3463 Blast from the past

Monday, February 13, 2012

The most common way people give up their power
is by thinking they don’t have any.
-- Alice Walker --

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A number of posts ago I mentioned that when I lived in Ottawa, Ontario, we kids had a lot of freedom. We'd take the city bus into the city and skate on the Rideau Canal that winds through the downtown. Well, the Boston Globe's Big Picture spread today is all about ice skating, and I was surprised to immediately recognize this location:

This is photo #7: "Thousands of people skate on the Rideau Canal and take part in Winterlude festivities in Ottawa on February 4, 2012. (Fred Chartrand/The Canadian Press/Associated Press) #"

(It was not that crowded when we kids were skating. There's a festival going on.)
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3381 Then

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Death is an alternate existence.

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Man, I write next to nothing here for months, and today you can't shut me up. Must be the snow....

Why is it that every time I connect with someone from the past on Classmates.com, they immediately put my email address on their broadcast list and start sending me those stupid cutsy-poo memes that everybody has been sending everybody else for years? Then I finally get annoyed and ask them to remove me from their forward lists, and they get pissed and I never hear from them again.

Well, today I got a forward of the "Remember Back When" genre. Then, coincidentally, Becs wrote about how different playtime is for kids today as compared to Back When. I started to write a comment on Becs' post, then decided it would be too long, so, Becs, here's my comment.

Yeah.

When I was in the 5th, 6th, and 7th grades, we lived in Ottawa, Ontario. We kids used to go everywhere in the city on the city buses and trolleys. A nickle got you on, and you'd get a transfer when you got off that was good for several hours, which you could use on any other bus or trolley, where you'd get another transfer, and so on. You could go anywhere, all day, on that one nickle.

No cell phones. We left the house in the morning with our nickle, and our parents didn't know where in the whole city we were, until we showed up again at supper time. We had another nickle in our sock for the pay telephone, in case we got sick or something.

Actually, we often left the city. We'd take the bus across the river to French-speaking Hull, basically the "other half" of Ottawa, to go to French movies. If we took the ticket stub to school, we'd get 5 points credit in French class.

We'd go for bike rides, straight out into the countryside, passing signposts that said "Ottawa 20 miles" (it was still "miles" then, pre-conversion) behind us.

Or we'd go to the Parliament buildings in the middle of the city, and watch the mounties and pet their horses. There was a hotel near Parliament with an indoor pool, and no one ever questioned our right to use the changing rooms and swim there. I guess they just assumed our parents were guests or members.

The Rideau Canal snaked through the city. It froze in the winter, and we would skate the length of it (maybe 4 miles?) and back. No adults herding us, just lots of kids on the ice.

We were 10, 11, 12 years old, but younger kids were doing it, too. Here, now, kids can't walk the 1/2 block to their home from the school bus until they're over 12. If a pre-approved adult isn't waiting at the bus stop, the driver is not allowed to let the kid off.

Kids are learning that the whole world is depraved. "Back When", we were pretty much set loose on the world. And, hey, we survived! Along the way we learned about weird people, and good people, and dangerous things and safe things. Getting lost and finding our way back again.

We learned about making independent choices, and dealing with the consequences.

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Hallowe'en. I don't want to hand out sugar, the state won't allow fruit (unless very expensively individually wrapped) and last year's kids didn't seem too thrilled with bags of salty corn or potato carbs. This year I ordered small bottles of bubble stuff. The supplier called yesterday (the order was placed over a week ago) and has promised that they will arrive by 3 pm Monday. They're being shipped UPS from a warehouse in northern NJ, so, maybe.

I don't know what I'll do if they don't arrive on time.

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Go to snopes.com and search for Halloween apples razor. There's only one documented nutcase. The rest seem to be hoaxes, or kids being "funny".

People overreact to everything, and I think it's because they've been "guilted" into feeling responsible if anything goes wrong.

That, plus the fear of lawsuits.

And the fear of not being politically correct. (Which, by the way, leads to a whole new topic: "Politically Correct" is gradually going from being a social thing to being a real political thing. People are being arrested for insulting the government or government employees. Death threats or real death are dealt for being "unpatriotic".)

Sheesh.

