TubaOrNotTuba

In this neighbourhood there are few large man-made works. When you do not see large works you forget just how many there are in the world and for how long mankind has been altering his own environment. Today my lessons in civil engineering taught me about a large canal in France called le Canal du Midi. Used to join the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean. I admit, I had never considered this need. I was aware of the Strait of Gibraltar and I figured that met all the possible conditions of getting a boat from here to there. But in the good old days when they were kings they would control who passed through their territory. Control freaks one and all. Anyhow someone decided to construct a canal for shipping over a distance of a couple of 100 kilometres and through the mountains. A lot of work with a shovel? Certainly and an even larger amount of work to make sure that there was water in his new canal all year long. Invention of systems that had never been built before. I found the lecture very intriguing. I admit. I had never, not once, considered how you make a river cross the canal. Or vice versa. But here where engineers, in the middle of the 16th century, not only thinking about how to do it but actually getting out there with hundreds of people and picks and shovels. Even better their workmanship is still in use today. Hundreds of years later. In sharp contrast we barely make our local roads passable from one year to the next. Will they go to visit the site? That could be fun but not likely to happen and so I will file away my knowledge in case the question ever comes up at supper. Funny how that goes. Just a note. We have no canals locally. And the ocean always has water. Where you live effects what you build.

Those who can, do. I guess when you have a talent you figure out how to let others see what you are capable of. One field crossover that is always been interesting for me are those who can act and make music. I know, they are a multitude. I do remember the first movie star that gave me enough name recognition that I spotted her on a jukebox list. One of those machines found in a local restaurant where you flip through the pages chose your song dropped money into the slot and listen to what came out. I am unsure what movie I had seen her appear in but they can vividly remember sing the name Hayley Mills come up in the list of artists that were going to sing for me. And for everyone else in the restaurant, I guess. One of those moments that you can no longer duplicate because the old idea of buying your songs a coin at a time is from the distant past. I wonder where all those machines have gone. Later on during one of my first summer jobs I had the chance to fill a jukebox. With my records. Not songs I have performed you understand. Songs I had purchased. And so we went at it my friend and I with a fever. We filled all the record slots and wrote out the song titles by hand and turn the jukebox into something of value. And then the job came to a sudden end. Did I ever get my records back? Probably although I do not remember the mechanism. But I can tell you step by step how to turn a jukebox into something of value and that is a life skill. Did my records garner attention? I am unsure. This was in a roadside diner and I think that people coming in from filling their saddle tanks on the truck did not care about the jukebox.

Sometime in mid morning, I woke from a dream. Very vivid pin in it I was eating peanut butter with a tiny spoon from a jar. Micro dosing I guess. To be fair I’m not given to eating peanut butter. No no analogy. Just no reason to do so. We had a dog that would not eat the stuff either so it does cross great leaps in biology. The rest of the family does enjoy the product. I know this because full jars come into the house and then go out empty. Since peanut butter doesn’t evaporate somebody is getting it into the system. It is a strange product. So much work involved. Go ahead, take a bag of peanuts and try turning them interfaced. Labour intensive. There was a time, back before allergies, when kids ate peanut butter in sandwiches. In school. After school. While watching cartoons on TV. A very popular product. I have no idea why I was dreaming about this but as I said it was all very vivid. The spoon was small with an elaborately carved handle top. A perfect thing for a child to hold on to. I checked in the kitchen and we do not own such a thing but I will not try to say it never happened. Not the spoon. Not the dream. There is probably a jar of peanut butter somewhere in the house. Crunchy or smooth? No idea. Give my next dream I will keep an eye out for glasses. Milk glasses. Like in the good old days when that’s how we got cool looking milk glasses by buying peanut butter. And someone just passed me a note saying that other people in the house eat peanut butter with bananas. As a reminder that we have bananas that must be eaten before they turn into bread.

I remember when the answer to many questions could be found in a comic book. The ones that come in at 12 cents and ended up in stacks and boxes under all of my friends beds. If you were willing to spend some time rooting around you could learn a lot. One series that should have received more attention were the classics where we learned about real things and real places in real people. This afternoon I have been trying to wrap my head around something known as the Spanish Civil War which seems to have caused a lot of stir in Europe back before the Second World War. Same players in many cases. Now, we depend a lot on the team names to figure out what is going on and so that was the approach I used while learning about this conflict. I am actually more confused than ever because the good guys the bad guys did not use the same names we would have today. What I took away from it was that this war was a way of resolving many older conflicts while wrapped in flags. And that the eventual winner hung on to his flag for another 4 decades also makes it hard to figure out what they were actually doing. I had grown up believing that a war would last for three or four years, not 30 or 40. My bad. The lessons were there in history books or those comics. I have not seen a classic comic in decades. They must still exist because people did not throw such things away. Somewhere under a bed there are still boxes filled with the jewels of history. Not at my house. My children never got into that little rabbit hole. At least, as far as I know. I must ask them where they learned their versions of world history. Maybe, like me they simply moved on and went straight to the Internet rather than making micro payments of $0.12 a week or month. In passing that was a reasonable price for people who got their salary by collecting empty pop bottles. A dollar went a long way.

