Thanks Go to Chris Larcombe for Tireless Proofreading and Valuable Suggestions

A STORIED LIFE

by Sonia Fricker Brock

Thanks go to Chris Larcombe for tireless proofreading and valuable suggestions.

Thanks also go to Jack Cooper for many helpful comments on the Podcasts (on which this volume is based) and to my other faithful listeners, including Tony Burns.

CHATHAM, ONTARIO

My name is Sonia Brock. I was born in Chatham, Ontario, Canada. My father was British and my mother an American. We often teased her about being a Yankee and she would, indignantly, rise to the bait every time.

In truth our borders were more fluid in those days. Her father worked in Port Dover, Ontario and also in Michigan, although he was Canadian. Grandad had been an efficiency expert in factories. The girls there were paid for piecework, that is to say by completed pieces of sewing, so they were grateful to be shown how to produce more items, faster.

Chatham was a farming town trying to be a city. The number 30,000 was very important since it defined Chatham as a real city and not just a town.

I guess everybody’s life has a soundtrack. I know mine has. It started back in Chatham, Ontario my home town. Chatham had been a terminal on the Underground Railroad, so there were a fair number of black folks round there, in Dresden and around Kent County.

Back in the 50s when I was coming into my teen years there was an unspoken kind of segregation going on. There was a black restaurant and a white restaurant. No signs were put up but everybody knew. White, middle-class kids went to one restaurant and black kids and rebels and working class kids went to the other.

The music we were exposed to at home was mainly classical and mainstream stuff. My mother had trained in opera singing and piano. My dad loved classical music and opera. He thought that black Gospel singing was screaming. He loved opera which I thought was screaming, so we had a sort of a stalemate there. I came to change my mind about opera but he didnt change his mind about gospel singing, unless it was Mahalia Jackson or Judith Anderson on a recognized TV network.

In his younger days he had worked in sales at the Heintzman piano factory in Toronto and taught himself to play piano by ear. When Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist, was in town he was hired to play at the Revival Meeting. His specialty was Almost Persuaded which was used to lure the shy up to the front so they could be publicly saved.

At night, in Chatham, when the AM signal was better, you could hear the black radio station signal from Detroit, Michigan some 50 miles away. That sound would come trolling down into southern Ontario and it was very, very different. I stuck with it, learned to understand it a little. I even began to imitate it. This was several years before Elvis hit the airwaves and popular music was very, very white with some notable exceptions like Nat King Cole. Little Willie John singing Im Glad over the AM radio waves coming from Detroit, late at night defines this whole musical period for me.

Chatham Town Characters and Stories

Some high school lads were hauled up in Court for painting a farmers cow blue.

Why did you paint that cow blue? the Judge asked sternly.

Because, Your Honour, we didnt have any red paint.

There was a local woman of loose morals. No-one remembered her real name but she was called Mrs. Pickle. This may have been a phallic reference. She had many, many children all of whom she loved very much but they were as near wild as children could be and the school system groaned in anticipation as little Pickle worked his or her way through the system, soon to be followed by the next wave of Pickle kids. The children were all named after priests or nuns or Catholic saints.

On a more professional level there was a local house of ill repute. Some high school boys called the place up once and asked the lady in charge how much they could get for $5. She replied, Not even as sniff, boys. Not even a sniff.

Catholicism was a mystery religion to us. The Catholics had two very big churches and the main on downtown was loudly marched by on a Sunday in July by the Orangemen. Catholics were called Dogans, a derogatory Canadian term no longer much in use.

There were Catholic French Canadian misses in my Girl Guide group. They taught us to swear in French. We thought allez au diable was a fiercely bad thing to say and practiced it carefully.

There was a teaching nunnery called The Pines and I can remember seeing on a wooded path leading back to the main house a group of young nuns in their novice habits joyously dancing a kind of ring-around-a-rosie. Their happiness was so pure that it evoked in me a longing for the contemplative life of a nun.

Then, there were cautionary tales. The one I remember is of a local worthy who went into a downtown drugstore with a soda counter one very hot summer day and ordered up a whole glass of cracked ice. He downed the lot and promptly died of a heart attack. Children would be solemnly told this tale with the tag line, And let that be a lesson to you!

There were local sayings, a kind of dry rural wit. The one I remember is, Do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb. (rhubarb can handle any amount of rain). wAnother was, Quite a spell of weather were having. This suited all occasions.

I also remember High School legends about getting high if you added aspirin to Coke. Never tried it so I cant say if it worked or not. Reminds me of the urban legend in NYC in the 60s that the inner white lining of banana peel would have the same effect if smoked. That one I know was not true.

WWII had impressed a number of prisoners of war and allies with the benefits of living in Chatham so we had Japanese, and German and also Dutch immigrants, as well as a full load of sojourners from the British Isles. I remember one Dutch family that saved and scrimped and put all their money into farm equipment and livestock and the like but they had a wood stove in the house and not much else until that magic moment came when the investment paid off. We were unaccustomed to such disciplined frugality.

