) heard the entire Mikado done by pros and many of the songs came back including the “Miya sama” words. It’s actually a fine musical and still fun to hear and imagine the staging of.

The Mikado, Nanki-Poo, Ko-Ko Pooh-Bah, Pish-Tush, Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing, Peep-Bo, Katisha–all the old character names and featured songs came back in a rush. The operetta began its performance decline around 1990 and ran into controversies after that even though G & S were actually spoofing British culture and pretensions beneath the ‘fantasy’ Asian surface. Productions were increasingly cancelled, though in 2016, a modified version debuted.

I can only remember this school memory as being incredibly formative and my introduction to Japanese culture, including the lyrics memory work. If you’ve never heard this operetta, I’ve included an image of the CD I was listening to. Because it’s an 1880s operetta written at the height of the Victorian British Empire, it is quite uniquely different from any other music you’ve ever heard most likely.