When you travel I hope that you, like me, take the time to enjoy the scenery. I’ve tried a variety of methods in a variety of places. By bicycle, the road went by at a speed that was reasonable. In a car, even when you were driving, you’d get a good view outside in both directions. But, when you move to mass transit for a number of reasons the game changes. I am not referring to when you travel by air, there you see almost nothing unless you count the clouds. But on the ground, things are better. A bus is reasonable and the train is even better. Oh! I have not done so for awhile. I did take the time to see about 1/3 of the country by train. The wonderful part is that the roadways were laid down a long time ago. And even after more than a century the view remains much the same. Trees may grow, rivers stay between their banks. I know that if tomorrow, I’m going down to a train, I could still tell where I am going. No need to worry about the distance going by. Fun details but not part of the experience. Where would I go if I had the chance? That is easy. I want to see what lies across the border. They too have a lot more highways than in the beginning but the rails stayed in place. When you travel beside a majestic river, you have a chance to see the same view as the people did when they laid down those rails. You cannot say that about roads. There was a time when everybody travelled through the woods. That, too has changed. I remain confident that I would still be able to tell where in the country I was traveling; although, if you leave the train signs in place that will help. One of those small things makes Canada so stable. Sadly, here in the east, most of our tracks have been taken up. Not a sign of something to celebrate nor a recognition that things were done right the first time around.

I required a long time to move from being a student to being a worker. It helped that I went to a residential school where I could live very close to my classrooms and get my meals there. Five years in one case and then another year at another place. A workplace supposedly; but I would go from my desk in the office to my place in the pool or my place in the gym, or my place in a sit down restaurant without any moment to hesitate in my life choices. I bring this up because I’ve been listening to the work experience of others and I always had it good. I will not go as far as great. These were jobs but on the whole I think I lucked out. I also decided for a number of reasons to continue working in that kind of environment summer after summer. Much easier than finding an apartment for short term. Just stay on campus and eat on campus and socialize on campus and profit from what seemed at the time to be a great deal in the financial sense. I think that even my children got caught up in it when they were very young. Or maybe we just dragged them along and they had no say in the matter. You can get used to the small beds and the shared bath and the hotline food if you’re a happy camper. I was. Going on 30 odd years since the last time I stayed in a student residence but I remember the experience well. Did you know that you do not need a double bed when you’re there to sleep? And did you know that industrial carpets are no worse on the feet than anything else. My kids learn to walk on exactly that kind of carpet. And we didn’t need the luxury that people now think of as necessities. No foam beside my bed because there was a payphone just down the hall. Food Sir from a tray? Fine by me. The odd bursts of noise from dozens and dozens of neighbours? All part of growing up experience. I could write a book about it except that no one else really cares.

I am developing a true interest in history. There’s a lot of it and I’m old enough to know that I will not learn it all. Not even a small percentage. Some concentrating on things that might be applicable to me. I live in an island. One that is just large enough. And people have been coming here by ships for centuries. Not all of them make it in with the boat intact. I find this whole idea both heard and soft. I mean, a lot of my ancestors came here by ship and they must have landed in good shape. This afternoon I listened to a documentary concerning a disaster that took place within a day’s sail of here. The idea of that distance is relative as you can imagine. This is one of a rather large steamship that was built when sails were still included in the kit. I am not going to name the ship but I will tell you that crew can affect the results. The term hubris comes to mind. Too proud to realize that they’re in trouble and not wanting to let the rest of the world know how they may have failed at their task. Anyhow this particular ship which is en route to the United states decided that there supply of coal might be low so they diverted to another port. At a time when navigation was really done by guessing. There is a lighthouse in this story but it was never seen by those on board. Instead they found a huge rock and that point on the story goes downhill. According to the newspaper reports hundreds were lost. The rock was attached to a small island with a few families living there. Fishers, all settled down for the winter. And yet, they jumped to the task. Dragged their boats out and across the fields to get close to the shipwreck. And they rescued as many as they could. I imagine that the story that I heard was made into something more interesting but seriously, jumping into the frigid waters in the middle of a storm is never a fun time. As I said, hundreds did die and their bodies were taken ashore and then tourists came and looted. Some people are less heroic than others. There are an artifacts to be found in a couple of museums just across the way I may never go there but I do have a sense of the story. And this story serves as a lesson. Back in the old days lifeboats weren’t quite enough

