NOTE: I am having problems uploading some images of the Bolshoi Theatre. I will keep trying. You may want to re-visit the posting in a day or so.
Nubbing in Virgil
After a wetter and cooler spring than normal, I wondered whether we would ever get the kind of strawberries we dream about all winter. You know: berries that are red all the way through, soft to the touch, and have a flavour that says ‘summer’.
The first ones we got were grown under plastic and while better than imported ones, they weren’t the real thing.
And then, after a few days of sunny, warm weather the famous Ontario strawberries were here.
One of the local weekly papers announced that over 100 volunteers at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake were getting ready for the 26th annual festival on the church grounds. The article had this sentence:
“Members of the congregation will begin nubbing the fruit today and continue right through Saturday morning, as long as more fruit is needed.”
‘Nubbing?’
Now, I knew, of course, what the article meant. The volunteers were going to remove the little leaves at the stem-end of the berries.
But where I come from, we always called that ‘hulling’.
Assuming that the term had been brought over from the British Isles by settlers, I checked the Oxford English Dictionary. According to the dictionary, ‘nub’ can mean knob, protuberance or lump, and by extension, gallows, that is, the place, presumably, where one’s knob is lopped off.
The only definition I could find for the word ‘nubbing’ referred to hanging.
There is no reference to strawberries, but it is not unreasonable I suppose to think that in some corner of the British Isles people used ‘nubbing’ to mean the removal of the ‘nub’ at the stem-end of the berries.
Being a modern kind of person, I also checked Google.
That was a mistake.
It seems that in some circles ‘nubbing’ refers to sexual practices, which I am not going to try to describe in a family blog.
I strongly advise readers not to Google the term.
I know that many of you are contrarians at heart and being told not to do something you will immediately do it.
All I can say is that I warned you, and I and “Letter from Virgil” do not accept responsibility for any damage that Googling ‘nubbing’ may do.
You’ve been warned!
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A postscript about all of this.
Just as I was getting ready to upload this posting, I heard that the Strawberry Festival folks were saying that the newspaper had incorrectly reported what they had said, that they used the term ‘nibbing’, not ’nubbing’. According to them, the springy little metal tool used to pinch off the tiny strawberry leaves is called a ‘nibber’ and, therefore, when one uses it one is ‘nibbing’.
I have never heard that little tool referred to as a ‘nibber’ but I am prepared to accept their claim.
Unfortunately, a Google check of ‘nibbing’ brings up references, once again, to sexual practices---practices that we can’t go into here.
At this point, I think I am with George and Ira Gershwin, “Let’s call the whole thing off.”
So to speak.
Pat’s First Visit to the Bolshoi Theatre
I had been in Moscow for several months in 1995, working night and day to start the technical assistance project that was to create some 20 model employment offices from Moscow to the Pacific.
Things were now running smoothly and it was time for Pat to come for a visit.
Talking with a friend at the Canadian Embassy about things Pat and I could do and see, we agreed that a ballet at the Bolshoi Theatre should be at the top of the list.
“But don’t buy tickets from the scalpers in front of the Theatre”, my friend warned. “The tickets are either poor counterfeits or are valid tickets for performances that have already taken place. The writing is all in Russian and until you have picked up some Cyrillic you can’t tell whether they are valid.”
“So I would be out of pocket a good bit of money”, I said.
“Oh, it’s not the money, it’s the embarrassment you’ll feel when the ticket-taking babushka at the Bolshoi cackles to everyone about what an idiot you have been to buy fake tickets.”
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My office manager knew someone who had a friend at the Bolshoi and I bought two tickets.
The night of the performance was cold and wet. We took the Moscow Metro from a subway stop near our apartment and with a transfer or two came up to the surface on a street not too far from the Bolshoi. The street was dark and the grimy buildings on either side were slick with rain. Pat’s knees were sore and we had to take care not to step into potholes in the gloom.
We turned a corner, and saw a large dark building on our left.
I pointed and said, “That’s Lubyanka Prison”.
“Lubyanka”, Pat repeated.
We stopped and stared at the prison, shuddering a little at the thought of all the evil that had taken place there in Soviet times under Stalin and Beria.
We trudged on and, finally, Pat said, “Are you sure you know where we’re going?”
We carried on to the bottom of the dark street and turned right.
There, before us was the stunning, brilliantly illuminated Bolshoi---all white stone and gilt trim---shining against the dark sky.
Pat gasped and we stood for several minutes in awe.
Inside, (we had no trouble with the ticket takers) the dancing and the music were superb.
But there was so much else for the eye.
Pat fell in love with the stage curtain, which, despite the Soviet symbols, is a wonderful example of the weaver’s art. (The photo distorts, we think, the colour of the curtain. Our recollection is that the colours are softer, more muted.)
