Sunday, February 22, 2009
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!
Sunday, February 15, 2009
POSTING # 7:
Three Major Issues Facing Niagara-on-the-Lake, Including Virgil; Some Highlights from Hilton Head; Starting a Nuclear Reactor in the United Kingdom; Will They Miss the Boat?; Word Problems; Wish I Had Had a Camera; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
Three Major Issues Facing Niagara-on-the-Lake, Including Virgil
You move to a new area---as we have done---and want to be a good citizen with considered opinions on the key issues concerning the residents of your new community.
That’s the ideal, but it is not always easy to live up to it.
There are three issues dividing the community at the moment and the two weekly newspapers are full of editorials, articles and letters about them. We are having a tough time figuring out which arguments are valid and which are just special pleading.
Here are the issues (they may well remind you of issues you have faced or are facing in your own communities):
1. Whether the Niagara District Secondary School, located in Niagara-on-the-Lake, should be closed and the students bused to St. Catharines. (The School Board favours this but many parents are objecting while other parents are quietly transferring their children to St. Catharines’ high schools where, it is claimed, the standards may be higher.)
2. Whether the new, state-of-the-art, centre-of-excellence Niagara hospital should be built in the western end of St. Catharines or in a more southerly municipality, closer to patients from places such as Fort Erie and Port Colborne.
3. Whether Project Niagara should be allowed to go ahead. The National Arts Centre and the Toronto Symphony Orchestras are proposing to launch in 2012 (the bicentenary of the start of the war of 1812) a 17 week international musical festival outdoors in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Promoters say that this Tanglewood North, on the shore of Lake Ontario with the Toronto skyline as a backdrop will bring in millions of dollars and many new jobs but some people wonder what the increased number of people and cars would do to the character of the town. (I wonder if the first program will include the 1812 Overture---just asking.)
Some Highlights from Hilton Head
The economic crisis has begun to have an impact on even the affluent residents of Hilton Head (HH).
A retired professional who moved to HH from the north 14 years ago and has been going annually to Africa as a volunteer at his own expense told us that he will have to stop doing that. His savings are dwindling away as the stock market tanks.
An article in the local paper told retired couples how to adjust to reduced income by, for example, having pot luck dinners with friends instead of going out to eat, by shopping at thrift stores and by using coupons.
The restaurants are fighting back with more early bird specials and the clothing stores are offering some amazing buys (we went down with 3 suitcases and had to buy a 4th for the trip home. (While we were buying our suitcase---at a thrift store---a man was getting help carrying a huge carpet out to his car. The store clerk asked whether his car would hold the carpet and the man replied that he was sure it would, it was a Cadillac Escalade.)
The County Sheriff had a press briefing on increasing crime, even in ‘gated’ communities. “Criminals are criminals, thugs are thugs but in hard times good people sometimes do bad things.” He encouraged people to lock their cars and homes. (Not far from our condo, a thief entered an unlocked 2008 Range Rover, and took a handbag worth $2000, which contained $400 in cash and a cell phone.)
Starting a Nuclear Reactor in the United Kingdom
Listening to pundits challenging the Obama economists to tell them exactly how and when the stimulus package and bank bail out will work reminds me of a story a friend tells.
As a nuclear physicist working on one of Britain’s first nuclear power stations, he helped load the reactor with uranium rods and whatever else is needed to make a reactor work (I am really out of my depth here). Outsiders kept asking him and the other physicists when the reactor would start to work. The answer was that they couldn’t release that information, implying that the experts knew exactly when the reactor would start but couldn’t tell because of security concerns.
In fact, the experts had no idea when the reactor would begin. It would start when it was ready.
To while away the time, the physicists set up a secret office pool in which they guessed not just the hour and minute, but the day, the reactor would come alive! The reactor eventually did come alive and as far as I know is still functioning.
I feel sorry for Obama’s economists. Even though the laws of physics may not allow one to predict exactly when a reactor will start, they explain much more than the ‘laws’ of economics. How does one predict the impact that human emotions such as greed, fear, distrust, envy, anger or confidence will have on an economy?
Perhaps we should just let the economists get on with their tough and absolutely critical task.
Will They Miss the Boat?
Talking about Britain, Pat and I finished our London posting in 1966 and prepared to return to Canada by sea with our two sons, one three years old and the other 9 months. Friends, another couple from the Canadian High Commission, were travelling on the same ship with two girls about the same age as our boys. (In those days, it was cheaper to travel by sea than air and the government allowed only deputy ministers to fly.)
The four of us and the children were sitting in a waiting room at dockside in Liverpool, having already checked in the baggage that wouldn’t be required during the voyage. We were waiting for officials from British Immigration and the shipping company to arrive to check our passports and tickets. I reached into my briefcase to check, for the umpteenth time, that I had the passports and tickets.
My colleague watched me and then blurted out, “Oh my god!”
He said he had put his family’s passports and tickets in a suitcase that he had checked as not required during the voyage, and which by now was almost certainly in the hold of the ship.
His wife’s face turned white and the four children, sensing a huge problem, started to cry.
In my work at the High Commission, I had developed friendships with people in both British Immigration and the shipping company and I was frantically trying to think whom I could contact to get permission for our friends to board without their documents. In an era before cell phones, I was having trouble figuring out how to reach the right people before boarding started.
Suddenly, my friend said, “I’ve got an idea.”, and took off.
The officials opened the boarding gates but we, of course, waited with our friend’s wife and her children.
Thirty minutes passed and still no sign of my colleague. Most of the passengers had boarded and tension was mounting.
Then, my friend arrived, waving the documents and we went through the various checks.
Later, in a bar on the ship, our friend told us how he had got the documents.
He had gone down to the dock with the idea of somehow getting into the hold. As he studied the situation he saw that workers carrying bags into the hold wore cloth caps with a large metal badge with a number. As they went up the gangway, a Customs inspector wrote down the number of their badge and admitted them to the ship.
Our friend found a worker waiting to carry some bags onto the ship, took him aside and offered him ten pounds (a very good amount at that time) to borrow his hat. The fellow agreed and our friend left his suit coat and tie with the worker, put on the cap, picked up the bags and went up the gangway. The inspector checked his badge and waved him on.
Once in the hold, he discovered that the luggage was being stored in different sections by alphabet. He located his section, found his bag and took out his documents.
We raised our glasses in praise of his quick thinking!
Word Problems
When I was young, Dad once asked me to go into the house and get the kodak. I had no idea what he was talking about but Mom prompted, “The camera”.
As I went to get the camera, I thought it was a shame that older people couldn’t keep up with the language. No one I knew called a camera a kodak (when Dad was young all the cameras were made by Kodak).
Of course, now the shoe is on the other foot, as we say.
I’m the one who is not keeping up with the changing meaning of words.
For example, I was at the car service centre recently and wanted the technician (I know they are no longer called mechanics) to adjust the head lights because people were flipping their high beams at me. I told the service adviser that people were ‘flashing me’, and I thought I saw a hint of a grin on her face.
When I came back for the car, she said, “We’ve fixed the lights, Mr. Hunter. No one is going to flash you now.”
This time, there was a definite grin, and I finally twigged.
Another example, this week Pat and I were eating at Bob Evans in Niagara Falls NY. I decided that I would have just one bun instead of the usual two they provide and would have a piece of their excellent banana bread instead. As soon as I said the word ‘bun’ to the server I knew I was in trouble. As quickly as I could, I uttered ‘roll’ but it wasn’t quick enough to stop her face going rapidly from puzzlement to amusement.
Travelling to different countries can also, of course, create word problems.
When we lived in England, I wanted to get some sour cream for the baked potatoes we were having with dinner. I went to the dairy counter at the largest department store in Leeds.
“Do you have sour cream?”
“What do you want?”, the clerk said and, with some belligerence, added, “All our cream is fresh.”
I explained about baked potatoes, and after a pause, she said, “Oh, you mean SOURED cream.”
A young friend visiting Canada from the U.S. also had a problem with words. She was studying at one of the libraries at the University of Toronto and asked a woman at the Information Desk for a ‘rest room’.
The woman looked very concerned and said. “Oh dear, it’s not ideal but we have a small room with a cot that we use when we feel ill. You are welcome to use it.”
After some discussion, our friend was directed to a ‘washroom’.
Wish I Had Had a Camera
In a mall this week, I saw a couple of men who were preparing to demonstrate one of those ShamWow-type absorbent cloths that you see on TV. They had spilled some water on the floor and one of the men was cleaning it up with PAPER TOWELS. Wouldn’t that have been great on YouTube?
Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
Our one and only burglary (touch wood) happened at our home in the Glebe in Ottawa. Pat had been away for an hour in mid-morning picking up a friend. As she came up the porch steps, she saw that the front door was ajar. Alarmed, she pushed open the door and saw coats strewn on the floor.
Without thinking that the burglars might still be in the house, Pat screamed, “Cassidy, what has happened to Cassidy?” and raced for the kitchen.
And there was Cass, crouched on the floor, gnawing on a turkey drumstick thoughtfully provided by the thugs from our fridge.
Pat leaned over to cuddle him and simultaneously tried to pull away the drumstick because, of course, poultry bones can get stuck in a dog’s throat.
Cass growled at her.
Later on, when he had got over the loss of the drumstick, Cass came up to Pat, wagged his tail and sat down, as though he wanted to tell her about the nice people who had come to visit while she was away.
Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
See you next Sunday for more stories from our family’s universe!
Three Major Issues Facing Niagara-on-the-Lake, Including Virgil
You move to a new area---as we have done---and want to be a good citizen with considered opinions on the key issues concerning the residents of your new community.
That’s the ideal, but it is not always easy to live up to it.
There are three issues dividing the community at the moment and the two weekly newspapers are full of editorials, articles and letters about them. We are having a tough time figuring out which arguments are valid and which are just special pleading.
Here are the issues (they may well remind you of issues you have faced or are facing in your own communities):
1. Whether the Niagara District Secondary School, located in Niagara-on-the-Lake, should be closed and the students bused to St. Catharines. (The School Board favours this but many parents are objecting while other parents are quietly transferring their children to St. Catharines’ high schools where, it is claimed, the standards may be higher.)
2. Whether the new, state-of-the-art, centre-of-excellence Niagara hospital should be built in the western end of St. Catharines or in a more southerly municipality, closer to patients from places such as Fort Erie and Port Colborne.
3. Whether Project Niagara should be allowed to go ahead. The National Arts Centre and the Toronto Symphony Orchestras are proposing to launch in 2012 (the bicentenary of the start of the war of 1812) a 17 week international musical festival outdoors in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Promoters say that this Tanglewood North, on the shore of Lake Ontario with the Toronto skyline as a backdrop will bring in millions of dollars and many new jobs but some people wonder what the increased number of people and cars would do to the character of the town. (I wonder if the first program will include the 1812 Overture---just asking.)
Some Highlights from Hilton Head
The economic crisis has begun to have an impact on even the affluent residents of Hilton Head (HH).
A retired professional who moved to HH from the north 14 years ago and has been going annually to Africa as a volunteer at his own expense told us that he will have to stop doing that. His savings are dwindling away as the stock market tanks.
An article in the local paper told retired couples how to adjust to reduced income by, for example, having pot luck dinners with friends instead of going out to eat, by shopping at thrift stores and by using coupons.
The restaurants are fighting back with more early bird specials and the clothing stores are offering some amazing buys (we went down with 3 suitcases and had to buy a 4th for the trip home. (While we were buying our suitcase---at a thrift store---a man was getting help carrying a huge carpet out to his car. The store clerk asked whether his car would hold the carpet and the man replied that he was sure it would, it was a Cadillac Escalade.)
The County Sheriff had a press briefing on increasing crime, even in ‘gated’ communities. “Criminals are criminals, thugs are thugs but in hard times good people sometimes do bad things.” He encouraged people to lock their cars and homes. (Not far from our condo, a thief entered an unlocked 2008 Range Rover, and took a handbag worth $2000, which contained $400 in cash and a cell phone.)
Starting a Nuclear Reactor in the United Kingdom
Listening to pundits challenging the Obama economists to tell them exactly how and when the stimulus package and bank bail out will work reminds me of a story a friend tells.
As a nuclear physicist working on one of Britain’s first nuclear power stations, he helped load the reactor with uranium rods and whatever else is needed to make a reactor work (I am really out of my depth here). Outsiders kept asking him and the other physicists when the reactor would start to work. The answer was that they couldn’t release that information, implying that the experts knew exactly when the reactor would start but couldn’t tell because of security concerns.
In fact, the experts had no idea when the reactor would begin. It would start when it was ready.
To while away the time, the physicists set up a secret office pool in which they guessed not just the hour and minute, but the day, the reactor would come alive! The reactor eventually did come alive and as far as I know is still functioning.
I feel sorry for Obama’s economists. Even though the laws of physics may not allow one to predict exactly when a reactor will start, they explain much more than the ‘laws’ of economics. How does one predict the impact that human emotions such as greed, fear, distrust, envy, anger or confidence will have on an economy?
Perhaps we should just let the economists get on with their tough and absolutely critical task.
Will They Miss the Boat?
Talking about Britain, Pat and I finished our London posting in 1966 and prepared to return to Canada by sea with our two sons, one three years old and the other 9 months. Friends, another couple from the Canadian High Commission, were travelling on the same ship with two girls about the same age as our boys. (In those days, it was cheaper to travel by sea than air and the government allowed only deputy ministers to fly.)
