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As I’ve mentioned before, one of the things that’s interesting — and often discouraging — about reading and publishing my archives is that much of my 20-year-old material is still relevant today. It happens regularly that I read a piece where someone is venting or explaining or speculating and I say, “Hey, that sounds familiar. I wrote about that 20 years ago!”

Here’s another example, this one from 1990. It’s almost seasonal.


February 27, 1990

I went out on the afternoon of February 14 to buy some ingredients for a special dinner and, I confess, I was astounded to see the shopping that was going on. There were lineups in the flower store and crowds in the card and giftwrap and candy stores. Every awful item that someone could think of to put a red heart on was on display. Valentine’s Day, it seems, has become a great occasion for consumerism — following on the heels of Christmas, occurring just at a time to give us a little shopping respite before Easter.

Easter? Well, apparently so. A few years ago, I was driving in my car when I happened upon a commercial done by one of those private radio guys who seems to be under the constant influence of amphetamines. He was talking about a mile a minute and I didn’t pay much attention but finally, he came to his point: “Come on down,” he gibbered, “and hurry! Remember, there’s only two more shopping days ’til Easter!”

Until Easter? I have to say this took me completely by surprise. Easter had never struck me as being a time for obsessive shopping. How long can it take, I asked myself, to buy an Easter lily and a chocolate bunny? But I made a point of looking around — I’m not a natural shopper and watcher for sales — and sure enough, Easter had become simply another day to sell stuff, another day in which we were encouraged to be somewhat mindless consumers.

The next day, I did a commentary on CBC radio about turning the most sacred observance in the Christian calendar into a shopping spree, in which I pushed the idea a little farther than the malls had; I suggested the merchants might advertise something like “Resurrection Reductions” or “Last Supper Specials.”

Some people in the radio audience weren’t amused and, predictably I suppose, they were more offended by me than by the sales themselves. They said I was sacrilegious.

All this came to mind when I saw the shopping crowds on Valentine’s Day and sensed the contradiction that’s going on in our lives. On the one hand, we’re supposed to be reducing what we buy as a favour to our environment. On the other hand, we’re being coerced by advertising and seduced by sales into buying luxuries with more and more abandon with more and more occasions being designated as gift-giving opportunities.

I am not optimistic enough to accept that business at all levels, from manufacturing to retail, is taking the environmental crisis seriously. I have very serious doubts that business, without strict government regulation, will take the necessary steps to be part of the solution in our present predicament. I don’t expect at the moment that the government will have anything to do with regulating how much people may buy or with what kind of persuasion is being used to increase that buying. But there are baby steps that could be taken immediately.

One of those steps? Why not start with packaging? We all talk about it, we all deplore it, and we continue to buy goods in it because we have so little choice.

I tend to leave little household purchases until special days, then I giftwrap them and make them into a little production. So this year for Valentine’s Day, I bought a grapefruit knife, an electric coil that boils water in a cup for making instant coffee in hotel rooms, and a small catnip toy. The entire purchase was under $15 but a large percentage of that must have been the packaging. Each small item was in a useless hard plastic bubble, mounted on glossy, multi-coloured cardboard. Don’t tell me I should have unpackaged them in the store — I needed the butcher knife to liberate them once I got them home. Besides, although that makes a point, it does nothing for the environment and I’m not a person who enjoys making a scene.

And don’t tell me if I shopped around I could have found the items unpackaged. That assumes that everyone who shops has a car and has unlimited time to search out environmentally friendly items. No indeed, the government should regulate packaging.

Before I went home on Valentine’s Day, I went to the Port of Wines store in Spring Garden Place. This is a provincial government business that didn’t even have a paper bag in the store and, except for the fact that I was carrying a shopping bag, would have used a large plastic bag for one small bottle of wine.

The time will come — it will probably have become a dire emergency — when governments will have to take a more active role in regulating consumerism but if they’re not inclined to do it just yet, maybe they could at least look around and consider how they might set an example.

2010

Easter

Oh, shut up

The epithet in my headline (which my mother wouldn’t let me say thus severely curtailing my freedom of speech) is not, surprisingly enough, about Ann Coulter and her recent Canadian adventure. On the contrary, it’s directed at the people who can’t stop carping and fussing about “freedom of speech” and how poor Ann, with her racist, homophobic, vitriol-laced material was “not allowed” to deliver her expected diatribe at the University of Ottawa. (As it turned out, it was she and her people who decided to cancel in Ottawa and her freedom of speech was on ostentious display the next day in Calgary — but we’ll leave it at that.)

But let’s be clear. This is not an issue of freedom of speech. Ann Coulter is perfectly free to stand on any street corner or in any park in Canada and say pretty much whatever she wants to say. Or she could hire a hall or start a newspaper. She could become a pamphleteer or a soapbox orator.

The real problem is that she was invited – and paid – to give a speech at a university which would validate the views of those in her audience who were looking for racist, homophobic, vitriol-laced material. Listening to her would give them permission to leave her event and go back out into the university community, feeling that their noxious views are acceptable. To give a different context to the question that’s been asked this week: Is this the role we want our universities to play? To sanction an event and a speaker that places many of their students in a threatening and dangerous position?

Ann Coulter’s so-called “ideas” should not be ignored, as some people suggest, and they should not be debated, which gives them legitimacy. They — and she — should be scorned and disdained and she should be held up to public scrutiny and called what she is: a vacuous bully, an ignorant boor, a nasty piece of work.