These Dutch farmers had an enormous manure pile next to the barn, a veritable hill of bovine end product and this was carefully spread over the fields in the early Spring when it was cooler. You could tell where the manure ended by how green the field was or wasnt as the case may be.

When I think of Chatham in Summer I see milkweed and monarch butterflies and my mind drifts back to an earlier time remembering that we were saving milkweed down during wartime. Bags of milkweed fluff were used in military life jackets during World War II.

Tinfoil was rolled into balls and saved for the war effort. It was dropped in strips to confuse enemy radar. Dumped in quantity, these strips simulated armadas of bombers on Radar screens of ground controllers, who would then misdirect intercepting aircraft and anti-aircraft guns against tinfoil while attacking bombers would sneak past the distracted defenses.

Tin cans were saved and flattened too. A poster told us to Prepare Your Tin Cans for War:

1 Remove tops and bottoms, 2 Take off paper labels 3 Wash thoroughly 4 Flatten firmly.

Tinfoil was rolled into balls and saved for the war effort. It was dropped in strips to confuse enemy radar. Dumped in quantity, these strips simulated armadas of bombers on Radar screens of ground controllers, who would then misdirect intercepting aircraft and anti-aircraft guns against tinfoil while attacking bombers would sneak past the distracted defenses.

In school we bought little Victory War Bonds at, I believe a quarter a week or some such amount, to be accumulated until there was enough to buy a bond.

River Road

During or just towards the end of WWII my mother rented a house that was partly a farm. The large backyard faced on the muddy Thames River and the front of the house faced a street called River Road. River Road has since been made popular in a song by Sylvia Tyson. This was a rural environment, just outside the small city of Chatham, Ontario. Farms were all around us. Located in Southern Ontario, the Chatham/Kent area is kind of a Canadian bread basket.

Across the way from us was a farm where they had the most wonderful apple orchard. We liked to sneak over there and pick up the wind falls, apples that had fallen naturally from the tree, because they were very sweet.

Mother pig and her piglets had the same idea. The piglets were there and we found them and we thought of them as toys. I was between the ages of seven or eight and my sister was three years younger. We were munching on apples and tossing apples at the piglets and listening to them squeal. Then came a monstrous apparition, the mother pig. She was gigantic. She was angry. She was coming straight at us and I knew that we were in a whole lot of trouble.

Apple trees have fairly low limbs, thus theyre pretty easy to climb. I ran for the nearest accessible tree, dragging my sister by the hand behind me. I started to climb up but she couldnt climb because she was too small. She was wearing a short, print cotton dress and not much else because it was summer. I dragged her up the trunk of that tree, ignoring all obstacles such as bark and projections, to where I was and then up a little higher, so that we were well out of reach of mama pig who was snorting and huffing around the tree below us. We stayed up that tree what seemed like forever. Eventually the mother pig forgot what she came for and wandered away. Very carefully and very quietly we went down that tree trunk. I lowered my sister . She was all scratched and scraped and bloody and dirty. I was in somewhat better condition but I knew I was in for it at home.

I dont remember if I told my parents about the pig but I may have said something about climbing trees. In any case I got what we called a lickin for that, a good, old fashioned one with a strap. Id saved my sisters life, not because I was so terrible fond of her at the time but because Id have been in SO MUCH TROUBLE if the pig had eaten her!

You may remember in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy fell in the pig pen and the farmhands were in such a hurry to rescue her. Well, pigsll eat anything. Go figure!

Spring Fever

I used to run away just about every Spring, starting when I was five or six, I guess. Something about springtime would get into my blood and Id run off to join the Gypsies. I never found them but Id run off to join them anyways. One time I scampered off when I was just a toddler and ran across a field with a bull in it. Nothing happened to me. I think animals know when a body is too young to fuss with. I ended up in Chatham at a Police Station where the policemen fed me ice cream.

This may have encouraged me to continue to run away each Spring but I suspect it was just Spring Fever.

I always came back and, after a while, my folks got to the point where theyd say Wheres Sonia? Oh, its springtime. Shell be back when she gets hungry.

The Sugar Beet Factory

Just down the road from our farmhouse was a really big sugar beet factory. Sounds harmless but in summertime the smell took some time to get used to. There were mountains of sugar beets which they processed and then the leavings were dumped across the way. They had built up a hill there with a road going across it. On either side of this road there were big pits. Thats where they dumped the leavings which fermented and produced a pervasive odour. I guess the rent was cheap thereabouts. One time a truck slipped off the road and into the wbubbling morass of sugar beet leavings never to be seen again. The driver escaped but the truck is still down there someplace.

