Old Friends

One thing I think about more often than not is old friends. Where are they? What happened with their lives?

On the face of it, it would seem simple: Use Facebook to find them. Well, that doesn't work with my friends. One was a Jehovah's Witness, she definitely won't be using Facebook. Anyway, I know she married and don't know her married name.

The other one was a good friend for years. Since grade seven. Her ethnic background was Ukrainian, her last name difficult to spell. Until you got used to it. We did all kinds of things together.

I'm sure I won't find her again. Mostly because her philosophy was, "Never look back." So she probably has put me out of her mind totally by now.

I guess my point is that it's not always easy to look back, even when you have all the tools (computer) to do it efficiently. And since all my friends were girls, there's the chance of marriage and name change as mentioned above.

So I guess I'll just have to keep them as memories, there was one more, a girl I knew in elementary school. Good memories and maybe I will see them again some day. If I ever go back to BC - a big maybe.

But forgive me if once in a while I go looking for them online just on the off chance that they're there.

Parenting

I think something has happened to parenting. I'm talking about all the therapy little girls seem to need to feel beautiful. According to a commercial, all sorts of girls stop doing something they like because they don't like their body.

Now, if I had said to my Mom. "I'm not going to the beach because I hate my body." She would have said "Don't be silly. You look fine. Would you rather be like Miss Skinny Minny who can't even keep their bones warm."

What I'm saying is, when did parents let childish insecurities get in the way of their children's progress. The idea in the old days was to get the kid out having fun and they would forget their anguish. Well, I'm not saying that you shouldn't help your children through their fears, but why coddle them so much that they're afraid to live?

Besides, there's a lot of other things to build self-esteem on. Like learning the piano. And speaking of that, when did the blame for all this fall on show biz. Or fashion.

I have an opinion which I don't let out too much because I don't think many young women would appreciate it. Now, I have three nephews who have girlfriends and all three are raising children.

They are the most polite, the nicest kids. Their self-esteem is very high. Why? I'll give my opinion, in all three families, the parents can't wait to get up in the morning to be with their kids. They rush home from work to play with them. In two families, the women have chosen to stay home with their 'babies'.

To move on a bit. How many times do you see shows telling parents to get away from the kids for a romantic weekend. It makes me think that the difference and problem with self-esteem comes from the parents.

Your mother loves you the most, right? Well, suppose the person who loves you the most, doesn't want to be with you? How does that rate in a child's mind. "I'm not good enough, even my Mom doesn't want to be with me.' Maybe?

So in my opinion, I think you shouldn't have kids until you know that you want to spend so much time with them. All your time. Give them all sorts of attention. Do things with them, don't stick them in front of the TV. One of my nephews doesn't even have a television and no video games, they're always out hiking or mountain climbing.

So throw sticks at me if you want. Show biz is not to blame. Adults are.

Albanian Camping

I went to school with a myriad of ethic identities. There was African, Saudi Arabian and Iraqi to name a few. The person I remember most was the Albanian lady. I was fascinated by her tales of life in Albania, it's such a little known place that I couldn't help but be.

One of her best tales was the one about her camping. It seems all Albanian kids went to summer camps. There, they fished and swam, hiked and boated. They also learned how to use assault weapons.

She told me how they'd get up each morning and put their assault weapons together, then have breakfast and go for a morning hike. When they came back, it was off to the shooting range where they practiced killing Capitalists. Then lunch. Swimming. More shooting.

Supper followed by camp songs. Communist camp songs and before they went to bed, they'd take apart their weapons and clean them.

When I told my brother about this, he had a laughing fit. The image of children shooting at Capitalist was amusing to him. But it occurred to me that such a camp wouldn't be out of place in modern America.

Now I know that us Canadians don't really like handguns. But we do have a lot of rifles in the rural communities. But America is running a risk of being invaded. There's the terror threat from outside people plus the threat from home grown terrorists.

Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing to teach young Americans, well, what the hell, Canadians, too, how to handle weapons safely, how to fire them, how to clean them. Mostly, how to be responsible. Because isn't the main problem with guns the people who aren't responsible and just use them as an inappropriate acting out prop.

We've just had a guy in Vancouver gunning a couple. Irresponsible.

Anyway, it's just a thought that maybe a fun way to learn responsible fire-arm handling wouldn't be amiss in a Capitalist country.

      
   

Ape Awhile With Me

In the eighties and nineties, I became way interested in apes. Chimpanzees, Gorillas and Orangutans were the staple of my reading. I moved onto Gibbons and monkeys later. I think I became so captivated because apes have their own world. The women who observed them, (Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas) made their lives stories that I could relate to.

Who hasn't known a Mike, for instance, the small chimp who used his brains to become top banana? It was this slant on their lives which made me see that the whole world is a habitat for something.

Apes and monkeys mostly lived in trees. Branches were pathways of their lives. They probably knew every twig and leaf of their environment. To me, trees were something for shade or something to look at and watch. To them, it was their world. They conducted their business up there and came down to the ground sometimes.

I only say that because all this time later I'm reading that Jane Goodall's community of chimps will be extinct in twenty years and it makes me sad that all those personalities will be lost. Most people just say, 'well, it's just an animal' but it is more, it's part of all. I think Jane Goodall's observations of baby rearing among chimps may well have proved that babies do better the more attention they get.

