A Quintessential What?

What would it take to be considered a quintessential Kingstonian? The only benchmark that I have ever heard of is how many generations of ancestor’s you have buried in Cataraqui Cemetery. That in itself is kind of limiting if you consider what the population of Kingston was 5 or 6 generations ago. According to the research carried out at the storied Institute of Higher Lernin’, located in my basement, a generation can be defined as anything ranging from 25 years to 40 years, whereas most genealogists now reckon the length to be around 35 years. That would make the population of Kingston about 3,500 people in the 1830's or if you exclude the Irish, the English and the drunks, just about two people. Consider also the death and pestilence of that era, and the lure of the big cities up and down the river, it certainly doesn’t lead to THAT many people who could leave their footprints behind allowing future generations to call themselves true Kingstonian’s. Another deciding factor could be if your family bears a street name, that would certainly identify you, unless of course your street has come onto hard times and it is now located in a particularly scuzzy part of town that you really don’t want to be identified with it. I won’t name any streets for fear of alienating some people (ever vigilant of political correctness around here) or group of people . Even an historical street name doesn’t seem to be sacred anymore, in these times of budgetary constraints, things have a tendency to go up for sale in the city. Given this atmosphere, even your street name might not last another few years. In my view, having your family’s bones buried up on the hill could be paralleled to what New Yorkers called the “Café Society” in the 1950's. These were prominent families in New York’s high society, some of whom had ancestors that landed at Plymouth Rock. However, their bank accounts were depleted long before their heritage ever would be and they continued to dine out on their name alone. In the case of this hometown, just because there is a weathered headstone over in the cemetery, certainly doesn’t make you that much more of a Kingstonian than anyone else. Although counting corpses in a cemetery is well, a kind of Kingstonian thing to do.

Just down the road in Gananoque, they have a much more succinct way of describing their own. It is said that unless you were born on your Grandmother’s kitchen table, you are not a Gananaquian. No quibbling over generations there, just kind of a dinner-ending thought to your kids meal if they happen to be dining at your Granny’s table one evening. Pierre Burton famously got into the act of defining what is Canadian by saying that only a true Canadian knows how to make love in a canoe. I think of the millions of words he had written over his life span and these are the ones that most Canadians are familiar with. Hell, when it comes to canoes, I can barely carry one, let alone make love in one. With my luck, I would be complimented on my technique when I was truly only trying to keep my balance. I get downright Homer Simpsonish when it comes to canoes. “Oooo. Both ends are pointy. Which end goes first?” Molson’s got in on the act as well with their, “I Am Canadian” television commercial first aired in 2000. Although, “Joe” mostly defined what he was not, he certainly got the message across. More recently the Ferguson Brothers, Ian and Doug produced an hysterical book entitled “ How to Be A Canadian”. I sometimes think this should be required reading for many of our citizens and newcomers alike.

I have gotten away from the root question, though. What makes a quintessential Kingstonian? I certainly feel I am a Kingstonian. I, along with my numerous brothers and sisters were born and raised here even though my family are relative newcomers on the block when it comes to Cataraqui Cemetery. However, in light of this argument I must note that, I do not plan on moving in there at any time soon just so that my kids can gain another generation in the place. I guess I could list some of the esoteric qualities that we, as Kingstonian’s all like to exude, our love of the water being one of them, or I could mention some of the negatives qualities, that maybe we are as a community, tied to the past with no vision of the future. I don’t know how many times I have read in the media that people from outside Kingston repeatedly and reportedly have said, “Nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there”. This is very similar to my feelings about Cataraqui Cemetery.

Well, maybe that is what makes a quintessential Kingstonian. Maybe it is our doggedness to stay here in light of our city’s squandered growth opportunities, or our desire to maybe hold on tightly to our past while others seemingly throw it away for the shiny and new. Our willingness to forsake success for comfort, to disregard the unknown for the known. Even our willingness to look at prisons for their architectural value and not reflect on their criminal contributions to our town might qualify us. I am certainly not an expert on who should or should not be considered a Kingstonian, personally I think it what resides in the heart and not what resides in a particular cemetery that should qualify you. We have often been accused of being a bit cliquish and elitist and in many ways we are. How can we not be? It is not our fault that we see life as the big picture and not count on the immediate and sometimes temporary results that many of our other Canadian cities demand. Maybe we just live on tried and true. How is that for being an elitist?