The four of us and the children were sitting in a waiting room at dockside in Liverpool, having already checked in the baggage that wouldn’t be required during the voyage. We were waiting for officials from British Immigration and the shipping company to arrive to check our passports and tickets. I reached into my briefcase to check, for the umpteenth time, that I had the passports and tickets.
My colleague watched me and then blurted out, “Oh my god!”
He said he had put his family’s passports and tickets in a suitcase that he had checked as not required during the voyage, and which by now was almost certainly in the hold of the ship.
His wife’s face turned white and the four children, sensing a huge problem, started to cry.
In my work at the High Commission, I had developed friendships with people in both British Immigration and the shipping company and I was frantically trying to think whom I could contact to get permission for our friends to board without their documents. In an era before cell phones, I was having trouble figuring out how to reach the right people before boarding started.
Suddenly, my friend said, “I’ve got an idea.”, and took off.
The officials opened the boarding gates but we, of course, waited with our friend’s wife and her children.
Thirty minutes passed and still no sign of my colleague. Most of the passengers had boarded and tension was mounting.
Then, my friend arrived, waving the documents and we went through the various checks.
Later, in a bar on the ship, our friend told us how he had got the documents.
He had gone down to the dock with the idea of somehow getting into the hold. As he studied the situation he saw that workers carrying bags into the hold wore cloth caps with a large metal badge with a number. As they went up the gangway, a Customs inspector wrote down the number of their badge and admitted them to the ship.
Our friend found a worker waiting to carry some bags onto the ship, took him aside and offered him ten pounds (a very good amount at that time) to borrow his hat. The fellow agreed and our friend left his suit coat and tie with the worker, put on the cap, picked up the bags and went up the gangway. The inspector checked his badge and waved him on.
Once in the hold, he discovered that the luggage was being stored in different sections by alphabet. He located his section, found his bag and took out his documents.
We raised our glasses in praise of his quick thinking!
Word Problems
When I was young, Dad once asked me to go into the house and get the kodak. I had no idea what he was talking about but Mom prompted, “The camera”.
As I went to get the camera, I thought it was a shame that older people couldn’t keep up with the language. No one I knew called a camera a kodak (when Dad was young all the cameras were made by Kodak).
Of course, now the shoe is on the other foot, as we say.
I’m the one who is not keeping up with the changing meaning of words.
For example, I was at the car service centre recently and wanted the technician (I know they are no longer called mechanics) to adjust the head lights because people were flipping their high beams at me. I told the service adviser that people were ‘flashing me’, and I thought I saw a hint of a grin on her face.
When I came back for the car, she said, “We’ve fixed the lights, Mr. Hunter. No one is going to flash you now.”
This time, there was a definite grin, and I finally twigged.
Another example, this week Pat and I were eating at Bob Evans in Niagara Falls NY. I decided that I would have just one bun instead of the usual two they provide and would have a piece of their excellent banana bread instead. As soon as I said the word ‘bun’ to the server I knew I was in trouble. As quickly as I could, I uttered ‘roll’ but it wasn’t quick enough to stop her face going rapidly from puzzlement to amusement.
Travelling to different countries can also, of course, create word problems.
When we lived in England, I wanted to get some sour cream for the baked potatoes we were having with dinner. I went to the dairy counter at the largest department store in Leeds.
“Do you have sour cream?”
“What do you want?”, the clerk said and, with some belligerence, added, “All our cream is fresh.”
I explained about baked potatoes, and after a pause, she said, “Oh, you mean SOURED cream.”
A young friend visiting Canada from the U.S. also had a problem with words. She was studying at one of the libraries at the University of Toronto and asked a woman at the Information Desk for a ‘rest room’.
The woman looked very concerned and said. “Oh dear, it’s not ideal but we have a small room with a cot that we use when we feel ill. You are welcome to use it.”
After some discussion, our friend was directed to a ‘washroom’.
Wish I Had Had a Camera
In a mall this week, I saw a couple of men who were preparing to demonstrate one of those ShamWow-type absorbent cloths that you see on TV. They had spilled some water on the floor and one of the men was cleaning it up with PAPER TOWELS. Wouldn’t that have been great on YouTube?
Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
Our one and only burglary (touch wood) happened at our home in the Glebe in Ottawa. Pat had been away for an hour in mid-morning picking up a friend. As she came up the porch steps, she saw that the front door was ajar. Alarmed, she pushed open the door and saw coats strewn on the floor.
Without thinking that the burglars might still be in the house, Pat screamed, “Cassidy, what has happened to Cassidy?” and raced for the kitchen.
And there was Cass, crouched on the floor, gnawing on a turkey drumstick thoughtfully provided by the thugs from our fridge.
Pat leaned over to cuddle him and simultaneously tried to pull away the drumstick because, of course, poultry bones can get stuck in a dog’s throat.
Cass growled at her.
Later on, when he had got over the loss of the drumstick, Cass came up to Pat, wagged his tail and sat down, as though he wanted to tell her about the nice people who had come to visit while she was away.
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See you next Sunday for more stories from our family’s universe!
Sunday, February 8, 2009
POSTING # 6: The Ice Wine Harvest; Mince Tarts in Hilton Head; Canadians Celebrating the U.S Presidential Inauguration; Arrogant Bankers; Short Stuff
The Ice Wine Harvest
While we were on holiday and enjoying the sun in South Carolina, we did take time--- now and then---to worry about the ice wine harvest back in the Virgil area. (I know this may seem hard to believe but you’re just going to have to trust us.)
Picking ice wine grapes is a tricky business. As you know, they stay on the vines after the normal grapes are picked, waiting until they have frozen and thawed enough times to bring the sugar and acid content up to the desired levels. When the berries become brown they are ready to harvest but the actual picking has to wait until some night when the temperature is -10C or colder.
Some vineyards had picked their grapes during a cold spell in December but other vineyard managers felt the grapes weren’t quite ready and gambled on a cold spell in January.
The gamble paid off. The second week of January was ideal for picking and the 2008 crop is now safely in fermentation vats.
I hear that the yield was large and the winemakers expect that 2008 will prove to be a very good year for ice wine.
I like to think that our worrying helped.
Mince Tarts in Hilton Head
In the Posting #5, I mentioned that we were taking mincemeat with us so I could have my 12 tarts between Christmas and New Years. Our plan, you will recall, was to buy frozen tart shells and fill them with good Canadian mincemeat.
But, there were no tart shells to be had in Hilton Head! And we weren’t about to try to make pastry dough in a skimpily-equipped vacation kitchen.
Happily, Mrs. Smith came to our rescue. One supermarket had two frozen mincemeat pies made by Mrs. Smith. Pat used her skills in geometry and quilting to calculate, with great precision, slices of pie that would be exactly equal to a normal tart.
According to Pat’s calculations, I have had the equivalent of at least 14 tarts.
We feel well prepared for 2009.
Canadians Celebrating the U.S Presidential Inauguration
After cheering, holding our breath, biting our nails etc. for Obama last fall, it didn’t seem right just to sit in our rented condo and watch the inauguration on television. It was a time to be with others. But, how to do that?
Then we saw an advertisement announcing an inauguration lunch at a local restaurant, Dye’s Gullah Fixin’s, that we had visited the week before. (The Gullah are descendants of blacks who settled along the coast of North and South Carolina after the Civil War. Dye offers some wonderful dishes from her Gullah ancestors including light, rich corn bread served with home-made sugar cane syrup, fried oysters, and peach dump---sliced peaches are ‘dumped’ into a baking dish with batter.)
The lunch was sponsored by the Beaufort County Democratic Club South of the Broad (the Broad is a river that divides Beaufort County between the city of Beaufort in the north and Hilton Head in the south). We sent an email to the organizer (to be honest, we were a little economical with the truth and didn’t say we were Canadians just in case…). He replied saying he had reserved tickets for us but warned the restaurant would be crowded.
We got there early and found space at a table with two other couples, from Pittsburgh. We shook hands, “Hi, I’m John and this is my wife Pat.”
One of the women said, “You’re Canadians.”
Pat looked at her, “How did you know? We haven’t said, ‘Out’ ‘About’ or ‘Eh’?”
“It’s your accent.”
Pat explained that we weren’t going to say we were Canadians for fear they would think we were crashing their party.
“Oh, you’re very welcome.” (And, indeed, we couldn’t have been treated more warmly.)
We learned later that the woman who ‘outed’ us attends the Shaw Festival with her husband every May and October. She certainly knows her Canadian accents!
The restaurant filled quickly and the organizer kept wandering around, wringing his hands, and saying, “I hope the Fire Marshall doesn’t drop in.”
We noticed there was a reporter with a notebook interviewing three women at a table behind us. Here is part of her article as it appeared in the Island Packet on the day after the inauguration. The reporter captured very well the mood and emotions of the party.
Julie Cordray of Sun City Hilton Head is black and grew up in South Carolina during the civil rights era.
Ina Takashima of Hilton Head Island is a Japanese-American who was incarcerated with her parents in an internment camp during World War II.
Lena Epps Brooker is a Native American who grew up in a part of North Carolina that had three-way segregation separating whites, blacks and "Indians."
“For the three women who sat among a larger group of friends, Obama's swearing-in was the culmination of lifelong hopes -- hopes their parents told them to hold onto from the time they were girls -- that one day a racial minority would win the White House.
"My parents told me that change would come, that barriers would come down," Brooker said. "Today, it did."
"Minorities are in board rooms and running businesses," she continued. "This is the last barrier. It's been reached. What my parents told me about -- it's here."
Cordray said she felt a "sense of completeness" as Obama took the oath. "It empowered all of us," the Georgetown native said.
Takashima still had tears running down her face 10 minutes after the new president finished his inaugural speech.
"This means the world to me," she said. "After suffering prejudice and hatred in my life, this day has finally come."
The three women weren't the only ones moved by the historic inauguration.
Obama supporters at Tuesday's gathering watched the event on two televisions placed on opposite sides of the small Gullah restaurant. One was propped up on a yellow ladder, a microphone perched next to it to amplify the sound. Beneath the television hung a poster with an image of Obama's face and the word "hope."
People stood and wept and cheered during the swearing in and after the inaugural speech. They sang the national anthem along with the United States Navy Band Sea Chanters as though the Hilton Head gathering was actually taking place at the Capitol.
It seemed to me that the whites, although pleased with the election of the first African-American, were rejoicing primarily because the Bush years were over and because the Obama victory promised more responsible national and international policies.
For the non-whites, the inauguration meant all of that but something else. They were celebrating the beginning of a new era, an era that promised greater fairness in the pursuit of the happiness promised nearly 250 years ago in the Declaration of Independence.
A remarkable day.
A remarkable nation!
Arrogant Bankers
The media are full these days of stories about Wall Street Bankers, their greed, conceit and, often, plain stupidity.
It remind me of a story that a friend tells of a run-in she had a few years ago with her banker. She lives in a small U.S. town and was having a contractor replace her sidewalk, steps and patio. When he had finished he gave her a bill for the price they had agreed upon---$7000---and asked if she could give it to him in cash (I hope neither she nor he is ever offered a job in Washington that requires them to reveal all their tax histories!).
Our friend went to her bank, was greeted by name by the teller and gave her a withdrawal slip for the $7000.
The teller started when she saw the amount, “I’m sorry but I can’t give you that much cash”.
“Why not? There’s enough money to cover it.”
“I just can’t.”
“But it’s my money.”
“I better let you see the manager.”
Our friend, keeping her cool remarkably well, sat down in front of the manager’s desk. He engaged in some small talk about her family and then said, “Now tell me dear, what are you going to do with this money?”
Our friend told us that she considered and rejected several options in the second or two after the banker’s question. Should she tell him the truth? Should she tell him it was none of his business? Should she tell him that his question was insulting and demeaning?
In the end, she leaned forward and whispered in a confidential tone, “Well, you know what young lovers are like.”
The banker had the decency to turn red. He quickly initialed the withdrawal slip and passed our friend back to the teller.
Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
Last month, coming back from a stroll by the ocean, Pat and I were crossing the narrow wooden ramp over the dunes and met a couple with two Prince Charles Spaniels. The man was about 20 feet ahead of his wife, being pulled along by a lovely dog, with a tennis ball in its mouth. The dog paused to sniff Pat, keeping the ball in its mouth. Pat leaned over, let the dog smell her hand, and then ruffled his fur and told him what a fine dog he was.
Suddenly, the dog with the woman began to bark furiously. The woman tried to shush it but finally had to pick it up. We left the man and walked to the woman and the still-barking dog.
The woman frowned at us and said accusingly, “You touched her sister.”
We didn’t know what to say.
Then the dog stopped barking and leaned over to sniff us. After the hand-sniffing ritual, we told her what a beautiful dog she was and played with her ears. If she had been a cat, she would have been purring.
The women, a little friendlier now, told us that her dog couldn’t stand anyone paying attention to her sister.
Apparently, sibling rivalry is not just a human condition.
We asked if her dog also liked to play fetch on the beach.
“No, she can’t be bothered. She just chases the birds.”
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Years ago when the children were young, we went for a swim at an ocean beach that was new to us. The waves were fairly high and I wasn’t sure whether there might be an undertow. The two boys knew about swimming in the ocean but they were getting quite far out. I thought it would be a good idea to give them a warning.
“Watch for an undertow”, I shouted.
Our daughter (who was younger than the boys, didn’t have any ocean experience and had no idea what an undertow was) stopped what she was doing. She decided that it would be a good idea to repeat the warning (she had a fine set of lungs and as is normal with youngest children she loved a chance to tell her older siblings what to do). She let out two good shouts, repeating what she thought she had heard.
