This old chair

Over the weekend I got to see a chair I've been hearing about lately: my Grampa's chair.

It's seen better days, obviously.  In some of them, Grampa was enjoying supper with my mum and sister and brothers and their mum, then setting his head down to rest after a long day; this was during the Depression, when it was hard for carpenters for find work.  I wonder too whether the brain tumor that cut his life short was beginning to grow then, sapping his energy.

Another thing I'm wondering: creamy paint? turquoise paint? a clear varnish to protect both parts of its history?

Not wondering: whether I will be doing this myself.  My Grampa almost certainly got the chair from his, so I think it's safer in the hands of a professional, don't you?

Fabric with feeling

My cousin has sent me an article about an exhibit we wish we could visit together - Threads of Feeling at The Foundling Museum in London (by which I mean England, not Ontario!)

It's a collection of fabric scraps given as identifying marks for babies left in the 1700s by mothers who could no longer care for them, but hoped to be able to come back for some day. Apparently only 152 of the 16,282 children accepted by the foundling hospital over a 19 year period were ever reunited with their families, which says a lot about the life expectancy and economic hardship of the time.

The history is amazing and moving, but a side interest to the creative people who visit this blog is the fabric itself, real everyday fabric that would probably never otherwise have been preserved for people like us to look at. Even wedding fabrics might not have been saved for so long - cloth being one of the most recyclable materials, especially at the level of poverty we're talking about here. But a baby is different, and the giving up of one unimaginably significant.

If you've got time for a hot cup of something and a longer than usual read, the first link will take you to the news article about the story behind the collection, the second to the museum site and a few remarkable photographs of the actual scraps.

What a quilt all that would make!

37 children, 1 mum

I started my weekend watching Nanook of the North and being amazed by how happy Nanook is in every image, living his stripped-to-essentials life. This is a man whose sole focus is providing for his family, and since he does that constantly and with great success, what's not to be happy about? Bonus: the amazing clowns-in-a-car scene in which he unpacks his large family from the hole in his kayak after pulling up to shore.

Later I visited a museum that included a very lived-in house, as explained by this plaque outside:


It's a different kind of family provision, one that I think had to be at least as exhausting as Nanook's lifestyle. You have to click on the image to get the full impact.

Now admittedly, out of the 37 children in question our Rhoda only had 18, but she still had more than either of her predecessors from her two husbands.

She didn't last long between her two marriages, judging by the less-than-23-months between the last baby from dad #1 and the first from dad #2, and I'm guessing the dads didn't last long either - even with combined households, it had to be a lot easier to put two people in charge of a pioneer farm.

Just as Nanook tirelessly hunted for seals and walruses and fish to feed his family, Rhoda produced children. Even if she started at 18, she must have been having babies till she was 45. By which time she was probably also a grandmother, don't you think? Maybe a few times over, with the contribution of the stepchildren.

I wonder whether she had time to enjoy them, beyond a few quiet moments in the night settling a hungry infant. Did she love her husbands when she married them, or did she just come to love them later, or not at all? How was it to marry men who'd lost wives before her? Did her stepchildren welcome her? Did she welcome them? and had she known them perhaps, from the time they were born?

Each question suggests so many variables - so many stories in one simple plaque.

The more things change

I took away a few impressions from the exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls I finally got to see last week:

2000-year-old papyrus looks really cool! I'd love to know more about how it was made.

It's astonishing, the clear and precise forms you can make on papyrus, which looks a little grainy, with a reed pen and some charcoal.

Also, how tiny some of those scribes were writing. Does it suggest the preciousness of the papyrus, or the acute focus of the scribe?

But mostly: 2000 years ago, people were just as worried about the end of the world and beset by disease and interpersonal cruelty and the need for legal documents around land use as we are today.

I'm not really sure whether to be saddened by that, or feel all heartwarmed, or not bother with either and just write some fiction already. Like I say, the more things change...

Looking back for future procrastinations

I found this book the other day when I was clearing out my storage room, trying (and failing) to find space for current and future procrastinatory materials:


I Remember The One-Room School, by Myrtle Fair. It's full of first-person anecdotes from students and teachers alike, plus some bonus photographs:


I just love stuff like this. Of course the book covers many decades but it has a lot of material from the 1920s and 30s, my favourites for reading about - those two blocks of time were such stark contrasts for each other, and considering it was such a terrible time, the Depression was a rich and creative one too.

In another blast from the past, last week my mum persuaded me that it is time I took home with me a mug that my aunt and uncle gave me for Christmas one year when I still lived with her and dad. I have drunk a lot of tea from this mug:


and am having more this morning as I ponder where the book and another little problem are leading me.

Yesterday I had to hit the mall to size down on something (always a happy problem for a chocoholic like moi) and looked at wool cardigans. I really, really need a wool cardi and really, really need to not knit one myself - I want to get back to some serious writing in 2010 and cardis require a serious time commitment. But I didn't like any of the ones I saw.

Then, at the grocery store, I paused at the magazine rack and picked up a sewing magazine with a pattern for making a ladies' sweater out of a man's felted one. Hello! Still swimming in felted sweaters here!

So I'm thinking... if I make my cardi, but sew it rather than knitting it, it might be as fast as a four-hour possibly fruitless shopping trip for just the right one, yes?

