LIVING THE Pi LIFE

I’ve mentioned before how terrible I am at the math and the science. I spent a good deal of my childhood in an insular place of books and television. A place where story drove actions, and evil was usually vanquished with a combination of luck, knowledge, and intuition. That’s why I struggled with the math and the science. I could never find the plot, context, or storyline. It never had a moral or counterpoint to ponder. It was just flat out dull and without a purpose. And all you Mathletes out there can yell and scream all you want about how math and science changed your understanding of the universe. Go ahead, this isn’t about you. But it will be if you stay tuned.
One day as I sat pondering the mangrove islands that sit about a mile or so from my office in the tropics, I realized how Pi could actually translate into my world. Finally, I was getting a handle on a puzzle that has been quietly stewing way back in the “things to eventually do” spaces of my mind. This one was buried behind an ongoing thought about how to define mayoral corruption, and just to the right of an ongoing debate about the best burger I ever ate.

According to Wikipedia Pi is referred to as an “irrational number”, a number whose “decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern”. Which makes it the perfect human number.

 Starting with the basic 3.1415 at birth we move on to calculating the next digit to the right, since there can be no other number to the left. And we spend the next umpteen years of our lives calculating one digit at a time. Each digit calculates as a defining point on the circle of your lifeline. Apparently Pi’s most common usage is to figure out circle volume, which fit with my thought on those moments when we actually figure out a point in the human life constant. By a certain age we like to think we have life figured out, and that we no longer really need to spend time pondering our place on the circle. Except I find as I age that my journeys and travels allow that I ponder more, not less.

The past ten years have seen me travel in ways I never traveled before, both personally and for work. I returned to places I have always loved to be. Those places of childhood and youthful experience that helped mold our family’s joint dynamic. I journeyed to new places where I found new outlooks, ideas, truths, and in no small measure personal growth. I found that some old concepts, formed in either anger or ignorance, needed a new look. It was challenging to question a lot of choices and decisions that in retrospect were holding me back rather than pushing me forward. And some that were needlessly destructive.

I chose to go back and examine each of those moments, and they had to be examined in different ways. First through circumstance, knowledge, and even prejudice, and then run through a filter of a particular emotion that dominated those moments. And those moments were not re-visited in linear fashion, because a life fully lived is never linear. Sometimes we have answers years before we know there is even a question, and sometimes we close doors far too securely without knowing we might want, or need to re-open them. And those moments are the Pi moments. When the calculation of the next digit falls into place, but we find several of the preceding calculations have been wrong, throwing off a sequence that follows.

After the cross country road trip I admitted to someone that I had never got lost, but I did turn some corners I hadn’t anticipated thus seeing places and ideas I hadn’t planned. That in itself was a Pi moment. Previous to that I had been lost many times, literally and figuratively. But I have travelled so many roads over the years that suddenly, on this road, an unfamiliar turn had the promise of new ideas and adventures.

 For the better part of a week I spent time on my tropical office chair watching the pelicans, the herons, the ibis’s, the Osprey. I was softly guided through a color palette of the sea trying to determine a shade of green from a shade of blue or even black. The jumping fish, the occasional fin of a shark, and the marshmallow theatrics of bleached cotton clouds in constantly evolving shades of a blue sky. All the while I was tracing the notion of Pi as a philosophical equation against my personal Songlines all helped through the lenses of iced tea, and when appropriate Sandbar Sunday, and Boodles.

 Calculating the number Pi is a process defined by a logical and somewhat linear progression despite being an “irrational number”. In life we as humans progress along the line we choose and follow in a seemingly orderly progression until from somewhere the irrational happens, and we stumble and fall out of sequence.

Some people are quite happy with their lives being rounded out to only 6 or 7 decimal places. I know people who are happy with that simplicity of a life that doesn’t progress much beyond last night’s sports scores or those game shows masquerading as “human reality”.

For me, I live for those Pi days when I find a new number for my sequence. I know I’ll have worked for it, and I’ll know its real value to me is that it’s not my last one.

Feeling Sheridan

At the town of Hardin Montana Interstate 90 changes direction from roughly east to mostly south. As you cross the Wyoming State line the Bighorn Mountains begin to show themselves off to the west, with scrubby grassland to the east. The land has gentle hills and the road pleasantly rolls along, neither challenging nor boring. It continues south through Sheridan until you get to the town of Buffalo. From there the road forks, I-25 continues south and I-90 resumes a more easterly run.

 

The turn at Buffalo was a ways into the future as I took Exit 23 at Sheridan for a fuel and pit stop. Turn right at the stop sign and you head downhill into the city of about 17,000 people. Turn left and there’s a Visitor Centre on a rise about a quarter mile up the hill. The Visitor Centre had first priority because the state run rest stop facilities are a safer and cleaner bet than a possible losing hand at a gas station.