A Russian friend called the other day from Moscow and we talked about the Bolshoi and the curtain. The friend said he didn’t know what had happened to the curtain. The Bolshoi Theatre has been closed since 2005 and probably won’t reopen until 2013 (what were to be minor repairs have turned into major structural changes because the building is sinking). In the meantime, performances are taking place in a temporary home.
The Soviet Union was indeed in many ways as Reagan said ‘an evil empire’, witness the brutality that went on at Lubyanka Prison. And perhaps it would be wrong to continue to display the Communist symbols in the Bolshoi Theatre. But we would like to think that the curtain will be preserved, somewhere, as a work of art---and as a reminder of the evils of the Soviet times.
Canadian Consultants at the Bolshoi
Our Project’s work of creating model employment offices required the secondment of more than twenty officials from Canadian employment offices from Newfoundland to British Columbia to work in Russia.
I always made sure that the consultants had a chance to attend a ballet if the Bolshoi season was on.
After one visit to the Bolshoi, a consultant said: “How can I tell my friends back home that I sat in the Bolshoi. They’ll never believe me.”
He and all of us felt privileged to have been in that wonderful, historic theatre and to have enjoyed some of the world’s greatest music and dancing.
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Despite the legendary thoroughness of the ticket-taking babushkas, there could be slip ups.
On one occasion, we arranged Bolshoi tickets for several consultants who were in Moscow at the same time---on their way to, or from assignments out in the provinces.
One of the consultants had been in a meeting and had to rush to get to the Theatre on time. He was puzzled when he arrived because although his colleagues had agreed to meet him at the entrance there was no one there. He assumed that because he was a little late they had gone ahead and taken their seats. The babushka checked his ticket, gave it back to him and pointed out his seat.
He took his seat and became even more puzzled. The consultants’ seats were supposed to be all together but he was surrounded by strangers.
He shrugged his shoulders, settled back in his seat and enjoyed the ballet.
The next day he ran into a colleague and asked where the person had been the night before.
“Our ballet is tonight, not last night”, was the reply. “You got your dates mixed up.”
The consultant asked a Russian employee to check his ticket. It was a valid ticket, but valid for the coming night.
The babushka had let him in despite the wrong date, and as luck would have it, that seat hadn’t been sold.
What to do about the coming evening’s visit to the Bolshoi?
The consultant still had his ticket, and a different ballet was being performed.
So he went back to the Theatre, this time with his colleagues.
I was talking to him a few weeks ago and he was still chuckling that he must have been one of the few people ever to have enjoyed two ballets for the price of one at the Bolshoi.
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A Russian friend was complaining about the quality of goods being produced at that time---1995. Clothes, cars, appliances were all shoddily made---managers still had the Soviet-era mentality of meeting their production targets, and not caring about quality.
“We Russians can’t make anything right”, he muttered.
I asked, “What about the Bolshoi?’
“Oh, the Bolshoi, that’s special.”
And indeed it was.
Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
We had a problem with squirrels at our bed and breakfast, Denwycke House at Grimsby. Guests would hear noises above their heads, in the attic,. As one guest said, “I think you have non-paying guests in the attic.
We called an exterminator who used live traps to catch the squirrels, which he took out into the country. He also blocked the holes the squirrels had used to get into the attic.
That fixed the problem of beasties in the attic but since we had a number of chestnut and black walnut trees on the property we always had lots of squirrels on the property,
We noticed that some of them especially the young ones seemed to behave oddly. They would run in circles, fall out of trees, start off across the lawn and suddenly go tearing off in a different direction.
Strange.
I asked an expert at our gardening club about the odd behavior. She said she hated squirrels. “Everyone thinks they’re cute. I don’t. They’re just rats with fluffy tails.”
She suggested that perhaps they had a disease, and that would be a good thing, as far as she was concerned, so long as it was fatal.
We stopped worrying about the squirrels. There are lots of things to worry about when one is trying to run a B&B in a 160 year-old house that has been neglected.
At least the squirrels weren’t in the house.
Then we started having phone problems.
Our line would go dead---not a good thing when one is running a B&B. I would call Bell and a technician would climb the pole in front of our house and eventually the phone line would work again.
A month or so later, the line would go dead again.
After several problems, I went out to talk with the technician to find out what was going wrong.
He said, “It’s the damn squirrels”.
He explained that the telephone lines were encased in a lead tube filled with a gas, nitrogen I think, to keep moisture out of the lines. Young squirrels were always looking for something to sharpen their growing teeth against. They would chew into the soft lead, puncture the tube thus releasing the gas. The lines would get wet and stop working.
He said they hadn’t been able to think of a solution apart from burying the lines, which would have been very costly in an old neighbourhood.
Now we knew what was causing the odd behavior of the squirrels.
Lead poisoning!
And whenever our line went dead, we called Bell and said that the squirrels were at it again.
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See you next Sunday for Posting #27 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting, or email me at johnpathunter@cs.com.
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