I have been reflecting on situations I’ve been in that could have gone so much worse. Financially. My time in university is high on the list. Going into a field that had no chance of getting a job spending the money to live on campus and go to classes for five years and then walk away with a minor debt load. But I have worse. When we decided to buy a home we were not planning to do so. We went out of curiosity to what was termed a Home Show where various manufacturers and realtors and all the associated noise were showing potential homeowners what was out there. Product printed presentations. And partway through the afternoon we ended up talking to someone who worked for a local home builder. I think we were unprepared for all the positive arguments he presented. And about 12 hours later, seriously, he took us for a drive to a small subdivision and showed us the only lot left. All the rest had been sold and in many cases already had structures on them. And without really understanding the math involved we decided that this would be our future home. Right there, on that corner. The one covered in boulders, left behind by others in the area. He showed us a floor plan and told us about how the houses were built and like fish in a pond wee bit hard. Now, in retrospect, it all turned out for the best. We stayed in our eventual home for three decades. We came out with a fully reimbursed mortgage. But given our total lack of knowledge in the field it could have gone so much worse. I am not someone who believes in angels but if there are such creatures they were watching out for us because we were totally over our heads. And yes we had to pay someone to cart away all the boulders.

Back in school I learned what I was taught. As I grow older, I realized that my education has some very large blank areas. My worldview was offered through a pinhole and now I realize how little I actually learned. If we look at the high points of a standard high school education, I was taught to calculate the number of atoms in a mall. Or was it molecules? Probably both. I also memorized poetry, in Latin. Serve me not at all in the rest of my life. I can solve simple quadratic equations even though I never used that knowledge again. What I did take away from it was that letters and numbers are interchangeable in certain concepts. As for history, I feel that I learned nothing at all period of value. I grew up in a world that believed that Great Britain was the centre of the universe. And the kings were important. In reality sport really was important was that you could trade things for money. I was taught only to trade money for things. And since i had little money I received few things. I still cannot wrap my head around the idea of $1,000,000 and that you could get there by trading. In sharp contrast others in the world have had this figured out for a very long time. I was given name recognition without being told why those names might be important. Did I waste all my time in high school? No because I learned to play the tuba. One of those life skills that has given me pleasure even if nobody else cares. My sense of geography was centred on Toronto. I know. My fault. There were better maps available but I chose to ignore them because my teachers felt that knowledge would not serve me well. Keep me close to home if you will. Of course, I have picked up little bits and pieces of what makes up a worldview but it has taken me decades. And I have no way to double check what I think I have learned. My time of writing exam papers is over. So if you were to ask me to give you a capsule view of the world it would take you very little time. But I am going to continue to study in my own way. A sense of curiosity.

Here we are. Early January. The time when people, some people, decided that going back to the gym would be a good thing. I come from a different time. For a number of years we had compulsory gym. Part of the curriculum. And we had to do things that in retrospect made no sense. Ignore the simple stuff like exercises and running. For some reason our teachers also included things that were better fitted to life in the circus. Let me explain. There were those ropes that hung from the ceiling. The ceiling was very high. You could not hit the ceiling by throwing a basketball unless you were very strong. We were told to climb with those ropes using our hands in our feet. Happily, in my class at least, no never fell from the top. But the possibility was there. And at the first sign of spring weather they took us outside to a field. A repurposed cow pasture. And we tried to emulate heroes of old. There is a reason why mankind stopped throwing cannonballs. And as for that stunt where you took a long pole and ran across that pasture and then try to swing yourself into space to go over a bar. Neither myself nor my friends ever managed. We had all seen the sport on TV and it seemed so easy. Until you actually run the long pool and try to stick it into the ground and then throw yourself into space and then not fall on your head. Too much effort and coordination required. We were young and we would probably bounce if we ever hit the ground but As for a way to keep us fit? I think some teacher had fallen on their head. Also, when you run around the track there is no easy way to explain to your mother why you were supposed to jump over little fences and not skin your knees. There you have it. A generation who dressed oddly went around outside trying to injure themselves and then decided that a gym was just too dangerous.