Elizabeth D’Oyley. English Diaries (1930)

     Elizabeth D’Oyley. English Diaries (1930) A school book, apparently aimed at senior high school. The flyleaf is inscribed “J A Bennett VB”, which I think would be grade 11 here. The selection starts with Charles Wriothesley (pron. rizely or rizzly) through Pepys, Boswell, Sir Walter Scott, etc. Most of the diarists are remarkably circumspect about their own reactions to the events they describe, the main exception being Pepys and Fanny Burney. In part this is no doubt the effect of  D’Oyley’s care in selecting suitable passages. An interesting read, since it provides eye-witness accounts of historical events, and implies differences in the goals of education between the 1930s and now. **½ (2010)

Robertson Davies. The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949) & The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

     Robertson Davies. The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949) Davies’ wit and sharp satirical observation makes this a book to enjoy. He is practising his style. Most of these paragraphs are very well formed, with exquisite sentences. Occasionally, they end with Marchbanks’ side of the response to his comments, most of them unflattering to the ladies whom he presumably regaled with his wit. The comments provide an indirect portrait of the still stuffy and narrow views of the respectable Ontarian, on which Marchbanks honed his wit. This social conservatism has moved West. The stereotypical Albertan now espouses the morality of the mid-20th century Ontarian, and suffers from the same urge to impose it on the rest of the country. I found myself eager to read selected passages aloud, an urge that Marie accommodated with her usual good grace. She even laughed at some of Davies’ passages. This copy is a first edition, but without wrappers. ***

     Robertson Davies. The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947) This volume too, is a first edition, but a second printing. In this earlier volume, Marchbanks (or Davies) restrains himself a little compared to the second one. But in both he expresses himself forcefully on the absence of a Canadian sense of pleasure. According to him, Canadians cannot abide mere fun, let alone culture (a much more strenuous pursuit). Although there have been changes for the better since the 1940s, sixty years later we still have a lingering sense that something advertised as good for you cannot be and must not be pleasurable. It was Presbyterians that set the ground-rules for social and cultural life in this country, and many of us suffer from a lingering hangover of puritan megrims. Only the terms of opprobrium have changed. The blue meanies oppose the arts not because of their putative immorality but because of their supposed impracticality. Significantly enough, the Harperites are willing to fund children’s sports via a tax break for family expenditures on hockey and other forms of mayhem, but not for music lessons. Like many money-mad people, they confuse price and value, and worse, have a very limited knowledge of the market that they profess to admire and understand. Update 2013: Families can now claim a deduction for music lessons and the like as well.
     Marchbanks’ struggles with his furnace form the leitmotif of his life as described in these diaries, and his repeated bouts of one or another kind of mild illness form the accompaniment. His casual mentions of daily triumphs and defeats remind us that in many ways our life has become much more comfortable in the last 60 years. But it hasn’t, therefore, become better. There’s more to the good life than creature comforts.
     The quotable bits in this book tend to be small paragraphs. Robertson has mastered the art of the long slow curve and the sudden break (he does not, however, use any baseball metaphors or allusions). He tends to use the semi-colon where most writers would use a period, so that his sentences appear to be lengthy to the eye, but not to the ear. (Davies writes for the ear, a rare skill and even rarer ambition). But here and there one finds a sentence that can be quoted without context. “If man has conquered the air merely to fill it with bombs and illiteracy, we might as well discount this civilisation, and try another.”  “New York, I perceive, contains almost as many rogues as Toronto.” “If we were all robbed of our wrong convictions, how empty our lives would be.” *** (2007)

Diary 1, 2

Diary
Wednesday, 25 April 2007
Davies' Diary of Samuel Marchbanks and Table talk of Samuel Marchbanks have inspired me to try my hand at daily writing. I don't know how well this experiment will go. Imitating a writer is hard enough; emulating him is much more difficult.... J. returned to Toronto today; I took him to the bus stop this morning. He seemed cheerful enough, which is just as well, his having enjoyed free board and lodging, reimbursement for the bus ticket, and $100 reward for helping me with the Trade Show booth. It comforts me to think that such minimal sacrifices on my part can generate such contentment.