There are some covered table areas with a clear view south and west, down across the low valley to where the Bighorn Mountains begin to challenge the distant sky. In Wyoming and Montana size and space take on vastly different meaning. At home on the coast distance is more relative, defined by rivers and the geography of coastal fjords. There aren’t a lot of “wide open spaces”. It’s heavily treed making it seem tight and close. The mountain terrain controls access so you’re pretty much always going uphill, downhill, or crossing a bridge.
 
In Wyoming and Montana you drive long distances to reach mountains that have dominated the horizon for hours. Descriptive phrases such as “endless prairie”, and “desolate empty spaces” are useless because they seem trite, childish, and embarrassingly cliché. Light is colored golden beige and light brown with a mottling green undertone, moderated and brightened by a blue sky that changes from edge to edge, from robin’s egg to iris, and back. The sky is so big you can’t see all of it. You have to turn your head from side to side as far as your neck will let you, and then nod up and down, and turn around. There is a feeling you exist in the centre of the sky. You know where everything is in your mind, yet you never actually see it because there’s so much of it.

This is the land of great modern western fiction. This is the land of Absaroka County where aging Sherriff Walt Longmire lives his troubled way through the understanding hand of author Craig Johnson. It’s the land of Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett, a good man brought to life by C.J. Box.

It’s a land where the dead can rest in peace for centuries without being disturbed, because it’s doubtful any human would come across the remains. This is the land of the Crow, Shoshone, Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapaho, and pretty much has been since time was invented. There is Spirit in this land, and I get just a tickle whiff of what awaits me when I come back through the Black Hills in a few weeks.

Thousands of years pass here, and nothing will change. Coming from a place that increasingly wants to run forward to fill the mountain sides and sky with glass and steel, obliterating the mountains themselves from view, and stressing the existing resources to a point where the community itself won’t be viable in a hundred years. I find this place and vista to be a place of personal reckoning.

Great expanses challenge the human soul, and makes some nervous. It seeks to find meaning and connection. It seeks to not be irrelevant and insubstantial. For most it seeks to not be alone, seeking comfort and safety in the company of other like beings. So the sage ones keep telling us.

For this moment I am pleased there is no one near. I find great expanses settling to my soul. As if I can finally reach out to open the mental and intellectual doors of the real me, and let a cleansing breeze carry in the freshness of a quiet world my mind loves to explore.

Various waterfront rooms at the Sheraton Waikiki overlooking the Pacific Ocean with practically nothing between me and the ocean were such a place. I spent days on the lanai just staring, sometimes reading, and writing prolifically. The beach at Tierra Del Mar and the summit of Mount Hebo in Oregon, both a surprise to find, and wonderful places to let the breeze blow through. My perch in the Tropics, where the sun moves across the sky, the shadows changing color and depth on the two small mangrove islands. The sky telling its own unique daily story from sunup to moonset. Even then the stars quietly whisper on, telling tales from so long ago that common points of reference are impossible, but the whispered melody of the sparkling universal language brings soothing comfort, and inspires curiosity.

Not everyone can find pleasure in contemplative solitude. It makes some people angry and nervous. Some enjoy it for a while, and then return to their day to day. For a few poor souls any kind of solitary endeavour can drive them truly mad. Being with such people can drive me mad.

It takes time for the depth of a momentary feeling to coalesce into significant thought, and even then only if you seek to let it. I find there seems to be less and less appetite for considered thought. The now seemingly constant state of individually processing raw information for a personally satisfying experience has left cogent ponderous thought, and the desire for salient context kicked to the kerb. Intellectual road kill on the information super-highway. The comment sections of the inter-web are filled with ignorance, vitriol, and self-righteous irrelevances. Perhaps like this blog.

None of these thoughts coalesced in the few minutes I stood there looking out across the valley at the Bighorns, the grasslands, and the long southbound ribbon of I-90. At the time I had never read Craig Johnson or C.J. Box. That enjoyment was over a year in the future. I had no idea of the names of the First Nations that flourished on this land long before the original 13 Colonies were formed. I was uninformed but open to the new and old, feelings and facts.

 

I had been on the road since 7 that morning when I left Missoula. I had passed Clinton (famous for a “testicle” festival, whatever that might be), Anaconda (ugly and industrial), Manhattan, and Billings. I had crossed the Continental Divide in a more emotional experience than I had expected. I pulled into and out of Sheridan around 3 in the afternoon. I was in town all of 15 minutes, conducted my business, and left. It would be 7 that night before I kept my date with a Motel 6 in Rapid City, after passing through Gillette, Deadwood, Sturgis and hundreds of miles of inspiring empty land.

It would be several years before Sheridan would become a real and considered thought and feeling. It’s a work in progress, and it’s that progress keeping my life interesting.

 

 

THE CHRISTMAS TAKEAWAY

 

Over the years I think I wasted a lot of my parent’s money. It wasn’t intentional, in fact I think they enjoyed spending it, but I don’t think I walked away with quite the same appreciation of those gifts as they might have expected.

