About Miss G ...

 I have always been somewhat embarrassed over the years to write about my marvellous offspring. It seems like hubris or something, and I am quite sure their level of success and accomplishment is theirs, not mine. But. The next generation is just as marvellous as the previous, and I am going to rejoice here in this space. I just have to. You are now warned and can skip the post and come back later.

My granddaughter  - the one I used to post about as 'Little Stuff' - is a big girl now. She graduated from McGill Thursday evening. My tall, athletic, beautiful granddaughter. Her mother did tell me her Grade Point Average sometime, but I don’t recall the detail. There might have been an A- in there somewhere, but she was pretty well straight A, in a course that looked to me like a mountain to climb. It was a mixed Arts and Science program called Sustainability, Science and Society. She graduated with the highest grade point average in the Arts and Science faculty. Her mother did the same in her undergraduate degree and received a Governor General’s Medal for the highest marks in Arts and Science from McMaster. It will be interesting to see if that is still done and if Audrey gets one.

We just talked to her mother, who seemed to me to be a bit peeved that Audrey’ achievement was not better recognised. Katie said that there was a huge group graduating and that in essence they were all just marched across the stage, tapped on the shoulder and ushered off. However, Audrey looked beautiful, her father bought her flowers (held in place by a McGill teddy bear, I am told) and we will have time to make much of her before she leaves for England and the high-octane Master’s program for which she has been accepted. I don’t know much about it yet except that it seems to feature psychology and that the girl will ace it. (Again, as her mother before her. Katie got a UK Commonwealth scholarship and did a PhD in biology at Cambridge). Audrey has applied for funding, but has not heard as yet.

When she is not being a top student, Audrey runs. She was on the McGill track team as a sprinter and trained in Ottawa for some years with the Lion’s Track and Field club. Her latest is a venture into longer distances and she entered in the 5 Kilometre race in Ottawa last weekend – ran on her 22^nd birthday in fact – and placed not badly. She got a program on line to learn from and I think she expects to do better with more experience. This is a girl who does things Well.

Whenever I think about it, I marvel at our good fortune in our daughters. Both reached the top of their professions; Katie is a professor at University of Ottawa (and if you want to know what kind of professor she is, google ‘Rate My Prof’ and read the praise from her students). Wendy left the Foreign Service from the position of High Commissioner – that is what an Ambassador is called in Commonwealth countries. She was one of six Assistant Secretary positions at NATO, a really amazing post. She has had postings and positions all over Europe and in Africa. In her spare time, she has done things like canoe down the Grand Canyon. Although it is highly unlikely I will be around to see the heights Audrey may reach, I am sure she will climb with skill and determination.

All my girls have brains and good taste and wide-ranging interests. And cats. No one could ask for more. 

The Pageantry of It All

 

I have just spent an hour listening to King Charles III read the Speech from the Throne. It was the first time ever for me to see the pageantry and customs surrounding what has been a standard of parliamentary democracy as we practice it. The reminder that the present form goes back hundreds of years is something I did not need because it is something I value. I learned the ins and outs of the form as a university undergraduate by participating in ‘Model Parliaments’, and in formal debates. It is a good method, although at times it can seem cumbersome. It is a method that, I believe, would preclude the present mockery of democracy in the United States. A Prime Minister is not able to govern by proclamation; a government that tried that would fail and an election would be triggered.

The speech was interesting in several ways. It sounded to me as if the king had inserted little bits of it by himself, most especially the conclusion where he quoted the national anthem’s wording of “the true north strong and free.” Total kitsch. But right, in context. Can't fault it but I cannot see the government’s writers putting that in. And too many figures quoted. In addition, I have a few minor complaints about the format. One is that it seems stupid to have issued the man a floppy booklet to read from where he struggled at times to turn the pages. The other is that it is annoying to have an English language voice-over for the French. Most of us have enough second language to follow clear, slowly read statements, especially if they are repeats of the same material. I wanted to judge the king’s French accent and was unable to hear him.

Anyway, that was my morning. Trade barriers, energy conservation and management, housing starts, some lowering/increasing of fees and rates, increased military spending (we’ve heard that before), all stuff that came up in the campaign. Annoying that the Liberals are taking credit for the dental program; the NDP shoved that one down their throats. Mostly, though, the speech was about sovereignty. With the king making the running. It would be more amusing if it were less important.

I like our country, a lot, and never more so than when we do something as stodgy but as pertinent as this morning’s entertainment.

On Mother's Day

 

My father was newly home from the Navy - 1947

Today is the day set aside, as they say, for children to honour their mothers. As a concept, I must say it annoys me. The ‘day’ becomes an occasion to spend money on things like cards, flowers, small gifts. You might arrange to take mother out of the house for a meal she does not have to cook; good luck at getting into any restaurant where you have not made a reservation well in advance. You might, given the situation, fete your mother at home and cook a meal for her. This is supposing that you are part of a ‘nuclear’ family and your mother lives separately from you. The whole thing is a contrived event that does, for me, very little.

 Honouring a mother? What does that even mean? To ‘honour’ someone is to, (The Oxford Dictionary says),.”regard with great respect. Example: "They honoured their parents in all they did."

Similar: hold in great respect, hold in high esteem, have a high regard for, esteem, respect, admire, defer to, look up to, think highly of, appreciate, value, prize, cherish, reverence, revere, venerate’ worship, put on a pedestal.

Some of the similar terms I can buy into. I like “think highly of”, “hold in great respect”. My mother was a woman of blazing intelligence, driven to do everything she did as perfectly as possible, a curious, warm, observing, thinking person. She was funny, thoughtful, graceful, driven. Obviously, someone to “hold in high esteem”. But to “put on a pedestal’ is a step way too far. She could be opinionated, dismissive, wrong about something. She was a master at ignoring things. She could worry at an impressive level about things that were just fine.

