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?
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
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.
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.
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