The suggestion that she should be tolerated — or ignored — reminds me of when American radio host Howard Stern was trying to gain a foothold in Canada. People who supported his being licenced by the CRTC kept saying, “If you don’t like him, just turn your radio off,” which, pardon me, is a really stupid thing to say as I’m very unlikely to have Howard Stern on my radio anyway.

But Howard is not playing to me; he’s playing to many of the same people that Ann Coulter plays to except Howard leans a little more heavily toward ferocious misogny and offers great aid and comfort — and advice — to men who abuse women. What good is it going to do if I turn my radio off? And likewise, what good will it do if I ignore Ann Coulter? I’m not their intended audience.

Let’s now hope she’s returned to the land of the free where her commentary is much more mainstream — although I’m told she’s going out of fashion even there — and get back to paying attention to those in our own country who may speak more quietly but who carry just as big a stick and whose aspirations are not so different from the mouthy Ms Coulter.

IWD

Today is International Women’s Day, always a day that gives us plenty to think about. I admire optimists and people who make a point of thinking positively but it doesn’t seem that I was ever destined to fit either of those descriptions for reasons that will become clear.

I’m republishing here a column I wrote in early 1991. Don’t let my playful tone fool you. There was a war on then too, the Gulf War, entered into by the first George Bush. A few days before I wrote this column, I had participated in a teach-in about the war at Mount Saint Vincent University. My feminist presentation was about the sexual and erotic imagery used to describe war. The proceedings at the teach-in were recorded and later that same day, part of what I’d said was played on CBC Radio’s As It Happens, “for the record.”

There was a lot of response to that radio spot and one person’s response led to this column.


February 17, 1991

Well, ladies, I had just popped an apple pie into the oven and was getting the ironing done when I decided that what I really should do is go out and get my hair done and then go shopping for something nice for myself. A new hat maybe … or some perfume … or maybe a nice frilly feminine dress. That should cheer me up, shouldn’t it?

You see, girls, I had just opened my mail and had a letter from a fellow in Ontario who had heard some remarks I made on the radio about the sexual imagery of war. From his letter, I discovered that I’m really on the wrong track and I should change my way of thinking or just shut up. I should lighten up, give it a break, get a life. I should try just being a normal woman and I might discover that I like it.

This particular letter, interestingly enough, kept calling my views “ubsurd” (sic). He went on to say that they’re half-baked, pop-feminism. He said he has a feminist friend who also heard me and she said it’s terrible to hear someone who’s supposed to be on your side and you wish she was on the other side.

Each to his own opinion, of course, but in the last few months I’ve been called ridiculous and vindictive, mean-minded, sour and hostile, and accused of spewing vitriol and being anti-male. Goodness, girls. Can this really be me?

  • violence against women: (more than 100 Canadian women will be killed by their life partners this year; one in four women and girls will be sexually assaulted; one in 10 women is regularly beaten by her partner; popular culture — videos, movies, books — still portrays violence against women as a form of eroticism.)
  • sexual harassment: (even as I write this and as you read it, some woman somewhere is being denied a raise or a promotion because she refuses to sleep with the boss; or a female student is being offered a chance to pull an A+ on her toughest course if she favours the professor — if you know what I mean; or a woman working in a roomful of men is being subjected to sexual jokes, often having to do with her own body.)
  • inequality in the workplace: (women still make only 69 cents for every dollar that men make; in the workplace, 41 per cent of women earn more than $27,500 per year compared to 84 per cent of men; 21 per cent of aboriginal women earn more than $27,500, compared to 81 per cent of native men; 28 per cent of women in visible minorities earn more than $27,500 compared to 75 per cent of visible minority men.)
  • the feminization of poverty: (the number of women living in poverty increased by 110 per cent between 1971 and 1986, while the number of men living in poverty has increased over the same period by 24 per cent.)
  • child care: (the percentage of women with children who work outside the home reached 77.4 per cent in 1989 but the number of publicly-funded child care spaces has not increased — in 1989, there were 450,000 more pre-school children with mothers in the labour force for whom no child care was available than there were in 1979.)
  • pornography: (how come every time I whisper the word “pornography”, there’s someone to yell “freedom of expression” and I’m accused of advocating censorship — when I’m not? Then, how come I could to listen to 50 minutes of a CBC Radio Maritime Noon phone-in asking the question “should news from the war be censored?” and 99 per cent of the callers (all callers except one were men) intoned their support for censorship because of the “special circumstances” of war and no one says boo?)
  • Well ladies, you just know I could go on and on but I think I should defrost the fridge, mop the floor and make a quilt. I’m trying to be a normal woman.

    I just want to add, however, that I don’t invent the situations and statistics I’ve cited above and I’d like to ask why the people who are the perpetrators of those situations and responsible for those statistics are never called anti-female? Ubsurd, isn’t it?


    Here is an interesting version of Bread and Roses, sung by the Boston Workmen’s Circle (A Besere Velt — A Better World) Yiddish Chorus. Bread and Roses is woven together with an anthem dedicated to the fighters in the Spanish Civil War. But also, just before the three-minute mark, they sing, “We are marching for health care, universal and affordable …” to great applause from their audience.

    Happy International Women’s Day, 2010. There’s still much to be done.

    February is Black History Month; March is Women’s History Month. Either one is an appropriate time to look back at the life of Dr. Carrie Best.

