POSTING # 8

Pruning the Vines; Big Question by a Jordanian Official; Walking to Port Stanley at Night; Can You Be in Moscow by Friday?; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)


Pruning the Vines

Last December, on a drive through the vineyard country around Virgil, we noticed a car pulled off the road, as far as a snow bank would allow. It was there the next day and the following day. Pat and I debated about calling the police and reporting what seemed to be an abandoned car.

The fourth day, the car was still there but this time we looked down the row of vines and saw a person, bundled up in a skidoo outfit, pruning the vines, in the wind and snow.

As spring approaches, the pace of pruning is picking up and sometimes there are three or four people working in the cold.

It reminded me of the time when I was in a doctor’s office in Ottawa and met a colleague from my Immigration days. Both of us had retired and we chatted about what we were doing. His last overseas posting had been at the Canadian Embassy in Washington and having fallen in love with the Virginia countryside, he had bought a farm. He was now planting a vineyard.

“That’s why I’m here,” he said, flexing his arms with a grimace “Tendonitis in both elbows. Planting vines is tougher than it looks!”

You have to admire the people who work so hard that we may have wine.


Big Question by a Jordanian Official

During this week’s Obama visit to Canada, I was thinking about what a different image the new president projects of the U.S than that projected by George W. Bush.

Three years ago, I was standing on Table Rock above Niagara Falls with a group of 8 employment officials from the Kingdom of Jordan. I had organized and was leading the visitors on a two week tour to study employment programs in Ontario and Quebec. The tour was drawing to an end.

One of the Jordanians, a particularly thoughtful person, came over to me and, pointing across the River to the people clustered on the American Falls observation deck, asked, “What are the Americans like? Are they like you Canadians?”

My first thought was how sad it was that we couldn’t just nip across the border and give the visitors some first hand experience of Americans in America. We could let them gather some impressions that they could put against the stereotypes that all media---in the Middle East and here---perpetuate. In a world of visa restrictions, that was just not possible.

I thought I knew what was in his mind. This was their first visit to North America, and they had told us they wondered how they would be received---eight Arabs, including two women in head scarves--- especially after 9/11.

The tour had gone well. The visitors were eager to learn and they followed the various presentations carefully, asking challenging questions. The Canadian experts, stimulated by this show of interest, responded wonderfully, discussing policies and programs that had worked and those that hadn’t. The experts loaded the visitors down with documents, software, and computer links. Usually I had to cut off discussion so we could get to our next appointment.

I was proud of the kindness and generosity of the Canadian experts. They never preached about the greatness of their work, they just shared. The visitors told me again and again how impressed they were with the Canadians they were meeting.

Scattered through the tour were visits to some tourist sites, a chance to relax and take some pictures. After visits to employment experts in Montreal, we took time out to visit St. Joseph’s Oratory on Mount-Royal. The group took pictures of the Oratory and of the magnificent view across the St. Lawrence.

Then, one of the group asked if they could go into the Oratory, where a mass was underway. I was uneasy---religion is, of course, so sensitive. Might someone back in Jordan object that I had ‘taken’ these Muslims into a Christian church?

I spoke to the leader of the group and told him about the request and my concern that a visit to a mass might be misunderstood. His response was, if they want to go, let them go.

With that, we all, including the leader, trooped quietly into the back of one of the Oratory’s large chapels. One of the chapel officials smiled and nodded a ‘welcome’ to us. After some minutes, watching a priest conduct the mass, one of the group asked if they could sit down. They slid into a pew and watched quietly and intently as the parishioners kneeled, prayed, and responded as the priest led them through the liturgy. Finally, I whispered that we had to move on to our next appointment.

As we got onto the bus, I could see that they were trying to digest what they had just seen---their first visit to a Christian church---and the quiet but warm welcome they had received.

Thinking back over these experiences, as we stood by the Falls, I tried to formulate an answer to the question, “Are Americans like you Canadians?”

Finally, I said that on a national level some of our values were different and these differences were reflected in approaches to social, economic and international policies that were not always the same---for example universal health care, or the Iraq war.

But, on an individual basis, he would have trouble telling us apart.

He thanked me and wandered off, deep in thought.

I wasn’t---and am not---very happy with my reply.

The Koreans have a proverb: “It is better to see once than hear a hundred times”. To tell someone what Americans are like doesn’t have the same impact as seeing them in their own country.