Really, truly, watch the video in the previous post.

...What if some stupid kid drinks the bubble stuff and gets diarrhea, and the parents sue me? See how it works, where it goes? In the current American climate, it could happen....
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1190 Plagiarism

Thursday, March 29, 2007

I am currently reading a novel (title and author don't matter) wherein the middle aged protagonist is suffering delayed anguish over having committed plagiarism in college.

It reminded me of my one (conscious) instance of plagiarism.

Fifth grade composition class, Ottawa, Canada, 1955. The last assignment of the year was to write about something very sad that we had seen or experienced.

I couldn't think of anything. That's really strange, because my life was full of sadness. My only conclusion is that I must have been depressed. Or shell-shocked.

I mentioned in a recent entry that I had lived in five different houses in Benton. Four of those five were between the middle of first grade, and a month into fifth grade. The first house was next door to the landlord. They asked us to move within a year. The second was an apartment next door to the landlord, and below the landlord's daughter's apartment. They asked us to move within the year. The third was one side of a duplex house, and the folks in the other half complained to the landlord, and we had to move within months. The fourth was the big stand-alone house, with an absentee landlord. We were there more than a year, until we moved to Canada.

The reason we kept getting thrown out was because my father screamed obscenities almost every evening, smashed things against the walls, and beat my mother and us kids. Neighbors didn't like hearing the crashing and screaming.

My mother maintained postal friendships with all those people until the day she died. I guess they felt sorry for her, but there was nothing anyone could do, and hearing it was just too hard.

So, there was that. But that was normal.

The pet Easter chicks grown to roosters we had in the big house? We kids were told that they had been sent to a farm, where they'd live with lots of hens and have fun. Then one day at dinner, we were served two little skinny tough chickens. We recognized them, even without their feathers.

So, there was that. But that was normal.

When we moved to Ottawa (my father was with the embassy), our house wasn't ready, and we lived in a different school district for several months, then moved again. I was in three different schools for fifth grade, and felt lost and unaccepted.

So, there was that. But that was normal.

I couldn't see the blackboard in school. I used to "read" what was on the board by watching the teacher's hand as she wrote. The school gave us an eye test, and then sent a note home to my parents that I had to have a formal exam. I came out at 20/400. Uncorrected, that's past legally blind. I got glasses. My father allowed me to wear them to school because the school insisted, but when I wasn't in school, he took them away and wouldn't allow me to wear them, because he didn't want me to get dependent on them. He wanted me to try harder to see. He'd test me, and beat me when I couldn't see, because I refused to try hard enough.

So, there was that. But that was normal.

We kids had no toys, and very little clothing, because every time we moved, non-essentials were discarded. Emotional attachment was not allowed. Anything accumulated between moves usually ended up smashed during a paternal rage.

So, there was that. But that was normal.

I couldn't think of anything sad to write about for the composition assignment. Maybe because sadness was so much of my normal life, I couldn't recognize any specific thing as sad. The "sad things" other kids were going to write about seemed so unimportant, not sad at all. Things that saddened others, well, they were things I'd just shrug off as minor.

The night before the assignment was due, I still had nothing. Nothing that had ever happened to me and nothing I'd ever seen, had been sad enough to bother writing about.

So I asked my mother. She mentioned a passage in a book she had read, where a child sitting on a school bus sees a dog get hit by a car.

So I used that. Word for word. Right out of the book.

I got an "A" on it. But I always got "A"s in that subject, so it didn't really feel like cheating. I felt only mildly guilty.

Until my parents got the letter that my composition had been chosen to represent my school in a district competition. I wanted to climb into a hole.

Then the letter that I had won the district competition, and my composition would be going to the all-city level. I wanted to pull the dirt in on top of me.

Then the letter that I had won all-city, and it was going to provincial level. I tried to stop breathing.

No more letters came.

I'm still waiting for the letter that says I'm going to jail.

I feel guilty because the second place winners didn't get to move up. I wish I knew why I didn't win province level. If it was because some other fifth-grader's composition was better, then it's ok. But if it was because some judge recognized the passage and disqualified me, then that means the school, district, and all-city second-placers might otherwise have had a chance to win.

If I had it to do over, I guess I could write about that..