As my journeys continue to take me along roads I never thought possible, I’m seeing some changes in perspective. Totally normal. It’s what travel and adventures are supposed to do, to make us more aware of ourselves, our lives, and the worlds of others that surround us. It’s exactly why I get in the car and take to the highway, or take a plane to Europe or the Tropics. And back when I was meaningfully employed I enjoyed the everyday excitement of the new and interesting. It was one of those jobs where you accepted when you got up in the morning you didn’t know where you might be sleeping that night. You went where the story gods sent you. And on each adventure you learned, sometimes good things, sometimes bad things, and always you learned about the frailties and failings of humans.

As a kid you never thought of such things, and neither should you have. For most of us Christmas was quite magical. Lights, cameras, action, relatives, family friends, food, alcohol (the source of many families’ grief and funny stories), toys, wrapping paper, hugs, kisses, and at least at our house a minimum of discord. As kids we were protected from such things. Whether by design or unspoken agreement amongst the adults, we went about our childhood Christmas ways never contemplating that the adults who loved us might have some inter-personal issues.

The other day I was archiving some family photos and came across some from those early Christmas’s. Toy’s long since forgotten, the one’s that every other kid might have received, some that helped define the pop culture of the time. I was struck by the innocent acceptance that each picture showed. It was obvious in these pictures that no one in my family really wanted for anything. Except perhaps for kid’s pajamas that fit, and didn’t look like they were going to fall down around your ankles and trip the unwary.

Those candid moments shifted perspective for me. In that moment came an understanding of the Christmas journey that every adult has to face eventually, the one that for some will be uncomfortable, for some profound, for some sad, and for some humourous. A journey that for the most part has already happened, and will continue in the following years. It’s a journey that happens only one day every year, bookmarking a place we would wish to revisit and at the same time go to great lengths to move forward from. The classic human conundrum, torn between the comfort of joy and safety in the past, while at the same time pushing ahead while carrying some baggage and trying to continue the traditions and customs of the past. Humans are notoriously bad at balancing such things. Like I said, a conundrum.

One thing, however struck me as absolute - dinner! Everything else changed, be they toys, clothing sizes, fashion, voices, or height. Dinner was the Christmas constant. Few things changed around dinner. Roast turkey, Potatoes Romanoff, Brussel Sprouts (they still overwhelm my gag reflex), ham, and assorted vegetables. Dessert varied from Black Forest cake to Brandy Alexander Pie. One year the Brandy Alexander pie was a bit too potent after a mis-reading of the recipe doubled the amount of alcohol!

And then there was the year we had no turkey. Our house had a two oven range, and one of them gave up working halfway through cooking the bird. It was a bit of a scramble but the parent’s put their heads together and found enough in the pantry to feed everyone. As I recall it was ham, spam, and canned corned beef. And we always had a houseful to feed. The minimum was 12, the max was 20. It all depended on the year, and who had nowhere else to go. We usually wound up with some holiday orphans.

We didn’t have a kid’s table. From the time we were old enough to feed ourselves it was expected that we would be scattered amongst the adults. We were expected to listen and participate. One pseudo uncle served on the Queen Mary during the Second War and always had a wonderful tale or an outrageous joke. Around that table we learned of politics, show biz (both gossip and history), humour, family history, world history, science (both real and fiction), table manners, current events, business, economics, labour, cars, planes, how to tell a story, ships, and everything else under the sun including how to hang wall paper.

We learned how to be part of the greater whole. During those dinners the morning toys were forgotten. The people mattered. I mentioned before that we were never aware of any family discord. Rightly so, a child should never be aware of such things. In some families discord would dominate the holidays, and we all know someone who suffered as a result. It could be that some of those people were at our Christmas dining table, but it wasn’t apparent.

At the beginning of this I put forth that I wasted a lot of my parent’s money on things I can no longer summon forth to matter. As they have both passed on, I can’t ask them, tell them, or thank them. However, I remember most of those dinners and the people who, in their own way, helped my parents to raise three curious and rambunctious boys.

One of the threads first sewn into the fabric of my life was something my parents often said at those times when sibling discord arose, “One day we won’t be here, and you’ll only have each other.” An inevitable prophecy that has come true.

Time continues to pass and those Christmas dinners where once we numbered from 12 to 20 have become smaller. With the exception of our beloved aunt who lives overseas, every one of those childhood dinner guests have passed on. Tonight there will be four of us for dinner, my two brothers and a new face. Yet around that table will be the loving memories of many people, the one’s that took an interest in the curiosity of growing children, and who very gently and wisely overlooked the mistakes of manners and tempers that every child will suffer.

My Christmas Takeaway has nothing to do with toys, and wrapping paper. It’s their gift of the quiet, intelligent, adventurous, humourous, love filled and mildly prosperous life I get to live as a result of those Christmas dinners.

Peace to all, and safe adventures in the New Year.

 

 

The Tick Box Life

It was a late Key Largo afternoon as The Blue Eyed Wonder climbed into the deck chair at Snapper’s Turtle Bar. They’re the ones at the far end of the deck, right against the rail and next to the water. Sitting next to me she looked elfin, and the truth is she’s only about half a head taller than Tinkerbell.