The sugar beet processing plant is gone now and I think theyve changed the name River Road to Riverside Drive. Where the sugar beet dump was is solid ground now and theyve built a subdivision on it. That dump has become prime property.

The Story of Rooster Booster

My mother kept chickens and had a Victory Garden. It was part of the war effort to grow your own food. She started out with Bantam chickens which are very small. She had hens and a rooster and the hens laid tiny eggs.

Later, she got some Leghorn chicks and they guaranteed that these chicks were all female but one of them slipped under the radar and and he was male, very much so. When those little chicks were growing up Rooster Booster, the Bantam, used to pick on that Leghorn rooster chick. He gave him such a hard time. Of course the Leghorn chicks got bigger. The Leghorn rooster started to get tall and lanky. As an adolescent he was still scared of the Bantam rooster who would chase him around.

This little Bantie rooster chasing around this big old Leghorn was quite a funny sight to see. One fine day the Leghorn rooster realized that he was bigger! He turned on the Bantam and, well, that was the end of Rooster Booster. You could say that it was the end of tyranny or whatever you want but it was curtains for Rooster Booster.

Winter

One of the things I remember best about my hometown of Chatham, Ontario is the weather. There were real seasons back then Spring Summer, Fall and, of course, Winter. It could get pretty snowy. I can remember, like Good King Wenceslas , walking in the footprints of other people to avoid the deeper parts of the snow on the way to or back from school.

One of the most beautiful and deadly sights then was an ice storm. Cold rain would turn to ice about the same time it hit the branches of the trees. The trees would become a crystal wonderland. It was wonderful to see but if a wind came along all the little frozen branches, sheathed in ice, would break, causing much destruction to the parent tree.

I have other memories of cold. I moved up north to Atikameg Alberta 200 miles north of Edmonton and above High Prairie. Atikameg was a Cree Indian Reservation. Now, I was expecting at the time and, in fact, Id had the child by Caesarian. I was healing from that, having been released by the hospital. Things werent going well and I didnt know what was wrong. I was isolated in a little log cabin up on a hill (The Teacherage where my husband worked had burned down recently). We were part of the Anglican Church teaching facility on the Reservation.

The Catholics were on another hill were next door, if you call next door a considerable tramping distance in snow. There were two Sisters there, by Sisters I mean Nuns. They had some medical training, so I thought Id better go and see them.

To get there you had to go down a long road from our hilltop, along the main road a bit and then up another long road to their hilltop. I thought Id take a shortcut. Straight from our hilltop to theirs.

Snow, where Id come from, was a relatively mild affair but up there it got pretty deep. I found myself trying to plough up the hill in waist deep snow. I was using bushes and branches to pull myself along. Its a wonder I didnt fall into a snow crevace and get frozen or something. Finally, I made it up therel to the Station. Nothing they could do for me really except to say that Id better get into town pretty darn quick.

They gave me, and this was all they could do, an enormous gelatin vitamin capsule. A lot of it was cod liver oil I found out from subsequent burps. So, they weighed me and they gave me this enormous pill. I said, Why is it so big?

They said, They think that if one pill is good, then the whole bottle is best. Theyll take it all at once to save muss, fuss and bother. So, we give them the biggest dose that they can take at one time and send them away. Then, when they come back, well give them another dose.

I took that pill and struggled back down the hill and made arrangements to come back into town. Turned out a had a Staph infection in my Caesarian incision. Staphylococcus is no joke and it was rampant in that bush hospital. I survived that but I didnt eat for about a week, due to the nature of the illness. I think the enormous vitamin pill the good Sisters gave me saved my life. There you go. You never know.

Another story involving cold was in New York City. I was using an ice pick to get the ice out of the refrigerator freezer. There was a gas in there called freon. I accidentally punctured the part of the freezer that held the freon and the gas started coming out. I thought it was dangerous, so I grabbed up Cathy, my daughter. She wasnt wearing any clothes at the time, just little panties. She was so mortified that Id dragged her out into the hallway in her skivvies. Turned out the freon wasnt all the dangerous and we repaired it so that it was okay. My goodness. That was an adventure in the cold!

My first husband, Bob Bates, may he rest in peace, had a little bit of trouble keeping jobs. One time he managed to get a relief job in a place the dealt in frozen foods. This was in August during the summer holiday time which is why he was doing relief work. It was the best job hed had in a while. Hed get occasional free frozen food and they supplied a snowman suit and the pay was good but all good things must end. The other fellow was coming back from holidays. Bob was upset to hear this. I guess hed been telling himself that he might keep the job. He was so dismayed that he ran out into the street in August, and August in New York City is hot, in his snowman suit, claiming he was going to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge or some darn thing like that. I think he ran about four blocks and then the heat got to him. He dragged himself back to the place, gave them back their snowman suit and got his final cheque and that was the end of that.

