To thine own self be true

Hugh, my oldest school friend (grade 1, 1955) visiting in Sept. 2014. We revisited the olde 1960s music in my ‘studio’.

SkyeBunny as Julius Caesar on the Ides of March

(credit: Heather Davies)

Winnipeg Blue Bombers and CFL coaching legend I grew up watching in the 1950s. Brought 4 Grey Cups back to Winnipeg. A high-water mark in sports history for Winnipeg.

5 years (grades 4-9) I spent delivering The Winnipeg Tribune in all kinds of weather year-round 6 days a week. Sometimes in -35 F windy blizzards and torrential summer downpours. 2 streets, 3 long blocks each and onto the prairie 100 yards or so out in the open.

We were poor, like so many people then after the war, 1959-64. For me, it was a chance to make some spending dough to buy candy and later 45 rpms. That first Christmas after working from January on, I had enough saved up to buy our family a Brownie camera. A big deal.

I got to meet a lot of people, especially with the hassle of bi-weekly collecting. It also gave me insights into how other people lived ranging from even tougher poverty to reasonably well-heeled middle class people living in the new houses that began to pop up as prosperity kicked in for some in the area.

There were days when I was so sick, my heroic mother delivered papers after she got home from work. It was a largely thankless job to make a few bucks every week, doing work for peanuts no adult would have ever considered, unless desperate.

The route amounted to 1 1/2-2 hours being tied up after school. There were dogs, frozen wooden steps (perfect for winter falls in my moccasins), and customers who made me come back for payment. But there were also nice people and kind women who took pity on me on the coldest winter days and took me in to get warmed up. Quite a range of humanity and my introduction to adults in depth.

Looking back, the newspapers obviously had no pangs of conscience about sending out young boys to get lead print on their hands and freeze their buns off in winter, especially carrying heavy bags of Saturday papers.

Years later when I read Dickens and William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper”, I easily identified with the child characters.

We were so poor somedays, a couple of times, there was no actually food in the cupboards except for cereal, and one Sunday afternoon, my mother made up a meal from just the several basic cooking ingredients on hand! There were days, too, when she borrowed money from me to pay a bill. In some ways, that paper route was family outcome–what I could make and save up.

Today 63 years later, another cold day, and I will not go outside yet again. Looking back, I don’t know how I survived those winter days, delivering the papers dressed to the teeth, returning to that big old drafty WW1 house with a slow and sometimes out-of-coal chain-pull furnace.

Paper boys were the life-blood of newspapers for decades. Seen a certain way, they, too, were exploited as cheap labor to keep newspapers running and financially successful.

On the other hand, the experience toughened me and made me harder. I am not sorry for the responsibility it gave me plus an ‘allowance’ I never got unlike other kids. The majority of the kids I knew never had that experience; it was one-of-a-kind, and it stopped happening after papers went to morning deliveries.

‘the accidents of birth’, home environment in young years, and heredity. It’s only later, when consciousness and reflection emerge that one often thinks how one’s life might have been better or (much) worse.

By ‘accidents of birth’, I’m referring to when (year) and where (place) where one is born. Certain eras and areas are more or less favorable. For instance, if you were born in the Victorian era in smoggy, foggy London, your chances of a long, prosperous life were highly unlikely.

Environment is also very influential; If you were born to a poor working family in Africa, life would be tougher than say if you grew up in small town America.

So one starts to see how certain basic, ‘built-in from the get-go’  factors might limit opportunity, much as Thomas Gray pointed out in his homage to poor working class people in “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. A peasant was much less likely to become a Milton or Cromwell, and so forth.

Virginia Woolf comments on the same thing when she points out in A Room of One’s Own that Shakespeare’s sister never got the same opportunities as her famous brother and that women writers always had a tougher time in becoming successful writers  until the twentieth century.

Heredity also marks individuals. The health and DNA predispositions of one’s parents and forebears, likewise, influence whether one will get certain health problems, cancer, or earlier death

And…there’s not one can do about this. Except to know and be aware of all these different factors in order to get to know oneself better and appreciate whatever breaks one has been dumb-lucky to have had.

Always and all ways, there are limits on each person from the time and place of birth onward. In some cases, Phil Ochs’ “There but for fortune, go you or I”. Not everyone has had the same blind luck; the relative fates of each person are ‘doled out’ unevenly and sometimes inequitably.

But, with awareness and personal choices, we can make changes and improve our lifestyles, attitudes, and actions over whatever time we are allotted in living. We can rise, ascend, and ameliorate. We do not have to merely accept our various limitations and imposed circumstances. We “can strive to seek, to find, and not to yield”, to quote Tennyson’s Ulysses.

Even in the Nazi death camps–as Bettelheim and Frankl suggested–people still have choices, though these may be few or likewise limited. One can often still choose the dignity, courage, and integrity of self in many cases. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings” says Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Existentially, then, we can still make and create ourselves under the most restrictive of circumstances and limits, transcending them, not just enduring, but “prevailing” (Faulkner’s distinction) over them. It is important, always,  to remember that there are many possibilities and that many life ‘rules’ can be challenged or broken to make positive changes and to grow on many levels.

you have to become even more realistic that each day could be your last or last good one.

This necessitates making sure your estate affairs are in order, that you are engaged in several meaningful projects (especially involving family), and making donations to groups and organizations that do meaningful work. There may also be spiritual ‘biz’ involving your soul that need attention, too. (e.g., Monsignor Quixote)

Living a rich, full life to the end is its own satisfying reward.

Acclaimed for his performance in Canadian director Norman Jewison’s classic 1971 film, Israel’s Topol repeated his role as Tevye 3,500 times between 1967 and 2009!

(Oddly, the film’s Jewish financial backers were surprised when Jewison told them he wasn’t a Jew, but they went on to back him and the film anyway.)

“Money is nor required to buy one necessity of soul.” –Thoreau

“It is better to live rich than to die rich.” –Samuel Johnson

“Every man has his price.”–Sir Robert Walpole

“Versatility is a curse, One-dimensional people make a lot of money.” –Jonathan Winters

“When money speaks, the truth is silent.” –Russian Proverb

“The dollar is always betting against the soul.” –Sven Birkerts

“The mass of men [and women] lead lives of quiet desperation.” Today for sure.

“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”–Henri Matisse. Attitude is still #1.

“All is flux, nothing stands still. Nothing is permanent but change.”–Heraclitus. The story of our pandemic age.

“We make ourselves up as we go.”–Kate Green. We make our own choices regardless of circumstances and the limits of our situations and environments.