Her thick and therefore uncontrollable dark brown hair had developed red highlights from two weeks of being in the sun. She kicked off the bright pink size 5 flip flops and put her tiny feet onto the chair rail and looked at me over the top of her mirrored prescription Ray-Ban aviators. I call her the Blue Eyed Wonder because of the depth of the shading in her eyes. Ask anyone who meets her what she looks like and they couldn’t say, all they can do is describe the intensity of the colour and focus in her stare. If you stare at them long enough you go straight to your secret inside places and tell her things you wouldn’t tell another soul. More than one person has spent years wondering how she got them to confess.

I’ve known her about thirty years. Off and on we had drifted through the years. Not as a couple, though that had happened once or twice. We had become companions in life. At least as much as someone who trusts no one, can trust anyone else, and that’s how she fit so uniquely into the structure of quietude and contemplation that I have finally achieved in my life.

We both ordered beer, the Sandbar Sunday, a locally brewed wheat ale. The tropical heat began to show in the sweat on the glass. It’s something you get used to, glasses that sweat and you learn to turn your head just slightly so it doesn’t drip on your shirt.

“You changed after the road trip. More withdrawn, even quieter than before, and yet more verbose at the same time. Plus you seem more intimately aware of what’s around you.”

“Whenever you travel for any period of time you become aware of all the tick boxes in your day to day life. All those things you do without thinking or questioning. Your work life has its tick boxes, your social life has its tick boxes, and your internal musings have their own tick boxes.”

I took a swallow of the beer and stared at the low stand of mangroves to my left. A two seat Waverunner went screaming past before I could say more. I’m not a fan of anything whose sole reason for existence is making noise and going fast without any real purpose. The beer was wonderful against the back of my throat.

“People like to have their lives orderly and predictable.” She said.

“Yes, and so did I until I began to notice there was more to it. I’m fortunate in that I travel alone. I get the luxury of time to not only see new things at my own speed, but also have the time to look at how I feel in seeing those new things. That’s when I discovered the idea of tick boxes. On the road across South Dakota I realized I was seeing more, hearing more, smelling more. And it made sense to me, because I was in a mode of being that demanded I be aware of everything. Everything had changed. I was alone in an unknown place and space. I had no infrastructure to support me in case of a problem. I had to seek out food, shelter, and even water. I had to be present in the moment at all times, in order to just survive that moment.”

Our deluxe cheeseburgers arrived, hers with Sharp Ceddar, mine with Provolone. She added Ketchup and nothing else. I have a fair sized infrastructure to support, so I added Ketchup, Mayo, and mustard.

“Do you eat a lot of this stuff when travelling?”

“Depends on the local menu. I prefer a salad option with burgers anywhere I go, but here it doesn’t seem to register with anyone. It’s always fries, like in England it’s chips. I once saw a menu there that offered lasagna with chips. Certain foods define a culture. In Greece I found yogurt, or something yogurt based was served with most everything. Mostly I eat whatever I feel is appropriate. The road trip featured a lot of pork and beef ribs. They were a signature theme and I wanted to experience them in different cities and environments. I am always glad to see fresh vegetables on a menu, especially steamed ones.”

Watching the Blue Eyed Wonder eat is an experience. Her delicate features and small mouth belie a ravenous appetite that she indulges with a surprising amount of ladylike grace in the face of its feral ferocity. It’s like watching a professional butcher, all economy of motion with no wasted effort. For me a successful meal is one that I don’t share with my shirt front.

She swallowed and asked “You still didn’t tell me why you changed?”

I had to think for a minute to try and phrase it, without wanting to sound pedantic or trite. So I finished the beer and signaled for another round before launching forth.

“It had to do with the tick boxes. I didn’t have them anymore. Somewhere on the road they disappeared and when I came home it worried me, a lot. I could no longer just lollygag through my day to day life with that blanket of emotional and intellectual certainty that everything would be what it was before. I started to ask myself questions that had to with relevance and reason. What I had was a greater awareness of what was going on around me. All the little things I had ignored or deemed irrelevant. The incompetence’s, the bickering, the negligence’s. Every little petty thing that I had written off as the background noise of my life became a major point of intellectual and emotional contention. And I saw others doing as I had done, ignoring or rationalizing a huge part of their lives, and that bothered me too. I kept flashing back to points on the road, a second of experience, a flavor or taste, a smell of Gulf air or the colour of the Great Plains sky. The feeling of belonging to the land of the Black Hills, all without ever being able to define why or how. It was all happening under the surface, and I couldn’t put a finger on what was happening to me or my life. I didn’t have the emotional or intellectual vocabulary to have that conversation with myself, and so my frustrations grew and grew.”

She took off her sunglasses and gave me the full force of those deep blue irises, the left one with a small fleck of gold at the outer edge, the right one with a fleck of jade green, square on the dot of midnight. She put her chin in the palm of a hand, elbow resting on the arm of the chair, and said, “Like a kind of PTSD?”