The weather nowadays is chancy. There are some terrible storms out there. Its all very well to look back and laugh at Winter but Winter can be deadly.

FAMILY: My Mother, Phyllis Fricker, writes:

Myself & Grandma Fricker Mother and boyfriend.

Aunt Addie and Mother (left)

My grandmother, Mary Faulkner was a twin. She married my first grandfather, Captain Brock. He was captain of a three-masted sailing vessel at Port Dover. Captain Brock was robbed of his money one pay night and was thrown overboard and drowned. Like many sailors in his day he could not swim.

Grandmother had three children by him: Kenneth, Clara, & Percy. She eventually married again to Frank Faulkner and had one child by him Hilda. Mary and Frank Faulkner lived in Port Dover in a little stucco cottage. They had about an acre of land with a couple of barns and a large chicken yard - fenced in. They had two horses, a Jersey cow, lots of chickens and geese and a few ducks. They had a strawberry patch, a raspberry patch, and a very large garden.

My mother told of her Grandma on their large front veranda - sitting in an old rocking chair with a large two-quart jar full of milk and cream. She would rock and shake and rock and shake and eventually the result was buttermilk and butter. The buttermilk was the best my mother had ever tasted. Then Grandma Faulkner would put the liquid into a big wooden bowl and use a butter sieve to draw out the pieces of butter.

Frank Faulkner

Frank Faulkner was a kind and friendly man. I dont remember ever seeing him in a suit, although I suppose he had one. He always wore bright flannel shirts and overalls and work boots. He worked hard. He had a horse and wagon with which he would go down to the beach at Lake Erie and take a shovel and fill the wagon up with gravel. I suppose he sold the gravel to contractors and builders. He and Grandma never seemed to have much money to throw around - but I dont remember ever hearing a harsh word from them. They just made do with what they had.

He always had a healthy appetite. After lunch he always laid down on the couch by the window in the kitchen and had a nap for an hour or two. The window sill always had geraniums on it. After hauling all that gravel he was, no doubt, tired and had sense enough to rest awhile."

On the Farm

"Grandpa had a plough and would work up his acre of ground. I can remember helping him to plant potatoes, He always kidded me and said I was putting them upside down and that they would grow down to China. As a child I thought this was a wondrous thing and visualized Chinese children finding potatoes in their garden and wondering where they came from. Grandpa would take sides of pork and hams and smoke them in the smoke house out by the barn.

He married Grandma when she was a widow with three children - Percy, Kenneth, & Clara. He fathered two more children - Bill & Hilda."

The Root Cellar

"Sometimes Grandpa would disappear down into the cellar. This was a dark pit dug out of the ground with a dirt floor and a narrow little stairway leading down to it. I suspect he had a little cache of home-made brew or hard cider or corn whiskey. However, I never saw him the worse for liquor.

He would go out to the barn and milk the cow. He tried to show me how to milk - but squeeze the teats anyway I could - I could never produce a drop of milk.

Grandpa's son, Bill Faulkner, joined the Services during the First Wold War. He was sent overseas and died during the terrible influenza epidemic." My Mothers Paternal Grandmother - Mary Faulkner

Mary & Frank were almost self-sufficient, though not rich. They had fresh eggs from their hens, also chickens to eat. They had jersey milk from the cow, also butter and cream. The had vegetables from their garden - Potatoes, carrots, beets, and squash & onions stored in the root- cellar for the winter. They had berries from the garden - Grandma made jams and jellies.

Grandma cooked on a huge iron cook stove which was fueled with wood. It had an oven and a water reservoir. She was a good cook. Breakfast was always a hearty meal. Bacon & eggs and fried potatoes, toast and coffee and usually a pie of some description which was served up on a beautiful glass pedestal dish.

Grandma wore cotton print dresses every day, very long, and usually covered with a voluminous apron with large pockets. When she went out to work in the garden she always wore a sun- bonnet. It was not stylish in those days to be tan. She was a tall, gaunt woman with thick, beautiful white hair. She had false teeth which must have been uncomfortable because she usually put them in her apron pocket. I can remember starting out to Church with her. People said that we walked exactly the same - toes out & fast. We would get partly along the way and shed say Oh shaw, we have to go back. I would asked why and she would say I forgot my teeth, I left them in my apron pocket.

Grandma was an avid quilter. Sometimes she would have a quilting bee at her home; inviting 5 or 6 other ladies. They all sewed like mad and never stopped talking and gossiping. Then tea or cake and cookies would be served. It was a very pleasant social event and the results were lovely quilts in various patterns - Log Cabin, Wedding Ring, Goose Tracks, etc. Every scrap of material would be saved - cotton & wool & linen. There were no synthetics then. She must have had a sewing machine because she made most of her clothes and dresses, also for Hilda and Clara.