It is terribly sad that tightened non-immigrant visa requirements---as necessary as they may be---make it hard for people from the Middle East to see for themselves what Americans are like.


Walking to Port Stanley at Night

At 2 A.M., in June 1955, I was trudging along the road from St. Thomas to Port Stanley, on Lake Erie.

“At least it’s not raining,” I told myself.

Unless I could hitch a ride---not likely in the middle of the night---I had another 10 miles or so to go.

A few weeks earlier, things seemed to be going well. I had graduated from high school, been accepted by Queen’s University at Kingston and had a conditional offer of a summer job at a brewery in Kitchener-Waterloo---a job that would help finance my first year at Queen’s.

Then I got a letter from the brewery saying that there was a hitch but they would let me know as soon as possible whether I could have a job. I waited for a week and then decided that I could end up waiting all summer. I decided I would hitch-hike to the tobacco-growing area of south-western Ontario. I had been told that work on tobacco farms was plentiful and reasonably well-paid, although hard.

Motorists were ready to pick up hitch-hikers in those days and I was soon in Tillsonburg, the heart of the tobacco country. At the local National Employment Service office, an official interrupted a card game with colleagues to tell me that I was too late for the ‘suckering’ (plucking tobacco blossoms to prevent seeds from forming) and too early for the picking.

The official had me fill out a long employment registration form, then told me there were no jobs available, and went back to playing cards with his colleagues. I was angry at the off-hand way he had treated me. (Years later, I became responsible for the operation of local employment offices and started something called Revitalization of the Employment Service, a program designed to improve the service to job-seekers. But that’s another story.)

I hitched a ride to Port Dover, nearly got a job on a fishing boat and then moved on to Port Stanley and found a job making chips (French fries) at a long-established, family-owned restaurant called Mackies, on the boardwalk by the beach. Mackies was famous for a tasty orange drink. and for its chips, which it served with a delicious home-made sauce that was a cross between ketchup and chili sauce.

The base pay wasn’t great and the hours were long but there was a bonus at the end of the week, if sales had been good (not in the same league as Wall Street bonuses, however!!) and there was a cottage where the staff could stay rent-free. Life was good and I was putting money away for the coming year.

One evening I decided to take the London and Port Stanley electric railway (referred to by the locals as the L. & P.S, which someone told me meant Late & Poor Service, or Lost & Presumed Sunk) to London to see a play at the Grand Theatre.

The play was a French farce with lots of sudden entrances and exits.

It was fun---and also long.

And, I missed the last train to Port Stanley.

I took a city bus to the outskirts of London and then started hitch-hiking. One ride took me to St. Thomas and then another to a few miles south of the city, dropping me off in the middle of the country, with fields on both sides of me.

I waited for a while but no cars came and I decided I had no choice but to walk home. As I walked, I came to a long cast-iron fence on my left with some large buildings behind, all in darkness.

Then I heard a vehicle, and turning around, stuck out my thumb. A pickup truck slowed down, then speeded up and I started walking again. Then the truck stopped and backed up to me.

“Where are you going?”, a man asked.

I told him Port Stanley and explained I had missed the last L&PS train in London.

“Get in. I’m not going into Port Stanley but I’ll drop you on the outskirts.”

As I climbed into the truck, he said, “Don’t ever try to hitch a ride here.”

I looked at him blankly, and he pointed to a sign that his headlights were picking up, “Hospital area. Do Not Pick Up Hitch-Hikers.”

“That’s the St. Thomas Mental Hospital, over there, behind the fence. They have a lot of criminally insane patients in there.”

We had a good chat and he took me right to my cottage.

As I got out of the truck, I thanked him for taking a chance that I wasn’t a criminally insane patient on the run. He just chuckled, and took off.


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I didn’t plan to include jokes in the blog but here is a favourite that seems appropriate:
A man driving past a mental hospital heard a bang and realized that his right front tire had gone flat. Muttering to himself, he got out, jacked up the car, removed the hub cap, unscrewed the lug nuts and put them in the upside-down hub cap.
As he started back to get the spare tire, he noticed that a patient was studying him from the other side of an iron fence. Upset at being watched, the driver accidentally kicked the hub cap and the lug nuts went down a drain.
He cursed and said, “Now what do I do?”
“It’s easy”, said the patient, in a quiet voice, “Take one nut off each of the other wheels and use them to put on the spare tire. That will get you to a garage.
“That’s great”, the driver said with relief, “How did you know that?”
“Look,” the patient replied, “I’m crazy, not stupid.”