Then she turned to me, with a growing look of horror, “What’s an undertoad, Dad?’
(I still wonder what kind of ugly, threatening reptile her imagination had conjured up.)
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See you next Sunday for more stories from our family’s universe!
Sunday, December 21, 2008
POSTING # 5---CHRISTMAS STORIES
POSTING # 5:
Niagara-on-the-Lake at Christmas: Henderson Christmas’s; Hunter Christmas’s; Henderson-Hunter Christmas’s; The Magic of Mince Tarts; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
Niagara-on-the-Lake at Christmas
One of the prettiest Christmas sights is Niagara-on-the-Lake at night.
Pat and I drove through the town the other night and marveled at how beautiful it is. The masses of tourists have gone, replaced by a few Christmas shoppers bustling from shop to shop. The stores give off a warm and cozy glow---not garish or trashy---and the trees and shrubs along the main street are decorated discreetly with strings of white lights.
A horse beside the Prince of Wales Hotel stomps its feet waiting for a young couple on a get-away weekend who would like to snuggle under a buffalo robe and tour the town.
The local Chamber of Commerce claims that Niagara-on-the-Lake is the prettiest town in Ontario, or perhaps Canada. From their advertising, it seems they are referring to the town in the summer, with flowers in hanging baskets and well-tended parks. And it is lovely then.
But Niagara-on-the-Lake at Christmas time is wonderful, soothing, reassuring, and magical.
Henderson Christmas’s
On Christmas day, the tradition in Pat’s family was to open the presents from Santa Claus and from each other in their home in Aurora, have breakfast and then set off for the farm in Oro, near Barrie where Pat’s mother grew up.
For the first 6 or 7 years of Pat’s life, until road plowing improved, Pat’s father drove them to Murdoch’s Service Station on Highway 11, north of Barrie. There, they waited for Pat’s grandfather to come in a sleigh to get them. The family would load the gifts for the grandparents, Aunt Margaret, Uncle Bob and the cousins onto the sleigh. Pat’s grandfather gave them warm robes and shouted, “Gett yup” to the horse.
When they arrived, Pat and her family would rush out of the cold into the solid brick farmhouse built by Pat’s great grandfather and revel in the smells of a real Christmas tree and cooking food.
Later on when the road snow plowing improved, they would drive right to the farm.
But some years there were problems. Barrie is in the middle of the Ontario Snow Belt and cars then were not as reliable as they are today. Sometimes Highway 11 was blocked by huge snow drifts and they had to turn around and go home to a Christmas dinner of bacon and eggs or ‘chicken a la king’ (toast with cream of chicken soup mixed up with some dead chicken leftovers.
On one occasion, they spent the Christmas day in an unheated garage in Barrie waiting for the mechanic, who had kindly agreed to forego his own Christmas dinner, to fix their car.
Pat says, “A feeling of fun and adventure prevailed on these occasions----the very idea of having bacon and eggs for Christmas dinner had us howling with laughter”.
Hunter Christmas’s
My family always celebrated Christmas at our home in Arthur.
During the year, Dad was normally serious and stern at dinner, but Christmas dinners were different and I remember them fondly. The ‘dinner’ was at noon after we had opened the gifts, passed around bowls of nuts, chocolates and oranges. We would start dinner by pulling Christmas crackers, reciting the silly jokes and putting on the ridiculous paper hats (dad included).
Dad would have a glass of sherry, the only meal in the year that Mom permitted any alcohol at the table---she didn’t want to set a bad example for the kids.
Mom would bring in the roasted goose and slice it. (It was always a goose, never a turkey. This was part of Dad’s heritage---his father had a bakery in Wales and he would roast the geese for all his customers, deliver them around the town and only then did the Hunters sit down to their own goose dinner.)
For dessert, we would have rich, dark plum pudding, made by Aunt Millie who lived in Perth, and mince tarts.
I remember one or two Christmas’s when the monthly cheque from the Ontario Provincial Police didn’t arrive on time. We were not poor but despite pretty careful money-management there was usually little money left by cheque time. If the cheque that normally arrived around the third week of the month was held up in the mail or by a snow storm, there was a problem, and the problem was magnified if this happened in December.
I can remember Mom explaining to us on one occasion that Santa would not be able to bring us the hockey sweater, skates, toboggan or whatever we had asked for. It was hard to understand why Santa with his unlimited resources would not be able to call at our house.
One Christmas, Mom decided it was time to introduce a little culture to the four men in her house (Dad, my two brothers and me).
On a visit to Guelph, our nearest city, she bought a 12 inch, 78 RPM record of John Charles Thomas, a famous American baritone, singing the hymn, Jerusalem.
Mom played the record and we were all impressed. He had an amazing voice.
Then one of us, I forget who, looked at the B side, something Mom had forgotten to do. It was Thomas singing Kansas City from the musical Oklahoma.
One of the verses goes:
Everything's up to date in Kansas City
They've gone about as fer as they can go
They got a big theatre they call a burleque
For fifty cents you could see a dandy show!
One of the gals is fat and pink and pretty
As round above as she was round below
I could swear that she was padded from her shoulder to her heel
But later in the second act when she began to peel,
She proved that everything she had was absolutely real!
She went about as fer as she could go
Yes, Sir! She went about as fer as she could go!
Dad smiled broadly, we boys giggled and Mom looked down at her fingernails, as much as to say, “That’s the last time I try to bring any culture into this family”.
Henderson-Hunter Christmas’s
We have generally had our Christmas’s at home but the dates have bounced around a bit, to fit in with people’s work schedules and relatives’ commitments. This year, we are in the midst of our Christmas as this posting is being finalized.
Our tradition has been to have pancakes and maple syrup first thing and then open the gifts under what was always a real tree until recent years. (Our trees were usually bought at the last moment and often looked a bit like something Charlie Brown might have selected. A neighbour up the street looked at our tree one year, shook her head, and said, “It’s people like you who give real trees a bad name.”)
The trees were decorated with a mish-mash of treasured items. Arab headdresses I had brought from a trip to Lebanon when the children were young, kindergarten creations made from toilet rolls and pipe cleaners, and assorted balls, glass angels and other bangles acquired around the world---all items rich in memories.
Early on, our daughter, Jen, appointed herself the distributer of gifts, even before she could read the names on the gift cards. What a wonderful job she did, making sure that everyone got a gift, including our dog Cassidy, before starting another round.
This early demonstration of family organization has carried on and developed, and everyone looks to Jen (and Pat, her husband) for the planning of family events.
The Magic of Mince Tarts
As I mentioned earlier, we always had mince tarts at Christmas time and I grew up believing that to have 12 months of good luck in the upcoming year you had to eat 12 mince tarts between Christmas and New Years. If you ate only 11, you would be OK until the end of November, but watch out for December!
Now, part of me likes to think that I am a rational, no-nonsense, non-superstitious person, but there is another part that doesn’t walk under ladders, that ‘knocks’ wood, and dodges black cats (except when I am in Britain, where a black cat crossing your path is considered good luck---go figure).
If there were a support group for superstitious behavior, I would have to say, “My name is John, I believe in mince tarts”.
It is hard to know where this belief in mince tarts came from---perhaps from my Welsh, Scottish or Yorkshire roots.
Or perhaps there is another explanation. As far back as I can trace our family tree, the Hunters were all master bakers. Did the guild of bakers dream up this idea a few centuries ago just to boost year-end sales?
(By the way, the Wikipedia Encyclopedia claims that in the 17th century, Oliver Cromwell, that Puritan spoilsport, outlawed the eating of mince tarts on Christmas Day, because, I assume, he was worried that the succulence of a warm tart would distract people from the religious significance of the day.)
Anyway, I brought this idea of the magic of mince tarts to our marriage and although Pat grumbled a good bit about getting out the rolling pin each December, she did it. I got my 12 mince tarts and although our fortunes went up and down, overall we have done pretty well.
Truth be told, Pat has bought into the idea so much that most years she forces me to eat 13 or 14 tarts just to be sure I haven’t miscounted. It should be noted that she has never joined me in the dozen of tarts tradition---she really doesn’t enjoy mince tarts.
All of which brings us to Christmas 2002. Pat and I were in Baku, Azerbaijan, where I was heading a project to reduce corruption in the public service (I can guarantee that future postings will have some stories about that experience).
We had gone out for dinner on Christmas day (to an Azeri restaurant---no turkey with cranberry sauce). As soon as I woke on Boxing Day, I thought, “We have forgotten mince tarts!”
Off we went to find some mince tarts or at least some mincemeat. Grocery stores in Baku had never heard of mince tarts or mincemeat. We kept getting shunted to ground meat in their butchery section.
Getting desperate, we went to the restaurant in the Radisson Hotel---a favourite of western expatriates. The chef said they had made mince tarts for a special Christmas dinner the day before but the tarts were all gone.
Could they bake some more? No, they were too busy preparing for New Years. Could they sell us some mincemeat. No!
We decided that we had made a good faith effort, that the fates would hopefully take that into account, and wouldn’t punish us. We had tried.
And anyway, it was just a superstition, wasn’t it.
The first indication that the mince tart fates were annoyed with me came on the evening of January 10th. Hans (not his real name), a German lawyer arrived in Baku. He was to help me by re-writing public service legislation to prevent (or at least reduce) corruption in the hiring, promotion and firing of Azerbaijan public servants. He arrived with all kinds of legal texts---plus a very high temperature.
It turned out that he had had an intermittent temperature in Germany after returning from a Christmas holiday in Kenya. His temperature would be normal during the day but high at night. His doctor told him it was just a virus.
I suspected malaria especially after he told me that he had not taken anti-malarial drugs while in Kenya---because, he said, he wanted to be able to drink and one can’t drink alcohol while taking those pills.
We took him the next day to one of the two clinics that western oil company employees used (there is a lot of drilling for oil in the Caspian Sea off Baku). His temperature was normal and his blood test showed no malarial infection. The Azeri doctor (trained in Moscow) thought it was probably a virus---take Aspirin, drink plenty of fluids and get lots of sleep.
Hans wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating much and was getting weaker and weaker, and I was getting more and more alarmed. Finally one night when his temperature was high, we took him to the other clinic. The doctor was a South African who had worked in the Canadian north and, more importantly, in Indonesia where malaria was common.
He immediately suspected malaria and the blood tests confirmed that Hans did indeed have malaria and not just that but a particularly nasty type that if not treated promptly could destroy organs. The doctor explained that blood tests can only detect malaria when the temperature is high---when the temperature falls it means that the ‘bad guys’ have temporarily left the blood stream and hidden in body tissue.
The doctor gave him a drug that he said would help but the best drug wasn’t available in Azerbaijan. He said we should use medical evacuation to get Hans back to Germany right away (a medevac jet with a doctor and a nurse could fly in from Moscow and take him to Germany).
At that point Hans told us that his travel insurance didn’t cover medical evacuation. His contract with the project included funds for insurance, but he had opted not to buy that insurance, and, instead, had pocketed the money.
He told us he couldn’t afford the $100,000 cost of an evacuation. He couldn’t even afford the $15,000 for a nurse to accompany him on a commercial flight to Germany.
Right!
His doctor took me aside, “This is really serious. He has to get back to Germany right away. He’s not infectious---Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. Get him on a commercial flight, tonight if you can.”
I called the agency in Germany that Hans worked with and the official said that if I could get Hans on a plane for the four hour flight, he would have a doctor and ambulance waiting when the plane arrived in Frankfurt.
Pat and I took Hans back to his hotel, packed his belongings and set off to the airport. Hans was wearing a brown, wool duffle coat with the hood up. He kept dozing off but I would wake him and coach him on how to behave at the airport.
“You will have to put the hood down.”
“But I’m cold.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’ve got to convince the airline people you are OK to travel. Put the hood down, stand up straight, and don’t shuffle.” (Pat says that I added, “Right now you look like an idiot!” She remembers thinking that that was out of character for me, but it was a pretty stressful time.)
At the airport we helped him through the outgoing customs screening and then just watched and held our breath as he approached the airline counter. He held himself together until he had checked his bags, and got his boarding pass. Then the stiffening seemed to go out of him, he slouched, put his hood up and shuffled off, out of sight, toward the departure lounge.
We waited until the plane had left, just to make sure.
The next day the agency phoned to say he had arrived safely and was now in hospital.
A week of so later the agency sent us an email saying that Hans was now at home and recovering well. The agency thanked Pat and me for our help, saying, “If you had not done what you did, the result would not have been good.”
Looking back on it, we were enormously lucky that the SARS epidemic did not become headline news until several months after Hans was safely home.
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The mince tart fates had one more nasty surprise for us at Baku.
Six weeks after Hans left, I developed some aches, pains and a temperature. I thought it was just a virus (shades of Hans!!), perhaps a cold or maybe at worst the ‘flu.
A friend working on another project called to ask how I was. Pat chatted with him and then I got out of bed to tell him it was nothing and I would soon be back to work.
Then, I started feeling dizzy and collapsed on the floor. When I came to, Pat was shouting at the friend telling him to come over right away.
It must have been a terrible time for Pat, not knowing what had happened to me---a stroke, heart attack, or worse (at one point she thought I had stopped breathing).
The friend arrived with an Azeri colleague with a big SUV. I was bundled into it and Pat told the driver to take us to the clinic with the South African doctor. The Azeri fellow didn’t know the way to the clinic---while Pat knew exactly how to get their because of our trips with Hans---but he was reluctant to take directions from a foreigner. After all, it was his city. In the midst of caring for me, Pat had to shout and argue with him.