Grandma was a great one for visiting. She had many relatives and friends in Dover. We would walk out almost every day and call on someone - Pete & Eva Brock, many of the Lowe family, 2 old-maid sisters who lived together and many others whose names I cant remember.

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Black Diphtheria

When I was in Port Dover one summer I met some American girls who were interested in art and we used to go out sketching along the River Lynn and other picturesque places around Dover. We were out on one of our daily sketching tours down by the fishing boats and the dock when I was overcome by a feeling of dreadful sickness. I went home to Grandma as I was running a high fever. She called the Doctor and when he came he diagnosed my illness as a particularly violent case of Black Diphtheria.

I will never forget how I suffered. My throat was swollen to the point where I could hardly swallow and was filled with a grey, crepey phlegm. The Doctor told me to gargle with hot salt water. This seemed to help me and to relieve the soreness. Of course, in those days, they did not have the wonder drugs that they have now and I consider myself lucky to have survived this dreadful illness.

Boating on the River Lynn in Port Dover

I used to love going on a boating excursion up the River Lynn with my Father. We would rent a rowboat and row down the river, it was beautiful. There were always lots of seagulls, and lots of red-winged blackbirds. These were happy times.

Pete McNabb

Of course, my boyfriends from St. Thomas used to come down to visit me at Dover. There was Pete McNabb, a Catholic fellow I was very fond of. He had two brothers who were Priests. One was a school-teacher in Toronto and the other was a missionary in China. He had two sisters who were nuns. Pete did his best to convert me to Catholicism but never succeeded.

Saturday Night Dance

There were always Saturday night dances at the dance hall down at the lake. Edna and I used to go down together.

This one Saturday night we went and there were not very many present. We sat like wallflowers for a while and then this farmer-looking fellow came up to Edna ans asked her for a dance. They got out on the floor and he said to her, Theyre aint very many here tonight, and she said Nope, there aint. and that was the sum total of their conversation for the rest of the dance. Needless to say, we went home in disgust. This is not the end of the episode however. We sneaked into the side door and quietly went to bed at 9:30. The next morning after breakfast Mother and I were washing dishes and I said that we were going to go to the movie theatre. That night. Mother said, You are not going anywhere tonight. You didnt come home until three oclock this morning and Im grounding you. I was so mad that I took a dish I was wiping and smashed it against the wall and flounced out of the kitchen.

Running Away In the afternoon Mother went shopping with Grandma. I packed a suitcase and ran away. I was picked up by two young fellows in a sports car, and they took me to St. Thomas. When I arrived there I went to stay with a special girl-friend of mine, Elma Strickland.

The Chase

Mother and Dad were sure I had run away to Pete McNabb, the chap I had been going steady with in St. Thomas. They were afraid I was going to get married to Pete. Dad high-tailed it to St. Thomas. I was not with Aunt Clara, where he thought I would be , so he went to see Pete. Of course, Pete didnt even know I was in St. Thomas. However, as fate would have it, my cousin Frank saw me on Talbot Street, talked to me and found out that I was staying with Thelma. The cat was out of the bag. So Dad took me back to Dover. Edna upheld my story that we were in early from the dance and peace was restored. Relations were strained between my Mother and I for some time.

Aunt Clara And Uncle Bill

Taken from my mothers memoirs - life in Port Dover, Ontario in the 1920s. The words are hers.

Aunt Clara was my mothers fathers sister. Clara was a kind loving and giving person. She lived in St. Thomas. She took in my mother,father and mother when they were destitute because of the great market crash in 1929. Her daughter and my cousin, Edna, and I were like sisters. We got along famously. If we got a cold Aunt Clara would doctor us up with mustard plasters or onion plasters.

She was an excellent cook and I well remember her famous casserole, macaroni and cheese. Aunt Clara was an active church worker, although Uncle Bill never went to church at all.

I remember Edna and I, one time, were removing all the wallpaper from the font and back parlours. We had to soak it with hot water, then scrape it off with paint scrapers. What a monumental chore! While we were staying there my father put in new hardwood floors. I suppose this was to help pay for our keep.

Aunt Clara was an active woman, quick-moving, always busy. She was very close to her sister, Hilda. One of the happiest times of my life was living with Aunt Clara and Uncle Bill. We were never made to feel like poor relatives.

We really enjoyed her front veranda where we would sit and visit and watch all the funny people go by.

We often visited Grandma Faulkner in Port Dover After Uncle Bill died Aunt Clara had the house divided into apartments. It was a large house.

Uncle Bill Miller was an engineer on the Wabash Railroad in St. Thomas, Ontario. He was a awful tease and a coarse sort of man. He would say, Well, I had to marry Clara. She got me out on the end of a pier in Port Dover and told me that, if I didnt marry her, shed push into Lake Erie. Well, I cant swim a stroke, so I had no alternative but to marry her!