There's also the idea that they may evolve into something else and they should have the chance to do so. That's nature and natural. So here's hoping that soon people will want to have apes and monkeys alive and pursuing their interests. Here's wishing that something can be done about the vanishing forests and animal lives.

Before that pathways all fall silent.

Inuit Drugs

I don't understand numbers all that well and they don't make me get emotional. Therefore, when someone gives me a number, say, ten thousand killed in earthquake, it often doesn't compute of affect me that much.

Now that's a terrible thing to admit but I will explain. If someone were to go into the area of the earthquake and talk to the people, who would tell their stories of a child disappeared, then I would get an image of sorrow and it would become immediate to me.

In the ninties, I had a neighbour who was an Inuit. He used to tell me that he'd made himself employed by started a translating service. Now that Nunavit was a territory run by Inuit people, there were a lot of Inuktitut speakers and all the reports were done in that language.

So he came to Ottawa, where he happily translated the reports into English and French and took reports to be sent to Nunavit and put them in Inuktitut. I asked was there much competition and he told me he was the only one doing this so had great job security. The government wasn't going away.

He told me other things, too. With great passion and upset he told me that when he goes back to the arctic how ten year old Inuit children would come up to him asking if he had any drugs he could sell them. This bothered him so much and he could be on the verge of tears when talking about it.

It made me see how communities of indigineous people have been affected by 'us'. The white people. Not me directly but the whole process of taking them away from their traditional values. I have heard it said that in the old days, no Inuit child would think of talking back or disobeying an elder. Benefits of civilization?

So maybe I shouldn't feel too bad that someone telling me 80% of Inuit are into drugs or some other such number doesn't make me sad or even get in my head. Not like my neighbour. I still think about what he said today and become as sad as him. Perhaps someday things will improve up there.

Hot Weather

It's hot today. It was hot yesterday, and the day before. Good, right? Yeah, we have our fans on all the time and don't go out when the sun is high in the sky. It's great. Finally.

I do have to say, that I wouldn't like it if it was any hotter. Like in a tropical country. There are all sorts of strange and scary bugs that come out in tropical countries, and all sorts of diseases that we just don't have here in the north.

I've always considered myself lucky that I don't live anywhere near big, big snakes that eat people, squeezing them to death or biting them. There really isn't anything living in Canada in the category of 'creepy' that kills. Well, I know in Alberta and BC there are rattlesnakes but nowhere near any of the towns.

And of course there are bears, but bears aren't creepy. They're big and powerful and you can hear them a mile away. You don't stand a chance of stepping on them.

The worst things in Canada, I guess, are the plants. Even animals have trouble with them. I know cows will sometimes eat a plant that looks like a plant they like and keel over dead. It's something they warn you against eating when you go out into the forest. In fact, they don't want you eating anything at all if you don't know what it is.

I've always lived by that rule when I was out camping but it fooled my once when I was camping right by a huge blueberry patch without recognizing the berries. After I found out I was in that patch every day.

But still I never ate anything when I didn't know what it was. Another thing they have in Canada is leeches. They get on your body when you're swimming and if you want to get them off you have to light a match and hold it to their head. Otherwise they'll leave their jaw in your leg if you pull them off. The heat makes them let go.

So I guess I'm fortunate. No pythons or fire ants, nothing to give me nightmares. Only the weather when the snow is deep and you can't go more than four blocks without fearing frost bite. So when I go out in this nice, hot sun I'll think how good I have it.

The Everyday Hero

All is fresh outside today. We had a big thunderstorm last evening and now it's nice out. I think it won't last, we're due for rain all this week. I'm so glad that I'm in my apartment, so cozy.

It makes me think about all the people in the past who weren't so cozy and comfortable in the rain. Like soldiers of the first and second world wars who had to stay outside in the rain and fight and maybe die.

My grandfather was a soldier in WWI. He fought at Salonika which is a little reported battle. He never talked about it, except to say that he hated mules. The officers treated the mules better than the enlisted men, he used to say, and that was all he said.

I think some day I'd like to go to Salonika and see what it would have been like for my grandfather and the others who fought with him. It was his downfall in a way because he was bitten by a mosquitoe and contracted malaria. This weakened his heart. After the war his doctor told him that if he wanted to live, he had to move to either Alberta, Canada or Australia. As he had relatives in Alberta, he went there on a Soldiers Settlement, which meant he got free farmland.

One day him and granny came home to find the horses had broken into their house and were eating their straw mattress. They gave up farming and grandpa went to work for the railway as a Section Foreman.

I don't know when the decision came to leave Alberta and go to BC, maybe he didn't care anymore that he would die young if he did, but they ran a boarding house in Vancouver and he worked as a steward on the ships that go up the coast of BC, making extra money by playing the piano for the crowds. None of this was good for his heart and he died at about 74 years old. I miss him still.

But strangely, when I think of him, it's not as the man I knew but as the soldier I've only seen photos of. Fighting in the rain. Covered with lice. Drilling. This terrible part of his life which changed him in so many ways. Even when hunting for meat in Alberta, he would never actually shoot anything but hand his rifle over to his friend. After the war, he couldn't bring himself to kill. The war made him gentle. It gave him nightmares. It was something he had to survive every day for the rest of his life.

It made him an everyday hero.