 My mother did her best, and it was a very good best, to bring me up to be a model child and adolescent. And I did my best, mostly, to measure up. Good grades, good manners, participation in the things my mother thought were worth while like Brownies, Sunday school and swimming lessons. (I liked the swimming.) I was, until about age fifteen, a good girl. In fairness, I have to say that what I chose to read was never censored, my friends were always welcomed, my interests were fostered even if they were not hers. And as I grew up and grew out of the circled wagons of her expectations of me, I never stopped loving her and trying to make her happy. After I left home, for instance, I wrote a weekly letter detailing a great deal of what I was doing and thinking. When she arrived at my wedding with a white dress and hat for me to wear, I wore them. When she sewed bright yellow trousers for me to wear, I wore those too.

 Many of my housekeeping habits, my choices in reading, my expectations in interactions with people, are still in keeping with my mother’s tastes and ways. I fold my towels in threes the way she did. I keep a lot of books she would approve. (Well, probably not the science fiction and fantasy – she was not enchanted even with Tolkien.) I think of her often with love. I miss her, often. I tried my best not to bring up my daughters to be good girls, to be model children. But honesty compels me to say that I am not sure I did any better for them than she did for me.

As a new grandmother - Christmas, 1966

 It is Mother’s Day. But I know that my mother is with me for 365 days a year and I am good with that. Maybe the word I should use is “cherish’. I cherish all we had together. I remember things she did and said, often. I miss her. I loved her.

Sweet Violets

 The yard of the house I lived in as a girl was long and narrow, with a paved walkway down the centre that led to the trash bins, the back fence and the back gate into the alley. The alley itself was dirt and worked well for hopscotch. On the right side of the yard, just behind the back of the house, stood a single car garage. Behind that, again, was a huge old willow tree. My mother’s wash lines ran from the garage to the willow and from the willow to a post at the back of the yard. Behind the garage not much grew as it was shady, but there were, in season, clumps of small, hardy violets. A beautiful deep purple, they were very scented. My mother loved to hang clothes on the line above them as she said things came in from the line ‘smelling wonderful’.                                                                                                                                                                                                      

My mother was a determined gardener. On a trellis beside the house there was a clematis, one she had transplanted every time she and my father moved, and, as well, there was a bed of peonies and several rose vines of various lengths of thorns, the one with really vicious thorns beside the garage door. At the back of the property, to screen the alley, there was a line of flowering bushes – bridal wreath is the one I recall. I envied the children of the house across the alley as there were several of them to split what seemed to me to be endless amounts of yard work, including but not limited to policing the willow’s dead branches, cutting back the evil roses, sweeping, raking and, when I was older, cutting the grass. I don’t recall paying much heed to those violets.

Sometime in there the willow had to be cut down. It may have been damaged in a storm; I am not sure. My mother commissioned a post for her clothes lines and the new lines ran from the garage to the post. I don’t think my mother planted anything more except a new baby tree. But, when my parents decided to sell the big house in Windsor and move to our city, there was a firm directive to me to get out a trowel and some trugs and dig up enough violets that my mother could be sure some would survive to reach their new home. She also considered the clematis, but since their grandparents were moving two climate zones colder, my daughters persuaded their grandma to let them give her a new, hardy clematis that would thrive in Ottawa.

My parents’ new home was a bungalow on a huge lot, the original suburb having been on septic systems. It was painted white with a black front door and my mother immediately realized that it needed, indeed cried for, red geraniums and white in a border across the front. When she discovered a rhubarb patch, she was delighted, and she relished a back patio with the clothes line in easy reach. When she received a picnic table for a Mother’s Day gift, her pleasure was complete. The clematis was duly installed and lawn maintenance people hired. (Although if they did not arrive to my mother’s taste in grass length, I cut. And raked. And cut.) The violets were also duly transplanted, some at my parents’ place and some in a corner of my aunt’s backyard, the bit not taken up by the swimming pool.

Forward a number of years, and my aunt was being overrun by violets, she said. She dug the majority of them and firmly gave them to me. I brought them out here and planted a row of them in the low bush beside the cut lawn at the side of the house. And sort of forgot about them, except in the week or two that they flower and the scent is wafted across the grass.

 

The photos accompanying this essay illustrate that these violets are stubborn, take-charge flowers. Plant one and ignore it and you have a multitude. This week, as spring peeps up, they are front and centre in our lawn. And the scent is still wonderful.

A Pledge

Younger Daughter (YD) on the left, Elder Daugher (ED) on the right. Clothes by Grandma

 I gave my daughter a piece of advice in the form of a truism a few days ago. “If you do not put yourself first,” I pontificated, “no one else will.”  A trite piece of advice but a sound one and I meant it. It is a working adage that I have tried to follow, off and on for sure, during my life, and a thing that I was sorry I did not do, if I had not been doing it Got that? Right.

JG and I are both in our eighties and, logically, moving toward the end of our ability to live by ourselves and look after ourselves. Much as I want to deny this, my creaking bones, lack of balance, frozen shoulder, reduced blood oxygen level (and lack of patience about all of these) are facts. It is hard work to make the bed, cook a meal, get showered and dressed in the morning, sweep the porch, stay awake while trying to read. JG has ongoing issues as well. Our daughters are doing some eldercare now and will see it increase as time and infirmity go on. Thus the advice in para #1 above.

The cabin 'at the farm'

It will not be the first time that our offspring have had to come second to what we, the parents, chose. When they were just school age, we chose to buy recreational land, a 100-acre parcel, over an hour’s drive from where we lived in the city. Not a cottage on a beach, not a chalet in ski country, but an old abandoned farm at the very end of an unimproved road. (So unimproved was the road, in fact, that for the first few years we accessed the property in winter by snowmobile.) The cabin we built on this land was heated by a woodstove, lighted by propane, serviced by an outhouse, provided with water drawn by the pailful from a surface well and provisioned with food toted in from the city, mostly, as in summer we could not leave food requiring refrigeration and in winter canned goods froze. We chose to spend all of our weekends and holidays ‘at the farm’ and the daughters were part of it by necessity.

I worried from time to time that the girls were missing out on vital parts of growing up, on bonding with groups of friends on weekends, movie dates, sports teams, even television (no hydro, remember). On the other hand, they learned to navigate by themselves in scrub bush, cross-country ski, build a fire in the snow, take their rowboat out onto the creek. They became, faute de mieux, readers and players of board games. They packed their own weekend clothes, packed their city activities into five days a week, and also learned to rely on each other. That they fit their lives into what we, their parents wanted to do, was not entirely a bad thing.

