"Come back! She'll let you swim!

 Wednesday, July 28, 2021

     In these heat wave days, when it's "hotter than a rattlesnake's belly in a wagon rut," as my Indigenous Shuswap brother-in-law says, the local pool is sometimes so crowded that some swimmers don't get wet.

     One girl of 11 or so didn't even reach the pool, until I helped.  Seeing the "Pool at capacity" sign at the admissions desk, they sweltered out the door into the summer heat.  The elder in front of them was paying his grandsons into the pool.  I, in line behind them, didn't intend to swim.  I only wanted to ask if the pool people had rescinded the recent rule that made people book their Friday-Sunday swim times.  

     The clerk looked at her count of immersed patrons, looked at the hot, paid handful waiting for some swimmers to leave so they could enter, and some left.  The clerk then chirped, "You may all go in now!"  Then she resumed admitting the grandsons, while the line lengthened behind me.

     I left my place in line, ran out the door into the parking lot, and called to the girl and her mom, "They just let everyone in!  Come back!"  They followed me back into the building.  People in line didn't object to me resuming my place in front of them.  Mom and girl took a place behind five people, in two groups, behind me.  A few more people soon lined up behind them. 

     When the elder's grandsons got in and he left, I, now at the front of the line, told the clerk I didn't want to swim.  I merely wanted to know if Friday-Sunday swims still required booking.  She said they didn't.  I said I'd be back.  I have a card giving me a free swim per month, a card I found in a bag of things my daughter cleaned from her apartment and told me to discard.  I scrounged the re-usables and recyclables from the bag.  I've mere days to use the free July swim, which doesn't require Friday-Sunday booking, Sunday being August 1.  I will go on Thursday or Friday morning, July 29 or 30.  Mornings are less crowded, as I had told the disappointed girl and her mother before they left the building. 

     Now first in line, I told the clerk about the girl and her mother.,  I  waved them forward from their place in line, but Mom said she'd wait.  I then walked back to their place in line.  "I like to swim more than to play in the park, even more than to go for ice cream," the girl told me.  She glowed with anticipation.  Her mother thanked me for fetching them from the parking lot.

     A second clerk now helped the first.  The line moved fast enough for me to see the mom pay for her girl to swim.  I walked home very please with myself.  I felt useful, and cool, even without having swum.

     

 

  

Christmas Toaster

 December 1, 2020

     People buy toasters every day.  I get one about every 30 years.  The $12 Proctor Silex I bought in the Williams Lake Woolco in the early-1990s died today in a smoke-alarm haze.  The $10 Everyday Essentials toaster that Chelsea bought me for Christmas today at the Williams Lake Real Canadian Wholesale Club has a large crumb tray to fill, but I trust it.  Both toasters, from unionized retailers, unite toast of Christmas Past with toast of Christmas Present and Christmas Future.  "God bless us, every crumb," as Tiny Tim didn't say.

     The old toaster died in a blaze of smoke, blackened bread, and a beeping smoke alarm this morning.  I hastened with a newspaper to aerate the detector and shut it off, to prevent the sprinkler system from springing into action.  To be sure, I blew some air on the thing using our hair dryer, and opened the apartment door.  A neighbor walking by asked and I explained the heroic death of my toaster as the cause of the commotion, and open door.

They don't make 'em like they used to, I suppose; but like Elwood Blues in The Blues Brother, with his "dry white toast," I adapt to the situation.  

The new toaster is cool to the touch, with black plastic sides, unlike the old toaster, with its shiny silver metal sides.  Another safety feature, Rule 18 in the handbook, says, "To disconnect, remove plug from wall outlet."  "They thought of everything," which is close to what Jake Blues says as he and Elwood drive through a mall.  "This mall has everything."

The old toaster and its two too-black slices of bread got dignified sendoffs.  The toaster went to a place that collects and recycles old electronics.  When I asked Chelsea to sing a Fred Penner song from her youthful days of toast and jam, she launched into "Sandwiches are beautiful, sandwiches are fine," as I walked the blacked bread across the road from our place to the community garden, now in fallow awaiting winter.  A young woman hit and killed by a truck on the street was what led to the garden's construction.  It's a memorial garden.  Birds now eating the toast crumbs are symbolic carriers of my late toaster's crispy, golden-brown memories.

