Pics

How we did it back in the olden days...

   I spent a little time the other day with a pile of old pictures dating as far back as the thirties, digging through them and posting to Facebook many of the ones I thought my friends and family might be the most interested in seeing.
   When my Dad passed away recently, several boxes of old family photographs ended up at my house. Only recently have I had the time to give them any more than a cursory glance.
   Many of them were pictures from my childhood, generally when I was on vacation, either in Calgary or Gibsons, B.C.
These pictures always evoke a visceral response, a strong longing to be in those places once more, as a child. I've been able to go back to many of those spots in the pictures as an adult but, obviously, they are not the same and never will be. It would be preferable to simply crawl back inside any of those pictures and just resume my life all over again. It is apparent from talking to some of my relatives that they wish this was a possibility as well.

How it's done these days

   Up at the top of this blog is an old Brownie camera. We had one that was essentially identical this one. These were one of the most popular types of camera back in the 40's, 50's and 60's. This camera took many of the photographs I found among Dad's albums.
   There is a difference between the black-and-white photos of yesteryear and the digital ones of today. The old ones can be held. Having to take them somewhere and get them developed produced something that could be arranged, collected, written on, stored and moved. Sometimes this meant they got tattered around the ages, or creased. Often this did little to deter from their value, much as laugh lines give a face personality.

Old photo albums

   Of course, old photos are more difficult to share. That is the blessing of today's digital world, wherein it is possible to instantly convey images from person to person and group to group. The problem with digital pics, however, is that they are almost too easy and convenient. There is virtually no need to make sure that a picture has purpose or composition, it is easy enough to simply snap away with abandon and then discard what you don't like.

Digital picture frame

   It was a marriage of these two technologies that I was engaged in the other day, finding old photos and taking pictures of them with a digital camera and then sharing them. To the vast majority of my Facebook friends, I'm sure the pics were pretty insignificant. To the chosen few, though, I hope they provoked some of the same feelings they did for me. If they did, it was something  I was happy to do. 
  
  

Tether

   This past week, a man named Nik Wallenda tight roped across Niagara Falls, the first person to do so directly over the Falls. He is a member of the Flying Wallenda family, one of the most famous families of circus aerialists in history. He dedicated the feat to his great-grandfather, Karl Wallenda, patriarch of the family.
   One of the Flying Wallendas' claims to fame was doing their performances without the benefit of a safety net. This also has been the source of some family tragedy. In 1962, while performing their famous seven person pyramid on a tightrope, one of their bottom members faltered and the whole pyramid fell. Two family members perished and one was paralyzed from the waist down. Then again in 1963, yet another family member fell and died as the result. Sadly, Karl himself passed away in 1978 after falling from a tightrope stretched between two high rises in Puerto Rico. In this way, the Flying Wallenda legacy is fraught with both tremendous physical accomplishment and horrendous personal grief.

The Flying Wallendas' seven-person pyramid

   All of this led to Nik Wallenda's historic walk across the falls.
   When I heard about this proposed walk, I immediately thought of the danger and the family legacy. I mainly thought of the danger. I thought this would surely be a death-defying feat of the highest order. It would actually define death-defying.
   Except death-defying it wasn't. The reason why it wasn't is because ABC, the American T.V. network which sponsored the walk and agreed to telecast it decided it didn't want to necessarily broadcast the possible demise of someone on live T.V. To this end they forced Nik Wallenda to use a tether, a strap that would connect him to the wire and prevent him from falling to his death should he actually lose his balance and not be able to recover during the walk.
   To his credit (I think), Wallenda was totally against using the tether. It certainly flew in the face of family tradition. I imagine it also went against whatever macho nature he has residing in his daredevil's heart. There was talk that he might even begin the walk with the tether on but then remove it when he was actually on the wire, the agreement being that if he felt the tether itself poised a safety threat he then had this option. As it turned out, however, the tether remained on.
   For many people, this changed the whole mystique around the performance. Suddenly, what once seemed like a once in a lifetime not-to-be missed extravaganza was now a non-event. Rather than the death-defiance, what we got was a long, wet stroll.
   There was a huge crowd in Niagara Falls watching Nik Wallenda's walk, possibly a hundred and ten thousand people. Then again, millions more watched the telecast. I didn't myself but, if I had, I would have watched under the assumption that death was being defied. I wonder how many people made the trek to the Falls under the same assumption and, if they had known about the tether, might not have bothered.
   As it turned out, the safety measure was totally unnecessary-- Nik even ran the last few metres. But, in the end, he'd been robbed of much bravado, strapped up as he was. He even admitted to feeling like a "jackass".