    In the history of Nova Scotia — home of the largest indigenous Black community in Canada — Dr. Best was well-known and admired for her many years of work on behalf of her people. She died in 2001 but not before she had made her mark and helped to dispel some of the egregious racism that existed throughout her life.

    Dr. Carrie Best

    She was born in New Glasgow in 1903. In 1946, she founded The Clarion, the first newspaper for Blacks in Nova Scotia. She wrote for newspapers and magazines and was a weekly columnist with The Pictou Advocate. She was the author of an autobiography, That Lonesome Road (which is also a social history of Nova Scotian Blacks.)

    She was well-known across the country as an equal rights activist and was a founding member of the Kay Livingstone Visible Minority Women of Nova Scotia, an organization which works with women and young people to promote a sense of identity and pride of race, integrity and self-discipline “and to lift others, as we ourselves climb toward dignity and self-respect.”

    Her last doctorate was awarded in 1992 by the University of King’s College in Halifax. In 1970, she was awarded the Lloyd MacInnis Memorial Award for her work in social justice. In 1973, she received the first annual award of the National Black Coalition of Canada. In 1974, she was appointed to the Order of Canada. In 1975, she was granted the degree Doctor of Laws by St. Francis Xavier University.

    In December of 1991, she received an award for outstanding contributions to human rights on the anniversary of the day the United Nations ratified the Declaration of Human Rights.

    I interviewed her a few years before her death at her home in New Glasgow. She scoffed at my tape recorder and refused to let me turn it on, telling me she didn’t want to talk into “that thing.” I returned to the time-honoured tradition of taking notes. Her words are in italics. My occasional comments are not.



    The ‘religious hobo’

    Dr. Best is in perpetual motion, rummaging in her well-packed briefcase for a pertinent document, punctuating her remarks with a gentle jab to her interviewer’s shoulder or a soothing pat to the knee. Her energy and vitality are infectious. She often speaks with tongue in cheek.

    * * *

    I was invited to give the convocation address to the Atlantic School of Theology. I nearly dropped dead when they asked me! They can’t mean me, I said. Do they know I don’t go to church? Well, I slept on it. I do live close to God — I’m a born-again Christian — but I consider Christianity and “churchianity” two different things.

    In the end, I accepted. I described my religious background to them and told them I was a “religious hobo.” When I was born, my parents were Salvationists and that’s how I was registered at birth. When I was a young child, they left the Army because the first “black church” had been established in Pictou County. That was Baptist.

    When I grew up, I had the bad taste to marry an Anglican but he was good enough to go to the Baptist church with me. After a time though, he missed the Anglican way of worshipping so … he had accommodated me and I thought it was my turn to accommodate him so I went to the Anglican Church with him. But I missed the Baptists. The Baptists clap and laugh and sing and really know how to praise the Lord. So I went back to the Baptists. You can see I’m a religious hobo.

    As I got older, I met so many wonderful people of all religions. I began to accept people for what they are — colour and creed don’t matter. I believe that all roads that lead to God are good.

    The root of my faith is Mother Earth. I think of all the little creeds as just different ways of interpreting God.

    So that’s what I told the graduates of the Atlantic School of Theology!

    * * *

    That Lonesome Road is dedicated to her mother. On the dedication page, she wrote, “Society Said: You are an inferior being,/born to be a hewer of wood/ and a drawer of water/ because you are Black…. My Mother Said: You are a person, separate/ and apart from all other/ persons on earth. The pathway/to your destiny is hidden…/ you alone must find it./ …And then she said…/ Take the first turn right,/ and go straight ahead…”

    * * *

    It’s very painful to talk about some of the practices of the past. When I was growing up in New Glasgow, you couldn’t eat in a restaurant. You couldn’t get your hair cut. I went to jail. My son and I were at the movies; we sat downstairs, we went to the movies three times a week and we’d sat in the same seats for years. Then one day, the usher came to me and said, “You can’t sit here. You have to go into the balcony.” I refused. They called the police; they had to drag me out of there. I was in jail for an hour. I was charged with causing a disturbance.

    But at all times of my life, I’ve been a happy person. When I was young, I think we might have been broke but we were never poor. I was personally just as happy no matter what we had. My personal happiness had nothing to do with racial discrimination.

    I confront bigotry face on. If I hear — and this has happened — that someone has called me “nigger,” I go right to that person. I look him right in the eye and I say, “did you call me ‘nigger’? Now I’ve heard you did and all I want from you is to tell me if it’s true. If you say it isn’t, I’ll believe you. We’ll go together to the person who told me and you will tell him it isn’t true.” You could always tell if it was true or not.

    I’m not a nigger. I’m as good as anyone and better than most. I love everyone who’s worthy of my love — but I won’t sit back and take that kind of bigotry.

    * * *

    Her memory seems unlimited. She quotes long stanzas of poetry, long passages from books, most of which were learned many years ago. She considers poetry to be part of her spiritual nature and part of her search for identity.

    “The long hours spent in reading poetry,” she wrote in That Lonesome Road, “and the hundreds of poems memorized during my early childhood, my learning years, my yearning years and even now in later life, are fragrant memories of my journey in Search of an Identity. The irresistible habit of committing poems to memory still persists, and like deposits in a savings account, can be drawn out at will. The fund is never exhausted, for the interest grows both on deposit and withdrawal and is compounded daily.