Numbers, Numbers, Numbers

Numbers have always held a special fascination with me. I am not sure why I was blessed/cursed with this. Even before proper schooling the pattern and rhythm of numbers often came to the forefront of my thoughts; albeit, it was not always in the ways my father would have enjoyed. When I was a child, preschool if I remember, I took an orange crayon and wrote on virtually every conceivable surface of our house the numerical sequence, 7 x 7 = 77. Not mathematically correct, mind you, but it had a certain symmetry both in a physical sense and in a rhyming sense. It was shortly after this that my father started using addition/multiplication flash cards with me to help develop my skills. Maybe he saw a twinkling of an innate mathematical ability or maybe he was just worried that I would continue along the path of mathematical mayhem of using graphic symmetry to reach a scientific conclusion instead of using empirical data.

As a student, I was never at the top of my class, it just wasn’t one of those goals I strived for. I always did well enough, but certainly not up to the standards that I was always told I could achieve scholastically. When confronted with those pesky IQ tests, on the whole they didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but it was also an opportunity for those patterns and rhythms of numbers to help me out. Nestled in those questions of “what number follows in this sequence” or “which set does not belong”, I was always able to easily see what was next or out of place. Not that it helped me out a lot, it just gave those people who said I just needed to work harder to achieve the goals they set for me. Now, after a reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”, I can now attribute my middling success at school to my birthdate. Being an October baby I was brought into the educational system almost a full year before my fellow students. To put it bluntly, my brain just wasn’t up to snuff when I started school.

The other day I started to think about the days of the year that bear significance to people. You might question first of all why in the world would I even think of writing an article about the number of important days in a life. Well, it does reflect back on my affinity for numbers, but more importantly it was the birth of our great niece on March 8. I started to think that perhaps a year ago to Alicia and Joey (the parents), March 8 was just another day in the year. One that would roll on by without a second thought. But now, just a year later it is one of the most important days in their lives. A day they will chronicle and remember until their last breath. I have always enjoyed bringing a little morbidity to joyous occasions.

As an infant, days really had no meaning to me, in fact the singularly most important day of my life, my birthday didn't even register until it was programmed into me. My world was happy just to be filled with a dry diaper and a wet breast. Days had no bearing unless there was an opportunity to wake somebody up when I wanted attention. This began to slowly change. Like most children, as I grew older there were only a few days in the year that meant anything to me at all. Those in particular were my birthday and Christmas, soon thereafter Hallowe’en was added to the mix. All the rest of days just sort of circulated around the Big Three, my own personal Holy Trinity. I eagerly anticipated each one with the next one quickly focused on no matter how far advanced it was.

But as I started to grow older, I started to collect days that became part of what formed me. Easter soon loomed, not for the religious aspect as most people would like to believe. No, it was for candy. Then as I got in school, Valentine’s Day and all the cinnamon hearts. So you see, gifts and candy really earmarked my important days. As I became less self-centred (the snickering you just heard was my wife), I began to celebrate other members of my family with their birthday. I was never that comfortable about giving at that point, but I did recognize their own days. By this point I now had 10 days dedicated out of 365. Then Labour Day became a touchstone for it signaled the end of summer and the slogging back to the books. New Years for the parties and the dawning of another year. Thanksgiving for family time and so on and so on, they keep piling on as years go by.

As we all progress through life, important dates are added to our calendar like charms on a bracelet or links on a ball and chain, it depends on your particular slant on life. Birth dates, weddings, funerals, holidays, anniversaries, death dates and monumental historical dates keep adding up. Sometimes they are significant, sometimes not as much so. In my own personal inventory, “International Talk Like A Pirate Day” (September 19) and the “Star Wars Day” (May 4; May the fourth be with you) hold almost an equal stature to that of the definitely in need of a new name, Civic Holiday. I did a quick calculation and came up with about 48 dates in the yearly calendar that hold some significance to me and I am not really that old yet. Well, old in the big scheme of things. The great irony is that as you get older and all these dates are collected and begin to seriously accumulate, in all likelihood your memory is fading and you start to forget them. This takes us back full circle to only one date that is important to you and that is a date you will never remember. The day you die. Isn’t that pleasant.

Parental Timeout? Nawwww.