Annie Edson Taylor--first person to conquer the Falls

   I suppose that if Wallenda was somehow robbed then possibly the rest of us were, as well. But robbed of what? What exactly caught our imagination in all this? Was it the Wallenda family name? The mystique of the Falls itself? The opportunity to view the most recent addition to the Falls' long history of daredevil acts which have included men and women going over the precipice in barrels, inner tubes, rubber balls, jet skis and some with only the clothes on their backs? Or is it possible that some of us wanted to see someone actually die on T.V.? Karl Wallenda's life-ending attempt to cross between those two buildings was not televised, that I remember, but was caught on film and is available on YouTube. All at the same time it is both difficult to watch and hard not to watch. Is it possible that some of us, for whatever reason, were out to capture some of this again last week? 

Karl Wallenda's last walk

   I had very little doubt that Nik Wallenda would make the walk successfully. As other-worldly as such tightrope stunts seem to us, to him they are second-nature. This is not to say that he takes them lightly. Far from it, he would point out that complacency is perhaps the biggest danger in undertakings such as this. Indeed, his great-grandfather Karl always thought that safety nets promoted complacency and were a danger in and of themselves. Hence the long history of performing without them.
   Wallenda plans more of the same in the future. Apparently a walk across the Grand Canyon is already in the works. It will be interesting to see what safety measures are employed. I'm sure the subject of the tether will come up once again. Will having used the tether once make it easier for him to agree to use it again? Or will it simply strengthen his resolve to never use it again....?
  

Father's Day

Dad, my sons Bryant and Ben, and myself .

   It is Father's Day today and this will mark the first time in 59 years that I have not had a father to celebrate this with, at least in corporeal form. The fact that he, in one form or another, may be present with us that day and observant of the proceedings has not eluded me, though.
   Naturally, it's a bit of a strange feeling, not having him around to get together with this year. I didn't need to spend any time buying him something, I didn't need to make sure he got the day and time correctly to show up here and I didn't have to worry about whether he'd be able to find the place okay and then find his way back home. I would have been happy to have had to worry about all these things at least a few more years but now I just don't need to anymore. So this is different.
   When I haven't been busy trying to keep on top of all the paper-worky types of things around finalizing his estate I sometimes find myself thinking about the legacy the man left behind.
   His passing afforded me the opportunity to speak with friends, colleagues and associates of his I hadn't spoken to in years. I received messages from people who'd known my Dad who I personally had never even met. To a person, they only had glowing things to say about the man. They talked about his sense of humour, his honesty, his desire to do things the "right way" and his ease around young people. All in all, not a bad legacy.
   It leaves me wondering as to my ability to live up to my Dad's standards. Not that I'm planning on leaving this earth any time soon but, when I do, will there be only good things said about me? Hard to say.

Bryant and I

   I am rife with imperfection, as most men and fathers are. This is not always bad, I don't think too many kids want a perfect father. A perfect father sets up a set of expectations that are difficult to live with. I don't think this is anything I need to worry about.
   In all his imperfection, the only thing a father wants to do is somehow keep his family safe, supported and happy. About seven years ago, however, I took it upon myself to undo all of that, in one fell swoop.
   I found myself in an unsustainable situation whereby I realized I was in love with someone who wasn't my wife. Faced with a choice between a woman I loved and a woman who had been my best friend and the mother of my kids for a quarter of a century I picked the woman I loved.

Ben and I

   Good fathers do not go out of their way to do what feels like destroying their family and this is what I felt I had done. In my mind, I knew that time might heal. In my heart, I wasn't sure this would ever happen.
   At this point in time, almost seven years later, I think a lot of healing has gone on. In spite of this, though, I have this spot in my soul that is irreparable. And, regardless of whatever healing there is still to be, I will always be able to look back to what happened seven years ago and have doubts about my role as a father.
   Your ability to be a good father, however, is also powered in part by the range of your experience and what you have learned from it. For better or worse, I have the experience from seven years ago to draw upon. I learned a lot about my relationships with the people in my life and I learned a lot about myself as well. Just as importantly, I learned a lot about my sons and what kinds of men they are. Through all their pain and anger they did what you would hope they would do--they supported their mother and they supported each other. They also showed the ability to reconstruct a relationship with me and, then, with my new wife, Doralyn. I doubt they really know just how proud of them I am and thankful at the same time. Though neither of them is a father himself yet, I have no doubt their children will find themselves just where they need to be--nurtured, cared-for and very well-loved.  
     

Head-down walking

   I know one thing about me--when I walk, I walk with my head down.
   I almost exclusively focus on the ground about three feet in front of me as I walk. This is not to say that I never get to enjoy the surroundings. I do occasionally look up to see where I am and what's around me but, for the most part, I walk quickly and I look down while I'm doing it.
   I feel I must appear quite strange and I try and remind myself to look up every once in awhile, so that people don't start to wonder.
   As an experiment once, I tried walking and only looking at things which were maybe fifty to a hundred yards ahead of me. I found this very disorienting. I became very uncertain as to what I was walking on and where I was stepping. At one point I actually became all weak and wobbly (but I suspect this might have been a coincidental sugar imbalance) and didn't really start to enjoy the walk until I went back to the head-down method.