We got to the clinic in record time and the driver was clearly impressed with Pat’s knowledge of the tricky streets in that part of Baku. He was one of many fine Azeris we met during our stay in Azerbaijan.
After tests, the doctor said that I had just fainted, that I had prostatitis, a bacterial infection of the prostate, and prescribed a heavy dose of CIPRO. He said I would feel lousy for a week or so but would recover fully in a few weeks.
As he was putting away his equipment, the doctor said he was quitting and returning the next day to South Africa. He wasn’t sure who would replace him at the clinic. One of his reasons for quitting was that he wasn’t sure how he would be looked after if he became ill in Baku. Not reassuring.
The prostatitis was the last straw. I had been having fights with the project contractor on how to manage the project and now with the illness and the uncertainty of medical care, I decided that the time had come to part company. The contractor agreed (I think they were getting fed up with my insistence on dotting ‘I’s” and crossing ‘T’s’ on contracts with local employees), found a replacement and Pat and I returned home.
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So, the events of Baku convinced us that the mince tart fates are not to be toyed with.
We are leaving for South Carolina on Boxing Day and. I will only have time for a couple of tarts before leaving for the South. We are not sure that tarts or mincemeat will be available in the land of the pecan pie so we are going to lug along some President’s Choice mincemeat and will buy prefab tart shells!
Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
Brother Jim tells a story about a long-ago Christmas. He had written a letter to Santa asking for a sleigh, the kind of sleigh he had seen at the local hardware store. Unfortunately, when Mom went to the store to get the sleigh she was told that they had just sold the last one.
Mom must have been heartbroken, must have wondered what to do. In the end, she prepared a letter to Jim from Santa that started off “Dear Jim”. Santa said that he had got Jim’s letter and thought he would be able to provide a sleigh but things had come up, and he was so sorry.
Jim says that if he received the sleigh, he would probably have forgotten all about that Christmas.
But he has never forgotten the letter he got from Santa.
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We always got Cassidy a hermetically sealed tin of yellow tennis balls for Christmas, to replace the tired, grey slobber-stained balls from the previous Christmas. When the presents had been put out under the tree, Cassidy would circle around until he sniffed the tennis ball container. He would lie for hours on the floor, shivering, his nose pointing at his present.
When Jen put his present in front of him, he would tear away the wrapping paper and then look for someone to open the can.
Once he had one of the new balls, he would take off across the floor playing his version of hockey, batting the ball back and forth between his front paws. Sometimes he would forget and grab the ball in his mouth, a move that wasn’t permitted by the rules he had developed for his game.
Over time, he had discovered that if he kept an ear in his mouth he wouldn’t be tempted to grab the ball. So, he would swing his head back and forth until he could grab one of the floppy ears in his mouth and then resume stick-handling (paw-handling?) holding the ear firmly in his mouth.
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We once got Cassidy a soft rubber toy that squeaked. As he was sniffing under the tree for his tennis balls, he stepped on the wrapped toy. It squeaked and he yelped and jumped back.
He got his revenge after the presents were opened. He chewed the toy until the metal squeaker fell out and then pranced around with the vanquished toy in his mouth.
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
THANK YOU----SEE YOU AGAIN ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY, 8
I am grateful for the kind comments about Letter from Virgil and for the memory-jogging suggestions.
It is great fun rummaging through my attic of memories.
Pat and I are taking off for the next few weeks---the next posting will be uploaded on Feb. 8.
We wish everyone a wonderful holiday season and a super 2009.
Niagara-on-the-Lake at Christmas: Henderson Christmas’s; Hunter Christmas’s; Henderson-Hunter Christmas’s; The Magic of Mince Tarts; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
Niagara-on-the-Lake at Christmas
One of the prettiest Christmas sights is Niagara-on-the-Lake at night.
Pat and I drove through the town the other night and marveled at how beautiful it is. The masses of tourists have gone, replaced by a few Christmas shoppers bustling from shop to shop. The stores give off a warm and cozy glow---not garish or trashy---and the trees and shrubs along the main street are decorated discreetly with strings of white lights.
A horse beside the Prince of Wales Hotel stomps its feet waiting for a young couple on a get-away weekend who would like to snuggle under a buffalo robe and tour the town.
The local Chamber of Commerce claims that Niagara-on-the-Lake is the prettiest town in Ontario, or perhaps Canada. From their advertising, it seems they are referring to the town in the summer, with flowers in hanging baskets and well-tended parks. And it is lovely then.
But Niagara-on-the-Lake at Christmas time is wonderful, soothing, reassuring, and magical.
Henderson Christmas’s
On Christmas day, the tradition in Pat’s family was to open the presents from Santa Claus and from each other in their home in Aurora, have breakfast and then set off for the farm in Oro, near Barrie where Pat’s mother grew up.
For the first 6 or 7 years of Pat’s life, until road plowing improved, Pat’s father drove them to Murdoch’s Service Station on Highway 11, north of Barrie. There, they waited for Pat’s grandfather to come in a sleigh to get them. The family would load the gifts for the grandparents, Aunt Margaret, Uncle Bob and the cousins onto the sleigh. Pat’s grandfather gave them warm robes and shouted, “Gett yup” to the horse.
When they arrived, Pat and her family would rush out of the cold into the solid brick farmhouse built by Pat’s great grandfather and revel in the smells of a real Christmas tree and cooking food.
Later on when the road snow plowing improved, they would drive right to the farm.
But some years there were problems. Barrie is in the middle of the Ontario Snow Belt and cars then were not as reliable as they are today. Sometimes Highway 11 was blocked by huge snow drifts and they had to turn around and go home to a Christmas dinner of bacon and eggs or ‘chicken a la king’ (toast with cream of chicken soup mixed up with some dead chicken leftovers.
On one occasion, they spent the Christmas day in an unheated garage in Barrie waiting for the mechanic, who had kindly agreed to forego his own Christmas dinner, to fix their car.
Pat says, “A feeling of fun and adventure prevailed on these occasions----the very idea of having bacon and eggs for Christmas dinner had us howling with laughter”.
Hunter Christmas’s
My family always celebrated Christmas at our home in Arthur.
During the year, Dad was normally serious and stern at dinner, but Christmas dinners were different and I remember them fondly. The ‘dinner’ was at noon after we had opened the gifts, passed around bowls of nuts, chocolates and oranges. We would start dinner by pulling Christmas crackers, reciting the silly jokes and putting on the ridiculous paper hats (dad included).
Dad would have a glass of sherry, the only meal in the year that Mom permitted any alcohol at the table---she didn’t want to set a bad example for the kids.
Mom would bring in the roasted goose and slice it. (It was always a goose, never a turkey. This was part of Dad’s heritage---his father had a bakery in Wales and he would roast the geese for all his customers, deliver them around the town and only then did the Hunters sit down to their own goose dinner.)
For dessert, we would have rich, dark plum pudding, made by Aunt Millie who lived in Perth, and mince tarts.
I remember one or two Christmas’s when the monthly cheque from the Ontario Provincial Police didn’t arrive on time. We were not poor but despite pretty careful money-management there was usually little money left by cheque time. If the cheque that normally arrived around the third week of the month was held up in the mail or by a snow storm, there was a problem, and the problem was magnified if this happened in December.
I can remember Mom explaining to us on one occasion that Santa would not be able to bring us the hockey sweater, skates, toboggan or whatever we had asked for. It was hard to understand why Santa with his unlimited resources would not be able to call at our house.
One Christmas, Mom decided it was time to introduce a little culture to the four men in her house (Dad, my two brothers and me).
On a visit to Guelph, our nearest city, she bought a 12 inch, 78 RPM record of John Charles Thomas, a famous American baritone, singing the hymn, Jerusalem.
Mom played the record and we were all impressed. He had an amazing voice.
Then one of us, I forget who, looked at the B side, something Mom had forgotten to do. It was Thomas singing Kansas City from the musical Oklahoma.
One of the verses goes:
Everything's up to date in Kansas City
They've gone about as fer as they can go
They got a big theatre they call a burleque
For fifty cents you could see a dandy show!
One of the gals is fat and pink and pretty
As round above as she was round below
I could swear that she was padded from her shoulder to her heel
But later in the second act when she began to peel,
She proved that everything she had was absolutely real!
She went about as fer as she could go
Yes, Sir! She went about as fer as she could go!
Dad smiled broadly, we boys giggled and Mom looked down at her fingernails, as much as to say, “That’s the last time I try to bring any culture into this family”.
Henderson-Hunter Christmas’s
We have generally had our Christmas’s at home but the dates have bounced around a bit, to fit in with people’s work schedules and relatives’ commitments. This year, we are in the midst of our Christmas as this posting is being finalized.
Our tradition has been to have pancakes and maple syrup first thing and then open the gifts under what was always a real tree until recent years. (Our trees were usually bought at the last moment and often looked a bit like something Charlie Brown might have selected. A neighbour up the street looked at our tree one year, shook her head, and said, “It’s people like you who give real trees a bad name.”)
The trees were decorated with a mish-mash of treasured items. Arab headdresses I had brought from a trip to Lebanon when the children were young, kindergarten creations made from toilet rolls and pipe cleaners, and assorted balls, glass angels and other bangles acquired around the world---all items rich in memories.
Early on, our daughter, Jen, appointed herself the distributer of gifts, even before she could read the names on the gift cards. What a wonderful job she did, making sure that everyone got a gift, including our dog Cassidy, before starting another round.
This early demonstration of family organization has carried on and developed, and everyone looks to Jen (and Pat, her husband) for the planning of family events.
The Magic of Mince Tarts
As I mentioned earlier, we always had mince tarts at Christmas time and I grew up believing that to have 12 months of good luck in the upcoming year you had to eat 12 mince tarts between Christmas and New Years. If you ate only 11, you would be OK until the end of November, but watch out for December!
Now, part of me likes to think that I am a rational, no-nonsense, non-superstitious person, but there is another part that doesn’t walk under ladders, that ‘knocks’ wood, and dodges black cats (except when I am in Britain, where a black cat crossing your path is considered good luck---go figure).
If there were a support group for superstitious behavior, I would have to say, “My name is John, I believe in mince tarts”.
It is hard to know where this belief in mince tarts came from---perhaps from my Welsh, Scottish or Yorkshire roots.
Or perhaps there is another explanation. As far back as I can trace our family tree, the Hunters were all master bakers. Did the guild of bakers dream up this idea a few centuries ago just to boost year-end sales?
(By the way, the Wikipedia Encyclopedia claims that in the 17th century, Oliver Cromwell, that Puritan spoilsport, outlawed the eating of mince tarts on Christmas Day, because, I assume, he was worried that the succulence of a warm tart would distract people from the religious significance of the day.)
Anyway, I brought this idea of the magic of mince tarts to our marriage and although Pat grumbled a good bit about getting out the rolling pin each December, she did it. I got my 12 mince tarts and although our fortunes went up and down, overall we have done pretty well.
Truth be told, Pat has bought into the idea so much that most years she forces me to eat 13 or 14 tarts just to be sure I haven’t miscounted. It should be noted that she has never joined me in the dozen of tarts tradition---she really doesn’t enjoy mince tarts.
All of which brings us to Christmas 2002. Pat and I were in Baku, Azerbaijan, where I was heading a project to reduce corruption in the public service (I can guarantee that future postings will have some stories about that experience).
We had gone out for dinner on Christmas day (to an Azeri restaurant---no turkey with cranberry sauce). As soon as I woke on Boxing Day, I thought, “We have forgotten mince tarts!”
Off we went to find some mince tarts or at least some mincemeat. Grocery stores in Baku had never heard of mince tarts or mincemeat. We kept getting shunted to ground meat in their butchery section.
Getting desperate, we went to the restaurant in the Radisson Hotel---a favourite of western expatriates. The chef said they had made mince tarts for a special Christmas dinner the day before but the tarts were all gone.
Could they bake some more? No, they were too busy preparing for New Years. Could they sell us some mincemeat. No!
We decided that we had made a good faith effort, that the fates would hopefully take that into account, and wouldn’t punish us. We had tried.
And anyway, it was just a superstition, wasn’t it.
The first indication that the mince tart fates were annoyed with me came on the evening of January 10th. Hans (not his real name), a German lawyer arrived in Baku. He was to help me by re-writing public service legislation to prevent (or at least reduce) corruption in the hiring, promotion and firing of Azerbaijan public servants. He arrived with all kinds of legal texts---plus a very high temperature.
It turned out that he had had an intermittent temperature in Germany after returning from a Christmas holiday in Kenya. His temperature would be normal during the day but high at night. His doctor told him it was just a virus.
I suspected malaria especially after he told me that he had not taken anti-malarial drugs while in Kenya---because, he said, he wanted to be able to drink and one can’t drink alcohol while taking those pills.
We took him the next day to one of the two clinics that western oil company employees used (there is a lot of drilling for oil in the Caspian Sea off Baku). His temperature was normal and his blood test showed no malarial infection. The Azeri doctor (trained in Moscow) thought it was probably a virus---take Aspirin, drink plenty of fluids and get lots of sleep.
Hans wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating much and was getting weaker and weaker, and I was getting more and more alarmed. Finally one night when his temperature was high, we took him to the other clinic. The doctor was a South African who had worked in the Canadian north and, more importantly, in Indonesia where malaria was common.
He immediately suspected malaria and the blood tests confirmed that Hans did indeed have malaria and not just that but a particularly nasty type that if not treated promptly could destroy organs. The doctor explained that blood tests can only detect malaria when the temperature is high---when the temperature falls it means that the ‘bad guys’ have temporarily left the blood stream and hidden in body tissue.
