TubaOrNotTuba

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.

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.