It is not very often I lose control over my emotions. I have always tended to be a fairly level headed individual, not given to extremes in either way. But a little while ago I was driving along in my car, just listening to some talk radio on CBC-FM when an interview not only got my attention, it caused me to grip the wheel and start yelling at my radio and in the process spraying the interior of my car with both invectives and spittle. I am quite surprised that the people at Queen’s Park haven’t legislated against talk radio as a distraction to drivers. I mean, I have had a car phone (since the days they were referred to by that name) since the late 1980's and in all those conversations, both pleasant and angry, I haven’t been distracted to the point that I caused a car accident. However, I do have to admit that I have nearly rear-ended someone after committing a Linda Blair. More than once I have twisted my neck through an unnatural arc trying to catch the swaying motions of a woman who sauntered down the street in a dangerously short skirt. Personally, legislating against attractive people walking on the street would probably do more to keeping eyes on the road than banning cell phone conversations.

The interview I was listening to was with a woman who was advocating against yelling at your children. Kind of ironic that such a topic could make me scream, huh? She thought that yelling at your children would cause them untold levels psychological trauma. She acknowledged that parents can and do become angry at children for not doing what they are told. Her solution to avoid the inevitably escalating argument was for the parents to take a time out. Really. I ain’t lyin’, she said this. Thinking back to when my children were young, it seemed to me that they made it a sport to see which parent would explode first. Maybe in this woman’s world, the sun rises in the west, animals talk to her in the morning and birds help her dress, but in my gritty reality, raised voices were not just to make a point but it was a matter of survival of the loudest. It was a challenge to even be heard over the din of three young children. She suggested a situation that if you are running late and the kids just won’t get dressed for school that you say to the children... in a soft reassuring voice, “I am going to go into the next room for a time out and in that time, if you can think of a way to help me get you ready for school, I would really appreciate it.” Then, I suppose magically, after a parental time out, she would return and the children would all be lined up at the door, in declining order of height, hair combed and lunch bags firmly in hand with self-satisfied smiles plastered on their cute little faces; a Von Trapp moment. In my world the script would read more like, ”John, I know you are focused on the world of science and in your quest for the betterment of society on the whole. I am also proud that you are pursuing the goals and dreams of an inquisitive 5 year old mind, but I am going into the next room for a time out and in that time if you could possibly rethink the idea of encouraging your baby sister to put that dinner fork in the electrical outlet. Your mother, the entire staff at the Emergency Ward and I would greatly appreciate it.”

Not that yelling is inherently a good thing, but, in my opinion, it is far from being the traumatizing incident that some people may think. Marjorie Gunnoe, a psychologist at Calvin College in Michigan states that, “When afraid, children learn poorly. Fear is a very bad teacher.” Sorry Marj, I beg to differ. Fear is a very good teacher. Specifically, it is how we learn not to do dumb things... again. She says that time outs or a firm, ”No” are better than yelling. But isn’t a firm “No” on the border of yelling? I am sure that if you look closely enough in the Bible, the Lord or somebody else spake in a booming voice to the rabble that always seemed to gather around mountains and such.

France has introduced a law making it a criminal act to yell at your spouse, citing the psychological violence it inflicts. I will agree that in some cases, words can be a fearful weapon and can have an horrendous effect on someone. But there is a difference between yelling and verbal abuse. The idea that you can be convicted of a criminal act for yelling at your spouse for not putting the cap on the Crest is a bit much. France, that beacon of rational thought in the 18th century, a pillar of republican ideals and causes for hundreds of years has wholeheartedly embraced the political correct craziness of the 21st century. However, I do have the feeling, that this law must have been enacted by men. It has been my experience that a woman’s retort by far is much more rapier-like than a man’s standard response of, “Oh yeah?”

So what it really comes down to is this; in a perfect world, just like in a perfect economy, some people think that the way things should progress, is the way they will progress. The real world is far removed from that way of thinking. Yelling may not be the best tool we have to raise our kids or interact with our spouses, but raising your voice in frustration or in trying to make a point is as much a part of life as talking. In all my years of sports, from the gentlemen-like nature of cricket where we all wore white ducks, to the rough, tough and bloody scrum of rugby, yelling was part of the game. Even at the best jobs in the world, someone at some point is going to start yelling at you for whatever reason. Be it the coffee is too hot, or if you looked at someone the wrong way or if someone’s animals didn’t talk to them that morning, you can count on the fact someone will take it out on you. If you are not equipped to handle someone yelling at you and you never experienced such action when you were a child, how will you ever deal with it as an adult? Maybe as was suggested, you could propose to your coach or boss, that if they could take a time out in the other room before they raise their voices, things might work out for the better. But something tells me not to hold my breath over that one.