“Such a clinical term for something that in the end turned out to be beneficial, and that induced the kind of change that made possible a new way of thinking and living. So no, not PTSD. It was a wakeup call that I could no longer just tick boxes for the rest of my life. I had to find a way to excite and stimulate all of those senses, all of the time. Life fully open has become an addictive experience.”

“Is that why you are so annoying in re-phrasing every question to have a positive spin?”

“Yes!! Because if you ask every question, or make a statement as a given and predictable entity you miss the point of actually questioning. My former employment life is now filled with such language and it’s become boring and predictable. So, like many others I’ve tuned out. I realized if I was going to learn about a place and its people I needed to open up to the locals, including the locals at home. The Chamber of Commerce is full of glossy tourist brochures, but really light on any actual colour of a place. Visiting a new place is only part of travel to me. Getting behind the lives of the people who live there tells me what I really travel for, to understand a way of life. And the only way to do that is to ask positive questions, and to be fully open to the answers and building on that, not steering it in a chosen direction. I had to eliminate the tick boxes around ‘Nice weather we’re having’ and actually put meaning into asking ‘How’s your day?’ and really wanting to know the answer and build a conversation around it.”

She put her glasses back on and nodded very slowly as if trying to grasp the niggly edges of what I’d said. I knew exactly how she felt, unexpected changes were far harder to accept than the ones planned and executed. And when those changes don’t happen to you, they are mostly impossible to grasp.

The sun was in its waning phase behind us. The clouds out over Hawk Channel were starting to turn a light pink that was deepening by the minute. The server removed the plates with the obligatory “Anything else?” We agreed to not go beyond the two beers without saying a word. She climbed down from the stool like a child from a dining room chair, slid back into the pink flip flops, and we walked through the bar holding hands, without a word.

She would muse over this conversation for a few days. I could tell in the long periods of silence and the way she would look at the water off the house deck at the two mangrove islands that sit in the channel. Whatever was going on in her head stayed there, at least for now.

 

The Silly Season

Politics is Show Business For Ugly People – Solomon Short

It’s the silly season here in the Tropics. Actually it’s the silly season across much of the nation, it’s just that here it really is silly. This is my third year in the Tropics. On my first visit the entire country was trying to figure out which color they wanted to wear, red or blue? I commented then that Andy Griffith was running for School Board and that someone was running for a seat on the Mosquito Control Board. Just about every office here that serves the public is an elected position. Which, as a lifelong student of human folly, makes it interesting for me. I’m also glad that the election advertising knocks the annoying lifestyle ads of Big Pharma to the kerb for the duration.

When I was here last year there was a fellow running for local council office though I forget his name and what he was really running for. What I do remember is that his radio ads promised he wasn’t a “backroom” boy. As a savvy and veteran consumer of political speak I think he was inferring that he wasn’t beholden to a network of “old boys”. After he had made these assertions of good character, the background music would come up full. It was the same music used for the theme of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and ended just at the point where the big foot would come down and crush whatever was under it. I swear it’s true.

But I digress. The big story here is about the two guys running for the job of State Big Kahuna. The incumbent Kahuna is coming to the end of his first term, and he wants to keep the job. His competition used to be the Big Kahuna here. After one term he wanted to swim in a bigger pond so he ran for federal office as a Senator, lost handily, then emerged once again seeking the Big Kahuna job as an Independent candidate, only to decide he had a better chance running for the party that had previously been the competition. As a surprise he won the nomination! That’s the kind of thing that narrowly defines political desire, not caring about obtaining the right to represent but rather obtaining power for power’s sake.

But it gets sillier. Both Kahuna candidates are being dogged by controversy. An attack ad, which for a while ran in nearly every commercial break on TV (one figure said it aired over 7000 times), targets the current Kahuna as having been involved in a scheme to defraud the Federal Medical system for over $600 million, and while testifying under oath invoked his right to not incriminate himself 75 times. It must be pointed out that he was never charged personally only the company he worked for as an executive, though when asked he wouldn’t identify his own signature on paperwork. The challenger is being attacked over his party hopping, previous record as Big Kahuna (his term started just before the economic collapse of 2008), that he supports same-sex marriage, and lifting a 52 year old economic embargo on a neighbouring Caribbean country. He faces just a tad of opposition from some conservative and minority groups.

The latest poll I saw had a 2 point spread between the two of them. Which is pretty much neck and neck when you consider the “margin of error” was 4 points. And that was after the last debate between the two of them, which degenerated into a serious form of political silly before it even began. There was a dispute over a small fan at the base of the challenger’s podium. The incumbent complained the fan broke the jointly accepted “rules” of the debate which contained a hand written addendum prohibiting the fan. The incumbent Kahuna refused to come out to start the debate.

A fan. It’s the Tropics. Why didn’t the incumbent Kahuna have one? Seriously! What sort of childlike foolishness is this? It’s beyond sad, it’s silly to the maxx. But that’s the point isn’t it?

In the mind of the voter there is no longer the expectation of electing a statesman and not a salesman. That we find ourselves offered up a choice between two bad choices means all we will ever have is bad choices. Jerry Garcia once said that “Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil”. Back when I was meaningfully employed I met and conversed with a lot of rational and intelligent people. Then they put on their political hats and all bets were off, the darndest things came out of their mouths.