Aunt Clara would bite every time and say, Oh, Bill, you know thats not so!

Bill was an aggravator. He would put sugar in his tea and then take his spoon and stir, and stir, and stir noisily nearly driving everyone crazy. He loved his beer and drank a lot of it. His hobby was growing roses. He had some beautiful rosebushes in the back yard and would spend hours tending to them.

They would go out and gather English walnuts every year. Bill would spend hours down in the basement , hulling them and cracking them and painstakingly picking out the nutmeats. Then, Aunt Clara would bake date and nut bread. Mmmmm, good!

Being an engineer and shoveling coal all day long he would be black all over when he came home. He had a shower installed in the basement which he would always use when he came home from work.

Although Bill never went to church he was dead set against the Catholics. I had a Catholic boyfriend who would call me on the phone every night about 6:00 oclock. Bill would wait for the call; bust his ass to get to the phone first and yell, in a voice you could hear down to the next block, Phyllis, heres that damned Dogan* on the phone again! What could I do. I was so embarrassed.

* Note: A Dogan is a Canadian Catholic. It may derive from a common Irish surname or may have been created to sound like a typical Irish last name.

MY FATHER, William Fricker

A Family Secret Im going to talk now about a skeleton in our family closet. It was something that bothered my father all his life . The shame attached to illegitimate birth is not as strong nowadays as it was in his day, so Ill tell the story here. My father was a remittance baby. A Remittance Man was someone from a good and presumably well-to-do family in England who was a black sheep for one reason or another gambling or drinking or whatever. The black sheep was exiled, in effect, to the colonies, Australia or Canada. In this case it was Canada. Those so remitted were paid a stipend to live on and this sum of money was paid as long as they did not return to England.

My father was only guilty of the sin of being born an illegitimate child of the privileged class. On his fathers side were ship builders. Their last name was Cooper. His father had an affair with the gardeners red-haired daughter and the offspring of that mismatch was my father. His fathers family did right by him and found a couple who were willing to emigrate to Canada, taking the little William with them.

Ive always had a question in my mind as to whether his adopted mother might have been his real mother, since she also had red hair. In any case, they emigrated to Canada. Bill was a toddler at the time. He was running about on the deck of the ship with a lollipop in his mouth and fell and jammed it down his throat. He survived. They got to Canada and settled in Mount Forest, Ontario.

He was raised as their own child but when he was about fifteen he found out he was a love child and that was a big deal in those days. His adopted mother or father must have spoken to someone in confidence and the word got around town.

Bill was mortified and ashamed. He used to doodle around on the piano when he was disturbed and didnt want to talk. His adopted mother talked to him from behind the piano bench. He told her he had decided to join the Army. He was only 14 or 15 at the time, so he had to have her permission and, somewhat reluctantly, she gave it. He had to stay in school for another year until he was sixteen.

When his Mum packed his bags to go over to England to join the British Army for WWI, she he rolled up the name and address of his fathers family in a pair of socks she knew he wouldnt unroll for a while. When he got to England he found the information in the rolled up socks and contacted the old boy, his granddad, was about all that was left of the family because it was the custom in WWI to put the officers in front of the troops where they promptly got shot. There werent any young males left in that family, They had all been killed. My dad was the only one left of the younger generation but he was a wild lad. Were it not for that he might have come into some money and recognition but, as I say, they found him a bit wild, so it didnt happen. The granddad found him a Commission in the Channel Patrol which later became the R.A.F. This is why he ended up in the Air Force in both wars. Now this secret was kept very close. He told his wife, our mother, and she passed it on to us. There are mysteries attached to the story. I tried to get information from his British war records but most of the stuff usually listed there was missing.

We do have his blackthorn walking stick. Someone attacked him with the blackthorn stick when he was posted over in Ireland during the Troubles, the Irish Rebellion. Ive still got the stick with the blackthorns sticking out of it and its hanging on my wall, a bit cracked from age.

He used it as a cane in later years because he had a war injury that he got in WWII.

The Smelly Ghost

Sometimes, in WWI, soldiers were billeted in fairly palatial quarters, not always, just sometimes. In Ireland it was a place called Lep Castle. Not sure of its location but I know its reputation. Lep or Leap Castle had a great tower and there was a hole in the top that went from the top down to the dungeon. In the bad old feudal days if the Lord of the Manor or Castle didnt like someone they were marched to the top and invited to leap down the hole and be dashed to pieces below. That was why it was called Lep or Leap Castle.

This same place had a peculiar, smelly ghost. It made noise too but that was not its most noticeable feature. The lads billeted there were sitting down to dinner one time and the Lord of the Manor was present. They heard were noises and bangs then a really dreadful smell. They all looked at one another and the Lord of the Manor said, Dont pay any mind to that. Its just the ghost. Hes a smelly ghost. First Ive heard of such but apparently they do exist.

