To thine own self be true

A unique bill for eating.

and his astounding continuing legacy to charity via the salad oil dressings he co-created with his buddy Mencken (who was also pals with Hemingway). All the profits go to charity. Can’t think of another actor who has matched this major philanthropic action. A gift that really keeps on giving….

A 2-transistor pocket radio accompanied me practically everywhere I went from grade 5 to 11 (1959-1965). On it I listened to the top 40 and 50 hits 0f the day and carried it with me on my afternoon paper route on the hottest summer day to zero temp days in winter. On clear evenings in summer, I could pick signals and programs from mid-western U.S. radio stations. It was a nice compliment to all the 45s and 33 1/3 records I also bought back then. Continuous, carryable music!

Little business man. Long impressed by the coin changers sported by bus drivers, I bought one for my paper route collecting. Customers were impressed, one enough to give me a wooden crate of Coke bottles for Christmas.

One of my cool tie pins for my dress shirts from grade 9-12. It passed through two holes in the collar with the tie worn above it. Nobody I knew had one like it.

My Dad enjoyed the photos he had taken of places he’d been in his retirement years. Once in a while, he would get a blow-up of something he liked and had been impressed by; he entered the original-sized picture of this hoodoos scene in a National Geographic contest.

This moment of being hung in our family room from the 1980s on until recently. We all have our favorite images re. family members that conjure up memories of the individuals and their stories beyond the images.

He once told me a little about the day he and my mother walked around the Drumheller museum trails, but the poem also contextualizes the scene within limits of his life experience and consciousness (imagined) as he took this beautiful picture.

Coincidentally. Peanut (Buster Parfait) is visiting us right now for a couple of weeks. The poem would have been less without its central contrast and juxtapositions. And the quiet, peaceful, contemplative spaces have a place in a larger world of noise, consumption, and chaos. Truth be told, I have long had a strong preference for the former.

Puppyhood left behind a decade ago, now an adult, Peanut enjoys our patio and backyard as she gets a break from the contractor’s building noise at my son’s place in their basement.

Ronnie Hawkins, who chose to live in Canada and who mentored The Band in the 1960s.

(Along with Alice Munro, the last two great Canadian writers still standing)

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Creating a fireproof Handmaid‘s book for PEN to auction off to raise funds against the mindlessly evil U.S. forces against censorship. She goes one better than Bradbury (F 451) by creating a symbolic/real book which doesn’t burn/can’t be destroyed by the censorship crazies.

(By George, the 20th century’s most prophetic, prescient author)

Orwell’s right again; he being the first to predict that the power-hungry would be in charge and control information flow. Even down to the two-minute hates in which mobs screamed in ecstasy to see their beloved mad leader a la Trump today. All information filtered and controlled for optics purposes and agendas to advance and secure power. The Story of Our Time. Yup, an Orwellian age first predicted in 1948 (one year before I was born). 

“Cognitive dissonance” by RD

“Blue-sky thinking” and a long-time delight in word play culminated in this poem.

My involvement with Richard III began in 1972 when I taught Josephine Tey’s 1951 detective novel, The Daughter of Time to a gr. 11 class. The book is about an English detective laid-up in hospital who reconstructs Richard’s reputation after much evidence of a Tudor defaming cover-up. It also deals with the timeless mystery of the Princes in the Tower. Derek Jacobi’s audiobook version below would be of interest to someone revisiting the book.

Later, in the mid-70s I would study Shakespeare’s tragedy and attend an over-the-top U of A student production of the play, complete with ‘blood’ splashing on the front row patrons in an opening scene! Even later in the ’80s, I would see Ron Moody as the crazy hunchback villain in a modern fascist version of Richard III. By this point, I had serious doubts about the stereotypical Shakespeare/Tudor versions of the much-maligned king.

Fast forward to 2013, and the book below and its arresting documentary about one woman’s successful search for the real king’s grave–a real-life detective story. Despite all the scientific evidence this quest produced, I was left wondering how much significant information it produced about the real man, who can never be fully known or understood.

Hence, the poem above with its Orwell epigraph suggesting that only the king would know what the reality and truths of his life experiences were, regardless of the quest’s curious human investigator and subsequent scientific/technological interventions and discoveries. (This reflects a more general personal belief, inspired by the work of ’60s psychiatrist-author R.D. Laing, that reality is basically subjectively experienced in a basic, built-in isolation with a built-in, attendant alienation; i.e., we can never fully know the interior life and experiences of others.)