Christians in the park

   Christians make me nervous. Christians in large groups, celebrating their Christianity make me even more nervous. Christians in large groups, celebrating their Christianity in public parks make me really nervous.
   There were a bunch of Christians doing this very thing this past Saturday morning in Victoria Park. I was running through the park in the morning and heard some music coming from the band shell, wondered what was going on, and then remembered---oh yeah... Christians.
   The fellow who'd organized this group of Christians had been in the paper and on T.V. recently because he'd been asking city hall to raise a Christian flag on city hall property to mark this special day and gathering. I guess city hall had originally said yes but then changed its mind. This may have had something to do with controversial remarks this fellow had made about kicking Muslims who wanted to practice Sharia law out of the country. This same fellow coolly predicted there would be 5,000 people in the park on the weekend to help celebrate.
   You could almost predict the outcome of all this. Nowhere near 5,000 people showed up, it was probably more like 500. Hecklers made an appearance and a couple of women started necking, provoking a response from the guy who arranged the whole thing. And that was about it, as I understand. There is a danger, of course, in reporting more or less only what the paper reported but it did seem like one man's brief moment in the sun, in the name of the Son.
   When thinking of large groups of historically organized Christians I am hard-pressed to come up with examples that don't cause my emotions to run the gamut from mild nervousness to a case of the full-blown heebie jeebies. The list, without much thought and as quick as they popped into my head, includes the Ku Klux Klan, the Amish, Mormons, Nazis, the Spanish Inquisition, the Catholic church, not to mention the Crusaders, the Salem witch hunters and people responsible for the obliteration of the Aztecs, Incas and North American First Nations. Saving the worst til last...T.V. evangelists.
   I imagine if you're a Christian and you're reading this then you're not taking to it too kindly. This doesn't bother me. It doesn't bother me because if you're a true Christian, as I understand it, you have a "turn the other cheek" mentality and will not take me too onerously to task on anything I've said here. By which I mean you won't hit me. Unless, of course, you possibly belong to one of the above groups...
   The fact that Christians make me nervous is a very personal thing and I imagine it stems from the feeling I'm just about to have something foisted on me whenever I'm around them. They occasionally even show up at my door, bearing books or pamphlets, extolling their brand of Christianity. They're harder to get rid of mainly because they're...well...nice. I am at the age now where it seems quite alright to be gruff and non-appreciative of telemarketers, door-to-door sales persons and rude shopkeepers but, because of their niceness, it is harder to be this way with Christians.
   I am one of those people who believe that Jesus may never even have existed, that he is a myth. I say this because there is apparently no secular record of an historical Jesus ever having existed. This statement is refuted all over the place (all you need do is Google "was there an historical Jesus?)  and what you end up with is scholars refuting other scholars so you really need to make up your own mind on this. If there actually was a Jesus, I believe his life was vastly different than the one portrayed in lore. In the two thousand years since he was said to have existed we have had to essentially rely on a word-of-mouth interpretation of the events back in those days. I also know that no two persons' recollection of an event will be the same and that no subsequent re-telling of a story will tell the same story exactly all over again. This is why I have doubts. I trust people as far as I can throw them. Because they are people.
   The funny part about all this is that I totally respect much of what Christianity stands for and much of what is said in the Bible. A lot of it makes sense. Jesus and his parables resonate with me. I am a pacifist by nature and appreciate the non-violence talked about in the Bible. My objection to Christianity is when there appears to be an agenda attached to it.
   I object to Christianity being used as motivation for killing people. I object to Christianity being used to make money. I object to it being used as part of a political agenda (see first two objections). I object to it being used as a means toward self-aggrandisement. I object to athletes making stupendous plays and then crossing themselves and pointing to the heavens, as if to give credit to God (unless, of course, they are willing to do the same thing when they drop the game-winning catch...).

   I appreciate people being Christians quietly, going about living virtuous lives with little mention made of their spiritual beliefs. If there is mention made of Jesus Christ it is perhaps because someone asked them, out of curiosity, why they are so happy, or motivated or driven or calm. I think all Christians need to do is "live the life" and I will, over time, lose my nervousness about them! 
  