I dont know too much about my dads WWII services. He was a Bombing and Gunnery Instructor on this side of the pond being a bit old for active duty. At one point in time he was in a plane, a training flight I believe. The plane went down and everybody in the plane was killed except my Dad, That’s where he got the leg injury that he used the blackthorn stick or cane for. He never quite got over that deadly crash.

It was a kind of Why me? Why did I survive? Everybody else is gone. kind of thing. Those who have had similar experiences can relate to this. I can only tell the tale. It affected him. He would go into depression sometimes and go into his basement den and listen to Bach and Opera and just get away from it all.

He was a good man and a good father, very honourable. He raised us well. There were four of us children and my brother, Brock Fricker, was the long awaited son. My Aunt Gertie

I remember my Aunt Gertie well. Her name was Gertrude but we called her Gertie.

Aunt Gertie was a perfectionist. She had standards. Her standards were the standards of her day and she applied them firmly and with an air of righteousness.

She helped to raise my mother in part. My mothers mother was pathologically attached to her own mother and left her husband taking my baby mum with her. My mothers father crossed the border into the USA and kidnapped her back to Canada. Thus, my mum was raised by various people, including Gertie, who was not a blood relative but a relative-by-marriage. Aunt Gertie became the family aunt. We all lived in the same town of Chatham, Ontario, which was a moderately-sized city deep in southern Ontario farming country.

When she grew up and married my dad, my mother used to dread Gerties coming to visit the house. Gertie would check for dust and looked under things, She sought imperfections and found them! She would call these imperfections to my mothers attention. Now, Phyllis, perhaps you didnt notice but there are dust bunnies under the couch... etc. There must have been an orgy of housekeeping before she came to call or, God forbid, if there was an unexpected visit, despair. Gertie, however, was not given to unexpected visits. Her premise was Let them do their best. Ill still find something wrong!

Gertie liked to do was visit people in hospital. She would tell patients about all the people she had known who had suffered from the same complaint and then died. Eventually, the hospital barred her visits because she just wasnt cheering up the patients.

Another thing She liked to do was attend the funerals of people she didn’t know. Lets just say she was interested rather than nosy. I don’t know if she commiserated with everybody. She was probably just curious about the cause of the deceased persons demise. A bit macabre when you come to think of it but that was Gertie

She was a widow with no children. Her apartment was perfect. In the dining room there was an oak dining table and a glass-fronted case with bone china cups in it as well as the good dinner service and a tea set. She had a neat little kitchen and a sun room. The living room was the jewel. There were needlepoint chair cushions and framed needlepoint works hanging on the wall as you came up the stairs to enter the living room. These were not done by herself. She wasn’t a crafty person. Needlepoint was the accepted feminine art of the day so she collected some. The mantelpiece held Royal Doulton figurines which used to fascinate me as a child. A beautiful oriental rug in tones of red and blue was on the living room floor. Everything in the room was just as it should be. In the bathroom on the back of the toilet ledge there were two rather unusual antique Plaster of Paris figures of small boys sitting on chamber pots. One had a broad smile on his face and was labeled Billy Can. The other was sunk in gloom with a dejected frown on his face. He was labeled Billy Cant When my Aunt, in her elder years was getting ready to go to a Home for the Aged she was giving away different things and she gave everyone their choice and I chose Billy Can and Billy Cant. I still have them.

My Aunt Gertie was not wealthy. Her husband had died relatively young and his pension did not keep pace with inflation. I believe she minded children for folks and in her elder years she took in boarders. Young males on limited income would occupy the guest bedroom. Some of them worked for Chathams CFCO AM radio station which was short on pay and long on opportunity and experience. Some joined the Chatham Little Theatre group where my mother was the doyenne. I dont know if these young men stayed in radio. Its a hard place to make a living. Some of them were decidedly Gay and my Aunt, all unaware, referred to them as the dearest boys.

I once took Gertie some embroidery I was working on and showed it to her proudly. She promptly turned it over and said firmly that someone (presumably an authority) had told her that the back of embroidery should be as neat as the front. I can still hear her voice saying this, too late for rebuttal because it is, of course, complete nonsense.

At the end, and endings are often sad, she was in a Home for the Aged. My mother would visit her there. Mother once said to me, Oh, Sonia, its terrible. Shes not even wearing her own clothes and they dont fit. She was so neat and now shes all messed up.

ATIKAMEG, ALBERTA

My first husband, Bob Bates, got a job teaching on an Indian Reservation called Atikameg, which means Little Whitefish. I went up north. By up north I mean Atikameg, Alberta

200 miles north of Edmonton near Little Slave Lake. I was expecting at the time. Bates managed to burn the Schoolhouse and Teacherage down before I got up there. The house was heated by a cast iron stove, wood-fueled. The cold kept him from carrying the ashes and cinders out too far from the house. He threw them in the snow next to the house in the full belief that the snow would put them out. The live coals in with the cinders burned through the snow all the way down to the Teacherages wood foundations and up she went!