There is a word that’s rarely mentioned outright in political advertising and media coverage, yet it’s the one thing that it’s really all about. Hypocrisy. It’s the emotional and intellectual measuring pole, even though it’s practically subconscious as we read, watch, listen, and evaluate. And yet it’s the one point that all the attack ads seek to succeed at proving. It’s how we respond to every story and commentary. We are looking for, and expecting signs of half-truths and deceptions. Every attack ad puts forth a “gotcha” accusation and they’re apparently quite useful. We swallow it whole, or in my case spit it up. Can’t stand the things, or those that use them.

The hypocrisy is in pointing out that something is gospel truth, when it can be an out of context fact. But don’t ever talk about issues, heaven forbid you say you actually want to accomplish something! Back home there is a major party who uses them to create a great deal of fear around other political parties. They don’t just run them during our own silly season, but year round, trying to keep the electorate in a constant state of concern. Or so they think. You see they’ve run them so often everyone tunes them out. Just like those ads for “Big Pharma”, walk-in bathtubs, and the Trivago guy.

Here in the Tropics I find the hypocrisy is part of the process. There are so many candidates who have been formally accused or convicted of fraud, corruption, and influence peddling that one night after watching so many of these ads, I asked myself if having been accused or convicted was actually a prerequisite to being a candidate? As if the question was on the official form, along with the questions on citizenship and where you live? Except maybe for the current guy that’s running for Mosquito Control Board. He’s trying to convince voters that he’s uniquely qualified because of his profession as an accountant. I think he’s pretty clean, though I would have thought trumpeting some knowledge of mosquitos might be a better approach.

And knowing something about the job never seems to be an issue, just your personal character and credibility. Back home I have this problem in spades. My own federal rep, a Member of Parliament, has his face and party affiliation platered on the sides of two mid-size SUV’s that he and his family drive around. He was driving these things before he was even chosen as a candidate! They show up at events, drive them in parades, and around town. To me this speaks more to his desire to be a recognized salesman and not a quality statesman. As if behaving like a real estate agent uniquely qualifies him to represent me and my family in an honourable and effective way, the way his predecessor did. Without the clown cars. To me as a voter and a thinking human being, such things matter.

As a much younger man, in an age when the sun was steam powered, we had a political group at home called the Rhinoceros Party. They dressed in outrageous costumes, made outrageous promises, and generally held that if you were going to send a clown to Parliament you should send someone who actually says they’re a clown. They disbanded when one of them reportedly received enough votes it actually seemed feasible they might win an elected seat. I think they got frightened at the prospect that voters were devolving intellectually, and they were seeking any option other than what they were getting. Even if it meant having a self-professed clown holding office.

What does all this have to do with travelling? It doesn’t matter where I’ve gone in the world the same issues, choices, and personalities have all essentially been the same, just speaking a different language. So are the voices and misrepresented facts in the advertising. I also discovered a growing vocal call that “None Of The Above” be considered a valid ballot choice.

From my deck chair here in the Tropics it’s all the silliness that’s growing worrisome, both for the people here and at home. Which brings me back to the guy with the Monty Python music…

This is not the blog I had intended for this week

This is not the blog I had intended for this week. It’s a world away from the tongue-in-cheek look at Tropical politics during the silly season. Instead recent events at home weigh on me.

Some parts of the media proclaim “Canada has lost its innocence”. Over a 33 year career in media I have heard that more than once. Usually it involved nutbars with guns. When it comes to the events of Monday and Wednesday all it did was result in the loss of a generation’s self delusion. That delusion being one built around pious righteousness that nobody would attack Canada, we’re too nice.

Canada is nice, and peaceful, and civilized. And guess what? People who are none of those things violently hate us for it. That’s right, violently hate. Ugly word isn’t it? It takes a lot of energy to hate one person, never mind an entire country who would rather sit down over a cup of tea and amiably chat about everything under the sun (especially a kids game played on ice), rather than plot how to destroy an entire race of people and their inclusive nature.

When it comes to assertions that Canada has lost its innocence I’m pretty sure they don’t know a great deal of our history. The murder of Louis Riel and the NorthWest Rebellion, the Vancouver Post Office riot of 1935, the country’s experience in the First and Second World Wars, or the invocation of the War Measures Act in 1970 after homegrown terrorist kidnappings and bombings. A search of Canadian history shows many instances of our having lost our “innocence” long before the events of the past few days.

That it was a huge wakeup for the country is without doubt. That it wiped the slightly smug arrogance of untouchability off our faces is a sure thing. So is the loss of a collective delusion that a generation of relative internal peace could last forever. And to me it’s not a bad thing because it opens up the discussion of what it’s going to mean to us in the coming months.