Spring follows winter; toaster follows toaster; so goes the world.

        

Terry the Toad at FreshCo?

 Sunday, August 23, 2020

     "Lots of things happen in FreshCo on a Sunday night," I told the clerk, as Hamlet would have told Horatio that there are more things oi Heaven and Earth than dreamed of in his philosophy.

     Then I paid for my Vitamin D3 and bicycled off into the sunset and home.

     Not long before, a woman customer in the grocery store asked me if that fancy old car outside was mine.

     "No, my bike is locked outside."

     She walked away, perhaps to continue looking for who owned that black Mercury that looked from the late forties or early fifties.

     As I rode home, I thought of Terry "the Toad."  He's the nerd in American Graffiti, the 1973 film set in a 1962 United States city.  That setting seemed ancient when I saw that new film when I was in junior high school in Edson, 700 kilometres northeast of here.  Now the film, like junior high school, seems prehistoric.  I saw it a few times since then, most notably at an outdoor screening during orientation week at the  University of Alberta in Edmonton in September, 2012.  Our daughter and I lived in Edmonton from September-March, to enhance her education and job prospects.  I attended the U of A long before 2012.

     Terry "the Toad" gets to use the car of the parents of Steve.  Steve's a cooler high school kid.  I had to  look up his name on Wikipedia just now, implying that I identify more with the nerd than with the cool kid.  Pretending it's his car, Terry picks up Debbie, who's ready for a good time.  They cruise around all night while he tries to impress and romance her.  Instead, Terry vomits from the liquor that an adult gets for him while robbing a liquor store, whose clerk runs out shooting at him.  Terry backs into the car of the local high school gang, who punch him up a bit.  They remind me of the Bronto Bunch from The Flintstones.  Terry's drag-racing friend John happens by and fights them off.  Before Terry and Debbie part at dawn, Debbie says she had a "bitchin' good time."

     Freud aside, if possible, I think the driver of that hot car in the Williams Lake FreshCo parking lot might be more like Terry "the Toad" than I am.  He, not I, had a chick magnet car.  What young  person has the loot to make such a jazzy car?  Bicycles have always been enough for me.  I didn't invite that shopping woman to cruise on my bicycle, but I was flattered that she asked me if the car was mine.  I haven't doubled on a bicycle since childhood.  I think the driver and I, like the shopping woman, are decades older now than Terry and Debbie were American Graffiti.  The driver might have been a child of the car's owner, but would the owner of such a car trust it to offspring, or anyone?  Perhaps a woman mechanic owned and drove the car in the FreshCo parking lot tonight.  Perhaps the shopping woman asking me found her and they cruised around.

     I saw but don't remember the sequel More American Graffiti.  Is it time for the series to have another film, set here in Williams Lake?  The film kids cruise on Elm Street.  Williams Lake's main drag, Oliver Street, is only about nine blocks long; but Second Avenue is about 15 blocks long.  Highway 20 goes 460 kilometres west to Bella Coola.  That's on the Pacific Coast, like California, which I think is the setting for American Graffiti.

     "Where were you in '62?"  to quote the television advertisement for the film.    

     

 

    

 

Olivia de Havilland Dies at 104

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Actor Olivia de Havilland (1916-2020), born in Tokyo, died in  Paris on July 25, 24 days after her 104th birthday on July 1.  Only this year did I learn that she was still alive, at 103.  Probably, genes from her mother (1886-1975) and father (1872-1968) helped her live so long.  She picked good parents. 

Cosmonauts, Voyager, and Humans

Thursday, May 28, 2020

     Two documentaries show how small humanity and Earth are in the universe, but how big Earthlings' insights can be:  "Cosmonauts:  How Russia Won the Space Race," by the the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (2017), and "The Farthest/Voyager in Space" (2019) by the Public Broadcasting System, of the United States.  The British and USians inject the obligatory national chauvinism and anti-communist hysteria in each film, but especially the second film makes humans small and big at the same time.