Thursday, 26 April 2007
Went to lunch at St Andrews today, as we usually do on the 3rd Thursday of the month. I chose leek and potato soup, a creamy broth of delicate flavour, that perhaps appeals to the 1/8th of me that's Welsh. A tolerable lemon cake with a good lemony icing, and a cup of coffee rounded out the meal. We sat with three friends that we have known since we came to Blind River 35 years ago, and had a pleasant conversation about inconsequential matters. This is the best kind, for it engages the mind agreeably without straining the prejudices. Since one of the people present was a geologist, we discussed rocks. He had a piece of Ayers Rock at home, picked up before it became necessary to forbid visitors there to pick up souvenirs. I wonder why people like to have stones as reminders of the places they have visited. One doesn't pay for stones, but that can't be a sufficient explanation, as most people are quite willing to put out cash for trays, spoons, tea towels, and other assorted items of dubious practicality. I suspect an unconscious return to the early childhood fascination with pebbles.

Our Garden

I admire but don't like regimented gardens, with flowers and shrubs and so on neatly arranged in rows, each kind in its own place, none of them mixed up with any others. Our front garden has a mess and mass of different flowers and shrubs: Bleeding heart (white and pink), oriental poppies (red and peach), arabis, dianthus, liatris, lilac, sedum (four varieties), euonymus (two varieties), irises (pale yellow and light purple bearded, dark purple plain), roses (seven varieties), rhododendron, Russian olive, day lilies, creeping thyme, mother of thyme, honeysuckle, Japanese spurge, elderberry, cedar, lavender, heuchera, daffodils, tulips, spirea (two varieties), creeping juniper, violas (volunteers, as they say, but we let them be), white violets, matricaria, grape hyacinths, white hyacinths, columbine, dahlia, hibiscus (a hardy variety), an Alberta spruce, red leaf sand cherry, hollyhocks, pulmonaria, crocuses, creeping phlox (white and pink), campanula, leontipodium, periwinkle, peonies, morning glories poking up their two-leaved seedlings, nine bark, hydrangeas, plus a dozen or so more whose names I forget.

In the side and back gardens we have an apple tree, an oak tree, a number of pin cherries (good for jelly and syrup), a couple of crab apples too young to have bloomed yet, clematis, raspberry, more roses, lily of the valley, woodruff, goat weed (a good ground cover under the deck), more bleeding heart, creeping phlox, irises, periwinkle, and day lilies, wolf willow, a white lilac, oriental lilies, lady's mantle, ferns, pansies, foxglove, delphinium, chrysanthemum, monkshood, phlox, several maples, more cedars, a rowan, primulas, bloodroot, and so on. We also have three beds of vegetables, but apart from the strawberries which come every year, and onions and beans, we haven't decided what to put in yet. By the end of next week, the vegetable beds will be planted and seeded.

Only the veggies are lined up in rows. The rest of our plants grow every which way, they look as if they had arrived and found their places and spaces as best they could. Which is pretty much the way we actually planted them, in patches of three or five plants, and most have spread to many other places. They bloom at different times, so starting with the crocuses, we have something blooming from April to October. We don't rearrange them much. Once in a while, we give away clumps of arabis or creeping phlox, or a bundle of iris roots, or whatever else we happen to have too much of.

We have a few annuals every year. I like large patches of impatiens and snapdragons, my wife likes pansies. The alyssum and forget-me-nots self-seed every year. We try out a few new things every year, this time it will be osteospermums, and purple and white verbenas.

Other people have very neat gardens, which have their own charm. But while I admire them, I don't want my garden to look like them. I like the way our garden looks: it looks as if it's grown there forever.