  
  

Counselling

   When I walked away from my first marriage, my wife at the time was pretty adamant that I needed counselling. At this point in my life, I was facing a lot of "how could you?" from many different corners and the fact that I might need counselling almost made sense, even to me.
   My ex was pretty sure that the counselling I required centred around my relationship with my mother. This was probably the easiest conclusion to come to based on the number and types of mental, psychiatric and emotional issues my mother had to deal with in her later years. Once again this seemed to make sense, even to me.
   I was still left, however, with the nagging feeling that there were actually no unresolved issues between my mother and me that still (or ever) needed to be dealt with. Of course, a lot of people who need counselling around an issue don't know they need counselling around that issue so I had not totally dismissed this as an area requiring attention. At the same time, however, I never went for counselling.

   Then I began golfing with my Dad.

   As I have described in previous blogs, Dad and I got together every Monday morning for a round of golf. Afterwards, he and I would sit in the clubhouse over a beer or a pop and we would talk. We talked about a lot of things, most of it being stuff that had happened years ago, when I was kid and sometimes even before that. He had stories to tell about his childhood, his summer jobs, his adventures in the Navy, how he met my Mum, the places he worked, all the moves we made from city to city, his two marriages, right up to the present.
   This also gave me the opportunity to ask questions about things that had happened when I was a kid, why we moved so many times, what was wrong with my mother, and those kinds of things. We often compared memories and, generally, Dad was surprised that I could remember as much as I could.
   Slowly, after many post-golf sessions, certain small realizations were made apparent to me. I guess the first and foremost was that my Dad was never there while I was growing up. This, unfortunately, was mainly due to the nature of his job in the insurance business. There were many times when he was away for days at a time, off on business trips, adjusting peoples' insurance claims. If he wasn't off doing that, he was taking a training course somewhere. This pretty well left my Mum and my brother Bob and I to fend for ourselves, or at least it felt this way. So this is what we did.
   At the same time we were fending for ourselves, we were being moved around, almost constantly, until I was eleven. At this point we ended up in London but prior to that we had lived in nine different houses in four different cities in two different countries. Fending had become a life skill by this point.
   During one of our reminiscing sessions, Dad asked me if I'd ever played ice hockey. For once, I just stopped and kind of looked at him. I remember thinking to myself were you to remember anything about your son growing up it was likely that whether he played hockey or not would have been one of those things. It wasn't even something I could credit his Alzheimer's with, at this point in his life Dad's short term memory was the pits but his long term memory was dead on. It felt to me that somehow or other he had either relegated this memory to the "unimportant" bin or perhaps had simply and intrinsically been "uninvolved" with large sections of my youth.
   My Dad loved cars and boats. I grew up disinterested in both. This has never really bothered me but at the same time I have often wondered what the dynamic was in all of that, I have seen other examples (most notably with one of my stepsons and his father) where the dad's passion for something has somehow been passed on to his son. This didn't happen in my case. On the other hand, my mum loved poetry and writing and now so do I.

Love of poetry and lack of dickering.

   Another telling moment--when I bought my first car I, of course, was all excited and couldn't wait to call Dad and tell him all about it. We got into a discussion about the cost of it and my interaction with the salesman. I had not "dickered" with the salesman and had paid full price for the car. Dad pointed out to me that, essentially, I had been "taken". This completely deflated me, naturally. Dad, to his credit, realized right away what he'd done and tried to make amends but the damage had been done. In later years, though, I went over this many times and it finally occurred to me that if you are going to learn to "dicker" over cars then who's the person most likely to teach you that? Your dad. Now in the lifelong relationship between a man and his son I'm not sure if there's a course called Dickering 101 but I had certainly never been signed up for it. I also don't think you need to drag your kids along with you every time you're purchasing a house or car but if you're really and truly involved with your kids then it's one of the subjects that somehow or other should come up. (Note to myself: Check to see of your kids know anything about dickering...)
   One of the things I did pick up from my Dad was a love of sports and I have all sorts of fond memories of being taught how to fish and throw balls and shoot pucks and all those kinds of things. As strong as those memories are, though, the memories of having to beg him to do those things with me were just about as strong. As an adult, I became involved with organized sports and I offered him all sorts of opportunities to come and watch. I offered him opportunities to come and watch both his son and grandson, at the same time. But he never took me up on those chances to be involved, even as just a spectator.