The year that the ED was in Grade 13 my father decided to move himself and my mother from their large Windsor home to an Ottawa bungalow, a short drive from where we then lived. I don’t know if I have mentioned that I am an only child, but that I am is pertinent. My mother was fragile both physically and, increasingly, mentally, and my father needed help in looking after her. I found them the house, facilitated the move and, in self defence, enrolled in a two-year certificate program at our local community college. My father did what he could to cushion me by hiring help summer and winter for their large yard. (They considered apartments when planning but my mother needed flowers and grassy space.) My mother did enjoy my reports of what I was learning and it gave me hours in the day that she perceived to be my own.

I passed that course and actually (and at my age, too) got a job in the industry, but my mother was really struggling and dad could not cope. I got calls at work; I lost weekends. I quit the job and took on eldercare. At the end, at one point I was sleeping on a rug beside my mother’s bed with a light shining on me so that she could see I was there. Luckily for her and all of us, her physical health broke down and she died before the mental stress became unendurable. My father took about a year to regroup, then moved himself into a seniors’ residence and installed his childless sister in the next apartment over. I became a chauffeur when necessary, but dad managed himself and his sister mostly solo. I started a home-based business in the intervals.

The house JG built 'at the farm'

Dad died in September of ’97 and my aunt lasted until February of ’98. Meanwhile my mother’ s unmarried sister’s health deteriorated and I was the caregiver there, first long distance to Windsor and then, after a move for her, in our city. By this time JG had retired and we were building our forever home here ‘at the farm’.  And, up until the big Ice Storm of ’98 crunched our bush, we were making maple syrup. I was a busy person facilitating other people’s lives for a few years in there. But once we got settled, I found several fun things to do for myself in the place where I found myself, mostly by joining boards of interesting activities. I became a busy person in my own right once again.

I miss, profoundly, being that busy person. Bad health, partly fueled by a lifetime of bad habits, has pretty well parked me in an electrically controlled recliner chair in the living room or here, at my computer, where I feel still in charge. We are very lucky to have the financial resources to hire help for what we cannot do ourselves. (Or we can hire help once we admit we can’t do it; some problems in this regard.) Our daughters take the time to check on us by phone and in person at a level I really hope is not too onerous, and their father has the odd job for them to do (on the roof, for instance) when they visit. Not too demanding yet.

If I am going to be honest here, I would have to say that I resented getting pulled into a lot of care for my elders. I knew it had to be done, I knew I had to do it, I even wanted to do it, but I still got angry about being ‘on call’. Or, I think that was at least part of the anger. The rest was, I believe, anger at fate. Anger at illness that turned my vital, intelligent, funny mother into a whiny child. Anger at age that robbed my equally funny and independent aunt of her self-reliance.  I can identify a mixture of annoyance and amusement at my male-dominant dad’s assumption that whenever he made an appointment, I would be available to take him to it. Maybe the problem was being taken for granted, for coming second in the calculation of what should happen.

Unless and until age and infirmity rob me of my personality, I swear I will do my best not to take my daughters for granted. And to manage so that they can put themselves first. 

Ides of April, Plus 1.

 It is April 16th, 2025 and yesterday was my 83^rd birthday. I was taken out for a fine dinner with my family, given gorgeous yellow roses (a story behind these) candy, cards, a book that I will treasure and a new frying pan and lid. Wait, you say. All of these things to cherish you and a … frying pan. Well, yes.

I have had for far too may years a frying pan that I use for a lot of recipes. It was the exact correct size, for one thing, to make two toasted cheese sandwiches. It had a lid that fits perfectly. It is just the right depth for fried rice, for sausage, the right length for bacon. A long list of pluses. But it was just plain worn out and the coating was probably slowly leaching plastic into our systems. JG has been at me to replace it. We have, I hasten to add, other frying pans in useful sizes. But this one was my kitchen helper. I have been procrastinating about replacing it. JG managed, somehow, to research the pan and yesterday presented me with a beautiful Paderno pan and matching lid, a much better lid than the old one. He went to a lot of trouble, I suspect, to find it. A frying pan to cherish, from someone who knows the exact right thing.

The flowers? My mother loved, above all other blooms, yellow roses. My dad always got her a big bunch on her combined birthday and wedding anniversary. Always yellow roses. My girls remembered this and gave me an opulent bouquet of them, carefully placed in small vials to keep them watered in transit. They are beautiful and they will last and are, presently, front and centre in our living room where I can admire them.

The book? Carol Off’s At a Loss for Words, Conversation in an Age of Rage. A topic and writer that both hit dead on my interests.

The chocolate? Well, yes. In spite of the fact that my scale tells me that I should not have it. Yum.

The cards from the daughters, inserted here. The card from my husband… made me shed tears.

One of my nicest treats, a phone call from a cousin. The topmost treat might have been, though, a conversation with the grandkid who was walking in Montreal on her way to study, and who seems, although loaded with exams and work, to be training for and cheerfully contemplating running a 5-k race next month.

My family, in all its glory.

Trump Tantrum Explored

Opinion column from the Washington Post by Philip Bump. 

 Now fact Checked. Wikipedia, Axios, Newyorker, all confirm. Firing was in first term - not clear in article. "Investigation" as of yesterday.

An official from the first Trump administration is being targeted for speaking the truth.

April 10, 2025 at 4:02 p.m -The Washington Post)

After the 2016 election, when it was understood that Russia had tried to influence the outcome, social media companies introduced a number of changes that allow them to better control misinformation and abuse on their platforms. One effect was that some prominent voices on the right found their posts being removed or muffled. It happened on the left as well, but on the right — in part because of the perceived politics of tech companies and Silicon Valley — these actions were attributed to partisanship rather than practicality. This argument soon trickled up to then-President Donald Trump.