And I'm thinking I should have bought that magazine when I saw it. Or maybe I can just wing a pattern myself, like I ended up doing for the mittens. The hardest part is always the sleeves anyway, and I have no shortage of those:

Poppy day

One of my former neighbours, before her house was leased to a skateboard shop and the garden ripped out, had a sizable planting of poppies. I had seldom seen these flowers in real life before and never so many at once; whenever I walked past I always marveled at how strangely beautiful they are, and thought of Flanders Fields.

Though they're gone now, I was still able to spend some time remembering military sacrifices last night watching The History Channel.

And what really struck me was how much the now-elderly men who give witness to these battles remember about them. They were so young - two of them, I noticed, were just 21 when they happened - and between the bombs and the fires and the artillery, the chaos must have been complete: and yet they have every detail at their fingertips.

It's the trauma, I expect. But I appreciate that they remember so we can, too. And I'm glad to be able to do that today.

Haunted, or haunting?

Last Sunday's outing included a stop at City Hall in Burlington, Ontario and, specifically, the war memorial that stands beside it. Apparently the statue is haunted - people say it blinks, changes the position of its hands, smokes a cigarette, etc. - and some of my party were interested to see it.

Well, if I were the ghost of a local boy who'd fought in the war and was buried in France, I would haunt the thing too. The site is lovely and old-fashioned, with large trees and a well-kept flagstone path around the base, an old brick house to the rear of the park and a vintage commemorative fountain at the entrance.

But the more I looked at this statue, representing a WWI soldier in full winter uniform, the more I was moved by its beauty. Days later I'm still thinking about it, about the artist who made it, and about all the local boys who wore these clothes and that gear.

The legs are wrapped, the greatcoat's folds heavy and pushed up against the back of the right leg as if by a strong wind. The gloved hands, cast so realistically that you can imagine hands inside them, rest one on a rifle and the other on the wrist of the first. The breast pockets are full, as are the belt's pockets - ammunition, I assume - and a knife and another weapon I couldn't identify are slipped through the belt at one side.

There are many more burdens, too. The figure wears two small satchels slung across the shoulder on one side, and a third on the other. Plus a backpack, and a small roll on top of that. Underneath the metal helmet is a woolen one, the kind mothers and sisters and sweethearts knit for loved ones and strangers alike. It fits snugly so that only the face shows: and what a face! Handsome, noble, resolute, brave - and above all, young.

I've thought often about the ordeal soldiers endured in that terrible war, but this statue brought me a new level of understanding of the sheer physicality of the effort - of the need for warmth, and the cost in weight of having it.

The statue is, I would guess, about 7 feet tall, and it stands on an similarly tall base memorializing the names of local boys who died in WWI, then WWII, and finally the Korean War. One name, Warrie, struck me especially, and I was pleased to find a reference to him on this page, which includes the best image of the statue I could find online - click on the picture for a larger view.

I was less pleased to learn that Warrie fought in the field for eight months before dying in an especially horrific battle. What torture those eight months must have been.

Not being able to find a more detailed photograph saddens me, though I doubt I could have taken one myself, the statue being so far above the ground. Not being able to find the name of the artist - it must be recorded somewhere, surely? - saddens me more. But what saddens me most is knowing that this memorial, with so much to say about sacrifice and tragedy and loss, is visited by hordes of people, myself included, for its entertainment value alone.

Maybe there is a bright side: maybe in staring intently at its unseeing eyes and its hands for some sign of movement, they too catch a glimpse of what those men went through.

What Mondays used to be like

Over the summer I visited a train museum with a lot of office-type equipment in it. I don't know whether it was the lack of chocolate that day, or the really good setup in the retired train station (or ghosts!) but I had a vivid sense the whole time of the life all this tired old equipment once led.





Things would have moved slower, though the people doing those things likely didn't.

Even if you were running around or tapping furiously on keys, though, you'd probably spend most of your talking time with the people in the same room. A lot of your other contact would be on paper.



This phone probably rang off the hook during business hours.


I wonder if you were more likely to get carpal tunnel from the crank-up phone, or the adding machines and typewriter?

Troop train

This past weekend a troop train rolled slowly past a little station I'd been visiting.


It was taking the troops to see the mayor, who was giving them a key to the city.



Something about seeing all these uniformed people sitting inside a moving train and waving - close enough to feel a connection, but too far to touch hands - hit me hard. I thought of all the men who went off to World Wars I and II on trains, and how it must have been to be a wife or a sister or a mother or a friend of somebody who was inside one, somebody who was maybe never coming back, and not really being the same even if he did.

I think this page, from a display case at the Railroad Museum in Fort Erie, says it better. Click on it, if it's too small to read here:

Standard of living

Forts from the War of 1812 attracted a lot of my time this past August, and since I had a new camera (the original not-so-fab one making the unfortunate acquaintance of certain flagstone paving at high velocity this past July) I took a lot of pictures in them.

Reviewing these ones, taken at Fort Erie in Ontario, I was struck by the things that don't change, whether your life is civilian or military, or unfolds through 2009 or 1812.

We all need ways to pass the time, and they don't have to be fancy: a few rocks will do.


We need healthy boundaries, with some doors for give and take.


A quiet place to rest is important.


Some places are, of course, nicer than others, and it is always striking when the nicer places are not only nicer, but all devoted to the comfort of one person rather than sixty (the straw bed above having been taken in the soldiers' barracks, a solitary single in a crowd of bunks.)


Still, a good view is free to all.


As long as nobody is firing into your vantage point.