Snowstorm

     When I drove to Elliot lake about noon today, the roads were dry. When I left E.L. about 2.5 hours later, fine snow was blowing down from the sky and sticking to the asphalt. I kept the speed at 80kph or less. The car held the road well, the winter tires (or tyres) made the difference. The snow muted the colours, reducing even bright reds and greens to softer earth tones, and shifting the dull blues and browns that we Canadians love for our cars into mildly tinted greys.
     Highway 17 showed some bare asphalt, and I could push the car to 90 occasionally. The snow swirled up from the wind of other cars' passing, the oncoming traffics trailed a haze of white dust behind it. I passed no cars between the turnoff and Blind River, and no cars passed me. Eastbound traffic came in short bunches, less than usual: the gathering storm, moving in from the southwest, must have convinced many casual travellers to stay home. The forecast this morning told of 15 to 30cm of snow, and much wind, with freezing rain in the south. Marie just talked to Cassandra, RoRo's flight landed an hour late, and Cassandra said she'd advised RoRo not to drive in from the airport. Bria said they couldn't stand up on the sidewalk. Jon said he wanted to walk to NoFrills for coffee, but decide he could do without it.
     And that's the weather report for this evening.

Terry Fox

Sitting in the waiting room at the Health Center the other day, waiting for blood to be sucked from my arm for a PSA test, I saw Terry Fox's picture on the cover of Maclean's Magazine. I remembered the time I saw Terry run.

I was on the way to the Sudbury airport to catch a flight to Toronto in order to attend a meeting that at the time seemed important, but whose purpose I have long since forgotten. The bypass had not yet been built so I was driving through a light rain along the old two-lane road. Near Lively, the traffic slowed down. I saw flashing police lights ahead and thought, O damn, an accident, that'll make me miss my flight. And braked to a stop.

Then I noticed that the police car was approaching me, its red and blue lights reflected in the water lying on the pavement. Behind it I saw Terry Fox, I knew immediately who he was, even though his van was some 50 yards behind him. He shifted his weight onto his good leg, made a skipping hop, threw his prosthesis in front of him, and used it as a pivot to bring his good leg over to the front again. His good leg hit the pavement, and he raised himself again in that skipping motion to lift the prosthesis off the ground and bring it to the front again.

Step, skip, swing, step, skip, swing, he came towards me, step skip swing. I began to imagine how many times he must have done that since he'd left the East Coast, thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, and wondered how his leg stump could stand the pounding, how the heel of his good foot could tolerate the repeated thump into the asphalt, how his back could take that twist and lift needed for each step.

My line of traffic began to move again, and I briefly saw Terry's face as he step-skipped past me. A couple weeks or so later we heard that that he had to stop near Thunder Bay because the cancer had come back. I thought, He knew it even then, in Sudbury, that was not just physical pain that marked his face, it was fear that he might not finish his run. I knew then that I had seen courage in his face.

Before I saw Terry, I'd dismissed his run as mere publicity hunting. When I saw him I began to see that Terry knew he wouldn't make his mark as the rest of us have done, in our work, our families, our communities. He would never succeed at any career, he would never be proud of his children, he would not earn the respect of neighbours and friends, because he wouldn't live long enough.

He could have waited for death, worked with the doctors to delay it for as long as possible, no one would have faulted him for doing that. But he felt the need to do something worthwhile. What could he do? He had no skills, no special talents, no training or education. He had only his body and his determination. So he did the only thing he could do: he used his body, he used himself, to draw attention, to enlist the rest of us in the struggle to understand the disease that was killing him, and would kill many others, and continues to kill.

Terry used himself up in doing this. He died doing this.

Every time we drive west through Thunder Bay, we stop at the monument beside the highway, and I remember. We stopped there again this past summer. I sat and looked up at his face, a face that I remembered from a brief glimpse in the rain, and I noticed that people spoke softly as they read the inscription and gazed at the statue of Terry Fox.

The Hike up Parker Ridge

 

Parker Ridge Trail is a popular hike. The parking lot was about half full. The information posters showed the flowers we could expect to find along the trail. Marie studied these, and stopped frequently to examine the flora. Several other people set out from the parking lot the same time as we did. We were: Robert and Roswita, Tim, Jenn and Vic and CJ and Caitlin, Peter and Marge, Catherine F, and Marie and me. A dozen of us.