The Transmigration of Tom Cruise and Other Scarey Thoughts

There are some who argue that as a child we are born tabula rasa, that is a blank slate without any influence of genetics or any other influences bred into us. There are others who believe that we are born preconditioned with lessons and experiences imprinted on us. Nature versus nurture. I am not sure where I lie in this argument, some people feel that they have some sort of past life that has been encoded into them, while others feel that there was nothing before them and all that shaped them were present day living. There are certainly arguments floating around on both sides of the issue, but really only one entity knows for sure and apparently He or She isn’t sharing that with us at this point.

There are the discussions of Plato who argued that there are a fixed amount of souls. According to the writings of Aristotle, the soul is not what makes a body move. Even before that step, a soul must first take what biological entities we are made up of, all those different chemicals and water and turns that into a body. A corpse is not a body and as such a body is not a corpse, contrary to all those police procedural dramas on TV. The soul is what makes it exist as a living body. Unlike the body, which has being only through the soul, the soul itself is a principle of being, and therefore, once created, cannot not be. In other words, the soul is incorruptible, and never ceases to be what it already is. And the circular notion of that argument is supplanted only by the poison scene in Princess Bride.

The Greeks jumped in with their idea of Metempsychosis (μετεμψύχωσις, for those of you who crave detail) which is a philosophical term again referring to transmigration of the soul. Scientology believes that there are only a fixed number of souls, which means that Tom Cruise has really existed for eternity and it certainly felt that way if you ever had to sit through Mission Impossible 3. The Taoist also have similar thoughts and ironically this belief gave me the central arc of my comedic screenplay, “If This is Heaven...”, where the fixed number of souls has created a way-station in paradise before allowing the soul to move on. Nietzsche has weighed in on this as well, but I think I have bandied about enough names and beliefs for now, I can sense your eyes, as mine, are glazing over.

Suffice to say, this is a time honoured and an ongoing debate and the only time the answer becomes apparent is when you die and then I figure you have to sign an Oath of Secrecy to never reveal this information to mere mortals. Well, unless you are Tom Cruise and then apparently the rules of the universe are thrown out the window, metaphorically speaking.

So what is the point of this article you may well ask? I was asking the exact same question about three paragraphs ago. You have to remember that my education was rooted firmly in economics and all of this philosophical stuff sounds like, well, greek to me. But I am sure many people say the same thing about economic theory (What you say? There is such a thing as economic theory?).

As mentioned, I am not sure where I fall in all this, but there are some very odd memories that have been with me for many years. Uncomfortable moments that for some reason cause the hair on the back of my neck to rise. One of the most vivid and dread inducing things I can see is a shipwreck of any kind. I do not know why it is, but if I see a lake freighter aground or even a pleasure boat upside down my breath gets short and I have a strong desire to emulate the figure in the Edvard Munch painting, The Scream. This is not a good thing for a guy who scuba dives. Acute anxiety does not play well a few atmospheres below the water. Encountering an underwater wreck? It feels the way I would image someone walking all over my grave. To quote David Letterman, there is just something hinky about the whole damn thing.

The other is the American Civil War. I remember collecting bubble gum cards in the early 1960's that had such a graphic depiction of the war that I am surprised they were even sold. Try to do that nowadays and you would be buried under a sea of sociologists, psychologists and every concerned parent for the normal development of a child breathing down your neck. But in my generation, they were just pictures a of a very, very bloody war, probably a good lesson to pass on. But I always felt somehow I was part of it. Which side has never really manifested itself, whether Union or Rebel, I don’t know. I just have this feeling I was in it somewhere and probably died in it somewhere.

I doubt I am the only one who has had this type of feeling, that somehow you have experienced something that was foreign to you but at the same time feels somewhat familiar. Maybe it awakened some long buried thought causing an avalanche of unexperienced memories to flow forth. Whether these are false memories as some claim or really are imprints from another soul, again we won’t ever know for sure and that kind of adds to the romance of the thing.

I found a paperback many years ago (Decisive Battles of the Civil War by Lt. Col. Joseph Mitchell) that listed all the Civil War sites and overlapped them with modern day maps and highways. I have a fascination with taking that trip someday to see if anything twigs. I wouldn’t quite say it was a compulsion, that brings up images of Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters with the Third Kind, kind of compulsion. But I would like to make it an adventure sometime. However with my luck, I’ll go for a leisurely scuba dive and come across a Civil War sunken ship and from that double whammy my friends, it will spell the end of me. Well, until I park myself in some other body.. corpse... entity, well you understand.