The doctor gave him a drug that he said would help but the best drug wasn’t available in Azerbaijan. He said we should use medical evacuation to get Hans back to Germany right away (a medevac jet with a doctor and a nurse could fly in from Moscow and take him to Germany).
At that point Hans told us that his travel insurance didn’t cover medical evacuation. His contract with the project included funds for insurance, but he had opted not to buy that insurance, and, instead, had pocketed the money.
He told us he couldn’t afford the $100,000 cost of an evacuation. He couldn’t even afford the $15,000 for a nurse to accompany him on a commercial flight to Germany.
Right!
His doctor took me aside, “This is really serious. He has to get back to Germany right away. He’s not infectious---Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. Get him on a commercial flight, tonight if you can.”
I called the agency in Germany that Hans worked with and the official said that if I could get Hans on a plane for the four hour flight, he would have a doctor and ambulance waiting when the plane arrived in Frankfurt.
Pat and I took Hans back to his hotel, packed his belongings and set off to the airport. Hans was wearing a brown, wool duffle coat with the hood up. He kept dozing off but I would wake him and coach him on how to behave at the airport.
“You will have to put the hood down.”
“But I’m cold.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’ve got to convince the airline people you are OK to travel. Put the hood down, stand up straight, and don’t shuffle.” (Pat says that I added, “Right now you look like an idiot!” She remembers thinking that that was out of character for me, but it was a pretty stressful time.)
At the airport we helped him through the outgoing customs screening and then just watched and held our breath as he approached the airline counter. He held himself together until he had checked his bags, and got his boarding pass. Then the stiffening seemed to go out of him, he slouched, put his hood up and shuffled off, out of sight, toward the departure lounge.
We waited until the plane had left, just to make sure.
The next day the agency phoned to say he had arrived safely and was now in hospital.
A week of so later the agency sent us an email saying that Hans was now at home and recovering well. The agency thanked Pat and me for our help, saying, “If you had not done what you did, the result would not have been good.”
Looking back on it, we were enormously lucky that the SARS epidemic did not become headline news until several months after Hans was safely home.
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The mince tart fates had one more nasty surprise for us at Baku.
Six weeks after Hans left, I developed some aches, pains and a temperature. I thought it was just a virus (shades of Hans!!), perhaps a cold or maybe at worst the ‘flu.
A friend working on another project called to ask how I was. Pat chatted with him and then I got out of bed to tell him it was nothing and I would soon be back to work.
Then, I started feeling dizzy and collapsed on the floor. When I came to, Pat was shouting at the friend telling him to come over right away.
It must have been a terrible time for Pat, not knowing what had happened to me---a stroke, heart attack, or worse (at one point she thought I had stopped breathing).
The friend arrived with an Azeri colleague with a big SUV. I was bundled into it and Pat told the driver to take us to the clinic with the South African doctor. The Azeri fellow didn’t know the way to the clinic---while Pat knew exactly how to get their because of our trips with Hans---but he was reluctant to take directions from a foreigner. After all, it was his city. In the midst of caring for me, Pat had to shout and argue with him.
We got to the clinic in record time and the driver was clearly impressed with Pat’s knowledge of the tricky streets in that part of Baku. He was one of many fine Azeris we met during our stay in Azerbaijan.
After tests, the doctor said that I had just fainted, that I had prostatitis, a bacterial infection of the prostate, and prescribed a heavy dose of CIPRO. He said I would feel lousy for a week or so but would recover fully in a few weeks.
As he was putting away his equipment, the doctor said he was quitting and returning the next day to South Africa. He wasn’t sure who would replace him at the clinic. One of his reasons for quitting was that he wasn’t sure how he would be looked after if he became ill in Baku. Not reassuring.
The prostatitis was the last straw. I had been having fights with the project contractor on how to manage the project and now with the illness and the uncertainty of medical care, I decided that the time had come to part company. The contractor agreed (I think they were getting fed up with my insistence on dotting ‘I’s” and crossing ‘T’s’ on contracts with local employees), found a replacement and Pat and I returned home.
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So, the events of Baku convinced us that the mince tart fates are not to be toyed with.
We are leaving for South Carolina on Boxing Day and. I will only have time for a couple of tarts before leaving for the South. We are not sure that tarts or mincemeat will be available in the land of the pecan pie so we are going to lug along some President’s Choice mincemeat and will buy prefab tart shells!
Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
Brother Jim tells a story about a long-ago Christmas. He had written a letter to Santa asking for a sleigh, the kind of sleigh he had seen at the local hardware store. Unfortunately, when Mom went to the store to get the sleigh she was told that they had just sold the last one.
Mom must have been heartbroken, must have wondered what to do. In the end, she prepared a letter to Jim from Santa that started off “Dear Jim”. Santa said that he had got Jim’s letter and thought he would be able to provide a sleigh but things had come up, and he was so sorry.
Jim says that if he received the sleigh, he would probably have forgotten all about that Christmas.
But he has never forgotten the letter he got from Santa.
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We always got Cassidy a hermetically sealed tin of yellow tennis balls for Christmas, to replace the tired, grey slobber-stained balls from the previous Christmas. When the presents had been put out under the tree, Cassidy would circle around until he sniffed the tennis ball container. He would lie for hours on the floor, shivering, his nose pointing at his present.
When Jen put his present in front of him, he would tear away the wrapping paper and then look for someone to open the can.
Once he had one of the new balls, he would take off across the floor playing his version of hockey, batting the ball back and forth between his front paws. Sometimes he would forget and grab the ball in his mouth, a move that wasn’t permitted by the rules he had developed for his game.
Over time, he had discovered that if he kept an ear in his mouth he wouldn’t be tempted to grab the ball. So, he would swing his head back and forth until he could grab one of the floppy ears in his mouth and then resume stick-handling (paw-handling?) holding the ear firmly in his mouth.
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We once got Cassidy a soft rubber toy that squeaked. As he was sniffing under the tree for his tennis balls, he stepped on the wrapped toy. It squeaked and he yelped and jumped back.
He got his revenge after the presents were opened. He chewed the toy until the metal squeaker fell out and then pranced around with the vanquished toy in his mouth.
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THANK YOU----SEE YOU AGAIN ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY, 8
I am grateful for the kind comments about Letter from Virgil and for the memory-jogging suggestions.
It is great fun rummaging through my attic of memories.
Pat and I are taking off for the next few weeks---the next posting will be uploaded on Feb. 8.
We wish everyone a wonderful holiday season and a super 2009.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
POSTING # 4
POSTING # 4: A Job in the Middle East; British Roundabouts; Here’s Looking at You!; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
A Job in the Middle East
As we continue to settle into our new community, we are impressed with how civilized and comfortable it is.
A couple of examples.
We had some questions about the history of the area and enquired at the local library. The librarian said they had a resident local historian---imagine that, in a small town. Pat and I have since met with her and she’s amazing---knowledgeable, helpful and fun.
Then there is a fantastic Newcomers Club with an enormous scope of activities designed to help new arrivals find things they would like to do and friends to do them with.
As I say, very civilized and comfortable.
Unfortunately, not all the world is so fortunate.
A few weeks ago I was offered a part-time consulting job involving technical assistance to the government of Lebanon. Under the proposal, my part of the work would be carried out mainly in Canada but I would have to spend a couple of weeks each year in Lebanon.
The timing wasn’t great and there were some other problems with the offer, so I wasn’t all that keen on it.
But I liked the sound of the work and I like the people (and food) in the Middle East so I decided not to reject it out of hand.
As I mulled over the offer, I knew that Pat would worry about my travelling to Lebanon, given the attention the media has paid to tensions between Arabs and Christians, the influence of Syria, occasional bombings etc.
I wondered if it would help Pat if I suggested that she come with me on the first visit to the country so she could see that the country was safer than the media suggested. To sweeten the deal, I could also suggest that we stop over in Greece (a country we’ve always wanted to visit), see Athens and some of the Greek Islands.
I flew what you might call a trial balloon, mentioning a trip to the Middle East, and a side trip to Greece.
Pat was not impressed.
In the end, I decided not to take the job.
This week, as we watched television pictures of students rioting in Athens, Pat turned to me, “Right, and afterwards, we could have gone to Greece….”
British Roundabouts
Pat and I met in the basement of a boarding house in Toronto in the summer of 1959 (that will be a separate story). I was posted to the Canadian Immigration Office in Leeds, Yorkshire in October 1960. Pat came over at Christmas, we got engaged and then I flew home to get married, in Aurora, Ontario, in June 1961. After a trip to England on a Cunard Line ship, we set up housekeeping in a two-bedroom apartment on Spen Road in a pleasant area of Leeds, called Far Headingley.
One of the first things we did was buy our first car, a small but spritely Ford Anglia.
A day or so after we had taken delivery of the car and while we were still in the process of adjusting to driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, a personnel evaluation team arrived from Canada to assess the five officers in the Immigration Office. The team would recommend whether any of us should be promoted. I had my interview and it seemed to go well.
After my interview, the Officer-in-Charge said that he been hoping to take the team home for dinner but his wife was ill and he wondered if Pat and I could entertain them. I said I thought we could, called Pat and she responded wonderfully with a great meal.
After dinner, I offered to drive the two fellows back to the Queen’s Hotel in downtown Leeds.
I was feeling good as we set off---about the interview and the fine dinner. We were traveling along at a sedate clip on the ‘wrong’ side of Spen Road until we got to the roundabout at Otley Road.
I should break here for a discussion of the British roundabout. British traffic engineers claim, apparently, that intersections with roundabouts have fewer accidents than ones with stop signs or traffic lights (except for bicyclists, who tend to get mashed a bit at roundabouts). I wonder if anyone has calculated the accident rate of drivers from North America or the Continent encountering their first roundabout.
Anyway, I turned into the roundabout and almost instantly there was a loud scream from Ron, the more senior of the two evaluators, “John, you’re going around the wrong way!!!!”
Vehicles were coming right at us, with lights flashing and horns blowing. Looking back on it, I think the thing that saved us was my hockey training. You get three or four opposing players coming at you when you’re carrying the puck, and you learn to bob, weave and stickhandle.
Anyway, I managed to get around the intersection and onto the right (“wrong”) side of the road without damage to us or anyone else. I dropped the two fellows off at the hotel, safe and sound, if a bit shaken. I didn’t offer to pick them up in the morning to take them to the Immigration Office.
I figured that was it for any promotion but, no, a few weeks later word came that I was being promoted (must have been Pat’s cooking). The only lasting negative impact of my mistake came from Ron. Every time he and I met he would start off, “John, do you remember that roundabout in Leeds…..” and he would proceed to tell everyone within earshot about my faux pas.
After some thirty years of this, I told Ron that there had to be a sunset clause on dumb things (pieces of legislation sometimes have a sunset clause saying that if the act isn’t renewed after a set period of time, it expires). Ron just grinned---there was to be no sunset clause.
Here’s Looking at You!
Despite his joy in telling the story about me and the roundabout, Ron and I became good friends. He was an excellent Immigration official and a fine person.
Now, Ron had been badly wounded in World War II and wore a glass eye. Here is a story he liked to tell about the glass eye.
After the war, Ron joined Canadian Immigration and was posted to a number of Immigration offices in the UK. Often, he and his colleagues and friends would drop into a pub after work. Now, there was a custom in some British pubs at that time that if you had to go to the washroom but still had a good bit of beer left in your mug you would say that you had spat in the beer (some people went one step further and actually spat in the beer in front of their friends!) to deter anyone from poaching your beverage.
Ron had a different approach; he would quietly put his glass eye in the beer. His colleagues knew about this and no one touched his beer. One night, however, there was a newcomer at the table. He saw Ron take off for the washroom, saw a good bit of best bitter just sitting there and while the others were distracted by a disturbance at the door, downed Ron’s beer. As the glass eye went down, he gagged and shouted, “What the heck!” (or something similar).
As the saying goes, everything came out OK in the end. Ron wore an eye patch for a few days until nature took its course.
And the newcomer hopefully learned a lesson about how to behave in a pub.
Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
It was in the early 1990s at the start of the Personal Computer boom, before most of us appreciated the impact PCs were going to have on our lives. My brother Jim and his grandson, Brad, were baking some cookies---Jim was reading the recipe and Brad, about 5 at the time and very much into computers, was mixing the ingredients. Jim read out that they should add a half cup of milk. Brad was looking through the markings on his grandmother’s collection of measuring cups and said, “Is that one, forward slash, two, Granddad?”
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Years ago when even a penny was worth something, a young boy in Arthur was getting ready for Sunday school. His mother gave him two nickels, saying, “One is for God--- put it on the collection plate at the Sunday school---and the other is for you---get some candy on the way home”.
The little boy started off but he had to stop on the way to study water running down a grate in the road. Suddenly, one of the nickels slipped from his hand and fell down the grate. The boy started to cry.
A passerby asked what the trouble was.
The boy sobbed, “God’s nickel fell down the drain”.
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I better start this story with a bit of background for readers of this blog who weren’t around in the 1970s and 1980s. During that period, it was common to hang a round, blue disk in the toilet tank. When one flushed the tank, the toilet filled with blue water. The disk was supposed to disinfect and deodorize, but didn’t in fact do much of either.
Now the story.
Jean-Riel, the son of one of our Ottawa neighbours, was a bright lad but very quiet in class. When the teacher asked a question he left it to others to answer. Perhaps he was shy or bored, or just didn’t want to be tagged as a know-it-all---who knows.