     Russia, still the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the internal fifth column working for foreign interventionists not having sabotaged it and pillaged its public assets yet, was the first nation to send a rocket into orbit around the earth, an animal next, and a human, between 1957 and 1961.  Space suits the Soviets invented are the model for those used to this day by every nation that sends people outside Earth's atmosphere.  Rockets the Soviets invented remain the basis for rockets used to deliver cargo to space stations, another Soviet invention.  When the internal and external sabotage of socialism reduced the Soviet Union to several rump states in the 1990s, cosmonauts on the Russian space station were stranded and almost forgotten in a disintegrating vessel that almost didn't return to Earth.  The documentary lets various cosmonauts and engineers speak about the historic Soviet achievements.

     The second film, about Voyager 1 and 2, launched by the United States, that absurdly-named nation, shows humanity's smallness in the cosmos, but also great human insight.  By 1986, the two unmanned space vehicles had flown near Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and their moons and rings, some of them unknown by us until then.  In 2012, the crafts left the gravitational pull of the sun and thus the Solar System.  Aboard Voyager 1 is a record made of metal and gold, with recordings of Earth nature photos, human biology, language, and music, Earth's place in the Solar System, and other items about Earth and nature, which includes us.  Playback instructions and a stylus are there, too. 

     Long after humans are extinct, and the Sun is a red giant that consumed the Earth and much of the Solar System, this tiny proof of our once-existence will coast through interstellar space. The odds are vast against an intelligent being finding this object.  Pivotal space scientist Carl Sagan worked on the Voyager and other US space projects.  In the film, his son says that Voyager is about us more than about the cosmos.  Carl convinced his bosses to turn the Voyager cameras to photograph the Solar System as the craft left it.  The Earth is a speck in a faint sunbeam.  That's all we were and are, but this spaceship shows the heights we can conceive.

     The other day the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio One in British Columbia, Canada interviewed a Canadian astronaut during a call-in show.  One caller said that the $10/year/Canadian spent on the space program is a profoundly wise investment.  We struggle with poverty, injustice, racism, and other flaws born of our system based on private property and the profit system; but this $10 hints at what we can aspire to, if we choose.

    Look through a drinking straw at the sky, a woman scientist of the Voyager program said.  That tiny round view includes hundreds of galaxies, in a universe of billions of galaxies.  A century ago people thought there was only one galaxy, our Milky Way.  By caring to look and ponder, we humble and exalt ourselves at the same time. 

Stanley Cup Winning Games from 1976, 1984, and 1989

Victoria Monday, May 18, 2020

I just watched a condensed version of the fourth and last game, May 16, of the 1976 Montreal Canadiens- Philadelphia Flyers National Hockey League Stanley Cup Final series.  Montreal won the cup against the two-time defending champions in four straight games.  Fans in Philadelphia's Spectrum gave Montreal a standing ovation.  When the 1994 Vancouver Canucks lost the cup at home to the New York Rangers, the Rangers' first cup in decades, Vancouver fans not only gave no standing ovation, they rampaged destructively through downtown Vancouver after the loss.  I remember listening to the end of that game on the radio on the Alkali Lake school bus entering Vancouver on a field trip I helped lead during my not-brief-enough teaching career. 

In the 1976 game, Guy Lapointe, Number 5, played defense;  I, Number 5, played defense in the Edson house league, my last year of minor hockey.  It was the first year that Yvan Cournoyer was captain; Henri Richard retired after the previous year.  Richard died a few weeks ago.  He won 11 Stanley Cups, the most of any NHL player.  Ken Dryden was goalie.  Guy Lafleur, Pete Mahovlich, Jacques Lemaire, and young Doug Risebrough, Steve Shutt, Doug Jarvis, and Bob Gainey were forwards.  Serge Savard, Larry Robinson, and Pierre Bouchard played defense.  Lafleur scored the cup-winning fourth goal with five minutes left in the 5-3 game.  I wore Number 10, like Lafleur, when I started playing minor hockey in 1970, on right wing.  Mahovlich scored the last goal.  The Canadiens' finesse overwhelmed the  "Broadstreet Bullies" of Dave Schulz, more elegant than I remember him, Bobby Clarke, Bill Barber, and Reggie Leach, the second person from a losing team, and the first Indigenous person, to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as most valuable player in the playoffs.

I was 14, growing like a weed, fit, fast, lean, and full of ice hockey, grass hockey, floor hockey, and any other hockey I could get my hands on.    Tennis balls were for grass hockey, not tennis.