Lower down on the administration’s organizational chart, though, officials were themselves working to ensure that the interference seen in 2016 didn’t occur in 2020. In October 2020, a Department of Homeland Security report identified evidence that foreign adversaries were “using covert and overt influence measures” to try to affect votes “and the electoral process itself.” Despite Trump’s insistence that the 2016 vote (and his election) hadn’t been affected by foreign interference, the government was responding to reality, briefing social media companies on threats and, in 2018, standing up the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to address foreign threats, including against elections. Trump nominated Chris Krebs to lead the agency.

By all outward appearances, there was no foreign interference that affected the results of the ensuing 2020 presidential election. What there was, however, was a change in the occupant to the White House.

You know what happened next. Trump, who had for months been stoking the idea that there was something uncertain or unstable about the U.S. electoral process, seized on the idea that the election had been stolen. During the weeks after the election, he embraced a wide variety of false and debunked assertions about how he’d been the victim of a left-wing plot to deny him a second term. Anytime a new theory emerged about how the election might have been stolen, Trump shared it with the American public as if it were fact — which at no point it was.

Among the claims he and his allies elevated was that electronic voting machines had been tampered with. Krebs, tasked with ensuring that this wouldn’t happen, put out a statement assuring Americans that election systems had not been manipulated.

Trump took this badly. Within hours, he announced Krebs’s firing on Twitter, insisting that claims about the security of the election were false and flew in the face of available evidence. Again, the opposite was true; it was Trump’s claims that failed to comport with the evidence, much less reality.

It could have ended there. But allegations that the 2020 election had been negatively influenced, leading to Trump’s loss, snowballed. Because early claims about explicit fraud and illegal voting were not substantiated, the pro-Trump narrative began to center more heavily on allegations that the outcome had been rigged. Voters, it held, had been unduly influenced by the suppression of information or false claims about politically potent issues. For example, that social media companies had briefly limited the sharing of a story about Joe Biden’s son eventually became a central element of the idea that they had been acting on behalf of the left.

As people learned that those companies had been briefed about potential foreign threats, a narrative emerged that the government had told the companies to limit the story — however incongruous it was that the government was at that time led by Trump himself. (What’s more, there’s no evidence that the brief restriction significantly affected the election.) Just as it had done before the election, the right attributed to malice and deviousness what was more easily and more accurately explained as explicable responses to evolving circumstances.

CISA’s rejection of Trump’s claims was fading into history until Wednesday, when Trump announced that he was removing Krebs’s security clearance and calling for the Justice Department to launch a fishing expedition, seeking out any scintillas of illegality in which Krebs or CISA might theoretically have been engaged. It was as explicit a manifestation of Trump’s vengeful worldview as anything we’ve seen since his second inauguration. There remains no evidence at all that CISA or Krebs engaged in any systematic effort to violate the law or even to combat disinformation because of ideology rather than factuality.

The president’s targeting of Krebs is in part a product of the massive economy Trump created by denying the 2020 election results. Loyalists who alleged fraud or left-wing deviousness were showered with the pro-Trump right’s most important currency: attention. Not that they didn’t believe Trump’s claims about rigging and theft, mind you; the idea that the election had been determined by nefarious elites is inherently appealing on the right. Particularly given how many Trump supporters knew no supporters of Joe Biden, the results seemed facially incomprehensible to many of them. So, sure. It was the elites.

CISA was a frequent target of these increasingly complicated narratives about 2020 and its aftermath, thanks in part to Elon Musk. The billionaire fully bought into the idea that social media companies had acted against the right, so he bought Twitter and allowed writers who bore obvious hostility to the establishment to cherry-pick from the company’s internal records. They cobbled together a contrived (and at times flatly erroneous) story about malfeasance into which CISA was looped. Boosted by Trump’s allies in Congress, the narrative gained the appearance of being credible, even though it wasn’t. Trump had the pretext he needed for Wednesday’s action.

In signing the executive order targeting Krebs, Trump made clear his intent.

“This was a disgraceful election,” he said about the 2020 contest. “And this guy” — Krebs — “sat back … and he’s tried to make the case that this election was a safe election. I think he said, ‘This is the safest election we’ve ever had.’ And yet every day you read in the papers about more and more fraud that’s discovered. He’s the fraud. He’s a disgrace. So we’ll find out whether or not it was a safe election.”

We’ve seen this before, from Trump and others in his second administration: Use the credibility of the office and the government to undermine reality in service of right-wing rhetoric. We need to see if vaccines and fluoride are safe, so we’re launching investigations (run by people who share our worldview). We need to revisit the allegations against the people who engaged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. We need to strip funding for research into climate change and instead boost coal production. And on and on and on.

Election denialism, though, holds a special place in Trump’s heart because he’s seemingly incapable of accepting that voters simply rejected him. Potential administration staffers were reportedly quizzed on their views about the election outcome, with employment apparently dependent on conforming with Trump’s position.

Targeting Krebs is in part about punishing perceived disloyalty and in part about overhauling reality. It is unquestionably also about leveraging the power of the state against a someone who had the temerity to insist that the truth was true. Calling for an investigation of Krebs is flatly authoritarian, perhaps more so than any other example of Trump going after his enemies.

It is a statement from the most powerful person in the country that the federal government will be deployed to monitor compliance with his worldview.

Plaints from a Petulant Pedant

I know that English, like all spoken languages, is mutable. The speakers determine, over time, expression, vowel placement and sound, consonant use, definition. But, knowing that, I mourn for some of the grace notes that I was taught were correct and that I no longer hear used.

For one, the use of few/fewer and less. The distinction between a numeric noun or group and a general one is vanishing, even on CBC and other bastions of good speech. “I hear less birdsong because there are fewer birds.’ Generic ‘birdsong’, no quantity. Numeric for ‘birds’ because they are countable. “I will have less of that noise in the back of the class, thank you.” Fewer than five turkeys survived the winter.”  Fewer people than formerly make this distinction.