   My brother and I use to frequent our neighbourhoods, employing the head-down walking style, if I remember correctly. I'm sure the neighbours made the odd there-go-them-weird-Baker boys comment. It only occurred to me just recently that I actually walk this way, otherwise it seems like a very normal way to walk.
   I walk partly for the exercise. As much as anything, though, walking gives me an opportunity for introspection. I believe that this is at least partially why I walk with my head down--it negates a lot of extraneous input from scenery, cars and other people that would otherwise cloud my ability to look inward.

   Some of my best thinking comes when walking. I have heard the theory that walking and running enhance the thinking process because they are activities which are not learned but are innate--you have been walking and running since you were born and never had to be taught how to do them. They are activities which increase the blood and oxygen flow to the brain without occupying it at the same time with details such as how to swing the golf club, how to hold the tennis racket, where to position yourself in hockey and so on. Without all this pre-occupation on learned things, the brain is free to wheel and deal, as it were. Getting a little bogged-down on things? Head on out for a walk!

   So I will continue to employ my head-down method. There is sometimes a world at your feet that you might miss otherwise. There is life and death down there. There is money. There are messages from strangers. There are things you really don't want to step in. There are signs, borders, edges, and dates. There is security and solidity.
   At the beginning of the long-running children's T.V. show, "The Friendly Giant", you are at ground level until you see the Giant's boot, at which point you are directed to "Look up, WAY up!" and this is when the adventure begins. To paraphrase this famous directive, I would suggest you go for a walk sometime, begin perhaps at eye level but then "Look down, WAY down!"
  
  

Guns

Lone Ranger and Tonto

   I can understand the fascination with guns. When I was a kid I myself was fascinated by guns. Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Paladin and Wyatt Earp all used guns effectively and glamourously. Silver bullets and the Buntline Special were cool. The Rifleman was cool. And no-one ever got killed.
   So I got my friends and our machine guns and pistols and we would race around the house or deep into the woods and we would shoot each other over and over and we never killed anyone either. No blood, apart from maybe scraped knees, and no death.
   This was fine but I'm not sure what it taught us, if anything. Not that we were out to be taught anything, we were just kids, having fun.
   When I say there was "no death" I'm not including the incident with the pellet gun. A friend if mine had a pellet gun and one day we were shooting it out of his second floor bedroom window. There was a sparrow on a wire, probably about 20 feet away. I truly only meant to scare him from the wire, with the pellet gun. Instead, I killed him. Like a target in a carnival sideshow, it flipped over, hung upside down by its feet for about five seconds and then dropped to the ground, dead.
   I was horrified.
   I have never in my life intended to harm, let alone kill, any kind of animal. Having then accidentally killed a small bird, this feeling in me was even more intensely imprinted, to this very day.

   This is the reality of guns.
   A few days ago, a man with a gun killed another man in the Eaton Centre in Toronto. He opened fire in a food court and not only killed his intended victim but wounded many other  bystanders in the process. One thirteen year old boy ended up in critical condition with a head wound.
   The reality of guns was foisted upon those innocent and  unsuspecting people that day, people whose only purpose in being there at that time and place was to shop and then chow down for more shopping.
   Who knows what the toll was on those people? I imagine anyone who suffered a physical injury will recover, in time. What might take much longer to heal is the psychological and emotional trauma of not only the injured that day but likely anyone who was in the vicinity and saw the violence or experienced the panic which ensued. The incident will give us all lingering doubts as to where the safe places are.
   I know that in our house there exists somewhat of a cavalier attitude around guns. Guns and things associated with them are considered cool. Guns have been used to kill animals. On our T.V., shows that take guns and make them into even bigger and better guns are among the most popular. There was no shock or disgust displayed when a newspaper article about the Eaton Centre killing was read, in fact there was almost tacit approval of the gunman's shooting ability.
   All this because there is no true understanding of the depth and nature and effect of this kind of violence, likely because it has never hit close to home. The same way it is difficult to understand the effect of a beating unless you have been beaten yourself.

   A gun or a rifle enables you to enter a cause and effect relationship with an enemy from a distance. Before guns it was arrows. Before arrows, various forms of armed combat existed which required the participants to actually touch each other, to look into each other's eyes during battle. This was distasteful so now we have guns. Not to mention missiles, rocket launchers, bombs and mines. Things that will kill your enemy without you needing to actually be there and see the result or perhaps even find out that he is actually stronger than you are. It is almost a cowardly way to kill.