    “Black history was virtually non-existent in Nova Scotia during my learning years … I remember when I received my cherished volume of the Poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar. I was ten years old … I found to my utter astonishment and delight that I could read the Dunbar poems which were written in the Negro dialect as easily as those he had written in classic English. These gave me my first sense of Black Identity.”

    * * *

    Things have changed — but not enough. The white race has got to start learning from those they feel superior to. The Blacks have to take pride in who they are. When Frederick Douglass was a young slave, the white mistress said, “He’s a bright boy. I’d like to teach him to read.” The slave master said, “When you educate a Negro, you unsuit him for a slave.”

    Education is very important — more important than ever. We have to start teaching our children ourselves — in “kitchen schools.” We have to get funding from Black churches, Black organizations, and take the time to teach the children where they come from, how far they can go.

    Being old now is not a disadvantage to me in all my projects. It’s a blessing. God gave me this extra time to accomplish whatever I can, to meet wonderful people of all races. I’m so thankful.

    Earlier today, I had a difference of opinion with one of my Facebook friends — Tony — about the movie, Thelma and Louise. In a move that amazed even me, I went into my archives and found a column I’d written on June 22, 1991, just days after the movie was released. I stand by the analysis that I wrote then. (The only change/addition I’ve made is the bracketed explanation about the film Independence Day.)
    ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Thelma and Louise

    Several years ago, I saw a movie called Independence Day. (This 1983 movie, directed by Robert Mandel, starring Kathleen Quinlan and Dianne Wiest, is not to be confused with the 1996 science fiction film of the same name.) It was the story of a violent marriage and it had an explosive, dramatic ending. I remember the exhilaration and excitement I felt when, with great deliberation, careful planning, perhaps a silent cheer from abused women everywhere, the battered woman filled the house with gas and blew it up with her husband inside.

    I saw the movie again recently. I watched in shock and horror as the ending approached and it dawned on me what was really going to happen. The wife did, in fact, blow up house and husband. What I had forgotten was that she was in the house too.

    How could I have forgotten that? How could I have been so manipulated into seeing that explosion as a happy ending?

    Those questions — and the answers — came to me with astounding clarity during one of the many discussions I’ve had recently on the subject of Thelma and Louise. One of my friends who had seen it and loved it said the unhappy ending was simply realism; it was the only thing that could have happened.

    Unhappy ending? That’s it, I said to myself. Like the ending of Independence Day, the ending of Thelma and Louise was not presented as unhappy. It was presented as triumphant, victorious, jubilant. Like the battered wife of Independence Day, Thelma and Louise ended up dead but the audience cheered and the critics pronounced the film a fun-filled frolic, a feminist romp that “all women will love, all men must see.”

    Thelma and Louise is the story of two women who have a history (and a present) of being mistreated by men — husbands, boyfriends and strangers. As the plot unfolds, they come to use standard male tactics as a way of dealing with the abuse: in the pivotal scene, Louise guns down a would-be rapist in the parking lot of a bar and from there, the two women — rightly assuming that no one would believe their version of the attempted rape — hit the road and head for Mexico.

    Market surveys all show that to be commercially successful, a movie must appeal to males, age 16 to 25. This accounts for the fact that a high percentage of Hollywood films are laced with violence, sex, car chases, explosions, crude language and multi-million dollar special effects. Thelma and Louise passes up no opportunity to include these elements.

    It’s a movie that competently reflects the culture it springs from — a culture that says “if you have a problem, shoot it,” a culture that insists that violence is not only effective, it’s entertaining. From the highly eroticized rape scene to the terrorist methods the women use in dealing with a highway patrolman to the spectacular explosion of an oil truck, violence is seen as a lark in which the occasional casualty is only to be expected, but nothing much to be concerned about.

    And the effects of violence? After a brutal rape, you might think the last thing on Thelma’s mind would be sex with a stranger. But no, barely a day later, there she is, ready to be seduced by a hitchhiker the women pick up who turns out to be a charming armed robber. Is the lesson here that maybe being raped isn’t so bad after all?

    Defenders of Thelma and Louise insist that this movie will cause people to talk about violence against women. I doubt that but, if it’s true, what will they say? I’m told that in some theatres, women stand and cheer at the violent methods employed by Thelma and Louise. Some of my own friends say they have felt empowered by the movie, have enjoyed seeing two women who decided to fight back.

    I can’t concede their point. Thelma and Louise decided to fight back — and they lost. Far from being a tool of empowerment for abused women, Thelma and Louise exploits the issue of violence against women for its own commercial purposes. There is no affirmation of womanhood in the movie, no suggestion that things can change; in the end, there’s no hope.

    The final scene is not violent. The death of Thelma and Louise is stylized, almost as in a cartoon. The final impression is of two women who have hugged each other, thrown back their gorgeous heads in gay abandon, decided they can’t turn back. They gun the motor of that ’66 sea-green T-bird, leave their police pursuers in a cloud of dust, and drive straight into the Grand Canyon. The action freezes as the car is in full flight and the manipulation is complete — a tragic ending that leaves its audience feeling good.

    Maybe the ending should have come with a word of warning though: don’t try this trick at home, ladies. Freezing the frame only works in the movies.