His Grade One teacher was telling the class about colours and how they could be mixed to produce other colours.
“We haven’t studied this yet, but does anyone know what colours you mix to get green?’
There was silence, no hands came up.
Finally, Jean-Riel raised his hand.
The surprised teacher said, “You know the answer, Jean-Riel?”
“Blue and yellow”.
The even-more surprised teacher said, “That’s right, how do you know that?”
“Well, my Mom puts blue stuff in the toilet and when I pee the water turns green.”
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NEXT SUNDAY
Watch for some Christmas stories from our universe in next Sunday’s Letter from Virgil.
A Job in the Middle East
As we continue to settle into our new community, we are impressed with how civilized and comfortable it is.
A couple of examples.
We had some questions about the history of the area and enquired at the local library. The librarian said they had a resident local historian---imagine that, in a small town. Pat and I have since met with her and she’s amazing---knowledgeable, helpful and fun.
Then there is a fantastic Newcomers Club with an enormous scope of activities designed to help new arrivals find things they would like to do and friends to do them with.
As I say, very civilized and comfortable.
Unfortunately, not all the world is so fortunate.
A few weeks ago I was offered a part-time consulting job involving technical assistance to the government of Lebanon. Under the proposal, my part of the work would be carried out mainly in Canada but I would have to spend a couple of weeks each year in Lebanon.
The timing wasn’t great and there were some other problems with the offer, so I wasn’t all that keen on it.
But I liked the sound of the work and I like the people (and food) in the Middle East so I decided not to reject it out of hand.
As I mulled over the offer, I knew that Pat would worry about my travelling to Lebanon, given the attention the media has paid to tensions between Arabs and Christians, the influence of Syria, occasional bombings etc.
I wondered if it would help Pat if I suggested that she come with me on the first visit to the country so she could see that the country was safer than the media suggested. To sweeten the deal, I could also suggest that we stop over in Greece (a country we’ve always wanted to visit), see Athens and some of the Greek Islands.
I flew what you might call a trial balloon, mentioning a trip to the Middle East, and a side trip to Greece.
Pat was not impressed.
In the end, I decided not to take the job.
This week, as we watched television pictures of students rioting in Athens, Pat turned to me, “Right, and afterwards, we could have gone to Greece….”
British Roundabouts
Pat and I met in the basement of a boarding house in Toronto in the summer of 1959 (that will be a separate story). I was posted to the Canadian Immigration Office in Leeds, Yorkshire in October 1960. Pat came over at Christmas, we got engaged and then I flew home to get married, in Aurora, Ontario, in June 1961. After a trip to England on a Cunard Line ship, we set up housekeeping in a two-bedroom apartment on Spen Road in a pleasant area of Leeds, called Far Headingley.
One of the first things we did was buy our first car, a small but spritely Ford Anglia.
A day or so after we had taken delivery of the car and while we were still in the process of adjusting to driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, a personnel evaluation team arrived from Canada to assess the five officers in the Immigration Office. The team would recommend whether any of us should be promoted. I had my interview and it seemed to go well.
After my interview, the Officer-in-Charge said that he been hoping to take the team home for dinner but his wife was ill and he wondered if Pat and I could entertain them. I said I thought we could, called Pat and she responded wonderfully with a great meal.
After dinner, I offered to drive the two fellows back to the Queen’s Hotel in downtown Leeds.
I was feeling good as we set off---about the interview and the fine dinner. We were traveling along at a sedate clip on the ‘wrong’ side of Spen Road until we got to the roundabout at Otley Road.
I should break here for a discussion of the British roundabout. British traffic engineers claim, apparently, that intersections with roundabouts have fewer accidents than ones with stop signs or traffic lights (except for bicyclists, who tend to get mashed a bit at roundabouts). I wonder if anyone has calculated the accident rate of drivers from North America or the Continent encountering their first roundabout.
Anyway, I turned into the roundabout and almost instantly there was a loud scream from Ron, the more senior of the two evaluators, “John, you’re going around the wrong way!!!!”
Vehicles were coming right at us, with lights flashing and horns blowing. Looking back on it, I think the thing that saved us was my hockey training. You get three or four opposing players coming at you when you’re carrying the puck, and you learn to bob, weave and stickhandle.
Anyway, I managed to get around the intersection and onto the right (“wrong”) side of the road without damage to us or anyone else. I dropped the two fellows off at the hotel, safe and sound, if a bit shaken. I didn’t offer to pick them up in the morning to take them to the Immigration Office.
I figured that was it for any promotion but, no, a few weeks later word came that I was being promoted (must have been Pat’s cooking). The only lasting negative impact of my mistake came from Ron. Every time he and I met he would start off, “John, do you remember that roundabout in Leeds…..” and he would proceed to tell everyone within earshot about my faux pas.
After some thirty years of this, I told Ron that there had to be a sunset clause on dumb things (pieces of legislation sometimes have a sunset clause saying that if the act isn’t renewed after a set period of time, it expires). Ron just grinned---there was to be no sunset clause.
Here’s Looking at You!
Despite his joy in telling the story about me and the roundabout, Ron and I became good friends. He was an excellent Immigration official and a fine person.
Now, Ron had been badly wounded in World War II and wore a glass eye. Here is a story he liked to tell about the glass eye.
After the war, Ron joined Canadian Immigration and was posted to a number of Immigration offices in the UK. Often, he and his colleagues and friends would drop into a pub after work. Now, there was a custom in some British pubs at that time that if you had to go to the washroom but still had a good bit of beer left in your mug you would say that you had spat in the beer (some people went one step further and actually spat in the beer in front of their friends!) to deter anyone from poaching your beverage.
Ron had a different approach; he would quietly put his glass eye in the beer. His colleagues knew about this and no one touched his beer. One night, however, there was a newcomer at the table. He saw Ron take off for the washroom, saw a good bit of best bitter just sitting there and while the others were distracted by a disturbance at the door, downed Ron’s beer. As the glass eye went down, he gagged and shouted, “What the heck!” (or something similar).
As the saying goes, everything came out OK in the end. Ron wore an eye patch for a few days until nature took its course.
And the newcomer hopefully learned a lesson about how to behave in a pub.
Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
It was in the early 1990s at the start of the Personal Computer boom, before most of us appreciated the impact PCs were going to have on our lives. My brother Jim and his grandson, Brad, were baking some cookies---Jim was reading the recipe and Brad, about 5 at the time and very much into computers, was mixing the ingredients. Jim read out that they should add a half cup of milk. Brad was looking through the markings on his grandmother’s collection of measuring cups and said, “Is that one, forward slash, two, Granddad?”
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Years ago when even a penny was worth something, a young boy in Arthur was getting ready for Sunday school. His mother gave him two nickels, saying, “One is for God--- put it on the collection plate at the Sunday school---and the other is for you---get some candy on the way home”.
The little boy started off but he had to stop on the way to study water running down a grate in the road. Suddenly, one of the nickels slipped from his hand and fell down the grate. The boy started to cry.
A passerby asked what the trouble was.
The boy sobbed, “God’s nickel fell down the drain”.
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
I better start this story with a bit of background for readers of this blog who weren’t around in the 1970s and 1980s. During that period, it was common to hang a round, blue disk in the toilet tank. When one flushed the tank, the toilet filled with blue water. The disk was supposed to disinfect and deodorize, but didn’t in fact do much of either.
Now the story.
Jean-Riel, the son of one of our Ottawa neighbours, was a bright lad but very quiet in class. When the teacher asked a question he left it to others to answer. Perhaps he was shy or bored, or just didn’t want to be tagged as a know-it-all---who knows.
His Grade One teacher was telling the class about colours and how they could be mixed to produce other colours.
“We haven’t studied this yet, but does anyone know what colours you mix to get green?’
There was silence, no hands came up.
Finally, Jean-Riel raised his hand.
The surprised teacher said, “You know the answer, Jean-Riel?”
“Blue and yellow”.
The even-more surprised teacher said, “That’s right, how do you know that?”
“Well, my Mom puts blue stuff in the toilet and when I pee the water turns green.”
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
NEXT SUNDAY
Watch for some Christmas stories from our universe in next Sunday’s Letter from Virgil.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
POSTING # 3
POSTING # 3: Canada Geese Drop in on Virgil, Waiting for a Woman in Amman, The World’s Greatest Vodka, Falling into a Storm Sewer in Kuala Lumpur, Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
Canada Geese Drop in on Virgil
Our home backs onto a large park, and this week a huge flock of Canada Geese used it as a rest stop on their way south.
Now, I happen to like Canada Geese but I know they have their detractors.
Golfers hate them---remember the story of a angry golfer who killed a goose with his putter after the goose had swallowed his ball.
Airline pilots fear them---a goose can smash the windshield or demolish an engine.
Farmers get angry about the damage to their crops.
And people strolling in parks complain about the amount of goose poop---it is certainly true that geese poop frequently and copiously.
I guess what I like about these geese is the skill, dedication and, yes, love they show in raising their young. I enjoy watching the parents take 6 or 8 gosling for a trip on the water or land. The male leads the way while the mother stays back watching for goslings who try to goof off. You can almost hear her saying, “For goodness sake Herbie and Freda, get back in line!”
And when the family is feeding, one of the parents always acts as a sentinel, head up watching for dogs, hawks and other predators.
Male geese can be aggressive in defending their young---just ask a dog that has been battered by a flurry of goose wings---and also very competitive over food and mating.
We were wondering how the males managed to forego all that aggressiveness and competitiveness and become cooperative with others during migration. A biologist friend told us that nature had found a way to turn the males into more cooperative beings. As migration time approaches, the male birds’ testes shrink and they produce less testosterone. After the migration south and back north is completed, the testes grow back to their original size, ready for another round of breeding.
It seems to me that there may be a Nobel Peace Prize for some scientist who can figure out how to use the Canada Goose technique to reduce human testosterone levels during perilous times of economic, military and political challenges.
Just a thought.
Waiting for a Woman in Amman
A driver had picked me up at my hotel in Amman, Jordan to take me to an Embassy reception. First, we had to pick up a Canadian official at another hotel.
The driver checked the lobby but there was no sign of the woman official. He settled back into the van.
“Women are always late”, he said.
“You better not let your wife hear you say that.”
“My wife! I have three wives.”
“Oh.”
As we waited for the official, he told me the story of his three wives. He married his first wife but after a number of years there were no children.
He decided to take a second wife but didn’t divorce his first wife. She stayed in their apartment and he found another apartment for the new wife. He said that, as his religion required, he divided his time equally between the two wives.
A few years passed but there were still no children. He decided to take a third wife, and rented yet another apartment for her. He said that it was easier for his Bedouin cousins who lived in the desert---when they took another wife, they just had to buy another tent.
It was a case of third time lucky and they had a boy and a girl who were now 14 and 12 and, as he said proudly, both healthy and bright. He had hoped that they would be able to go to college or university but he was worried that there wouldn’t be enough money for tuition. Costs of everything were rising and it was expensive to maintain three homes. He was a veteran and the government had a modest program to help the children of veterans. And if the children did well in their exams they might win full scholarships but the chances of that were not great---competition was very tough.
The driver shook his head, “I don’t know what is going to happen”.
Just then the official arrived---she had been on the phone to Canada---and we set off for the reception.
Our discussion was in 2001 and while the cost of living in Amman was rising then, it has soared since the start of the Iraq war in 2003. I often wonder what happened to the driver, his three wives and the two children, who would now be 21 and 19.
The World’s Greatest Vodka
Talking of receptions reminds me of the many official dinners my interpreter and I attended as we travelled across Russia during the planning for the creation of model employment offices. Our hosts were always enormously generous with their food---wonderful local and national dishes---and with their vodka.
Prior to the first (of many) toasts, a local official would always tell us that we were about to taste a special local vodka that was clearly the best vodka in Russia, and therefore, of course, in the world.
At one of the dinners, I playfully asked about the criteria that Russians used in judging different vodkas. The usual response was, “Well, you just know”, but I would persist that we had to be more scientific; we had to isolate the key criteria. The question provoked a lot of good natured bantering and my interpreter and I used the question at many of our dinners.
After lord knows how many dinners and how many toasts, here are the criteria that great vodka must meet:
1. Clarity. It should be as clear as fresh water.
2. Smell. There should be no smell.
3. Taste. It should have a clean taste, not oily.
4. It should go down the throat smoothly, not burn on the way down.
5. There should be no headache the next day.
6. It should affect the legs before the head----after many toasts one can still talk even though one can’t walk.
7. Finally, if the vodka is really good, and there is enough, one no longer needs an interpreter.
The criteria for vodka served us well, breaking the ice and getting conversations flowing.
There was another gambit we used to break the ice. Almost all the dinners involved a course of borscht---my favourite soup. After praising the soup, I would ask which was right: to put the sour cream in the bowl and pour the soup over it, or to add the sour cream after the soup is in the bowl. And then, the interpreter and I would sit back and listen to the proponents of each argue that the ‘right way, the only way’ is this or that. It was fun.
Falling into a Storm Sewer in Kuala Lumpur
I was in Kuala Lumpur in November 1991 as a consultant to assess the Malaysian Employment Service and prepare a leadership training course for senior managers.
I had arrived on Friday and was using the weekend to tour the city and get over jet lag before my meetings started on Monday. On Saturday, after breakfast, I talked with the hotel staff and they gave me maps and instructions on touring the old part of the city. They said the weather would be fine for touring, sunny and hot, but they warned me that it was the monsoon season and there was likely to be a heavy rain storm in the evening.