   Getting back to counselling. What I think has happened is that I have self-counselled. My ex thought I had issues with my mother and she also thought I had issues with being a Dad. I truly believe she was wrong about the former. I also truly believe I had a dad who didn't do a lot of  "Dad" teaching when I was growing up, likely for a number of reasons, one of them being simply not being able to be there enough. I don't know for sure but I also suspect that both he and I were probably much closer to our mothers. Whatever self-doubt I have about my role as a father, I think, likely stems from my father. That is my way-too-simplistic conclusion from all the self-counselling I have done.
   My Dad, as many of you are likely aware, has passed away and now there is little opportunity to address any of this, not that I likely would have anyway. When he passed, there were nothing but wonderful things said about him and I imagine I have somewhat tarnished some of that. I cannot emphasize enough, though, that by the end of his life he had more than made up for anything that had happened or not happened when I was a kid. He ended being a man who demonstrated no end to his wisdom and profundity and showed how much he loved those around him with no reservation. Anyone who met him liked or loved him in return. His grand kids loved him particularly so and this was reciprocated in full.
   For myself, I have way too many things to thank him for. I did have the opportunity to express to him almost all of these before he passed and that is just another reason why I am thankful. My self-counselling has, ironically, been somewhat of a joyful thing. I think I now have a better picture of my relationship with my father and, warts and all, it has been a very self-fulfilling process insofar as I believe I now have a better understanding of myself and a higher comfort level in that regard.
   This is not to say that I have totally eliminated the possibility of engaging in counselling at some point. It might be nice to sit down with someone and say,"I did this and I did this and then I did this and what does that mean?" And then go from there.
  
  
      
    
  
  

Songs You Should Probably Hear At Least Once

   There is a lot of wonderful music out there, you hear it on the radio every day. If your my age, you've been hearing it on the radio for about fifty years now. What I've learned over the years, though, is that the music you hear on the radio is not always the best music there is out there, even by the the same artist.
   I find this very frustrating to talk to people who have an opinion on an artist only based on what they've heard on the radio. To help relieve my frustration a little in this regard, I'm going to post some of my favourite songs you probably haven't heard on the radio.

   The first one is Leonard Cohen's "The Sisters of Mercy". I was kind of torn between this and "Dress Rehearsal Rag" but I was after a slightly lighter tone so chose the former. I saw Cohen perform this song live here in London many years ago and he told a little story about how it came to be. Apparently he was wandering frigid Edmonton after a concert one wintery evening and somehow got invited in out of the cold by a couple of young women. He ended up spending an "unfortunately chaste" night at the girls' place and ended up writing this song as a result, if my faltering memory serves.
   Melanie Safka has always been one of my favourite artists, ever since "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain). It always bothered me that one of her most popular songs of all time was "Brand New Key". It certainly is a catchy little song but in her overall body of work there is some achingly beautiful music. Once again I had a hard time choosing. I finally opted for "Leftover Wine", probably one of her best. Briefly, it describes her relationship with her fans and audience. It was hard not to pick "Momma Momma", "Bobo's Party" or perhaps even "Birthday of the Sun", plus many others. This particular song, perhaps more than any other, showcases her amazing voice.

   I was watching a Harry Chapin PBS special many years ago and saw him perform a song called "Sniper". It was an amazing nine minute opus and I immediately went and bought the album it was on. Out of many Chapin songs I love, this is personally my favourite. It is a fascinating character study, touching on human nature and the effects of alienation. It was inspired by the story of Charles Whitman, who, in 1966, went to the top of the University of Texas tower and started shooting, killing thirteen people and an unborn child. Not typical Chapin stuff but he goes back and forth, almost documentary style, getting the story both from the sniper's viewpoint and the people who knew him. This is a powerful song.

   I was only mildly familiar with Joni Mitchell before I saw an appearance of hers on the Johnny Cash show way back when. She sang a song called "For Free", from her "Ladies of the  Canyon" album. At that point I was hooked, bought the album and many more. Nothing of hers I'd heard on the radio at that point really would have prompted me to become a fan so I'm very thankful for Johnny Cash having her on.