They first hundred yards or so are easy, and most hikers struck a brisk pace. I foresaw a stiff climb up the steep mountain side; Tim had studied the maps (he's a geographer), and told us it was a 1200ft vertical difference in about 1-1/2 miles of trail. Recalling what I had learned about hiking as boy in Austria, I started walking at what even to me seemed a very slow rhythm, and let others pass me. Eventually, I passed most of them.

Within a couple of hundred yards up the trail, I knew I'd made the right decision. I maintained the rhythm to the top, never varying its speed, just taking shorter or longer steps depending on the terrain. About 1/3rd of the way up, I passed a gentleman who had raced ahead of me. He was standing by a bench, chest heaving, chuffing like a broken steam engine. I greeted him without pausing, and kept on. The wind picked up the higher I got, and began to chill me, despite the wind-proof jacket I wore, and which had seemed too warm just minutes earlier, when I was sheltered by the forest. I reached the top before the others.

I carried a kite that had never flown. At the top, there were two stone-built low shelters, one occupied by a family of four. I sat down in the second one, it reached part way up my back. I was glad I'd tied my hat on, else the wind would have blown it down into the valley. Then I flew the kite, a parasail about 20" wide. I paid out about 150 yards of line, and watched the kite soar off the brow of the ridge and out over the valley. The rest of our group saw it, too, and took some photos. CJ showed up, and held onto the kite. The wind was strong, he hard a hard time holding it. Eventually, I reeled the kite down. Tim helped me retrieve it as it came into the turbulence below the ridge and dived onto the rocky ground.

On the other side of the ridge a small hollow sheltered us from the wind. We had our lunch there, sitting in a raggedy row along the east-facing slope. To the north, a small pine tree, sheltered by the hollow, demonstrated that the tree line is a zone, within which minor differences in micro-climate determine whether or not a tree survives. After lunch (and lots of photographs), we held a short ceremony committing Mum and Dad's ashes to the ground, scattering them under the pine. I read parts of the service from the Book of Common Prayer, which Mum preferred over the more modern forms. Catherine F. read a few words on her own behalf, and a letter from old friends on the Island. We stood for few moments in silence, said the Grace, and broke up.

We went on the trip because Roswita insisted on it. At first, I didn't think much of it, agreed mostly because Roswita is my favourite (and only) sister, and because it was a good excuse to see Tim, and Jenn and her family. But Roswita was right, it was good thing to have a committal rite.

I printed off some of the photos for Cassandra, Niobe, and Jon. I especially like the one of the tree with the higher mountains in the background, for Parker Ridge is only the first in a series of ridges that lead up to the peaks. I used a cheap panoramic camera, the kind that magazines once gave away as subscription premiums, and which one could find at Value Village. This one has a glass lens, so it takes reasonably sharp pictures. I will use it again.

Trip West 1: highlights

Highlights

1) The drives there and back, marked by light traffic, good weather, and a relaxed mood. We stayed in so-so and very good motels, never phoned ahead, always found accommodation that was at least acceptable. But we also now know which ones to avoid. Ate well, especially breakfasts: two eggs over easy, bacon, toast and coffee always works. Ate twice at Rossport's Serendipity Cafe: excellent food, lovely view over Rossport Bay.

2) Family: we saw almost everybody, only Peter Edenloff couldn't make it to Camrose while we were there. More later.

3) The hike up Parker Ridge, the flying of the kite, and the memorial service for Mum and Dad.

4) Railways in Jasper (CNR and VIA) and Schreiber (Northern Ontario CPR). And a surprising number of trains on the prairies, l-o-o-o-ong trains!

5) The Costume Museum, Drumheller and area, Donalda Art Gallery, Camrose railway museum. More later.

6) Maligne Canyon, the art gallery at Jasper Park Lodge, Maligne Lake, the Rockies, Pembina River gorge, Sunwapt Falls.

7) Time together with no deadlines, no meetings, no stuff we had to do.

And that's it for tonight.