Can You Be in Moscow by Friday?

People who are about to retire sometimes want to know how one gets a consulting contract. I tell them about the obvious things one should do, such as sending out CVs, and building a network of friends and contacts.

But then I tell them that sometimes the unpredictable happens, and tell them this story about how I got my contract in Russia.

I had been retired for three years, had done some short-term consulting and was part-way through a book I was trying to write about a trip Pat and I had taken on the Thames River, retracing the route taken by Jerome K. Jerome in his Three Men in a Boat, Not to Mention a Dog.

On a Monday, two weeks before Christmas in 1994, I was talking to an electrician at our home in Ottawa describing some work we wanted him to do. The phone rang and Pat came in to say that Chris (from my old department, Human Resources and Skill Development) wanted to talk to me ‘urgently’. I asked her if she could tell him that I was tied up but would call him soon. She came back and said Chris insisted on talking to me right away.

I picked up the phone and without saying hello, Chris said, “John, can you be in Moscow by Friday?”

“Well, my passport is valid, but can you get me a visa before Friday?’

“The visa’s no problem. Here’s the deal.” He went on to explain that the World Bank had invited Canada to bid on a large, two-year project, which the Bank would be funding, to set up model employment centres across Russia. My old department had been invited to participate in the bid and it had to find a person with employment service operational experience to join a team of three people who would go to Moscow, study the situation and prepare the bid. It would be two or three weeks work, at most.

As Chris had predicted, the visa came through and I left Ottawa on Friday with the team leader and another expert. We spent several days visiting existing local offices around Moscow and talking to Russian officials about the proposal.

The Russians wanted a western employment service to create 20 model employment centres scattered through eight time zones from Moscow, through Siberia, to the Pacific. We agreed that the project made sense, that the time-frame of two years was about right and that Canada and my old department had the resources to do the job, if our bid were accepted (the U.S. and Australian governments were also submitting bids).

But, it was clear that the project would be a difficult one given the lamentable state of the existing employment centres, the huge distances involved, the shaky state of the Russian transportation system and the general economic upheaval as Russia adjusted to a market economy. And then there was, of course, winter in Siberia.

The three of us sat down in our hotel to draft the Canadian proposal, my role being to write the sections on operational details. The World Bank had set out project requirements quite clearly and things went smoothly until I came to a requirement that we had not discussed, that the winning country had to appoint one of its experts to be an on-site project manager, based in Moscow.

Thinking of the problems of travel, weather, and economic dislocation, I turned to the team leader and asked, “Who in the heck are you going to get to be the on-site manager?”

The team leader looked at me, paused, and said, “I was kind of hoping you would take it on.”

“But”, I sputtered, “We are running a Bed and Breakfast, and I’m doing some writing…”

“You don’t have to make a decision now, talk to your wife, think it over and let us know.”

Pat and I talked it over and discussed it with the family. In the end, we all agreed that I should take it on, if Canada won, which it did.

And, that’s how one contract came to be.


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Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)


We toured Britain by car when the boys were in their mid-teens and our daughter was about 8. To help them pass the time between castles, cathedrals, restaurants and hotels, we bought them a tape recorder. They used it sometimes to record their impressions of things they had seen. When they got bored, they would do things like sticking it out the car window and saying, “That’s what the wind sounds like in Durham (or Nottingham…).”

At the end of a hectic day, we arrived in Oxford, all of us anxious to get out of the car and stretch. Disregarding signs that encouraged drivers to park on the outskirts and take a bus downtown, we carried on to our hotel, in the centre of the city, where we had booked rooms and a parking spot.

We found the hotel without much trouble but although we could see it, we couldn’t figure out how to drive to it, what with one-way streets, and barriers, designed I suppose to keep cars out of the centre. Round and round we went looking for an alley or side street that would let us drive up to the hotel.

There was a fairly animated discussion between the driver and the navigator about whose fault it was that we couldn’t get to the hotel. You know the kind of marital give and take: “If you would just drive a little slower”, and ‘’’If you would just give a little more warning about turns”, etc. etc.

Finally we stopped a cyclist, an Oxford student, and told her our problem.

“No trouble at all”, she said and went over to a hinged barrier arm that was blocking us, and lifting it up, waved us through.

We decided she would do well in life.

After dinner, the kids brought out the tape recorder and began to play the animated discussion, which they had taped in full.

Embarrassment!

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See you next Sunday for more stories from our family’s universe!