   Okay, I think I might stop there although I could go on and on. As you've probably figured out by now, I am an old "folkie" and I make no apologies. If you've hung in there and actually listened to all of these then you've heard almost half an hour of "Brian Baker music" and you should be congratulated for making it through! There has always been so much music out there that the radio and T.V. stations couldn't possibly do all the artists the justice they so readily deserve. The end result is that we, as an audience, lose out. We never get the opportunity to hear all the other music that's out there. Occasionally, Doralyn and I will be watching a movie and somewhere in the soundtrack we'll hear a song we fancy, that we've never heard before. So we look up the artist and discover all sorts of new great music! That's the wonderful thing, it's all at your fingertips!
  

Poetry

   In a recent blog, I mentioned that one of my all-time favourite movies is "Four Weddings and a Funeral". I then went on to list some of the qualities about it I liked best. One of the reasons I like it is that it contains poetry.
   In his eulogy to his partner, Gareth (Simon Callow), Matthew (John Hannah) reads a poem to the mourners who are gathered. It was W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues". I had never heard this poem before and, up to that point in the movie, it was nothing I'd been expecting. It seemed I'd even forgotten the actual title of the movie and was not prepared for either one of its larger-than-life characters to pass away or this poem's recitation to move me the way it did. It took the general tone of the movie and turned it a full one hundred and eighty degrees.
   The following is a clip of the movie wherein John Hannah recites the poem: 

   This is what I love about poetry. It does have the power to at least momentarily grab hold of you and re-arrange the way you view or think about something. In "Funeral Blues", Auden manages to take the demise of one single person and and stop the world with it. It's not one of those "death" poems that's trying to be uplifting either, the last line clearly shows a depth and length of despair which appears to be almost interminable.
   My love of poetry began back in the sixties. As I became interested in popular music, I found myself drifting towards artists such as Simon and Garfunkel and Leonard Cohen. Cohen, in particular, bridged the gap between poet and musical artist demonstratively. We studied Cohen in high school, both his music and his written work. For me, it was the perfect blend of words and music I'd never heard the like of before. I imagine it also appealed to the introspective and analytical part of whoever I thought I was at the time.
   It is tempting to include one of his pieces of music here but I'm saving that for another post somewhere down the road. I would like to include, though, one of his poems that has resonated with me the last forty years or so. It is from a book of poetry entitled "The Spice Box of Earth".

 I wonder how many people in this city 

I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when I look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.

  

                        
                                             


     
   
   When I went to retrieve the words to this poem, I was amazed at how many other bloggers had taken the time to write about it. It clearly had struck a chord with many other people, not just myself. I think if you are a writer of any kind then you tend to look a little more closely at the things unfolding all around you. Writing is also a bit of a lonely thing to do and nowhere is this demonstrated better than in this poem by Cohen. How much more alone can you be than to be in an apartment by yourself where the furniture is not even your own, looking out over a world of anonymous strangers? But the poet in Cohen has seen through to the universality of this and wondered if maybe we are all in the same boat together. When you realize this, the potential of us all being together in our loneliness arises. This will not stop you from being isolated but once you realize you are not alone in your isolation it's not quite as terrifying. When I read this poem the first time the imagery hit me like a tiny little thunderbolt. This, then, is one of the things I love about poetry.

