TubaOrNotTuba

My first visit to a zoo took place a very long time ago. How young was I? I was still a Cub Scout and our group was taken on a tour of a wildlife sanctuary. A very minimal sort of view of a zoo. What I remember from that day was that the largest animal on site was a black bear. Actually a couple of them. In an enclosure. These animals were very used to humans because we were allowed to feed them. Peanuts still in the shell. And what I took away from that was that even animals have their own way of doing things. The bear would take in a peanut chew around a bit spit out the shell and swallow the good part. Probably like we would do if we were a little more wild. No BBQ sauce or salt for these animals. I have no idea what they ate when there were no tourists in front of them. That was not part of the trip although, probably should have been. Feeding berries to a bear might have been fun. Even as keen as we were being young boys we lost interest quickly. One way of controlling the number of peanuts eaten by a bear in a single day. And then we went on to other things like checking out the porcupines or the weasels. As I said this was a very minor sort of zoo. It still exists I think as part of a provincial sanctuary. I doubt that any of the original animals are still around. And since I will not be returning I will have to go with my memories. To a young boy a black bear can seem rather large although these are probably not much more then Cubs size. No threats were made. Not to the bears and not to the boys. Consider it a successful visit on both accounts. And I have no idea who provided the peanuts.

Time to look back on yesterday. After sleeping well I have had the chance to analyze the national election. Some winners and some losers. A lot of money put back into the economy. Some questions about what comes next. All in all, I am relieved. We have a new Prime Minister who is the same person as the day before. Locally same political party captured all the seats in our area. Sure they replaced the people but the idea is still there. Our government is not on the point of collapse and their dollar is still worth something close to a dollar. I am relieved. What comes next is the inevitable shake up for the political parties. After you spend millions and millions of dollars your members have expectations. In many cases they have not been met. We now go into a long summer of political maintenance. Trying to get some people back into the positions of real power. I had my usual pleasure of listening to numbers that really meant very little. My big take away is that the map has some new names on it. Reflecting changes in population centres. We always need new maps right? For those who were tasked with reporting and analysis, they did well no real moments of collapse. All fitted nicely into a four hour period ending a big night. That magical moment where the government announces which party will be in power went by with all the noise of clouds on a summer day. I am glad in retrospect that no candidate wasted his or her time coming to visit. My voice is backed by one vote and as the numbers grow one is inconsequential. There is one question remaining on the table. In theory we now have a minority government and we have had those before. I imagine that we will return to the polls within a year.

I am fascinated by the concept of curation. That is probably too strong a term. I am curious about the things I have created and then left behind. I have tens of thousands of photographs. Any one of those could be improved by spending some time with the photo editing suite. I have tens of thousands of pages of content that I have written. Any one of those could deal with some careful editing. I have tens of thousands of hours of musical production. Solo and with others. You can probably see where I’m going with this. Too many efforts are done in the context of one and done. If I was more focused on my own creations I would want to make them better. The reality is that I do not. I have to weigh on one hand the value of things I have already created and on the other the time available to create new content. And like most people I am lazy. I’m quite happy with the original effort fully aware that any given instance could be improved. In school we were told to do a draft of a text and then to add the the touches needed I am not as good student as I should be. In photography back in the day any given subject was unlikely to merit a reshoot put that down to the cost of materials and a lack of focus. No pun intended. There are things that I could do with photos and texts and musical efforts to improve the finished content. I probably never will. I have been listening to interviews with others when they try to describe their own creative techniques and this seems to be a generalized state of affairs. We enjoy the original moment of creation but when it comes time to edit and fix we tend to set it aside for a better moment. I believe that our whole educational system has this bias. And I am not the one who will change that system. I remain content that I am still creating new content that others may never see. A good analogy would be the hours spent by any musician in a practice studio. We all know what better means. However we lack the willingness to continue seeking that better.

So many memories. I am of the age where I have embrace many and each one comes with a clear image. Either in my mind or in a photo album. The photo album was and is the best chance we have to remember what happened before. I come to this with a particular background. My mother had two cameras. A pair of brownie Hawkeye cameras that she had purchased before I was ever born. I was given one of them when I was very young. I cannot say that I made much use of it because the necessary film and processing costs far exceeded my allowance. By the time I arrived at university I had already learned the rudiments of working in a dark room. That interest and knowledge carried me through the next two decades. It is only because of that background that I can look at an old photo album and describe to you the process involved. By 1950 some local photo studios had processing machines. All the photos arrived in very well conceived stop snapshot albums. I think some of them are still in my parents possession. I came along when I could go to a local box store purchase the materials I needed to work in the darkroom go back and spend countless hours transferring from raw film to photos you get to hold in your hand. I believed that I had the key to the knowledge of the world. My sense of pride diminished somewhat when my grandmother explained that she also had done darkroom work a full two generations before my birth. For all of you modern youngsters who think that everything comes out of a digital file, believe me, things were not always so simple.