I toured the old city and had an early dinner so I could get back to the hotel before a storm hit. Either I miscalculated or the storm came early that Saturday. I had just stepped outside the restaurant when sheets of rain started to fall.
Cities in Malaysia have to have ways of carrying off the heavy rains. In that part of the old city, there was a deep ditch along the front of buildings with slabs of concrete across that created a sidewalk. There was an inch or two gap between the slabs so the water could drain into the ditch. It is an excellent system that serves two purposes, getting rid of the rain and providing a sidewalk for people. Excellent, that is, unless someone steals a slab.
I was walking along, rain running down my face, trying to find a taxi when I stepped onto a slab that wasn’t there. Down I went, hitting my chest against a slab that WAS there and knocking the air out of me. When I caught my breath, I was standing in the ditch with water running past my knees. Some people helped me clamber out and find a taxi.
Soon I was back in the Pan Pacific Hotel checking the damage. Apart from a nasty scrape on the chest and some sore ribs I seemed fine. I had a hot bath, wrote an email to Pat telling her I had fallen into a sewer but was fine and went to bed.
The next morning there was an email from Pat saying that she had told B and B guests at breakfast about my sewer adventure. One of the guests knew Kuala Lumpur well and said that criminals used the storm sewers to dispose of the bodies of their victims---the water flushed them out to sea. Just what Pat needed to hear!
My chest was feeling pretty sore so I called the Canadian High Commission and they recommended a clinic they used to examine potential immigrants to Canada. A kindly doctor checked me over, gave me a tetanus shot and some antibiotic cream for the scrape. She thought my ribs were fine but ordered a chest x-ray to be sure.
The clinic was not used to dealing with tall people. As I stood against the wall, the technician strained to get the x-ray camera up as high as it would go. Finally, she took the picture and I went back to wait for the doctor. After thirty minutes, the doctor called me in. She was laughing, “Look at this”, pointing to my x-ray on the illuminated panel. The image showed the bottom half of my chest.
“You are too tall”, she said.
She felt my ribs again and sent me on my way, saying that if the pain got worse, I should get back to her.
As it turned out, my ribs were fine but I took a lot of ribbing (sorry about that) from colleagues who loved to tell about the consultant who fell into a sewer.
Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
Friends took their toddler to a fine restaurant in Yorkshire. He sat in his high chair, ate well and was charming with the waitress. He then asked if he could get down and walk around a bit. Our friends looked at each other and decided that he had been so good they would let him. The boy wandered down to the back of the restaurant, smiling at the diners and chatting with them. Our friends took a deep breath and relaxed.
Suddenly, there was a muffled but distinct little explosion that came from the toddler. He stopped, felt in his diaper and then shouted, “Dus gas Mommy”.
One of our grand-daughters had received a first bike and she and her dad went shopping for a helmet. The salesperson brought out several models and he and our son talked about size, cushioning, straps etc. Finally, as the salesperson bent down to take another helmet out of a box, our grand-daughter leaned over and whispered to him, “I think I need a red one”.
Another grand-daughter, about three at the time, was shopping with her dad. They got back to the car and he discovered that he had left the keys in the locked car. The little girl sensed there was something wrong, and then the light came on. She gave a world-weary shake of her head, “Not AGAIN, Daddy”
NEXT SUNDAY
Watch for a more stories from our universe in next Sunday’s Letter from Virgil.
Canada Geese Drop in on Virgil
Our home backs onto a large park, and this week a huge flock of Canada Geese used it as a rest stop on their way south.
Now, I happen to like Canada Geese but I know they have their detractors.
Golfers hate them---remember the story of a angry golfer who killed a goose with his putter after the goose had swallowed his ball.
Airline pilots fear them---a goose can smash the windshield or demolish an engine.
Farmers get angry about the damage to their crops.
And people strolling in parks complain about the amount of goose poop---it is certainly true that geese poop frequently and copiously.
I guess what I like about these geese is the skill, dedication and, yes, love they show in raising their young. I enjoy watching the parents take 6 or 8 gosling for a trip on the water or land. The male leads the way while the mother stays back watching for goslings who try to goof off. You can almost hear her saying, “For goodness sake Herbie and Freda, get back in line!”
And when the family is feeding, one of the parents always acts as a sentinel, head up watching for dogs, hawks and other predators.
Male geese can be aggressive in defending their young---just ask a dog that has been battered by a flurry of goose wings---and also very competitive over food and mating.
We were wondering how the males managed to forego all that aggressiveness and competitiveness and become cooperative with others during migration. A biologist friend told us that nature had found a way to turn the males into more cooperative beings. As migration time approaches, the male birds’ testes shrink and they produce less testosterone. After the migration south and back north is completed, the testes grow back to their original size, ready for another round of breeding.
It seems to me that there may be a Nobel Peace Prize for some scientist who can figure out how to use the Canada Goose technique to reduce human testosterone levels during perilous times of economic, military and political challenges.
Just a thought.
Waiting for a Woman in Amman
A driver had picked me up at my hotel in Amman, Jordan to take me to an Embassy reception. First, we had to pick up a Canadian official at another hotel.
The driver checked the lobby but there was no sign of the woman official. He settled back into the van.
“Women are always late”, he said.
“You better not let your wife hear you say that.”
“My wife! I have three wives.”
“Oh.”
As we waited for the official, he told me the story of his three wives. He married his first wife but after a number of years there were no children.
He decided to take a second wife but didn’t divorce his first wife. She stayed in their apartment and he found another apartment for the new wife. He said that, as his religion required, he divided his time equally between the two wives.
A few years passed but there were still no children. He decided to take a third wife, and rented yet another apartment for her. He said that it was easier for his Bedouin cousins who lived in the desert---when they took another wife, they just had to buy another tent.
It was a case of third time lucky and they had a boy and a girl who were now 14 and 12 and, as he said proudly, both healthy and bright. He had hoped that they would be able to go to college or university but he was worried that there wouldn’t be enough money for tuition. Costs of everything were rising and it was expensive to maintain three homes. He was a veteran and the government had a modest program to help the children of veterans. And if the children did well in their exams they might win full scholarships but the chances of that were not great---competition was very tough.
The driver shook his head, “I don’t know what is going to happen”.
Just then the official arrived---she had been on the phone to Canada---and we set off for the reception.
Our discussion was in 2001 and while the cost of living in Amman was rising then, it has soared since the start of the Iraq war in 2003. I often wonder what happened to the driver, his three wives and the two children, who would now be 21 and 19.
The World’s Greatest Vodka
Talking of receptions reminds me of the many official dinners my interpreter and I attended as we travelled across Russia during the planning for the creation of model employment offices. Our hosts were always enormously generous with their food---wonderful local and national dishes---and with their vodka.
Prior to the first (of many) toasts, a local official would always tell us that we were about to taste a special local vodka that was clearly the best vodka in Russia, and therefore, of course, in the world.
At one of the dinners, I playfully asked about the criteria that Russians used in judging different vodkas. The usual response was, “Well, you just know”, but I would persist that we had to be more scientific; we had to isolate the key criteria. The question provoked a lot of good natured bantering and my interpreter and I used the question at many of our dinners.
After lord knows how many dinners and how many toasts, here are the criteria that great vodka must meet:
1. Clarity. It should be as clear as fresh water.
2. Smell. There should be no smell.
3. Taste. It should have a clean taste, not oily.
4. It should go down the throat smoothly, not burn on the way down.
5. There should be no headache the next day.
6. It should affect the legs before the head----after many toasts one can still talk even though one can’t walk.
7. Finally, if the vodka is really good, and there is enough, one no longer needs an interpreter.
The criteria for vodka served us well, breaking the ice and getting conversations flowing.
There was another gambit we used to break the ice. Almost all the dinners involved a course of borscht---my favourite soup. After praising the soup, I would ask which was right: to put the sour cream in the bowl and pour the soup over it, or to add the sour cream after the soup is in the bowl. And then, the interpreter and I would sit back and listen to the proponents of each argue that the ‘right way, the only way’ is this or that. It was fun.
Falling into a Storm Sewer in Kuala Lumpur
I was in Kuala Lumpur in November 1991 as a consultant to assess the Malaysian Employment Service and prepare a leadership training course for senior managers.
I had arrived on Friday and was using the weekend to tour the city and get over jet lag before my meetings started on Monday. On Saturday, after breakfast, I talked with the hotel staff and they gave me maps and instructions on touring the old part of the city. They said the weather would be fine for touring, sunny and hot, but they warned me that it was the monsoon season and there was likely to be a heavy rain storm in the evening.
I toured the old city and had an early dinner so I could get back to the hotel before a storm hit. Either I miscalculated or the storm came early that Saturday. I had just stepped outside the restaurant when sheets of rain started to fall.
Cities in Malaysia have to have ways of carrying off the heavy rains. In that part of the old city, there was a deep ditch along the front of buildings with slabs of concrete across that created a sidewalk. There was an inch or two gap between the slabs so the water could drain into the ditch. It is an excellent system that serves two purposes, getting rid of the rain and providing a sidewalk for people. Excellent, that is, unless someone steals a slab.
I was walking along, rain running down my face, trying to find a taxi when I stepped onto a slab that wasn’t there. Down I went, hitting my chest against a slab that WAS there and knocking the air out of me. When I caught my breath, I was standing in the ditch with water running past my knees. Some people helped me clamber out and find a taxi.
Soon I was back in the Pan Pacific Hotel checking the damage. Apart from a nasty scrape on the chest and some sore ribs I seemed fine. I had a hot bath, wrote an email to Pat telling her I had fallen into a sewer but was fine and went to bed.
The next morning there was an email from Pat saying that she had told B and B guests at breakfast about my sewer adventure. One of the guests knew Kuala Lumpur well and said that criminals used the storm sewers to dispose of the bodies of their victims---the water flushed them out to sea. Just what Pat needed to hear!
My chest was feeling pretty sore so I called the Canadian High Commission and they recommended a clinic they used to examine potential immigrants to Canada. A kindly doctor checked me over, gave me a tetanus shot and some antibiotic cream for the scrape. She thought my ribs were fine but ordered a chest x-ray to be sure.
The clinic was not used to dealing with tall people. As I stood against the wall, the technician strained to get the x-ray camera up as high as it would go. Finally, she took the picture and I went back to wait for the doctor. After thirty minutes, the doctor called me in. She was laughing, “Look at this”, pointing to my x-ray on the illuminated panel. The image showed the bottom half of my chest.
“You are too tall”, she said.
She felt my ribs again and sent me on my way, saying that if the pain got worse, I should get back to her.
As it turned out, my ribs were fine but I took a lot of ribbing (sorry about that) from colleagues who loved to tell about the consultant who fell into a sewer.
Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)
Friends took their toddler to a fine restaurant in Yorkshire. He sat in his high chair, ate well and was charming with the waitress. He then asked if he could get down and walk around a bit. Our friends looked at each other and decided that he had been so good they would let him. The boy wandered down to the back of the restaurant, smiling at the diners and chatting with them. Our friends took a deep breath and relaxed.
Suddenly, there was a muffled but distinct little explosion that came from the toddler. He stopped, felt in his diaper and then shouted, “Dus gas Mommy”.
One of our grand-daughters had received a first bike and she and her dad went shopping for a helmet. The salesperson brought out several models and he and our son talked about size, cushioning, straps etc. Finally, as the salesperson bent down to take another helmet out of a box, our grand-daughter leaned over and whispered to him, “I think I need a red one”.
Another grand-daughter, about three at the time, was shopping with her dad. They got back to the car and he discovered that he had left the keys in the locked car. The little girl sensed there was something wrong, and then the light came on. She gave a world-weary shake of her head, “Not AGAIN, Daddy”
NEXT SUNDAY
Watch for a more stories from our universe in next Sunday’s Letter from Virgil.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
POSTING # 2
POSTING # 2: Whence Virgil; Impact of Economic Problems in Canada and Russia; Bed and Breakfast; Immigration
Whence the Name Virgil?
Friends keep asking how Virgil got its name. Was the town named after the Roman poet, or after some local resident named, say, Virgil Smickerson?
According to Ontario Place Names (Fifth Edition), the village was settled around 1783 and first called Four Mile Creek, and later Cross Roads. In the mid-1800s, the name was changed to Lawrenceville, in honour of George Lawrence, a prominent Methodist settler. In 1895, a post office was established and the name was changed to Virgil after the Roman poet.
The book does not explain why the name was changed to Virgil. What was wrong with Lawrenceville?
I had developed a fanciful theory that the minister of the Anglican Church was fed up with the homage being paid to a Methodist and, having studied the Latin poets at Oxford or Cambridge, promoted a name change that would both smite the non-conformists and honour the author of the Aeneid.
It seems that my theory (as with so many of my theories) does not hold water. The Post Office officials, who played a key role in naming places, had a policy against names that honoured local figures, so Lawrenceville had to go. There was already a nearby village called Homer, in honour of the Greek poet.
Ergo, Virgil.
I still think there is more to it than that and I’ll keep looking for a more entertaining explanation.
Some Local Impacts of the Boom and Bust
Two months ago scrap metal prices were at record levels and they tempted a local thug to steal 20 or so manhole covers--- including one from the middle of a street near our home--- and sell them to an unscrupulous dealer, who then, I suppose, sold them to China..