The people who hate us aren’t going to win our conversion. They aren’t going be able to frighten us. They might occasionally take a shot at us and some people will get hurt. But they can’t defeat who we are as a collective nation of people who spend a lot of time loving and caring for each other. It would never occur to us to spend our lives cowering in caves and desert tents using only ignorant hatred to sustain our reason to live. In Canada we use our lives to forward the purposes of civility, reason, and knowledge.

Let’s keep some published figures in mind. The authorities have revoked and cancelled the passports of 90 people. I suspect there will be more, but that’s an aside. Conservatively estimate that at least three times that number are high on the watch list, and round it off to around 400 people. In a nation of 33 million people the reality is that an overwhelmingly larger number of us love and respect each other than wish harm on strangers. It’s why I’ll not be frightened or cower indoors. If I was at home, I would be out at the pub around the corner, enjoying the company of my neighbours and friends over a burger and a beer.

However, we must also be aware that there are people out there who wish us harm, large scale and small. We must be vigilant to the quiet and withdrawn and we must learn to talk with them, and engage them in a conversation. The individuals who committed the soldier murders this past week were “radicalized”. Perhaps, but somewhere along the way they passed through many hands in officialdom that might have taken a moment to listen to the underlying issues, the real personal ones of alienation and isolation. It wasn’t until they started acting out that anyone paid attention with police visits and revocation of passports. They became tools of extremism because it was the only way they had a voice to be heard.

We must also be cautious of the loud and grandiose, whose particular firebrand rhetoric speaks of hate and exclusion. That one thing is better, and the other lesser. In Canada we’re pretty attuned to these folks, but rarely do we engage in shutting them up by declaring them offensive to our educated intelligence.

Personally I am against any form of extremism, be it practiced in the name of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, or any political stripe. The methods of extremism are familiar and somewhat frightening to anyone who has experienced them before, in childhood. By the common nature of the world they are just a common street corner bully! And for most of us, we outgrow our fear of them.

Canada didn’t lose its innocence this week. We are far too mature a country for that. We just awoke from a slumber to realize yet another barbarous bully needs to be stared down and educated, perhaps by force that we like to be left in peace.

A CANADIAN STORY

Fifty seven years ago last week a tall, dark haired Englishman with a ginger mustache stepped off a DC-6 in Vancouver from Chicago via Seattle. He hailed a cab outside an airport building that was vaguely art deco, and was taken downtown to his new place of residence. The Barclay Manor was a boarding house then and still exists in some form today. On the way he crossed over the new Oak Street Bridge where the colorful bunting was still flying after its official opening a few days earlier. “What a wonderful people these Canadian’s are,” he thought to himself, “to roll out all this color just to welcome me.”  It was typical of his English humour, he was also quite tired.

His journey started a few days earlier on the northwest coast of England, where the stormy winter winds howl down off the Irish Sea and would steal your soul if you weren’t dressed and prepared for it. He had left behind his wife and newborn son, though they would follow in the September, to come to Canada with big hopes for a prosperous and comfortable life.

The journey to the West Coast of Canada was mostly made in the blind, and not just a little of that was blind faith. After all, the stories of your in-laws who had a few years earlier been out here only once for a short period, and the cheerful propaganda of the Government immigration brochures and films depicting life and opportunities, can only give so much assurance that what you assume from the facts presented are the truths of what you will actually find.

He and his wife had grown up in a seaside resort town, the kind of place where everybody in town is trying to separate the tourist from their money. The “season” was short and the winter was long. It wasn’t easy to put anything over on either him or his wife. When you grow up in a “Carny” town you learn the language of mis-direction, propaganda, and you didn’t need a degree from a business school to understand how the money cycle worked. Neither he nor his wife worked in the trade of the town. He had an aptitude for circuits and logic and electrons, she made candy and was a hairdresser.

The economic and political circumstances didn’t favour the kind of life they really wanted, so they became part of the European “brain drain” and joined the exodus to the various far shores of the old Empire.

They thought carefully about where they could go. America was only briefly on the table, though with his skills and experience he would most certainly have been snapped up by one of the major electronics firms. They had a newborn son and the military draft was still in place. National Service in the RAF had been two years of his life teaching him radar operations and maintenance, and came with an all-expenses paid trip to Malaya during a Communist uprising sometimes called “The Malayan Emergency”. He was proud of his time in Service, but they would both prefer to raise their children in a place that wasn’t prone to military adventurism.

So after all the consideration it came down to Canada, but where in Canada? It had to be by the water. Growing up by the sea neither of them could see a life without it being close by. And they decided that mountains would be nice. So they settled on Vancouver and they made their successful applications.

They drew up a plan. He would go out first and find work and then send for them. If he couldn’t find work in Vancouver, he would go North and find work in the mines, for they were always hiring those willing to work hard. In the end he found work quickly at the regional offices of the Dutch company Philip’s Electronics as a maintenance technician. The offices near the corner of Grandview and Boundary Roads, was where he was a year later when everyone in the office heard the metal scream as the Second Narrows Bridge collapsed, dumping seventy nine construction workers into the waters of Burrard Inlet and killing eighteen. It was one of those moments in history that everyone in the city shared. They would freely tell you where they were and what they were doing when they heard the banshee screech of failing metal.