    The house was on the shore, about 100 feet from the water, right where the Black River flows into the Miramichi. It was a pretty house, weathered grey with sharply pointed gables and gingerbread trim. It looked a little worse for the wear. From a certain angle, it looked as if it were leaning back on its haunches; it had been built many years ago, with no foundation, and was “settling”, especially toward the back, where the kitchen was. From the front, it looked as if it were hunching its shoulders against the northeast winds that swept around the point, blowing in from the Miramichi Bay. It was a cold old house.
    ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Black River house winter

    February 17, 1976

    I forgot to push the rolled-up blanket against the door before I went to bed so there was snow on the kitchen floor this morning. The wind battered the house all night. It’s some cold. The glass of water I took to bed with me was frozen when I got up — frozen solid, not just a little skim of ice like sometimes.
    The water in the kettle on the stove was frozen too. I got the fire going and waited for the water to melt so I could prime the pump — at least I remembered to drain the pump last night.

    After I got the pump working, I filled the big copper boiler on top of the stove to get some hot water. It was wash day and I wanted to get an early start to get the clothes hung outside while there was still some daylight. I had a few dishes to do so I started on them first. The dishwashing detergent wasn’t frozen but it had turned into a gel so stiff, it was almost solid. I had to use a knife to get some out of the bottle. I suppose I’ll have to start keeping it in the fridge.

    The fridge is huge. I saw it advertised in the newspaper and a deal was pretty much made over the phone. I’ve never had a very good grasp of the size of an object that’s described in cubic feet. Anyway, I’m glad now. I keep many things in the fridge. It keeps them from freezing: things like canned goods and ketchup; oils and vinegars; potatoes, pickles and peanut butter — not to mention shampoo and conditioners, moisturizers, makeup and lotions. I think I could — as it used to be expressed — sell refrigerators to Eskimos. They could use them the same way I do.

    I almost froze my fingers getting my big washtubs in from the shed. My hands were a little damp and when I reached up to lift the first tub off the hook where it hangs, my fingers stuck to the surface. I peeled them off; no permanent damage but I went and put my gloves on before I dragged the tubs in.

    The two tubs sit side by side in the middle of the kitchen floor, one filled with hot soapy water, the other with less hot clear water for rinsing. The steam rises into the still-cold air of the kitchen like you see from those hot springs in Iceland. I sit on a cushion. I have a washboard for scrubbing and a hand-operated wringer that clamps on the side of the tub for wringing. A little shelf at the bottom of the wringer moves back and forth to keep the soapy water draining into the soapy tub and the clear water back into the clear tub. It’s very efficient.

    I put the newly wrung-out clothes and towels and sheets into a wicker basket on the floor beside me but before I got outside to the clothesline, the bottom layer had already started to freeze up. I put a few layers of newspaper and a folded blanket under the basket until I was ready to go out.

    God, it was cold out there. I was already wearing long underwear, heavy pants, wool socks and a couple of sweaters and I added boots, scarves, jacket, mitts and a wool hat plus earmuffs. The wind was still blowing and if the clothes weren’t frozen in the basket, they were most certainly frozen by the time I got the clothespin fastened onto the line. It’s not that easy to do, wearing gloves and mitts and still having numb fingers. Why do I do it? Well, they’d freeze if I hung them in the house anyway and they dry a little faster outside, especially in that wind.

    After the clothes were hung and as long as I was dressed for outdoors, I decided to fill the woodbox and take a trip to the outdoor facility to empty my little private indoor commode. It was frozen too.

    I made some bread this afternoon. I had lots of potato cooking water, bottles and bottles of it — in the fridge, of course — and a bag of stone-ground whole wheat flour my sister had given me for Christmas. It has taken me quite a while to find the best way to raise my dough in that cold old kitchen. I tried placing the bowl in the warming oven of the wood stove but it was too warm. It rose too fast and the texture wasn’t good. Placing it on the outer edge of the open oven door caused an uneven rise.

    I finally worked out a system that involves hot towels, newspapers for insulation, and an enclosed space that holds some heat where I set my big bowl — a medium-sized cardboard box works fine. (I’m quite inventive. I’m the same person who used to bake beautiful loaves of bread in a fireplace that I built on the shore out of flat stones and mud with a refrigerator shelf from the dump as the baking rack.)

    The rest of the day was uneventful. I brought the clothes in and stood them up around the kitchen until they thawed and fell over. They really do smell good. I read a lot, with my chair pulled close to the stove and my feet on the open oven door. I’ve drained the pump and I’m ready for bed now. My head got really cold in bed last night. I’ve put a large thick towel at the bedside so I can wrap it around my head tonight, if necessary.

    snow storm fields

    ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    The stories I tell about living in the cold old house on the shore are not about poverty or hardship. They’re credentials. I tell them because it’s fun to tell them. I tell them so I don’t feel I have to explain why I love my washing machine.

    But I tell them carefully and never with a suggestion of deprivation. Every day I lived in the old house, I thought of the woman who had lived there first, whose husband had built the house in the early part of the century. She had eleven children, most of them born in those very rooms. She had no electricity, no car to take her to town for shopping, no fridge to keep her food from freezing. And her water pump, unlike mine which was conveniently located in the kitchen, was outdoors.

    There was another woman I used to think of too, while I was living in that cold old house. She lived in Chatham, where I grew up, and I met her only once.

    It was 1950. I was six years old, a sweet little girl with long hair curled into ringlets by my mother every morning, dressed carefully in tiny pleated skirts and crisp white blouses, sent to school with bookbag and accessories — a pencil case, a plastic ruler with a hole in the middle, a soft pink eraser, fresh notebooks, everything I needed. I went to The White School, an old wooden building that must have had another name in the beginning but was never known by another name in my time. It seemed very big to me; today, when I drive by the lot where it used to stand, I realize that it didn’t take up much space. The students who went there were mostly working class; a few were middle class; some were very poor.

