TubaOrNotTuba

I had forgotten just how often I used to travel. Back in the days before children. Thanks to the Internet I can now watch videos created by others where they take the time to document their trips. I avoided air travel for years. Other than that first trip I made to get to university after the rail system went on the general strike. Both before and after that particular trip I tended to be a fervent user of the National Rail system. It worked at a price point that I could afford. I no longer have the dates of travel but it seems that I made the trip from eastern Canada to Toronto more than 30 times. Given the train cars used then have been in service for years and some still are. I can look at the travels done by others now and say that my experience was probably similar. After all when you have seen 1000 trees all the others look the same. Travel by rail was relatively comfortable. As long as you dressed warmly. These rail curves were heated by steam and the system often just didn’t work. Believe me crossing Quebec in the middle of a snowstorm meant that you tried to keep from moving. Keeping the little bit of heat you had in your coat, in yur coat. But it never went to extremes. After all some frost on the window was just part of the experience. Because I was a budget traveler I did not frequent the diner car. Maybe to buy a sandwich but usually I brought my own food and beverages with me. I learned, early on, that a standard stubby beer bottle would go down the toilet and out under the tracks property. Imagine how embarrassing it would be to lug those empties with me as I left the train. But that was my travel. I have not done the trips in a long time but I still remember them as a rite of passage. Getting from here to there on a minimal budget.

As a student we all believe ourselves to be much better in math then we actually tend to be. I went to a school with well over 1000 students in the halls at any one time. We believed that we were unlike anyone else around us. And there was mathematical proof. All you had to do was to look at the rows of book lockers each with their own combination lock. We were sure that we had the only one with our combination. The odds are good in a population size like that where each lock is issued to a single person that I believe was based in fact. None of us understood how mathematical numbers really work or else we would not have still been in high school. Anyhow our locks were an important part of our identity in a very abstract manner. If you kept your combination secret then the odds of your math book being stolen remained minimal. We were so sure that our individual lock was unlike any other that we actually tried to keep them from year to year. That was the reality. In a school of my size there were a definite number of issued locks but we were unaware of how many more were kept in shipping cartons in the back of the main office. The only reason the I learned about this was that my lock was destroyed accidentally. Not in the way you imagine. It was not cut away by the janitor using giant tools. Rather when our family went on vacation towing a small tent trailer my lock was repurposed to keep the trailer with us. A long train. And that chain drag on the ground. After a week or so of travel my lock had a visible whole in the base. A cheap metal case grounded down by the ground. And when I returned to school a couple of months later and went to the office to find out how difficult it would be to receive a new lock I was told to put my dollar bill on the desktop and take a box of locks and find the one that I liked best. The school had no worries about running out of locks. I no longer have that lock nor do I have its replacement. Locks are just an incidental in school. Leave the lock there past the end of June and it will be removed for good.

From what I have read there have been a lot of small ships built in this part of the world. Going back over centuries now. We have very few sailing vessels left in our harbours but they’re out there. When I first started paying attention half a lifetime ago I was aware that schooner was a work of art and that the number of people who had the ability to build one was less each year. With that in mind on each occasion that I have been at proximity to a sailing ship I have gone to look. Now I understand that one is being rebuilt in Nova Scotia right now. A vessel that I actually visited several decades ago. Sailing ships require maintenance and in the case of this vessel it had fallen on hard times. But a number of local people took things in hand and have raised the funds to rebuild their ship. Because with all that effort it is truly theirs. Not something you order from a catalog. I’m going to have to make a decision. When they re-launch that ship about two months from now will I be there to watch. We can do it. We know the where and the when and the RV will give us a place to sleep while we wait. Just need to be ready. This is the sort of thing that may not happen again in my lifetime. Unlike many other attractions launching a ship qualifies as an occasion. As long as I stand clear of the edge of the wharf I should be OK. I will let you know how this plan progress is. Besides, I have already been on board that same vessel. It should seem oddly familiar. At least I won’t have to ask for directions on where to find the stem or the stern. And maybe I can get a good shirt to wear going forward. Something that marks the date and the place and makes it into a historical event.