Bronwen Wallace

   Speaking about thunderbolts, I once read a book called "The Stubborn Particulars of Grace", by Bronwen Wallace. I had attended a reading she did here in London, admired her poetry greatly, and bought this book afterwards. Just a few short months later she was dead of cancer, sadly. My signed copy of her book is now one of my prized possessions.
   Wallace, more than any other poet I'd read up to that time, pointed out the potential for poetry in everyday life. She essentially looked at the everyday goings-on in her life and saw the significance beyond their surfaces. Occasionally, I will read a poem and go holy crap at the end of it. Just about every single poem in "The Stubborn Particulars of Grace" evoked that response and I read the book over and over. It greatly affected the type of poetry I was writing at the time simply because it made me realize that almost anything can be a poem. It was then I really started looking at the world in a new light.
   In a "Fifty Shades of Grey" kind of world, you don't see a lot of people sitting there, reading poetry, anymore. As I remember, back in high school we were more or less forced to read the little bit of poetry we did. I took a little less forcing than most of the rest of us and I'm kind of happy for this. I get back to the books of poetry I still have every now and then. Besides Cohen and Wallace, I could also recommend Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Bill Bissett, Lorna Crozier, Colleen Thibaudeau, James Reaney, Anne Michaels and Michael Ondaatje. Canadians, all of them, and a pretty small selection out of all the great Canadian poets there are. In my life, I have gravitated to the Canadian poets but the world is full of marvelous writers of poetry, Auden included.

   So give poetry a try. Go to a reading the next time there is one. Join a poetry group. Download a song but maybe read the lyrics at the same time. Sit with a kid and do rhymes. Take a song you enjoy and give it your own words. Look at the world around you and try to figure out what one thing means to the next. None of this will be nearly as painful as it may seem to you now. Poetry is worth it, in whatever dose you choose!   
                                                                    

              

  

Steamboats (As A Unit Of Time)

   I imagine that when most of you think of "steamboats" you are taken back to the glory days of side wheelers plowing down the Mississippi or perhaps even the Great Lakes waters, maybe even the coastal and inland waters of B.C.
   To me, however, "steamboat" is a unit of time. It is a unit of time closely approximating one second once you have taken the time to say the word "steamboat" out loud, in normal cadence. As a proviso, you must also add a number to this, as in "one steamboat" or "two steamboats".
   "Steamboats" is the classic method for denoting how long the defence in a game of touch football must wait, after the ball has been snapped, before it is allowed to rush the opposing quarterback. The reason this is used is primarily to allow the offence time to complete some kind of play. In normal football, the offensive players would be able to block the defensive ones, thereby giving the quarterback a little time to run a play. In touch football, though, there is no blocking allowed. This, then, is why "steamboats" are employed.
   It works like this. Before the start of the game, the two teams decide how many "steamboats" will be counted off after the snap of the ball. It will be the job of one of the defensive players to stand there and count the "steamboats" out loud. When he has reached the allotted number of "steamboats", he or anyone else on his team is allowed the rush the quarterback. So what you end up with is one guy standing there, going "one steamboat, two steamboats, three steamboats...etc", while all around him all hell is breaking loose, guys are criss-crossing all over the place, yelling for the ball, cursing and the like.
   I have no idea why the word "steamboat" was chosen. As a spoken unit of time, the number "one thousand" is also used, along with its ascending number ie. one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand and so on. Ironically, so is the word "Mississippi" (one mississippi, two mississippi,...) so maybe this is where steamboats came from?
   Generally in a game of touch football you don't go much higher than about eight steamboats. This is probably good, as my experience using steamboats as units of time in other endeavours eg. run/walk intervals, is that "steamboats" becomes a bit of a tongue-twister the higher up you go. I actually did a comparison the other evening as Doralyn, my wife, and I were out doing a training run. I compared "steamboats" with the"one-one thousand" method and found the latter to actually be more precise. Of course, at the same time my heart was beating outside my chest so it was a very subjective kind of test!
   So that's the story on steamboats. It's probably been about 45 years since I've played touch football of the schoolyard variety so have had little opportunity to be on a field counting out steamboats. I'm not even a hundred percent sure that anyone even uses "steamboats" any more. It could very well be they have gone the way of......well.....steamboats...now that I think about it!

Pics: Part Two

   Going through old photo albums has been an ongoing process lately. I had an initial burst of energy around this when we were headed west to scatter my Dad's ashes. There were pics I wanted to be able to share with people along the way so I took more than a cursory glance at the albums before we left.
   We have been back for awhile now and I have been walking past the pile of stuff, photo albums included, which ended up at our place after my Dad's apartment was emptied out. In an effort to organize and make some sense of all this I have been sorting and paying much more attention to things than I've previously had time to do.