    One day in winter, all of us in grade one, having struggled into our winter duds, were standing in line in the ante-room waiting for the teacher to come around and tie our scarves at the back of our necks so they’d be ready to pull up over mouth and nose for the cold walk home. As she approached me, I saw with dread that she was carrying a small sheaf of papers.

    “I want you to take Eddie’s lessons home to him,” she said. “He was sick today.”

    My little heart sank. I was scared of Eddie anyway and I had heard all the lurid White School tales about the house where he lived. I didn’t understand some of it but I knew what a bootlegger was. This was a grade one nightmare.

    I lagged behind the others on the way home. I tried to think of some way of getting out of it. Finally — but much too soon — I turned down the street where Eddie and his family lived, in a ramshackle frame house behind an abandoned building. I picked my way through the rubble in the snowy yard — old car parts, an overturned wheelbarrow, a wagon with no wheels. Before I knocked, the door opened. A woman holding a baby was standing there.

    “Who are you? Who sent you ‘ere?” she said.

    “I brought Eddie’s lessons from school.”

    “Come into the ‘ouse.”

    Oh no oh no. This was not part of the deal. The room she led me into was more like a shed: it had bare board floors, a few old sticks of furniture, an unmade bed in the corner. It was cold. There was no sign of Eddie or any of the older children or the bootlegger but there were small children, a few of them — toddlers and babies.

    “What’s your name?” she said. I told her.

    “I know where you live. A new ‘ouse.”

    It was a new house; it was owned by the power commission where my father worked. It was an ugly house and my mother didn’t like it. But it had a furnace and rugs and matching furniture and curtains. To Eddie’s mother, it must have seemed like living in a palace.

    My childhood experience had not prepared me for her house. How could I have fit that cold hovel, those ragged children, that unkempt woman into my ordered little life where we collected money in Mission Band to buy food for hungry little heathen children in India; where we made little drawstring bags out of facecloths and filled them with soap and toothpaste and toothbrushes and combs and maybe a barrette for deprived children in Africa?

    How could it be that there were little children in Chatham living like this? Did they have enough to eat? Did they ever have roast beef on Sunday? Did they have any toys or storybooks? Did anyone ever take them to the beach? Did they have aunties and uncles who visited at Christmas? Was there even a stove in this place?

    These specific questions came to me years later; at the time, I asked no questions at all. I don’t know why except little children often feel shame and embarrassment when faced with complex situations that are uncomfortable.

    I never saw Eddie’s mother again. I think they moved away shortly after my visit. I never told anyone I’d been there.

    There was something else I never told anyone. The day I went to Eddie’s was the third time the teacher had asked me to take his lessons to his house. The first time, I tore the pages into little pieces and buried them under a rock in a swampy ditch on the way home. The second time, I put them at the bottom of the box where I kept my supplies for playing school. No one ever found them.

    Stan Carew is the lovable host of CBC Radio One’s Weekend Mornings, heard across the three Maritime provinces on both Saturday and Sunday. It’s a very popular show — rightly so, as it’s simultaneously current and nostalgic, sophisticated and whimsical, cozy and worldly.

    Over the Christmas holidays, Weekend Mornings played to the whole nation a couple of times. This is always fun and it’s easy to tell that Stan, Deputy Doug Barron and Duke, the studio stallion are excited and challenged to play to a whole different audience. The dynamic changes.

    The week after the national show, Stan played some of the very positive feedback from around the country.

    And then, he said sombrely, we got this. “This” was a rather scolding response from a woman in Ontario to a Spike Jones song that he’d played on New Year’s weekend. I had heard it and I had a real “what-were-you-thinking-Stan?” moment at the time. It’s an awful song. It has no redeeming social value: it’s not cute or funny or saucy or satirical.

    The caller was hard on Stan. She said he should be removed from his position.

    Stan sounded hurt and bewildered, which annoyed me.

    It would be nice if we could consider that song an artifact, an amusing reminder that we can dig up to show why things needed to be changed. But women and girls live every day in a world that diminishes, ridicules and marginalizes their lives. It’s there in advertising, in music, in film, in politics, in religion. It’s in the language and in the attitudes and in the “jokes.” Because I continue to point this out, I’ve spent much of my adult life being told to lighten up, get a sense of humour, “he didn’t really mean anything by it. It was a joke!”

    Just last week, I was in the company of a gaggle of grade four kids — four boys, one girl. The boys were rambunctious, inappropriately noisy for where they were and eventually, their adult supervisor raised his voice to them. “Try to behave more like her,” he said, nodding toward the lone girl. The boys hooted and chortled and fake-gagged. “Should we grow our hair long and wear pink? Play with — yecch — Barbie? Go shopping? Run like this?” Their contempt and disdain were palpable. They’re 10 years old.

    I have been an active and vocal feminist since the ’70s, at first working for rights that women had never had and later, trying to salvage and retain those rights that have been gained which are now threatened on a daily basis. Stephen Harper, with his minority government, has stripped bare those federal departments which had anything to do with levelling the Canadian — and the world — playing field.

    Anti-feminists — feeling very emboldened these days — can haul out their statistics about numbers of women in university and in the professions but in fact, many women continue to live in poverty in precarious employment situations and in dangerous home environments. Women still struggle to have their families and raise their children within systems that have not changed to accommodate their biology and — only partly because of that — women are still earning much less than men are in most workplaces.