The small family moved through a series of rental basements and houses as they saved for a house of their own. They were a modestly prosperous working class family of their time. He was gaining attention and respect for his quality of work and work ethic.

In 1960 he was hired as a transmitter maintenance technician for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. His new workplace would be a building resembling a park ranger station/chateau that sat alongside a rough and only partially paved road, three quarters up the side of Mt. Seymour. Beside the building was a huge transmission tower that was visible with the naked eye from most anywhere in town. They also welcomed a second son. And they bought a small house in North Vancouver to reduce the commute, and to save money on bridge tolls. North Vancouver was affordable to working class folks. Times change.

In 1961, the third son came along keeping her busy with diapers and feedings. It was the way things were done. It was neither questioned, nor thought different. Those kinds of changes in the social structure of Canada were still a way off. She taught them to read, and draw, and indulge the imagination. She taught them their address and phone number, and to never talk to strangers or open the door to anyone. Bad World 101 for 1960’s kids. And there was always love from the whole family. The children never doubted, it was never said, but it was always felt.

In the early 60’s family started to come over. Drawn by both concern, and love, the immigration boom of the time was helped along by her parents, and his mother. Then her sister and a friend, who would become a most loved Aunt, came through on their way to check out Australia but never left Vancouver. They too got jobs, and prospered in a working class way. But in Canada working class meant something totally different than where they had come from. They discovered the working class didn’t have the same social barriers. If you were competent, able, and willing you had chances for advancement and increased opportunities both economic and social. On the edge of the wilderness there isn’t room for rigid stratification. When there’s work to get done everybody knows how to drive the truck and where it needs to go, and why.

Vancouver had a different feel to them all. There is a freedom of thought, action, and revealed intent here than there was back “home”. The lives they were building, modest success upon modest success, was building to the realization that this was now home, and the place from whence they came and the friends and loved one’s still there, would always live gratefully in their hearts, but their hearts were rooted here. They all became Canadian Citizens as soon as they had the opportunity.

They refused to live in any of the city’s “enclaves”. Other immigrants had chosen to live in close proximity to other similar immigrants. They formed Vancouver’s “neighbourhoods”. The young family chose to spread their social wings in more diverse communities. In 1967 they moved to a new street, in a new neighbourhood on the side of Mt Seymour. It was so new the street was dirt, there were neither curbs nor sidewalks, but the power lines were underground and the water and sewer lines were new. The curbs would come later. When they moved they had no idea what a cultural milieu it would be, or that the greater area was more diverse than they had imagined.  Germans, Swedes, South Africans, Englishmen, most of the United Nations, and even some folks from Saskatchewan, all mingled pretty freely without any real tensions of their cultural pasts. Mostly they shared a quiet and peaceful place and future, and they did it without any real or conscious thought of doing otherwise.

It didn’t mean holiday observances might not have been different from house to house, that added to the children’s experiences of differences and diversities, nor did it stop the children from playing hockey in the street. Their children were the greatest gift they had been given, and this place they had chosen to live was giving the children an even greater gift, tolerance and respect.

Life goes on. The people in this story have mostly passed on. Only the woman who became “a most loved Aunt” remains. The children all stay in touch and live close enough to each other that getting together for Sunday breakfast is still the family tradition. One passed down from the parents that always wanted to share not just their wealth of experience, but also teaching by example, that you may not agree but you should always be civil and respectful.

This is just one Canadian Story. Today is the 147^th Birthday celebrating what is the most unique real time social experiment in human history. My parents and family chose to be a part of it. They became modestly successful in their chosen professions. In 1969 my mother returned to the workforce as a sales clerk at Woodward’s department store in Park Royal. At the time it was more out of a need to pay for the braces that my brothers needed than any great political or social statement. She continued to work long after the braces she paid for put the orthodontist’s kids through college.

My mother’s work helped my parent’s provide greater opportunities for us. She paid for our week long coach tour though Europe, The Benelux Countries, five countries in seven days. I’ve spoken of it before. Following that trip I returned to school and the grade 8 study of the Renaissance. Thanks to my parents, and my mother’s job to be specific, I actually had an idea of what the heck it all meant and where it happened.

I could go on at length with this but I won’t. I think you get the idea. Tonight when the sun begins to set on this day of national celebration and the parties and fireworks kick off, as birthday 147 becomes history, I will have a beer, bake a potato, grill a steak and serve it up with a big green salad. And I will spend some time thinking of the immigrant experiences of my family.

While ours was unique to us, the detail specific to us, it has been my experience through life that the reasons why they, and all the folks from the other nations came, and the gratitude they had for being accepted is a mostly Universal feeling for those who chose to come and prosper here. And among those who continue to do so.

In the end it didn’t matter where they came from, only that they lived here. Their legacy as immigrants rests with my brothers and I who are modestly prosperous, healthy, and happy. It’s what every parent wants for their children no matter where they come from. It’s the only thing that any society really wants for itself. In Canada it actually gets to happen, but quietly and peacefully.