And then there are those delightful verbs to lie and to lay. Mostly, to lay is used correctly in the present and past tenses. “The hen lays and egg. The duck laid an egg yesterday. Both of them have laid sporadically this year.” Got that? It is to lie that gets all messed up. “The fallen statue lies face up. It lay there yesterday. I think it must have lain there for longer than that.” When is the last time you heard someone use lain. You hear “He laid there (sometimes spelled layed) all night.” I used to introduce this concept to the Grade 9 classes by telling them that “You have to LAY something.” And then I would pause and wait for the boys to stop snickering. But, some of them at least remembered. Of course - “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

When I hear someone using ‘fulsome’ to describe a generously complete action or item – “He gave a fulsome report, leaving nothing out.” – it rattles me. I learned the word as denoting an insincere overabundance. “Fulsome praise” was too much, over the top, embarrassing. I once had a discussion about me described as “fulsome”. When I called the speaker on it, he assured me that all he had meant was that there had been a lot of it. But. This man was a writer and former English teacher and lecturer. He knew both meanings. And I knew which one he intended.

I have on my desk, tucked behind the computer monitor, Fowler’s English Usage, The Oxford Reference Dictionary, Dreyer’s English and the MLA Style Manual. If the Dreyer title is not familiar, Ben Dreyer was the Copy Chief at Random House for many years and so you might be more familiar with the Penguin Style and Usage title.

And I still get things wrong on a regular basis. Mutable, right?

A Post about Puppets

The public school that I attended had an art teacher and a well-equipped art room. One of the things we learned to do was make marionettes. I remember it very well as I loved doing it. We started with lightbulbs and used paper mâché to form the head. The body was sewn and stuffed, with joints. We used a T bar, the simplest form of manipulating a puppet like that, with strings of fishing line. My puppet was Queen Guenevere; she had a velvet dress that my mother helped me make from scraps left over from my Christmas dress. As I recall, she was strung from the shoulders, wrists and knees, the last with the line running through the dress. And we did shows for the school.

This introduction gave me a taste for theatre. I did not much enjoy performing, but making the costumes and scenery and setting things up was fascinating. I carried this into high school, working backstage for musicals (We did a cutdown Mikado, for one) and on sets and decorations for assemblies and dances. My favourite memory from this time is dressing the biggest guy in our class in a hoop skirt and white wig as Snow White. As I recall, my mother sacrificed a double bed sheet for this skirt. It was not all good fun – at one point purple dye from the Angel Gabriel’s wings got sprayed onto my father’s white shirts and my mother was Not Amused.

In university, I also did stage and musical crew work. I recall ordering enough light brown grease paint to turn all of the principals plus a chorus of Canadian girls in February from white and pasty to brown and shiny. Getting it all off again was another matter and I appear in the university’s year book holding a cast member by the hair and scrubbing his face. My worst moment? A Shakespearian character was getting his eyes gouged out when his wig came off and went thump on the stage.

But back to puppets. My next venture was to teach my daughters and their friends – age about five to seven I think – to use hand puppets. They were avid Sesame Street fans, and some of my husband’s work socks became dragon heads. Other puppets were also single arm, but flat of the hand with the head stuck onto the middle finger and the other fingers folded to make shoulders. We used an ironing board for a stage and my mother’s discarded drapes for curtains. JG had a good quality tape recorder and that also was useful.

I got into costuming again when the ED was in gymnastics. I recall a whole set of leotards for a team and a set of costumes for a Christmas pageant. And somehow the YD needed a costume for a school play. And a uniform for a choir. Also, there were, my delight, Hallowe’en costumes. The height of that – a Monarch butterfly that the grandkid’s mother used for an adult party, costuming her spouse as the caterpillar.

But, the most fun. I joined a group called “Kids on the Block”. It is still extant and you can read about a version of it here. My puppet had cerebral palsy and was in a wheelchair. She had speech difficulties. The puppets were full body and we stood behind them dressed in black and spoke for them, after taking a class to learn what they should say in answer to questions from the audience. The audience was mostly composed of public school children, although we did some adult presentations as well, usually to acquaint teachers and parents about the program. It was really rewarding and the group was composed of some very skilled and caring people.

That’s about it. In my house are two beautiful marionettes, gifts from my daughters as adults, and a third, a lamb with floppy legs on a T bar. This last of my toys went on outings when I was working with a small child on basic English skills (and if the father learned the difference between “in” and “on” with his daughter, score one.) 

Jobs and all that - for Nance

One of my fellow bloggers put up a list of all of her jobs, and challenged us to to the same. So, here is my list. She also asked which of these jobs were, to paraphrase, influential. I whipped down my list and left it for a bit. When I got back to it, I recalled several different paid positions that I had simply forgotten to put in. Two of them were summer jobs in high school for the money, and could be seen as preparation for a life as a housewife, one aspect of this being chambermaid. The other one I left off is one from which I was fired, probably justifiably as I look back but painful at the time. Most of what I have been paid for otherwise has to do with words, teaching them or working with them. My love has always been visual art, an area in which I am a modestly talented amateur with enough sense to have realized this early on. With words I am pretty proficient. The theatre, costumes and puppetry have always been for fun. The secretarial stints? A fee paid to a world that has always been kind to me.

And do I talk to the checker at the grocery store? Yes, always, including thanks for not crushing the bread when appropriate.

A timeline on these lists would probably be useful, but as a stopgap, the paid list starts at age 14 and ends at age 60 or so. The volunteer list - high school to two years ago. 

•  Babysitter
• Library Assistant
• Kitchen help, chambermaid, server, Doon School of Fine Art (in exchange for lessons, board)
• Chambermaid, Bigwin Inn
• Swimming teacher, swimming team coach and lifeguard
• High School Teacher
• Essay marking for Hamilton Collegiate Institute Grade 13 English*
• Supply teacher, both panels
• Trustee, Ottawa School Board
• Personnel Officer, Ottawa Board of Education
• Maple Syrup Camp worker/ Maple Salesperson
• Assistant, Advertising Consultancy
• Secretary, Incorporated Investment Company
• Free Lance Advertising Consultant

So much for the paid employment. As a volunteer

• Makeup artist, wardrobe, theatre, high school and university
• English language coach, essay marker
• Editor, Cook Book
• Costume maker, gymnastics teams
• Secretary/treasurer for several organizations
• Puppeteer
• Kitchen staff, local hall
• Advertising member, executive, local hall
• ESL for adults teacher

*An explanation here. The Hamilton Board of Education gathered the students in the Grade 13, a university preparation year at that time, into one school in downtown Hamilton. The Head of the English Department there was extremely busy in management as the school also attracted a large component of Hong Kong students with a huge range of ability in the language. He wanted to teach but knew he would not be able to keep up with the essay stipulation in the syllabus. I was at home with first one and then a second newborn. We discussed and he hired me to mark the essays for his students and to flag any problems I saw as I read them. He had four classes, 100 students approx. And so, I marked. With comments. And added a comment sheet for his information as needed. We found and supported one suicidal girl this way; I have always been pleased about that.