Looking at the calendar I realized that I have been retired for more than a decade. Where does the time go? Having all those extra hours to my credit did not allow me to change the world. Nor did I expect it to. When I attended the seminar that explained to me how being retired was going to change my life I came away with one sentence. Every day is now going to be Saturday. I had no great attachment to Saturday but I expected it to be pleasant. And looking back it has been. It also allows me to look at what it was like to transition from working to not working. Going beyond that final afternoon when I picked up my small box of belongings and headed for the bus stop I had already been in preparation for some time. That I even had the forplanning to get a box to hold my coffee cup shows that I had this in control. And on the bus people do not notice. In fact I think that it was only the clerk at my local coffee shop who clued in that I was about to do something very different with my life. The question was asked and I gave one of those explanations that is used in a social situation. Yes I’m going to retire this weekend and yes I have mapped out the rest of my life and yes I’m looking forward to it. Not much else you can say. The day that I actually finished work was uneventful. The office was still on summer hours and so by Friday the number of people still at their desks was down too a skeleton crew. I can only wonder what that situation is like for someone who actually has responsibility for what goes on in their office. How do they plan ahead for the moment when they stop answering the telephone and hand in their dorky. Something you only do once. If you were to ask do I miss answering the phone all the time, the answer is clear I do not miss it at all. Very few of my calls were really important. I gave support to others who get stressed over the tiny things. And if I was asked would I want to do life over again? Hardly. My efforts were hardly missed. In fact I remember talking to someone months after my retirement and they were unaware that I had left the building.

I may have mentioned several times that we are in the middle of a federal election. With that comes several critical things that you must do as a citizen. Someone mentioned that political campaign is actually a job interview although they fail to point out who is actually being interviewed. Remember those candidates want you to think they are the greatest thing since sliced bread. They go to great lengths to tell you how they know the solution to all problems. Probably they do not. Ask yourself if the candidates have ever had a real job before. No laughter here because we have people who have been on the sleeve as they say for decades. If someone says that he knows all the answers to the housing problems ask what he was doing ten years ago. You may notice that what he said then and what he says now are not equal. Anyhow today our voting cards came in the mail. Proof that our names are on a list somewheres. With that card I should be able to avoid giving proof of who I am. No DNA samples required. No need to find someone who knew my grandfather. Again I am not joking. People take the idea of voting to mean those that live here as a serious concept. And yes I qualify. When they finally get to the ballot box and find someone that can read the ballot for me I will be allowed to make a mark. And then I will go home and wait to see who I can blame for the next few years of discomfort. Remember if politicians did a wonderful job we would keep them around. And probably get a shirt with their name on it. Or their name on your wrist although I feel that is a step too far. But two weeks from now I will go over to the local centre and I will mark my choice. It will change very little in the reality of the situation but it is all that we have. Remember we have already tried the idea of having a king. See where that got us.

Look around you. Outside I mean. How much do you know about your own backyard? I cannot speak for every place I’ve lived put in a couple of them I spent enough time there to get a sense of what had come before. When we built our first house we had to bring our own dirt with us. The lot was essentially sitting on a rock. In terms of history here in Canada that means that when you go back a couple of centuries that was it. A rock. At my current location the ground is a little more plastic. However local history tells me that before the current neighborhood there was not very much. I have found some old photographs that confirms my belief. There had not been a house on this piece of land before hours. Simply a lane going down to a lower field. I bring this up as I watched some of those wonderful documentaries out of England where they spend hours and hours trying to figure out where the castle went. Turns out they had a lot of castles over the years but because they were built by man and then subject to the whims of war, many have disappeared. My documentary, today is from a small village on the coast that was covered by sand. Rather quickly. I know how that works because I live close to sand dunes and they move all the time. But for those trying to discover the remains of a former townsite they have to move carefully. Any place that was covered over by sand is dangerous. Not only do the sands move but when you try to dig your efforts can fall in on top of you. Not ideal for research. I have only watched the first section of the program and I imagine that by the time it ends I will have a much better idea a place that I will probably never visit. But it allows me to be more reassured about my own conclusions of this place. We have no mountains locally. Just the ocean. Because someone before me had named the hill outside I can look around and imagine what they saw two centuries ago for the curious bump in a field. No elevation and as I look down hill from here I have to tell myself that the field below is a man made construct. Dugout by horse and plow within my own lifetime.

In my media feed there was a documentary dealing with plastics. Plastics as in fixing your body. Now I have not had a great deal of work done on me so put that thought aside however there have been a couple of times when somebody in a hospital has repaired damage. For me the first real motion by a doctor to fix a problem I did not know I had with when they decided to put my nose back in place. I had had an unfortunate contact between my face and the road. Nothing to see here but you could hear it because our nose is an integral part of our voice. There were tapes where I had dictated text and I had developed very bass tone. The surgery took care of that without leaving any real scars either physical or mental. Later I managed to slice open one of my fingers and the doctors simply tape the skin back into place and let nature do its thing. You can hardly see the scar. My final big moment was when a surgeon decided to replace a cornea. Essentially putting a new surface on my eyeball. Not much fun but at least it did not hurt and the replacement issue was the donation which has since worn out. If we’re lucky we outlive some of the work that is done. Now I doubt then I will have any other moments of note although we never really know. But at least if one of my children asks I can say that I am not completely original. That has to be worth something when you tell tales around the campfire. My grandfather went through most of his life with a fake eyeball. Something to do with working in the woods back in the days when that was a dangerous thing to do. I would love to know more about the story but he has been gone for a very long time and from what I remember it was not something that he talked about much around the supper table. Just another part of living.