I have not driven a car very much. Through my whole life. I did the Mandatory education in a Driver’s Ed car and I did use my father’s vehicle to go up and down the local streets. But for all of that I depend on others. In the final years of high school my buddy had a car. A small car. A blue car. One with a hole in the roof. Fine German engineering. Built by Volkswagen and marketed as the Beetle or the Bug or both. What set this car apart from other cars was the heating system. I do not think we ever found the control to turn on the heat. And since we lived in a place where winter went on for many many months we learn to freeze. One of the biggest trips we would make was up the highway. As I remember, 17 miles, to a local arena where rock bands would play. And after each concert we would drive home. Waiting to be warm again. I had an important job. I was tasked with keeping the frost off the windows. Allowing the driver to see enough of the road ahead should get us from here to there. This was not the kind of comfort that we now enjoy. The idea of a heated steering wheel was decades ahead. We were tough. That hole in the roof known as a sunroof I think was designed as an escape hatch. There was a program on TV about soldiers in the desert war in small vehicles that had a hole in the roof. The lookout could stick his head out and seek enemy vehicles. And so that is what we did anytime the wind dropped to a point were freezing was not instant. I have no idea what happened to that car. As I said it was small and blue and lacked even the most rudimentary of heating. Fine engineering if you live in the desert I guess. But we didn’t. I think that the car was purchased to replace an earlier vehicle which had been crushed by a snow plow. I saw that instance. The roads were icy and we bumped into the Driver’s Ed car driver. Two cars totalled. Such other things we remember a lifetime later. Being cold and almost being killed.

Back when I was still employed our company had a slogan. We were told that learning was a lifetime activity. And I concur. With that in mind I have been watching content that will help me to learn about things that were until now mysteries. At the basis of everything there is food. I come from a culture where bread is important. I have made bread in different ways with different recipes and with very different goals. So today I came across a video that talked about how bread was made just over a century ago. In England. At the time when industry got into the game. I learned a lot of things that I had never considered. I have made bread one loaf at a time. The company in this video made several 100 loaves a day. By hand. In a coal-fired oven. And because everything in industry revolves around cost I learned that sometimes you cut corners. You employ ingredients that are suspect. I had never considered the idea of adulterating flour with chalk. But others did. I learned that offering loaves that were too small upset the clients so probably the only thing that was closely regulated was making sure that the loaves were as large as listed. I also learned that when you do not have machines you do things by hand. Or by foot. In this case they would mix the flour using their bare feet. Night after night because the bakery tended to be open after sundown to reduce the ambient temperature. I learned that people like their white bread to be white and that there are minerals that you can add to your flower that increase the illusion that’s your bread is of the proper colour. There was more but I have no reason to make this into a script. Just take it from me that we are better fed now then we used to be. My bread is probably fit to eat.

I now believe that winter is at an end. High on the list of things to get done is the swapping of the tires. This is something that we could do at home given that we have two complete sets but decision was made many years ago to support the local economy. Going to the garage at the corner and getting the tires swapped affirms our belief that they are an important institution. If we were to never go there then we will be at a bad place if we ever needed their expert assistance. I am not a mechanic. Just a thought but I could probably seriously damage the car if I was to head out there and play with my tools. I am sure that many feel the same way. But there are others who have this mistaken belief that they know best no matter what the situation. That probably works well if you never drive on a public road. It is not that long ago that the car was introduced to the province. The history is out there. And like with any new technology very few people became involved in the care and feeding of the car. Locally we have a garage that remembers in the historical sense the days of the first cars in the area. It is a family garage that has moved from father to son to grandson. In fact they started their business around the same time that my grand father was a practicing blacksmith. Putting wagons back together and fixing broken wheels. There has been an obvious evolution. But the basic fundamentals are still there. Using the right tool for the job was as important to my grand father as it is to my local mechanic. Both of them understood that a hammer had a purpose. The range of tools has increased but the mechanics underneath are related. Knowing that advanced knowledge allows for solutions to problems is what keeps me from wanting to repair my own car. Promised flying cars a long time ago. They are not yet available but when they are I will still abstain from wanting to repair the chariot. I will rely on the wisdom of those who have put their lives into making things work for others. It is a mindset with value.