Iced

 April Fool’s Day anyone? We have a dandy here; a return to winter conditions that is more than annoying. We had a ten-inch dump of snow late last week and then freezing rain and then a day of warmth and fog that did little to the snow but fuse it into a soggy mess. And today we had a freeze and lovely sun shining on all the ice. The freezing rain seems to have brought down every dead twig and branch on every tree around and all of this mess is strewn across the ice. Although there was enough melt to clear the laneway, we have a complete ice cover on the lawn and field. It is amusing to look at the tracks the turkeys have left. Friday, they left a hole for every step they took and today they can stroll along right on top. But, of course, there is nothing much for them to eat.

I am worrying a lot about the songbirds. The male red-winged blackbirds arrived about ten days ago. They come before the females, I think to set up their defended sites. But the marsh where they should be doing this is frozen. A flock of at least two dozen was mobbing our feeders – the sunflower silo as well as the corn on the platform feeder. And the suet ball has been eaten away the last few days at a great rate. I figured it would be the last one this year, but if this weather holds, we will probably put one more out. And as for the robins – there is little or nothing available for ground feeders nor will there be until we get a good melt and a few sunny days afterwards. It may be a quiet spring.

We have more freezing rain forecast for tomorrow, too. At least we had only a minor power outage. Our Hydro crews are heroes, truly. With all the clobber being pulled out of the trees by the ice, most of us in this area had only a few hours before repair was completed. Farther south, I gather, it was much worse. We have, as most of our neighbours have also, a generator, a good one that allows us to run the stove and electronics as well as the frig and water pump. We do lose the internet because, although we host a node, the tower is too far from the house to be powered by the generator. It is a good thing my car is a hybrid.

It is salutary, in a way, to be without electricity. It makes you realize how dependent we all are on it and other modern conveniences. The pioneers who opened up this land had nothing. No light at night except firelight, no screening on their windows, no heat except wood, no food except what they grew and foraged themselves. There was no easy access to medical care. In fact, there were trails, not roads, and not a plow to be dreamt of. At first, there was no schooling for their children although the Scots who settled here got that up and running pretty fast. They also put a library together, and a meeting hall that did double duty for prayer and everything else. Amazingly tough and adaptable people, in truth. And neighbourly. As their descendants still are – I got checked by two different neighbours in this latest mess just to make sure we were warm and safe. It still goes on.

Covet

From Mirriam Webster:  transitive verb: to wish for earnestly - covet an award. : to desire (what belongs to another) inordinately or culpably - The king's brother coveted the throne. intransitive verb: to feel inordinate desire for what belongs to another

From Oxford -  verb: covet; yearn to possess or have (something). -"he covets time for exercise and fishing". Similar: desire, be consumed with desire for, crave, have one's heart set on, want, wish for, long for, yearn for, dream of, aspire to. hanker for, hanker after, hunger after/for, thirst for, ache for, fancy, burn for, pant for.

Origin - Middle English: from Old French cuveitier, based on Latin cupiditas (see cupidity).

Of all the things that a person can play with, I love words. I love putting them together, studying them, enjoying them. A post or so ago I looked up the Ten Commandments in its form both in the King James version of the Bible and in the Vulgate.

A Digression - Why is there a version of the Bible called the  Vulgate? The New Testament was originally written in Greek. The principal Latin version of the Bible was prepared mainly by St. Jerome in the late 4th century, and (as revised in 1592) adopted as the official text for the Roman Catholic Church.  Jerome's Latin version was called the Biblia vulgata, the 'Bible in the common tongue'. And it remained in Latin for many hundreds of years, accessible only by the clergy and others (very few) who knew Latin until common people at the beginnings of the ‘protestant’ movement stubbornly insisted on translating it and using the translations. ‘Vulgus’, in passing, meant ‘the mass of the people’, quite literally ‘the public’ and only later took on the connotation of ‘rabble’ providing our adjective, “vulgar” to describe a range from unrefined to sexually explicit speech or action.

Are you still there? If you are, you will be pleased to know that I am about to rejoin the main thread of this discussion by highlighting the use of “covet” in the Tenth Commandment. It is really a word that is used regularly in modern English only with the commandment or discussion of it. And it is another word that comes to us from the Latin, in this case from ‘cupiditas’. Now my Collins English/Latin dictionary gives a whole range of definitions of this word, a noun formed from the verb ‘cupere’ (yes, of course, Cupid). ‘Cupiditas’ can mean “desire, eagerness, enthusiasm, passion, lust, avarice, greed, ambition and partisanship”. It switched its ‘p’ for a ‘v’ in medieval France, giving us cuveitier, and arrived in our language to become the Middle English word 'coveit'.

It is certainly not the only word choice that the learned men working, at King James I’s request, on a definitive English translation for use in churches could have used. A book I read about the translation process describes men learned in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and other tongues. They lived in the same age that produced Shakespeare and other prolific coiners of words. (Shakespeare only uses ‘covet’ three times in all of the plays; methinks he did not like the word much.) They must have had reason to decide on ‘covet’ and add the list of things not to be coveted, adding ‘or anything that is his’ to cover the corners.

It is impossible to trace what the learned men were translating FROM when they chose to use ‘covet’. If I could remember the name of the really interesting book[1] I read about this, I could quote the list of sources they used, but please understand that there were a lot. It took them years and when you read the King James version, you understand why. It is a masterpiece of language, very precise, very clear. And very current if you lived in the first half of the seventeenth century. And so, in spite of Shakespeare’s dislike of it, 'covet' was the word of choice for the commandment about not being – what? Jealous? Greedy? Too set on material things?