The Habs won the next three Stanley Cups.  They lost only one of 13 games in the 1976 playoffs, and only 8 or 12 of 80 80 or so games in the 1977-78 season. 
The December 31, 1975 game in Montreal against the Soviet Red Army team was the best hockey game I saw until the mid-1980s Edmonton Oilers became the best team of all time, according to Gordie Howe, among others.  Pele called Maradona the best soccer player of all time.  Opinions are not always like assholes, although everyone has one.     

Cut to the last game of the 1984 cup final, in which the Oilers beat the New York Islanders, who had won the previous four cups, after the Canadiens' four cups.  I was glad the Oilers stopped the Islanders from winning their fifth cup and tying the all-time record of the 1956-60 Habs.  I watched that game between the two academic years of my University of Alberta Bachelor of Commerce After Degree.  I watched a condensed form of that game last week.  The Oilers became the first Western Canadian team to win the cup.  Watching them play was watching poetry on ice:  speed, passing, shooting, Andy Moog magical in net, Gretzky and Kurri in front, Anderson and Coffey faster than anyone, any year, any team.  To be fair, Cournoyer was still pretty fast in 1976.  Watching that game again was what made me write this blog post.

Go five years in the future to 1989, the last all-Canadian final, between the victorious Calgary Flames and the Montreal Canadiens.  Last week I watched a condensed version of the game in which the Flames won their only cup.  I was happy for moustachioed Lanny Macdonald, who had reached the 1977-78 semi-finals or quarter-finals with the Toronto Maple Leafs, only 11 years after the Leafs' last cup.  The Leafs last won in 1967, now 53 years ago.  I doubt any Canadian team will ever again win the cup.  The last team to do it was the 1993 Canadiens, who are now years into the longest cup drought of their history. 

I watched a game of the 1989 Flames-Habs series in a taxi office in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.  I was traveling across Canada by train, and Newfoundland by bus.  Nova Scotia bars were closed on Sundays.  The Saint Francis Xavier student residence where I stayed for $12 that night had a crowd of other young people watching something else on the common-area television.  Harrumph, as I say to those who giggle at folks such as I watching decades-old hockey games again. 

I watched another game of that series on the ferry from North Sydney, Nova Scotia to Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland.  Played in Calgary, that game had a very late broadcast time in Newfoundland.  The ferry lounge, closed partway through the game but for its television, had three people in it:  me and two other young men bent on Christian evangelizing me.  I already had the religion of hockey.  I gave them enough attention for politeness but not enough to miss important parts of the game.

When a tv sports channel started broadcasting old games because the worldwide coronavirus crisis caused the closure of hockey and other sports leagues, from professional to toddler, this spring, I noticed few high-profile advertisers during the early broadcasts.  Who'd want to watch a mid-2010s  game between two of the many boring teams that populate the NHL now?  The three games above had advertisers such as usually advertise on tv pro hockey broadcasts, automakers, for example.  Perhaps these games are more popular than the drivel disguised as hockey that has been National Hockey League play since 1989, or not long after.

Now I sound like one of those old timers such as my dad, who venerate Charlie Connacher, Howie Morenz and Maurice Richard, who played before I was born.

As I age, many notable events recede into the past, but they're worth remembering.  People still watch Hamlet, although I don't remember any Danes playing in the NHL.          

A and N Boutique No More

May 11, 2020

Army and Navy, "Western Canada's Department Store," one slogan says, went out of business this week.  This family-owned business started in 1919 in Vancouver.  The first location I knew was the Edmonton one at 82 Avenue and 104 Street, when I started attending the nearby University of Alberta in 1979.  My brother called it "A and N Boutique."  I bought many bargain clothes there, notably fleece pants for running in winter.  I also knew the 105 Avenue and 97 Street location, which closed more than 20 years ago, years after I left Edmonton.  In 2019 the original, downtown Vancouver location decreased from two buildings to one, and had various centenary decorations after the reopening of the diminished space.  I was in the New Westminster location many times, and in the Langley one once or twice.  The remaining five locations closed this week.  Army and Navy joins Kresge, Metropolitan, Eaton's, Sears, Woodwards, Zellers, SAAN, W.W. Arcade, Stedman's, Marshall Wells, Macleods, and various other retailers on the ash heap of capitalist consolidation.  What would Rosa Luxemburg say?