    Women and girls face judgement every time they walk out their front door, every time they pick up a magazine that tells them they’re too fat or watch a television commercial that demands more and more of their time and energy to meet ever-changing impossible beauty standards.

    People who say that the struggle for women’s equality is over and that feminism is therefore passé are not paying attention. It is disheartening for those of us who are paying attention to have to get up every morning and put out the same brush fires, day after day after day. It’s tiring.

    And Stan? That’s why the woman who called from Ontario took you so strongly to task. She had just come through the Christmas season — as the rest of us had — and she had probably been dealing with family members and co-workers who’d had too much to drink. Clearly, she had just had it up to here and Spike Jones was just the final straw.
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    P.S. To all those defenders of Stan who called in and told him not to give in to those crying for “censorship”: Making choices for a playlist is not censorship. Radio hosts choose and reject songs for all kind of reasons — rightly so — and it is simply silly to use the word “censorship” in this situation.

    jukebox

    My son is 15 years old. From the time he was a newborn until four or five years ago, I sang to him, every night of his life — just after stories, just before sleep. A few weeks ago, I was browsing through some old email and I found a seven-year-old note I had written to my friend, Sally G., who had taken an interest in my nightly singing. She asked me what I sang and I produced a list for her.

    It was interesting, after all that time, to see the list. I had forgotten some of the numbers in my repertoire and I enjoyed becoming reaquainted with them. At the time, I wrote this to Sally: “I’m thinking of singing them on to a tape so I can play them for him when he’s 15. (Or threaten him with them.)”

    I never did get them sung on to a tape but I will share this enhanced version of them with him here — and with you too!
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    1. Rock a Bye Baby (Well, I avoided versions by Nirvana, Metallica, Nine Inch Nails — but please check this, Virginia O’Brien from the Marx Brothers movie, The Big Store, with a little intro by Groucho.)

    2. Lullaby and Good Night — Brahm’s Lullaby (Update: I had to add this replacement for my original choice. This is Jewel.)

    3. Hush Little Baby Don’t Say a Word (This is a version by Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin and it doesn’t sound at all like me but I love it.)

    4. Little Sir Echo (Dame Vera Lynn — need I say more? With Ambrose of the Mayfair Hotel Orchestra.)

    5. Alouette: (This is so much fun.)

    6. Tell Me Why (I spent a long time looking for this song. I won’t go into all the discoveries I made during my search except to say that it was nice to listen to the Four Aces singing Tell Me Why — even though it was the wrong song. This is the wrong song too — another Tell Me Why, this one written by Titus Turner and sung here, magnificently, by Maria Knight. But here is the song I was looking for, sung so sweetly by Tony and Bobbie sitting at their kitchen table. I liked them right away.)

    7. Turn Around and You’re Two, Turn Around and You’re Four (I made myself cry most nights that I sang this. I made up little-boy words to substitute for “little dresses and petticoats” and other inappropriate phrases. The song was written by Harry Belafonte, Malvina Reynolds and Alan Greene. This is Harry.)

    8. Moon River (A big bedtime favourite for many years. Written by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, when a choral version rises up behind Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard embracing in the pouring rain with old wet Cat squashed between them … c’mon, not a dry eye in the house. Here’s the incomparable Audrey. And here’s the final scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Get the tissues.)

    9. The Teddy Bears’ Picnic (In 1930, the lyrics of The Teddy Bears’ Picnic were written by Jimmy Kennedy and set to the original music written in 1907 by American composer J.K. Bratton. This is the real thing: Henry Hall & his Orchestra recorded in 1932.)

    10. Let Me Call You Sweetheart (Bing Crosby. The song with music by Leo Friedman and lyrics by Beth Slater Whitson was published in 1910. At some point, my son — with his boy sense-of-humour — began to demand the parody version: Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with your machine. Let me hear you whisper, that you’ll buy the gasoline. Keep the headlights glowing and your hands upon the wheel. Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with your au-to-mo-bile.)

    11. Swing Low Sweet Chariot (I didn’t sound anything like Kathleen Battle. Or Joan Baez who sang it at Woodstock.)

    12. I Don’t Know Why I Love You Like I Do (I wasn’t the only one who sang this one: Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Sarah Vaughn, Hank Locklin, Stevie Wonder, Marty Robbins … This, however, is Dean Martin. It seems to suit him.)

    13. Good Night Irene (It was famously written by Huddie Ledbetter — Leadbelly — and recorded by many artists over the years. The Weavers had a huge hit with it in 1950 accompanied by a bit of controversy as they tamed the lyrics a bit from the original.)

    14. Home on the Range (Here’s Roy Rogers, The Singing Cowboy.)

    15. Take Me Out to the Ballgame (It was written in 1908 by Jack Norworth. This is a great version, apparently recorded in 1908 by Edward Meeker.)

    16. My Buddy (This is a sad little song, universally believed to have been written about a World War I soldier who lost his friend in battle. The music was written by Walter Donaldson, the lyrics by Gus Kahn. The song was published in 1922. I would like to have been able to link you to a version that seems closer to World War I but I have settled on an “amateur” performance that seems to be Mom-related.)

    17. You Do Something to Me, Something that Simply Mystifies Me (Here is Ella Fitzgerald and you will never find a better version than this so don’t bother looking.)