L-R, Aunt Eileen and my Mum in the "Devil's Cauldron" pond

   It has been an enlightening process. I am sad that I never had the opportunity to sit down with my Dad before he died and go through them. Many of the old photos related directly to some of the stories he used to tell me about the olden days and it would have been wonderful to have sat down with him and actually looked at some of the things he'd only been telling me stories about. At the same time, I would have been able to ask him some of my remaining unanswered questions.

   I wrote about this in an earlier blog but one of his favourite stories to tell me was the one about the Banff Springs Hotel and the famous golf course there. He was particularly fond of the fourth hole, the "Devil's Cauldron", as it is known. He would always describe it in great detail, even to his description of the fellow in the boat, the "Maid of the Missed", who patrolled the huge pond in front of the green, returning missed shots to their owners (for a price). I was only able to imagine what this hole looked like though. Then, just recently, after we got back from out west, I happened to be looking through one of his old albums and realized there were pictures of my Dad, Grandad and somebody else playing golf. One of the pics was a far away shot of the Banff Springs hotel and I then was able to figure out that the pics were actually of the Devil's Cauldron! I then was able to find pictures of my mum and my Aunt Eileen wading in the pond in front of the green. My best guess was that these were taken in the mid- to late forties.
   An album of my mum's was kind of a combination photo/scrapbook album and contained many pictures of her  when she was a law clerk for the RCAF during the war. Many of the photos were of her and the other clerks and their friends hanging out. Several of them pre-dated my Dad and were of her and the occasional boyfriend. This, of course, was very enlightening, imagining my Mum with romantic attachments which didn't include, at the time, my Dad!
   What I found in the scrapbook section was even more revealing. I found many poems in my Mum's handwriting, poems about love lost and the War. Hard to say whether they were poems of her own or simply poems she'd found somewhere and wanted to remember. What I do know is that I have always had a fascination with poetry and I'm thinking it might have been hereditary...
   Probably the most interesting thing I found in the scrapbook section was a an RCAF itinerary she'd been given with very precise instructions as to accompanying the remains of a compatriot by train from Winnipeg to Kelowna, B.C. There were instructions as to assisting the family with the death of their loved one, funeral home arrangements and the like.
   I was totally unaware that my mum had done anything like this but not surprised. When I did the math, however, I realized that this had been a responsibility she'd been given when she was about twenty! I couldn't even imagine the weight of this kind of a task when I was twenty or even the age I am now. I do know, though, that those were war years and things simply were different, you did what you had to do and this was all part of the battle. Finding this bit of documentation meant so much to me.


Andy Bathgate and family members

   One of my mum's best friends back in the forties and fifties was a girl named Verah Bathgate. They had been in the RCAF together and the album was full of pictures of the two of them. One of the pictures included amongst these was a picture of Verah's brother, Andy, their mum and, I think, a couple of Andy's nieces. What really caught my attention was that Andy was one of the top NHL players of his day and always one of my favourites. Until yesterday, I didn't even know this picture existed.
   I found pictures of my mum and her family vacationing in the mountains, in front of the Chateau Lake Louise and, of course, the prerequisite pic in front of Lake Louise itself. These were places Doralyn and I had just returned from and it was poignant knowing that we had just been only paces away from paths my relatives had trod almost seventy years ago.

Aunt Eileen at Banff Springs Hotel

   Flipping through old photo albums is like watching through a time machine. You see young people growing older as each page turns. I saw pictures of my mum as a toddler, as a teenager, a nurse, a new mother, a sparkling wife, a loved neighbour. I also saw a picture of her only about a month before she passed.
   I watched my Dad go through all the different phases of his life as well. I saw him as a very young boy, with his brother and sister and Mum and Dad, on beaches and in boats, as a sailor in the Navy, as a championship-winning football player, as the insurance man, as a widower and then again as a brand-new husband. I saw him transform into a father, a grandfather and then a great-grandfather.


My sister, Jayne, and I. You're welcome, Jayne!