In the last few weeks, the scrap metal markets, along with other commodity markets, have of course crashed and this week a friend who works in the office of a legitimate scrap metal dealer in Hamilton had his pay cut by 20%. The boss was apologetic but said that there was so little demand for scrap metal that he either had to lay off some workers or cut salaries for everyone. While unhappy and worried, our friend was glad to keep his employee benefits.
It is amazing how quickly the financial and economic situation in Canada and the world has worsened, and how quickly the effects are felt in towns such as Virgil.
Bust in Russia
I had a problem with scrap metal during the 1995-97 period when I was living in Moscow and managing a technical aid project to improve Russia’s employment programs.
Russia was going through terrible economic problems as it tried to make the shift from a state-planned to a market economy. Some western economists convinced the Russian leadership that the most effective way to make the leap from one type of economy to another was ‘shock therapy’. The government agreed and abruptly closed or significantly reduced funding to state industries and slashed spending on health care, education and pensions. This ‘sink-or-swim’ approach resulted in huge increases in unemployment, suicides, alcoholism, sickness and crime, and the emergence of the Russian mafia. Eventually, there was also the creation of some new, legitimate businesses.
The Chinese, encouraged by other western economists, among them J.K. Galbraith, decided instead on a gradual approach. Historians will have to decide which economic prescription was more effective.
In 1996 I was trying to schedule a visit of two Canadian consultants to a city in western Siberia where the Canadians would help the local employment office convert itself into a model for other offices in the region. The local office was undergoing some major repairs and each time I scheduled the visit, I was told that there had been a delay in construction.
The consultants and I were getting frustrated at the last minute postponements. Finally, I was told on a Friday that all that remained was to lift a glass-paneled roof onto the building. A crane had just arrived and it would install the roof on Monday.
On Monday, someone phoned to say that thieves had broken into the crane during the weekend and stripped out all the copper wiring to sell as scrap metal. The building was eventually finished and the consultants were able to do their thing.
At the time, we were incredulous that people would steal copper wiring. It seemed so improbable----like, for example, someone stealing manhole covers.
Bed and Breakfast and the KGB
Although Pat visited me in Russia on a number of occasions, she couldn’t stay because of our bed and breakfast, Blue Spruces, in the Glebe in Ottawa. Many of the stories I will be telling in this blog will relate to our B&Bs (we operated Blue Spruces for 14 years, Denwycke House at Grimsby for 5 years, and Windows-on-the-Lake in Grimsby for another 5 years).
Soon after we started Blue Spruces something happened at a couple of other B&Bs in Ottawa that made us stop and think---do we really want to do this.
The husband at another B&B came home from work to an obviously upset wife. “Our new guest has been wandering around the house naked all day.”
“Naked”, he repeated.
“Naked as the day she was born. I’ve tried to reason with her but she won’t listen. She’s upstairs in the hall on the phone. You go up and tell her to get dressed.”
“Why me?” His wife gave him a fierce look, and he set off up the stairs.
Trying not to look at the woman he started, “Excuse me but you will have to….”
The woman waved her hand at him, “Can’t you see I’m on the phone!”
He waited for a few minutes but when it became clear that she wasn’t close to the end of her conversation he said, “I’m sorry but you really have to get dressed.”
She ignored him but he kept repeating his request and finally added, “Perhaps you would be happier at another B&B.”
She ended her call, banged down the phone and said that she wasn’t going to take this anymore and was going to leave.
The next night the host and hostess in a nearby B&B were awakened in the middle of the night by loudspeakers, flashing lights and when they looked out they found their house was surrounded by the Ottawa Police Swat Team in full gear. The husband stumbled into the hall and met the new guest, clothed this time, going down to open the door.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“It’s OK”, she said, “I called the police to tell them that the KGB is after me.”
Now, in most cities a 911 call such as that would have resulted in a squad car making a discreet visit, but this was Ottawa and no one could forget September 5, 1945. On that day, Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk in the Russian Embassy, defected with secret documents describing the spy network that Russia, the supposedly loyal World War II ally, had established in the United States, Canada and Britain.
Gouzenko was turned away by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on a couple of occasions but as Russian secret agents searched for him he finally found an officer who would listen. He was soon in a secret location sharing his documents with the RCMP, the FBI and MI5.
The poor woman was taken by the police to a local hospital.
Bed and Breakfast and the Forgotten Umbrella
The Ottawa B&B community spent a good bit of time talking about the ‘naked lady and the KGB’ episode and I guess we all decided that although we would have to be careful in checking new guests, something like this would not happen to us. And nothing as dramatic as that happened to us but there were some interesting times.
For example, a very nice couple spent a weekend with us and after they had checked out we noticed that the man had left an umbrella. This was not just a normal umbrella but an expensive one with an elaborate, hand-carved handle. We decided we should call them and ask if we could forward it to them (we always got a telephone number when people booked a room).
A woman answered and when we explained that they had left an umbrella at our B&B last weekend, the woman said, “But we weren’t at a B&B last weekend…” There was a significant and increasingly ominous silence and we quickly said that we must have made a mistake.
We’ve often wondered what happened to that marriage. But, we learned our lesson: store left-behind items and wait for a call. Don’t ever call the guest’s home.
Immigration and Infidelity
That reminds me of a story told by one of my trainers when I was studying in Ottawa to be an Immigration Foreign Service officer.
A group of Immigration officers liked to have their sandwich and coffee lunch on the 7th floor of an office building in downtown Ottawa. One day, one of them looked at the building across the street and shouted for the others to check out what was happening in the dentist’s office across the way. The dentist and his nurse were indulging in a little lunchtime misbehaviour, hugging, kissing, etc.
The dentist and nurse were at it again the next day. One of the immigration officers went across the street, found the name of the dentist and did a Yellow Book search for his phone number.
The following day, the immigration officers waited until the couple were at each other and then one of the officers dialled the dentist’s number. As the officers watched, the dentist separated himself, reached for the phone and muttered an out-of-breath “Hello”. The immigration officer intoned in a deep voice, “This is God. You should be ashamed of yourselves.” The dentist looked over at the Immigration building, stumbled across the room and pulled the drapes.
NEXT SUNDAY
Watch for a more stores from our universe in next Sunday’s Letter from Virgil.
Whence the Name Virgil?
Friends keep asking how Virgil got its name. Was the town named after the Roman poet, or after some local resident named, say, Virgil Smickerson?
According to Ontario Place Names (Fifth Edition), the village was settled around 1783 and first called Four Mile Creek, and later Cross Roads. In the mid-1800s, the name was changed to Lawrenceville, in honour of George Lawrence, a prominent Methodist settler. In 1895, a post office was established and the name was changed to Virgil after the Roman poet.
The book does not explain why the name was changed to Virgil. What was wrong with Lawrenceville?
I had developed a fanciful theory that the minister of the Anglican Church was fed up with the homage being paid to a Methodist and, having studied the Latin poets at Oxford or Cambridge, promoted a name change that would both smite the non-conformists and honour the author of the Aeneid.
It seems that my theory (as with so many of my theories) does not hold water. The Post Office officials, who played a key role in naming places, had a policy against names that honoured local figures, so Lawrenceville had to go. There was already a nearby village called Homer, in honour of the Greek poet.
Ergo, Virgil.
I still think there is more to it than that and I’ll keep looking for a more entertaining explanation.
Some Local Impacts of the Boom and Bust
Two months ago scrap metal prices were at record levels and they tempted a local thug to steal 20 or so manhole covers--- including one from the middle of a street near our home--- and sell them to an unscrupulous dealer, who then, I suppose, sold them to China..
In the last few weeks, the scrap metal markets, along with other commodity markets, have of course crashed and this week a friend who works in the office of a legitimate scrap metal dealer in Hamilton had his pay cut by 20%. The boss was apologetic but said that there was so little demand for scrap metal that he either had to lay off some workers or cut salaries for everyone. While unhappy and worried, our friend was glad to keep his employee benefits.
It is amazing how quickly the financial and economic situation in Canada and the world has worsened, and how quickly the effects are felt in towns such as Virgil.
Bust in Russia
I had a problem with scrap metal during the 1995-97 period when I was living in Moscow and managing a technical aid project to improve Russia’s employment programs.
Russia was going through terrible economic problems as it tried to make the shift from a state-planned to a market economy. Some western economists convinced the Russian leadership that the most effective way to make the leap from one type of economy to another was ‘shock therapy’. The government agreed and abruptly closed or significantly reduced funding to state industries and slashed spending on health care, education and pensions. This ‘sink-or-swim’ approach resulted in huge increases in unemployment, suicides, alcoholism, sickness and crime, and the emergence of the Russian mafia. Eventually, there was also the creation of some new, legitimate businesses.
The Chinese, encouraged by other western economists, among them J.K. Galbraith, decided instead on a gradual approach. Historians will have to decide which economic prescription was more effective.
In 1996 I was trying to schedule a visit of two Canadian consultants to a city in western Siberia where the Canadians would help the local employment office convert itself into a model for other offices in the region. The local office was undergoing some major repairs and each time I scheduled the visit, I was told that there had been a delay in construction.
The consultants and I were getting frustrated at the last minute postponements. Finally, I was told on a Friday that all that remained was to lift a glass-paneled roof onto the building. A crane had just arrived and it would install the roof on Monday.
On Monday, someone phoned to say that thieves had broken into the crane during the weekend and stripped out all the copper wiring to sell as scrap metal. The building was eventually finished and the consultants were able to do their thing.
At the time, we were incredulous that people would steal copper wiring. It seemed so improbable----like, for example, someone stealing manhole covers.
Bed and Breakfast and the KGB
Although Pat visited me in Russia on a number of occasions, she couldn’t stay because of our bed and breakfast, Blue Spruces, in the Glebe in Ottawa. Many of the stories I will be telling in this blog will relate to our B&Bs (we operated Blue Spruces for 14 years, Denwycke House at Grimsby for 5 years, and Windows-on-the-Lake in Grimsby for another 5 years).
Soon after we started Blue Spruces something happened at a couple of other B&Bs in Ottawa that made us stop and think---do we really want to do this.
The husband at another B&B came home from work to an obviously upset wife. “Our new guest has been wandering around the house naked all day.”
“Naked”, he repeated.
“Naked as the day she was born. I’ve tried to reason with her but she won’t listen. She’s upstairs in the hall on the phone. You go up and tell her to get dressed.”
“Why me?” His wife gave him a fierce look, and he set off up the stairs.
Trying not to look at the woman he started, “Excuse me but you will have to….”
The woman waved her hand at him, “Can’t you see I’m on the phone!”
He waited for a few minutes but when it became clear that she wasn’t close to the end of her conversation he said, “I’m sorry but you really have to get dressed.”
She ignored him but he kept repeating his request and finally added, “Perhaps you would be happier at another B&B.”
She ended her call, banged down the phone and said that she wasn’t going to take this anymore and was going to leave.
The next night the host and hostess in a nearby B&B were awakened in the middle of the night by loudspeakers, flashing lights and when they looked out they found their house was surrounded by the Ottawa Police Swat Team in full gear. The husband stumbled into the hall and met the new guest, clothed this time, going down to open the door.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“It’s OK”, she said, “I called the police to tell them that the KGB is after me.”
Now, in most cities a 911 call such as that would have resulted in a squad car making a discreet visit, but this was Ottawa and no one could forget September 5, 1945. On that day, Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk in the Russian Embassy, defected with secret documents describing the spy network that Russia, the supposedly loyal World War II ally, had established in the United States, Canada and Britain.
Gouzenko was turned away by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on a couple of occasions but as Russian secret agents searched for him he finally found an officer who would listen. He was soon in a secret location sharing his documents with the RCMP, the FBI and MI5.
The poor woman was taken by the police to a local hospital.
Bed and Breakfast and the Forgotten Umbrella
The Ottawa B&B community spent a good bit of time talking about the ‘naked lady and the KGB’ episode and I guess we all decided that although we would have to be careful in checking new guests, something like this would not happen to us. And nothing as dramatic as that happened to us but there were some interesting times.
For example, a very nice couple spent a weekend with us and after they had checked out we noticed that the man had left an umbrella. This was not just a normal umbrella but an expensive one with an elaborate, hand-carved handle. We decided we should call them and ask if we could forward it to them (we always got a telephone number when people booked a room).
A woman answered and when we explained that they had left an umbrella at our B&B last weekend, the woman said, “But we weren’t at a B&B last weekend…” There was a significant and increasingly ominous silence and we quickly said that we must have made a mistake.
We’ve often wondered what happened to that marriage. But, we learned our lesson: store left-behind items and wait for a call. Don’t ever call the guest’s home.
Immigration and Infidelity
That reminds me of a story told by one of my trainers when I was studying in Ottawa to be an Immigration Foreign Service officer.
A group of Immigration officers liked to have their sandwich and coffee lunch on the 7th floor of an office building in downtown Ottawa. One day, one of them looked at the building across the street and shouted for the others to check out what was happening in the dentist’s office across the way. The dentist and his nurse were indulging in a little lunchtime misbehaviour, hugging, kissing, etc.
The dentist and nurse were at it again the next day. One of the immigration officers went across the street, found the name of the dentist and did a Yellow Book search for his phone number.
The following day, the immigration officers waited until the couple were at each other and then one of the officers dialled the dentist’s number. As the officers watched, the dentist separated himself, reached for the phone and muttered an out-of-breath “Hello”. The immigration officer intoned in a deep voice, “This is God. You should be ashamed of yourselves.” The dentist looked over at the Immigration building, stumbled across the room and pulled the drapes.
NEXT SUNDAY
Watch for a more stores from our universe in next Sunday’s Letter from Virgil.
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