As far as I can tell, it is okay to want a house or an ox or an axe like the one your neighbour has. You just are forbidden to want, to yearn for, to dream of, his.  (This makes more than perfect sense when you get to ‘wife’, eh?)  (Squaring this with ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ took me some time as a Sunday School student.)

Another Digression. - I have a vague memory, speaking of being a student, of Chaucer using a word very close to our modern ‘covet’ in several places, notably the Wife of Bath and the Parson, but I can’t find the quote in context in a fast search. Chaucer’s word is coveiten,

All of us who were dragged off to Sunday School know, vaguely, that coveting something, the sin of covetousness, is wrong. But without the word being in common use, I, for one, find it difficult to know exactly what it is wrong to do.  The other commandments have language that is quite clear. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ Got it. But, what exactly is coveting? If my neighbour has a beautiful new baby grandchild, and mine are all grown, is it wrong to hold that baby and wish for those days back again? If my neighbour is younger, supple, strong, out in her garden, is it wrong to wish that I could still do the same? “To desire inordinately or culpably”; where does ‘ordinate’ stop and ‘culpability’ begin?

I wish I could remember more about the book I read about the King James Bible’s creation. I cannot stop thinking about those translators, those men (I suspect they were all men) sitting hour after day after month producing that beautiful language. Ruth and Naiomi, just as an example –“Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die; and there will I be buried; the Lord do so to me, and more also if aught but death part thee and me.” (Ruth 1:16-17 KJV) How did that come to be written in just that way? The cadence, the clarity, the clean, stark beauty, all outstanding. All, we are lead to believe, the work of a committee.

 

I love language, words, communication through the best choices of words. Words, I used to pound into my restless teenagers, are tools. The more tools, the better the tools you have, the better your results. You can carve with a chainsaw, certainly, but you can carve smaller and finer with a sharp, sharp knife. And among the words in English that I love the most, that I cherish, are those of the King James translation.

In the beginning was the word …

---

[1]

 I found two that might be it.  God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible  – 2003 by Adam Nicolson and In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How it Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture by Alister E. McGrath, 2001.

But the greatest of these is charity.

 March weather. The sun shines, the sky is a glorious blue. And then, whap. Snow, ice pellets and wind. It pulled from my memory banks this rhyme by Walter Crane.

 Earlier, I wrote this, after bidding the YD goodbye.

 If I have made no other mark on the world, I have given my country two splendid women. The YD, the one I described as retired from her career; you remember that? She is off as of this morning to start another stint of being useful to her country and getting paid for it. I must admit that this does not surprise me all that much. I figured she would get hooked by someone into something and, yes, indeed, she did. I did not ask permission to publish what she is doing, but I will check with her to see if I can. And in the meantime, be assured, she is very well-suited to be doing it.

 The grandkid, on the other hand, is coming to the end of four years of university and has a mad kaleidoscope of choices. Grad school, job, year off to travel, all that. And probably more that I haven’t thought of. Her mother went the summer job to grad school route, on scholarship. Her aunt wrote the Civil Service entry, interviewed, was chosen and spent the time before she was to report in by touring part of the world with a backpack. As for me, I spent a lot of time trying to get the last three credits I needed for an honours graduation and failing. I think I blew the exam at least three times and I had been working for a year when I finally threw in the towel and asked the registrar to allow me to graduate with a pass BA. That course and the degree was hugely important to me then but I cannot recall the mindset or even remember much about the whole thing. It is so, so not important now. That driven and miserable young woman is someone I do not know – and probably someone I would not have much time for.

 Once I got my feet on the ground in the real world, what became important to me, besides my family and friends, was being of use to my community, to my neighbours. It seemed necessary for me to be put to work my time and what skills I had that would serve. Perhaps those of us who do that make differences so small as to be invisible, one at a time. But in aggregate, ordinary people doing their best, as neighbours, as friends, as volunteers, in their communities, make this country what it is, I think. And what is it? A fine, safe place to live. A place we can be proud to own. And, for me, a place to celebrate.

 I think I was in Grade 8 when I first got interested Canada as a place. It was because of a public speaking topic: “The Twentieth Century Belongs to Canada”. The quote comes from a speech by Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

I can’t remember a lot about the research or what I said, but I do recall reading Hugh McLennan’s Two Solitudes, and probably Pierre Burton, although I cannot recall what book(s). My parents, readers and with two degrees each, probably gave me material. I was hooked. My father was also a pretty avid capital L Liberal, and I heard a lot about politics and what was good or not and working or not. And that the country only survives and thrives on the backs of its citizens.... its thinking and analyzing citizens.

 Third pole of the tripod that holds up civilization, in my opinion? Civility. Patience, good order, courtesy, willingness to listen and willingness to learn. Those are the values that it is most important that our schools and our parenting instil in children so that they will grow up to be people that can live together, not necessarily in harmony but in the values that make good neighbours. Obedience to the rule of law, even if you think the law is a foolish one, is key. (I am not talking about doing 55 kph in a 50 zone. I am talking about slowing down in a school zone to a safe level and watching for the kids. Right?) It is not the Ten Commandments either – I have never been sure what ‘coveting’1 does, if it is not followed up. Agreement of all of us to the rules is what keeps us all, in the main, safe and secure.

 

1 A lot of words have been written about this. 

What I Did on My March Half Holiday.

 I had a good day today. I went to a meeting of my book club, a group of women all at the ‘grandmother’ stage of life who love to read and talk. Some months we pick a book and do an in-depth discussion; at other meetings we each bring a report about a book we have read and think the others would enjoy. The second of these two types was what we did this morning. I picked up some good pointers about books to read that I think I would otherwise have missed. And I think that my report was well received, or so it seemed.

 We also had a go-around about current politics and, of course, the American mess. I think that in general the group was cautiously hopeful about Carney (for my US of A readers, Carney has just been selected by the Liberal Party to replace Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister. He will be ‘sworn in’ tomorrow, that is March 14^th as I write this.) We were also, of course, incautiously scathing about President Trump’s idiocy. Well, not just his - Trump and Musk and the enablers of both. We agreed that the outpouring of patriotism general in our country just now is amazing. I only hope it lasts and we can hunker down for the long term it will take to wait until the idiots self-destruct.