   Speaking of my Dad as a new husband, there were pictures of Jean, my step-mum, when I first met her. From there, many pictures of a happy couple with friends and relatives over the years, enjoying their years together. It was possible to follow them from place to place as they moved around Canada. And they aged right before your eyes, right into grey hair and wheelchairs. And then my Dad as a widower again.
   Via saved school pictures, I watched many of my cousins grow up.
   There had been a book of family pictures which had always had a prominent position on Dad and Jean's coffee table. I found myself flipping through this and found pictures taken of myself and my ex-wife, Lori, the two of us sitting on the couch in Dad's living room. I turned a couple more pages and all of the sudden there's pictures of me and Doralyn, sitting on the same couch. And, bizarrely, I am wearing the same shirt!
   The difficulty in all this, though, is that as much as these people all seem so alive and vibrant many of them are no longer with us. I remember seeing one picture of Dad and Jean and a handful of the neighbours from Oakridge and, out of the seven or eight people pictured, only one was still alive. It is a bittersweet process, to be sure.

Dad and Jean, happy together.

   I am missing some pictures. There are pictures I am clearly able to recollect having seen as a kid that are nowhere to be found. It would be wonderful to see the pictures from when my Mum and Dad honeymooned with Marg and Ralph Green but I just can't find them. I had no chance to really talk to Dad about them, they just didn't seem important at the time. Hopefully they are floating around somewhere in one of his kids' storage cupboards or something like that and will pop up again.
   There is something wonderful about the digital picture age--it is how all of these images have appeared on these screens. The instantaneous ability to take a picture and, literally in the next three seconds, have it posted on the internet is pretty heady stuff. At the same time, you are not able to hold these pictures in your hand, you're not able to flip through pages of them, and you are not able to feel the ghosts of all who perhaps held the camera or, themselves, were the subject of the picture.
  
  
  
              

Common Ground

   My mother was Dorothy Ruth Baker. She was born Dorothy Ruth Harris, though, and I think it's likely I've seen this name actually more often than her married name. I've had the opportunity several times over the last few months to sit down and go through all the old family photograph albums and have seen writings of hers and pictures of her where she has either signed her maiden name or it has been written there for her.
   My mother passed away in 1973, from a drug overdose. She had taken several weeks worth of sleeping pills and antidepressants all at once and died in her sleep. This was not the first time she had overdosed and she had been treated for depression for several years by the time she actually passed.

My Mum

   I was twenty when my mum died and had gotten to the point where I was essentially taking care of myself. I believe my Dad and my brother Bob were also doing the same thing. It almost seemed to me at the time that her dying was the only logical conclusion to all the things that had been going on in her life up to that point.
   She was cremated and we had a memorial service for her at the church we attended. Her ashes ended up at Mt. Pleasant Cemetery here in London. I had the occasion to drive by the cemetery quite often over the intervening years and I would look at the building that housed the crematorium and I always assumed her ashes were in there somewhere.
   About eight or nine years ago, on a whim, I decided to stop in at the cemetery and find out exactly where her ashes were so that I could see their location. What I discovered was that her ashes were not in the crematorium at all, they had actually been interred in the Common Ground section of the cemetery. I was given a map to this section but was told that they could only tell me approximately where in that section her ashes had been buried. In a subsequent trip, I was told there was actually a small metal tag with a number on it denoting a more precise location in Common Ground and I was able to find this but only after much digging around through the underbrush beneath a hedge.
   This discovery opened up many questions for me and re-awakened some strong emotions at the same time. I think I had somehow compartmentalized all that had gone on with my mother in my head and tucked it away somewhere, conveniently. This new enlightenment as to the disposition of her remains brought stuff back out in the open all over again.

Mum and Dad on their wedding day.

   I had always thought of common ground as the place where all the poor people ended up, all the unidentifiable bodies and where the socially rejected people went as a last resort. And this was where I found my mother's remains.
   For whatever reason, as a family we had never really talked about my Mum's final wishes and did not discuss her final resting place. It was only in my head that I assumed I knew where this was. I do remember that, at the time, we were involved with the Memorial Society in London. The Memorial Society was, and still is, a service that offered an alternative to lavish and expensive funerals. What this meant at the time was that Dad and a family friend actually had to go down to the Memorial Society and build the container my mum's body would be cremated in. Everything about my world seemed surreal at the time and the fact that my Dad had to do this seemed only part and parcel with everything else.