A single consequence of getting older is that your view of the world around you changes. You start to recognize that time goes by very fast. You begin to realize that there are so many unkept promises in particular in the world of politics. Right now the country is in the middle of a campaign to change the top level of government. We do not have a president thankfully. And I have learned that you do not get many opportunities to hear the people who want to be in the leadership of your country once the election is over. Try not to be discomforted by the promises but have not yet been tested. Rather pay attention to promises that were made in the past and then ignored. Today I listened to a speech on the plans to combat crime nationally. To be fair I see very little example of crime where I live but I suppose that those in the middle of the large city have a different point of view. Our government over the centuries have spent a lot of energy in trying to make punishment proper to the offence. We no longer randomly execute. At least not to my knowledge. What I took away from today’s speech is that the number of crimes that can be actually punished is very small. We lived within a structure of laws that our leaders have constructed on our behalf. Representative democracy. And as any government or want to be government presents their platform they have to work with careful attention to what will actually fly. My take from the speech today is that there are no large changes coming short term. Rather those in the political class want the rest of us to be reassured. They have their eyes on the prize even before they have a chance to play the game. With that I will continue to be reassured that my life is not in grave danger generally. In other words my government is looking out for me. And remember what you hear during a political campaign may not actually reflect what happens going forward but at least it shows that those who want to be are thinking things through ahead of playing the game.

Add a guess people in this country have always understood that the automobile is a necessity. Going back a century ago a garage was founded up the road from here to do care for new cars made by Ford. Before my time but I understand that they were brought in by railroad train to a local crossing and lifted off so the new owner could take possession. I can even tell you about a home that was owned by an automobile dealer. The only one in the area. As a child I learned all sorts of interesting facts about cars that turned out later to be myths. One of my father’s friends owned a Studebaker and he explained that the glove compartment was designed to bake bread. I never saw him do it but that was the story. Although it was not the first car in our family I can remember going shopping for a new car. I was about three years old and my father and my uncle took me along holding my hands and lifting me over the wet places on the road. A very specific memory if you will. The car was red and white and we kept it for about 5 years until my father found something better. That was how it works with the car; you own it and then you get something newer and better. Right now we have a vehicle that will probably be considered as a trailbreaker. Or trailblazer. The car is a hybrid with a battery and a motor. Believe me such things were not even dreamed about when I was young. I say all this as I watch a video of some people driving a Model T through rough country in the West. What the narrator claims was the original sort of terrain used by these cars. Designed before the Jeep. I know. This is just a century ago. You can still find them in museums and I think that my old high school music teacher has one. There are old cars and then there are antique cars. Try not to confused too. One cost you a little bit of money and the other cost you a lot.

Do you have a heater on your desk. Not underneath where one would expect to find such a thing. On the desk surface. Specifically to keep your coffee cup warm. For many years my office was located in a repurposed school building. Rooms that were the size of a small home side by side with far too many desks crammed into the available space. Once they banished the student population it became the refuge of the secretarial class. And because I spent far too many hours going underneath those desks to analyze and fix electrical problem I noticed something that I found to be peculiar. Every desk had a small round heating plate where someone could keep their cup of coffee warm through the many hours spent answering the telephone. I am not going to talk about the relative efficiency of this method because my desk did not have one. I learned to enjoy cold coffee. But what I did figure out is that someone at some point had brought one to work and everybody else had to have one. Nobody can climb to the top when one person has something that everyone else wants. Instead their request would go over to purchasing and they would buy them, one at a time. Not for me to preach efficiency here. What I still wonder years later is if these small heating pads actually did the job. I never heard someone say that their coffee was too hot or too cold. And when every desk has a heating pad that probably was not an option. Strangely we have one here at home. An artifact of a former lifestyle. When I want a cup of hot coffee I know how to find the machine. And coffee does not stay warm for very long so I am left wondering why we have this small pad in a world where there is no need. Is this habit or purpose? I will continue to study this to see if I can determine the cause and effect.