A lot of changes took place in the century before my birth. That means that I was not a witness but I lived with the technology advances. And because people become accustomed to technology they take shortcuts. Ones that involve safety. Our home had a fuse box with those round screw in fuses that would burn out in case of something going wrong. Of course none of us understood the why so if a fuse burned out we went to her pants pocket and pulled out a penny. Turns out that a penny does a proper job of bridging a burnt out fuse. The problem goes away and to those on site it all seems normal again. I lived in the period where asbestos was a common building material. We put the stuff on our roofs and all the walls of our home another floors and anytime insulation was needed we could always find a bag a fibers. No idea of what was going to happen going forward. In fact I can remember picking up broken asbestos shingles and cracking them in half because to a 10 year old boy they seem like a cheap substitute for a knife. Go figure. We heated our homes in part with oil and putting in proper pipes seemed like overkill so we had a funny drip system where a gallon of fuel oil simply dripped away into the pan below and made it to the stove. Not something you can do anymore I imagine. Getting back to electricity plugs coming from the companies sometimes had a third prong. We did not know why and so faced with a plug that only had two holds we remove that third problem it worked and the problem was solved. Actually I have seen someone jury rig an automobile to drip fuel into the carburetor when the pump stopped working. Nothing exploded but it certainly could have. I can probably find other examples but this serves as a starting point. A reminder that in my day we lived dangerously.

Have you ever lived in a place that seemed too good to be true? I had gone through five years of residence life and believe me we did not live in fancy accommodations. But I liked it. And when it came time to leave university and get a real job I was ill equipped for the transition. And so I went back to another school. In this case a government training course. Unlike the academic sector our government has a lot of money to make things right. And so I moved into a residence with about 400 private rooms. With an attached centre for our health. Including a gymnasium and staff and a new olympic size swimming pool. But it gets better. I had quite enjoyed the meals in university. This institution was there to better the training of government employees. The meals were superb. To tell someone that you had fresh trout on your supper plate seemed almost otherworldly after five years of the hotline. Unlimited beverages and desserts although I had learned by that point the gorging on desserts was not a way to stay in good condition, so I did not. However the dining hall had wonderful wood furnishings and the table surface was covered in copper. A decision made by the architect obviously. I was there for the better part of a year. I’m not going to bore you with what I learned but I was there also to be better equipped to live in an adult world. Believe me when you live with other students including the football team your table manners become primitive. Here we were being groomed to live among the class of people who actually live in the world of the government. It must have cost a fortune to keep that institute open because at the first opportunity or with the change of government the site was sold to the private sector. Things are still there but I believe that the cost of housing bureaucrats has risen substantially. Put it down to better budgets. And our private rooms with private baths and our own TV was obviously a notch above what I had given to accept while in college. Yes I would go back if given the occasion but I would call with a different set of goals.

I would like to offer my apologies to anyone who has ever eaten food that I have prepared. I realize that I am clueless about spices. Sure I read the recipes and I have a basic vocabulary but I have no idea how to bring a bland meal to something exceptional. I blame in part my upbringing. I come from a long line of people who kept some salt and some black Pepper in the kitchen. And maybe some sugar. Yes I did realize that other people made meals that were excellent. However I was never told why. The term to trade spices is old and serves as a foundation for our world economies. I had thought this term was referencing transactional trading. Only. It turns out that over the centuries mankind has learned that the space that the other fellow has might make their own food taste better. And if you had a wide circle of friends you could end up with some kitchen productions that were extraordinary. Getting back to my own home the local store had those little jars of spices but because my parents did not bother to buy them there was no experimenting. And if you did not have those little jars of spices you could not become a trader at the local level. In retrospect it might have saved us some money but it’s certainly diminished the variety of flavors on our table. A video that I watched this afternoon had some important advice. First of all try different spices. And if your selection of spices beyond that salt sugar and pepper has been around for years, please throw most of it away and start over. Spices have a shelf life. Also try to keep some notes on what you do that pleases. Recipe books are convenient but hardly the answer to all questions. This subject is deep and I am not going to try and explain the world of food flavors in something this short. Rather take this as at decision of my part to try and improve my own knowledge of flavor.