Common Ground in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery

   Thirty years later, as an adult, suddenly I felt as though I needed and wanted to know how all this had happened this way. One day not that long ago I had the opportunity to bring up the subject with Dad. I had been wondering for awhile as to the best way to talk to him about it, it's not the usual kind of thing that pops up naturally in a conversation. Finally, one morning after golf, I was able to interject one of those "oh, by the way" kinds of questions. We had been talking, I think, about his own funeral wishes and I asked him about my mum. I told him what I had discovered myself by going to the cemetery.
   He also was unaware that her ashes had ended up in common ground, though he was not surprised. He then went on to explain in more detail their involvement with the Memorial Society at the time and how things worked back in those days.


Where my Mum's ashes are, 7 to 8 feet left of the bench in the above photo

   More than anything, though, he said that it had always been my mother's wish that there not be anywhere or anything marking her final resting place. She had felt strongly that her physical body was of no consequence to anyone and didn't want her remains to end up being a focal point. I suppose it is a bit of a cliché, but she was happy to live on in people's hearts and memories, as much as anything else.
   To me, this sufficed as an explanation. And, knowing my mother, it made sense. At the time I discovered the whereabouts of her remains, I was all for having them dug up and either re-interred, with a marker, or scattered somewhere appropriate. A little time removed from the discovery and the recent death of my Dad, though, has given me a slightly different perspective on honouring final wishes. So I strongly suspect my Mum's ashes will stay right where they've been for almost forty years now and that's really okay with me. It is as it should be.
  

Last Words

   I have been rear-ended and t-boned while driving a couple of times in recent years. In each and every case I had a split-second to realize something nasty was about to happen. I am trying very hard to remember what the final thought or word was that was going through my mind just before impact.
   I'm pretty sure it was an obscenity of one kind or another and I'm thinking it was either a "s__t" or a "f__k". Okay, who am I kidding, it was a "f__k". Okay, who am I kidding, it was a "F__K!!!!"
   I also instinctively knew that none of these collisions were going to be of the life-threatening variety.
   Today, as I was driving along the ever-present Oxford Street, I wondered what I might utter should I ever see certain death approaching in the rear view mirror, should I be stopped (as a bad example) at a stoplight behind a Mack truck, only to have another Mack truck bearing down on me at 140 kph, no brakes, and completely out of control.
   I am very terribly afraid I would stick with the old, tried-and-true "F__K!!" How terrible a way to end a life, though, with that being your final utterance?!
   I promised myself then that I would try and train myself, if at all possible, to come up with something more appropriate, should I ever actually be faced with this situation. Something necessarily brief, yet more meaningful than "F__K!!
   This is not easy to do, and much of it is dependent on the length of time you have.
   If you have a second or less, you are pretty well looking at one word, two at the most. Unless you actually have time to say "GOOD-bye", perhaps "Bye" would do the trick. And it kind of seems appropriate. I suppose you could mention the name of a deity, like "God" or "Christ". These words, however, have taken on the modern meaning of being epithets and might be misconstrued, at the time. Perhaps you could blurt out the name of someone you love, in the hopes that this person's name is something short like "Sue" and not "Wilhelmina".

   If all else fails, maybe even just a positive word, like "Love" or "Beauty", might do the trick as a last word. "Peace" and "Hope" pop into mind, as well. What about "Sex" as a final, wonderful thought? Just try and stay away from words like "Self-fulfillment" and "Reliability", to be on the safe side.
   While "researching" this blog (by which I mean going to Google and typing in "last words"), I discovered several sites you could go to and read well-known (generally) people's last words. Many of them are in the "skull" up above. These are always fun and interesting to read but are generally deathbed oriented and perhaps thought-out beforehand. Some of them seem somewhat hallucinatory, almost as if the mind had gone somewhere and left the body behind. Obviously, these are not the kind of "last words" I have been talking about here.  If, however,  you'd like to spend any time trying to come up with something meaningful to pass on to your loved ones (or whoever happens to be there) in your final moments, then please feel free.
   For me, just in case it is true that your whole life flashes before you when you die, I don't really want to get to the end of watching all that only to have it end with a "F__K!!"