 After this refreshing two hours, we went and had lunch in the main part of the coffee shop, the four of us who could. Others had rides already booked or other commitments. We meet at a coffee shop in the town where almost all of the members live, either in the town or close by. Only two of us have a trek to get in; mine is a half-hour drive and I think my friend’s drive is about that. We meet at this location because the proprietor has a ’meeting room’ with a big table and seating for all of us which we can use free of charge providing we buy coffee and goodies to consume while we meet. It is a perfectly sized room for our number and the coffee is excellent. So, I am informed, is the turmeric latte, but I stayed with the coffee.

 While I was thus disporting myself, my husband had coffee with a friend and then went and did all the grocery shopping, picking up the hard-to-find items and the ice cream. This last rode home in the truck bed to keep it as cold as possible. It was above freezing by the afternoon, but only by a couple of degrees. Very little melting has taken place on our laneway and in the pull-up beside the house. JG put a lot of de-icers down, but I am still terrified to walk on it, my balance being non-existent these days.

 To finish this boring report, I note that my shoulder has some flex back in it, enough that I can put earrings into the ear and wash my hair with two hands. (Try washing your hair one-handed; an exercise in frustration.) I also note that others are reporting robins and red-winged blackbirds, but not one feather of a spring bird has appeared to my wondering eye. We have a local man, David Francey, who is a wonderfully accomplished folk-singer and he has a song about the red-wings. I will see if I can hook it in here.

King Donald

 Every once in a while I get a supremely silly idea that just takes possession of me and needs to be told. And this one just in; you lot get the benefit.

I think that we should ask King Charles III to abdicate in favour of dear President Trump. And we should make the man King of Canada with all the rights and privileges of a constitutional monarch, just what Charles has in respect to Canada.

Those of you who are Canadian should know this, but for my American friends, here it is. The role of the constitutional monarch of Canada.

Canada's monarchy is a unifying symbol and protector of democratic rights, and the King is the head of state. The King's powers are defined by the Constitution and other laws. 

Role of the King

Uniting Canadians: The King embodies the Crown and represents the collective values of Canadians. Constitutional government: The King upholds constitutional government and seeks peace, harmony, and prosperity. Impartial arbiter: The King can act as an impartial arbiter in a constitutional crisis.

 Role of the Governor General

The Governor General is the King's representative in Canada and exercises those rights accruing to the crown, including giving royal assent to bills passed by Parliament, appointing, on the advice of the government, holders of many offices.

 Function of the Sovereign

The sovereign and his representatives typically "act by 'not acting'"—holding power, but, not exercising it—both because they are unelected figures and to maintain their neutrality, "deliberately, insistently, and resolutely". Consequently, the Crown performs two functions: as a unifying symbol and a protector of democratic rights and freedoms.

At the same time, a number of freedoms granted by the constitution to all other Canadians are denied to, or limited for, the monarch and the other senior members of the royal family: freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom to travel, freedom to choose a career, freedom to marry, and freedom of privacy and family life.

While the Crown is empowered by statute and the royal prerogative, it also enjoys inherent powers not granted by either. The Court of Appeal of British Columbia ruled in 1997 that "the Crown has the capacities and powers of a natural person" and its actions as a natural person are, as with the actions of any natural person, subject to judicial review.

Most of the above cribbed from Wikipedia.  I trust you have gathered that the monarch has no real power at all. He can 'advise and warn'; that is it. And the judicial review bit I just love.

The way I envision things, King Donald would continue to live in his castle in Florida but would have his face on our stamps and currency, would be invited to cut a ribbon or perform some other useless function in Canada from time to time, at which time we would all turn out, wave little flags and admire his robes of state. The rest of the time he would be out of our lives, just like our present monarch.

Don’t you think such a future would suit him to a tee? He would never miss another golf game and I am sure that former hockey greats and other gormless souls would continue to grace his parties.

More Martlet

In heraldry, a ‘martlet’ is a mythical bird without feet that never roosts from the moment of its drop-birth until its death fall; martlets are proposed to be continuously on the wing.

More Martlet Musings

When I started university, way way back in 1960, one of the university’s freshman events was to shut the whole group of us into a large lecture hall and require us to write out and memorize the school’s competitive sports chant. Given that the university was the Queen’s University of Kingston, with strong Scottish roots, we had to learn and sing  "Oil thigh na Banrighinn a'Banrighinn gu brath", which translates to "The university of the wife of the King forever". The chant also includes the Gaelic war cry "Cha Gheill", which means "no surrender". The Bannrighinn (F, genitive) being the Queen, of course, wife of the king since Gaelic has no word for Queen. At football games, this was sung, ideally in a long line while kicking in unison. It was thought to fuel school spirit, or was fueled by spirits or both. (Please note that when JG and I returned for his 50th Anniversary reunion, some singing and kicking was done, but not by us.)

Our major competition in the football that was the heart of ‘school spirit’ was McGill University, an English language university plunked into the heart of Montreal. In those old and politically incorrect days, the men’s teams were the Red Men (McGill’s colour being red) and the chant, loudly rendered to drown Cha Gheill, was something like “We are the red  men, feathers in our head men, pow WOW, pow WOW.” The second verse was, again from my memory, “We come home from fighting afar, greeted by our long-nosed squaws, Pow Wow etc” .  Pretty terrible, although nothing compared to what was heard after rugby games. I will not go into that.

At any rate, their men's teams became colloquially known as the "Indians" and from 1961 to 1967 women's teams were formally known as the "Super Squaws". At some point after that, McGill decided to clean up its act. The cleanup got written up here. The men’s teams are now “Redbirds” and the women’s teams are “Martlets”.

And here, proud grandmother that I am, I picture a Martlet for your enjoyment. She is a track athlete, and runs the 400, solo and relay, and some shorter distances. The relay did very well indeed. These are both public domain photos from the McGill Track and Field site.

PS Also an A student. Proud grandmother.