The Seven Stages of the Dwarves

I was standing in line at the tobacco counter the other day. I had finished some grocery shopping and throughout my travels up and down the aisles I had this recurring vision of winning a lottery. Not one to tempt fate, I decided to buy a ticket. As I stood in line, I juggled the groceries around in my arms and fished some money out of my pockets for the tickets. There were only two other people in the line in front of me so I thought the ice cream I purchased should still be frozen by the time I got to the car. However, what I didn’t count on was the guy in the line in front of me being what could only be described as a lottery professional. He had a stack of tickets about the size of a deck of cards, and each one had to be scanned by the computer to verify his winnings or as it turned out his non winnings. In my estimation, and I had lots of time to do my estimating, maybe a quarter of them were winning tickets. My first thought was why didn’t he check them at home and only bring in the winners? But then I thought maybe the scanning of the tickets is all part of the entertainment for some people. Although, to give some educational credit, I now know the French for “No prize”. It was bored into my brain with the same cadence of a Gregorian chant.

By this time my arm was growing a bit numb from the ice cream and I thought that maybe splurging 5 cents on a plastic bag wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all. But I had renewed hopes as the cashier was finally done with the scanning and had totaled the man’s winning. Those hopes were dashed when the man began to buy more tickets with the grace and reverence of a wine connoisseur. I would not have been surprised at all if he had held them to his nose and sniffed them. As I said before, I had lots of time to think.

Finally, the next person ahead of me shuffled up to the counter and laid open a plastic folder on the counter. This was not a good sign. He had selections in Pro Line Sports, Pro Picks and Point Spread and was reeling off phrases that were as foreign to me as ordering a Timmies coffee is to an American. By this time my ice cream was about to start dripping onto the floor so when my opportunity eventually did come, I quickly bought my tickets and I scurried out the door, hoping not to leave a Chocolate Mocha trail behind me. It was then that I realized how quickly I went from being in an excellent mood into being grouchy.

I never really thought I would hit this stage, but I have become rather grouchy lately. Fortunately for all around me I haven’t quite made the leap to grumpy, but as it is, grouchy can be bad enough. I don’t become obnoxious to the people around me, it is more that I am grouchy to the rest of the world; politicians for one. I just don’t seem to have any patience for their rhetoric anymore. Conservatives, Liberals, NDP, Green it doesn’t matter what the political stripes are, I just don’t have time for their petty bickering of whose fault it is and whose fault it isn’t and whose fault it is that something isn’t being done quickly enough or whose fault it is that things are being done too quickly and recklessly. I am tired of hearing that our national troubles can be laid at the feet of a previous government 75 years ago, or 30 years ago or 2 years ago. If I was within earshot of a politician I would simply tell them to shut up, sit down, accept the responsibility of their action, their parties action and proceed accordingly. But that is about as likely to happen as a snake crawling back into its discarded skin. How is that for an apt metaphor?

When I was a bit younger, I didn’t really notice the fine line between grouchy and grumpy. As an illustration, grouchy to me is using the greatest invention of the world; the mute button on my remote control. I can sit and mumble to myself, but happy in the knowledge that I didn’t have to listen to that crap on the TV anymore. Grumpy would be leaving the sound on during the news and getting all worked up over those aforementioned politicians and telling everyone in the neighbourhood my rather unrelenting opinion, because the rest of the world is wrong and only I am aware of its inanity. In talking with my wife and children, this is a phase they are not necessarily looking forward to.

In our propensity to always categorize and sequentially rate life and death just as Dr. Kübler-Ross did with her stages of grief, I think in life, we will all progress through the Seven Stages of the Dwärves. I have made my way through Happy (the 1970's, not surprisingly), Bashful (for most of my youth), Sleepy (the child rearing phase), Sneezy (during that one particular summer of hay fever) and Dopey (although a case for the 1970's can be made here as well). Still to come, I’m sure, will be the Doc stage where I will be analyzing every medical symptom as they are presented in my friends and myself as we keep aging and the ever popular Grumpy to carry me down the stretch.

I think grouchy is kind of like a way station on the way to grumpy. It’s a place you have to get through before moving on. Like being in the Little Leagues. I don’t want to deride grumpy as a state of mind, or an undesirable place to be. God knows I will probably reach that stage soon enough and in all likelihood I will probably revel in my grumpiness.