    18. Four Strong Winds (It was written in 1961 and recorded by at least 50 artists. William loved this song. Me too — and I loved Ian and Sylvia.)

    19. Now and Then There’s a Fool Such as I (This is young Elvis who could do no wrong. And as I didn’t want to make a choice, here’s Jim Reeves also. He wasn’t as cool as Elvis but this version was really good for the last dance — and much easier for bedtime crooning.)

    20. ‘Till There Was You (From The Music Man. When I was living in Prince Edward Island, I celebrated a significant birthday and my friends, Heather and Rachel, tried to get Robert Preston, the Music Man himself, to come to PEI as a birthday present for me. I’m not sure how far they got in Hollywood but I appreciated the effort. This is Shirley Jones singing so sweetly to Robert Preston.)

    21. As Time Goes By (Play it, Sam. Dooley Wilson.)

    22. Que Será Será (The New York Times would like to see Doris Day honoured with a special Oscar this year. Although she’s mostly remembered for light romance with Rock Hudson, here’s her rendition of Que Será Será, from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.)

    23. You’ll Never Know Just How Much I Love You (From the time he was very young, William insisted that the line, “And if I tried, I still couldn’t hide my love for you …” should be, “And if I tried, I still couldn’t hide my love from you …” He got such pleasure from waiting for that line and correcting me authoritatively that I continued to sing it as it was written: ” … my love for you …” This is Alice Faye. The song is from the movie Hello, Frisco, Hello and won the Academy Award for best original song in 1943. Who knew?)

    24. Oh Canada (A nice version, sung by a children’s choir, here. When I sang it, I always changed the lyrics to, “Oh Canada, our home and native land, true patriot love, in all of us command … ”

    I was surprised — although, in Internet comment sections, nothing much surprises me any more — that when I was browsing around, looking for different versions of the anthem, I came across so much vitriol being spewed at our country. Goodness, some people take such pleasure in saying such vicious things.)

    25. Kiss Me Once and Kiss Me Twice and Kiss Me Once Again (As the years passed, bedtime changed and soon enough, the long sessions of singing came to an end. This was the last song to go. Some nights, I would stop in and say, “Would you like to hear a song?” and he was always very polite and said, “Sure.” This was always the song. Here are two irresistible versions. Enjoy them both: Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong.)
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    This is my core list. Other songs added themselves from time to time but didn’t have the staying power to show up here. Some of these occasionally dropped off the list but they bided their time and in the end, they were rewarded with a permanent spot.

    It took me really long to do this post but I had a very good time doing it. I listened to dozens of versions of these songs that didn’t make the cut and I learned a few things as well.

    Go ahead — click on all my links. I know you’ll be glad you did!

    One of the highlights of 2009 was the May reunion of my Montreal General Hospital nursing class. I did a short write-up of the weekend for the alumnae newsletter which was published in the Fall. I’m republishing it here. It will be of special interest to my nursing friends but perhaps there will be some general interest in it as well.
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    When I began to write this, it took me by surprise when I acknowledged to myself that a tour of the hospital and the nurses’ residence, Livingston Hall, stood out as such a highlight of the reunion weekend. Hanging out in the hotel, walking the downtown neighbourhoods, eating good food and being together for the wonderful evening of the alumni dinner couldn’t have been more fun but it was in walking the halls of where we used to live and work that the past really returned to life.

    In 1961, when we arrived at the MGH, the hospital had only been open for six years. It’s been through a lot since then; it shows some wear and tear but that’s to be expected. During the tour, we found it amazing 1) how much and how many details we remembered and 2) how everything used to be so much bigger.

    For those of us who haven’t worked in a hospital setting for some time, things looked unfamiliar and intimidating but we found it easy to super-impose yesterday’s memories over today’s realities. We stood in the sixth floor lobby – not as imposing as it used to be, by the way – and looked at those six elevators that used to take us up to work every morning. Funny thing, we all had the same memory and that was how, as student nurses, we had to stand back and let the staff doctors go first even though they wouldn’t catch hell from the head nurse if they were late – as we certainly would.

    From that memory, we went on to the one about being in the cafeteria lineup where we had to let practically everybody get into line ahead of us – and we had only a strictly-enforced 30 minutes for lunch. The cafeteria is a much different place today and if we complained about the food then … well, there’s no guarantee the commercial fast food and pre-cooked meals of today would be met with any more satisfaction.

    The affection that we feel for the Montreal General is connected to much more than happy thoughts of youth. The time we spent at the MGH School of Nursing was formative in so many positive ways. I had written about an earlier reunion and speculated on the intimacy that was still present in our relationships with one another:

    We wondered why we still felt so close, although it had been many years since some of us had seen each other. We knew there was something more than just the simple fact of having lived in residence together even though our residence was not only our home but was also our school and was connected to our workplace on several different physical levels.

    In the end, I think our bond of sisterhood grows out of years of proximity to each other but also to our shared participation in the great stories of life and death and in knowing the intrinsic value of the important work we were so well-trained to do at the Montreal General Hospital.

    There were 57 members of the Class of ’64 at our 45th reunion. There were classmates whom I hadn’t seen in the whole 45 years since graduation. It made me think regretfully of the light-hearted way the words, “Have a great life …” are used by the young and how different the significance of those words is at the different stages of our lives.

    The organization of activities and fun was flawless and in case we didn’t all get a chance to say so, many thanks to everyone who worked on the reunion, at all levels, to make such a satisfying weekend come together.

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