   Yes, I am pretty tired of guns. I'm tired of constantly seeing them pulled out on T.V. and in movies. I've been watching them for so many years now I know exactly how to hold them and exactly what kind of burn marks they leave if you kill a person at point blank. I know about bullet trajectories and SWAT team tactics and how to "clear" a building and on and on. If somehow or other I were a T.V. or movie producer, I would ban them with no reservations. And, in my wildest fantasies, if I could teach deer, ducks, geese, bears and moose how to shoot back I would do so, in a heartbeat.

In tune

   As a child, being in tune, musically-speaking, was a foreign concept. I had gotten it in my head that I was not a good singer from a very early age and, therefore, was not terribly interested in musicality. I`m not sure how I even got the notion I could not sing, whether it was from friends, family or school, I have no idea. It could have been that claiming I could not sing simply got me out of singing, period.
   School, though, has a way of forcing you into situations which you might otherwise have avoided forever.
   At some point in Grade 7 or 8 I found myself a member of the school choir. I suspect that my presence in the choir had much more to do with the paltry number of boys (and girls, for that matter) in the small three-room public school I attended. I certainly would not have willingly joined the choir, given a choice. It, I think, became apparent to Mr. Buchanan that there were a handful of boys in the group who were going to require (re-choir?) individual attention.

NOT my public school choir.

   You need to remember that this was a time in a boy's life when his voice was as unpredictable as his complexion. We were all struggling as much with puberty as we were with musical scales and realistically being able to warble anything but a high-pitched squawk was pretty high expectations. In spite of this, Mr. Buchanan took the three squawkiest of us apart one day after all the other kids had left and laid upon us some individual attention.
   He had the three of us sing together and he had the three of us sing apart. He talked to us about our breathing. He talked about letting it all out, without reservation. He coaxed the note right out of us.
   At some point I became tired of all this and was pretty sure I'd just wasted a whole recess during which I could have been chasing girls or sneaking up behind my buddies, reaching under them, grabbing their scrotums and nearly lifting them off their feet. In other words all sorts of fun things.
   But then it happened. We'd been going over the same couple of lines of a song repeatedly and you'd never have known it wasn't three completely different songs. Then, suddenly and as if by providence, there was a miraculous melding of voice, cadence and rhythm and our three voices sounded like one voice! Mr. Buchanan's jaw dropped and I'm sure ours did as well. I can remember everything about that moment, what corner of the room we were in, which direction we faced, and the fact that I had one hair on my chest. Mr. Buchanan had us go over the same couple of lines once more and we sang it in tune again!
   This was my very first experience with the mystical "in tune" I'd been hearing about and I now knew what the hubbub was all about. I remember little else about the choir that year but that one experience and it has stuck with me.

My autoharp (or, really, one just like it...)

   Just two or three years later, in high school, I bought an autoharp. I thought this was kind of a cool and easy way to make music. We had occasionally used one in public school, for accompaniment, and all you needed to do was press one of the white buttons while you strummed. Couldn't be much easier and that's why I liked it. I played it constantly and wrote godawful teen angst songs, fashioning myself (I thought at the time) after Leonard Cohen.
   Eventually, though, the sound on the autoharp changed, the chords becoming almost unrecognizable. Yes, it was out of tune. At the time, I had little to choice but to traipse the autoharp downtown to Chapman and Hewitt's and have them tune it for me. The guy would always kind of look at me in a funny kind of way but then take it anyway, tune it, and call me a couple of days later. Substantially after this period in my life I got my hands on a book about autoharps and realized I could tune the damn thing myself! At this point, I understood the almost quizzical looks I received every time I took it downtown.
   Any time since I have tuned it myself and always enjoy the experience, how just the tiniest twitches of the tuning fork can bring it either into, or out of, tune. It is almost like a Zen moment when the two strings match each other and become one, almost. As you can tell from the picture, there are a lot of strings to tune and when they are finally all done and the chords are played and they sound the way they're supposed to sound it's a self-affirming experience.
   There is so much about music I don't know. I took clarinet in Grade 9 and was accomplished enough at making an acceptable sound with it. Our main task for the year was to perform all the scales for the teacher and I could never get the hang of this, though. My teacher was one of the least approachable ones I had and, being a niner, I would not force myself to ask for direction. My final exam in Grade 9 music was simply to sit down and play all those scales and I was unable. In a gesture of magnanimity, he agreed to pass me if I agreed to not take music in Grade 10. This was fine with me!

So NOW they tell me!

   As an adult, I now appreciate scales a little more and wish I'd payed a little more attention to them in school (like a lot of other things!) I wish I'd learned how to read and write music as well. I'm not that good at the technical end of things, however. I've sort of taught myself how to play a keyboard but I have no idea what chords I'm playing, the names of the notes or anything. This does little to detract from the enjoyment I get from playing, however. Not only that, but anytime I watch someone reading music and playing it, I often wonder if they can create it, as well. If I can only do one or the other, I choose to do the latter. And, hopefully, be in tune at the same time!