This was the biggest excitement of that winter. All the kids showed up, with bells on as it were, and, as Bob and the adult Indian workers tried to throw the schoolbooks of the fire area to save them, the kids threw those books right back in the fire. Take good aim. Throw that book back in the fire. Their aim was very good. I guess they werent into book learning.

The only place left to live was a little Indian log cabin way up on the hill closer to Indian territory rather than Anglican Mission territory. They got horses and men and everything trying to drag that thing down to the Anglican settlement but it gets 30 below up north. Frost and cold had a good grip on the foundation. The cabin wasnt moving!

We settled in up there which was considered a great shame. That little log cabin was really snug. The old house which had burned down would have been cold and drafty. Theyd built it like a regular frame house further south. This was far, far north and very, very cold. The only time it warmed up was when the Chinook came over the mountains carrying a warm wind from the ocean current. From Fahrenheit 30Â° below it would sweep up to 20Â° above Zero in about an hour- something to look forward to.

I was a solitary soul. Folks expected that I would visit with some of the more Christianised Indians and the daughters of the Hudson’s Bay Post Factor and so forth. I liked to read and think and do things with my hands. Now, I had lots of time to do that. Reading was precious. I had one book of literate horror stories. Most other books had gone up in flames. I remember reading Kafkas Metamorphosis . I would allow myself three pages a day from this book, so I wouldnt run out of reading. Most of the books up there had perished in the flames when the Teacherage burned down.

As the days went by I got bigger and bigger because, hey, I was expecting. Bates settled in to teaching with some disturbances. The Indian boys liked to slip shotgun shells into the cast-iron stove which gave the subsequent explosion a really satisfying reverb. We had some pictures of them. Ive got them now. Pictures of the Indian boys riding quarter horses or small horses dressed in, basically, cowboy regalia, riding bareback and doing it very well. Its just a strange image of them all dressed up as cowboys. I guess they believed in sticking with the winning side.

The preacher was British, as was his wife. He was about 70 and had spent many years in the frozen north as Anglican missionaries to the Indians. The Indians on this reserve, by the way, were nomadic Cree. They had a special way of looking at time which was embedded in their language and in their culture. This made for some problems when it came to court cases because the past to them was, apparently, yesterday or many moons ago. Nothing in between. This made Where were you on the night of such and such? a little bit precarious. I dont know what their future tense was like, or if the even had one. All I heard was about legal matters.

The Indians were fishermen and hunters and they worked on the oil rigs from time to time. For fishing in winter they cut a hole in the ice and it was proprietary. Whoever cut the hole could fish there and no one else. I found that out after a polite visitor came and informed me that I had been fishing in his hole.

If you did catch a fish, all you had to do was throw it on the roof of the cabin where dogs or bears couldnt get at it and that fish was frozen in no time.

NEW YORK CITY

My Dobro

I got my dobro-style resonator guitar* when we moved to the Lower East Side of New York City. Across the 2nd Street and down a ways towards Avenue B, Sammy Blank had a little hallway of a store. It was long and narrow, an Aladdin’s cave of stringed instruments. Guitars, mandolins, zithers, violins and banjos hung from the ceiling like musical fruit. That’s where I picked up a Dobro-style guitar with very high action and the rusted steel strings - at a bargain price. I took that thing home and started to woodshed. (High action means the strings are further from the frets and it takes more force to push them down and play)

I was used to the unchallenging gut strings of a ukulele but I liked that steel sound but Oh my goodness! pushing those dobro strings down was something else. I worked at it day by day until the tips of my fingers literally turned blue. I made myself practice every day, even if was for only 5 minutes, every day! Learn this chord - play it. Learn the next chord - play it. After a while the ends of the fingers on my left hand became almost like wood. I could tap them on the plaster wall and it sounded like wood tapping on a plaster wall

I started to play some of the blues numbers I had learned then and they helped make the load easier. Somehow or other the blues made it easier to deal with the things that were going down.

Trouble in mind Im blue, But I wont be blue always,

That old suns going to shine on my back door someday *the term dobro has come to refer to any acoustic guitar with a metal resonator set into the body (also known as resonator guitars or resophonic guitars).The bridge of a resophonic guitar over which the strings pass is attached to a metal resonator which produces and amplifies the sound; the body of the guitar does not play a significant role in sound amplification.

My Parents Visit Me In New York City

My mother and father lived most of their lives in the small city of Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Chatham was 50 miles from London, Ontario and 50 miles from Detroit, Michigan in the breadbasket of southern Ontario. The Chatham-Kent area was famous for growing corn and peas and tobacco. Chatham was the hometown of Fergie Jenkins, baseball player, DArcy McKeough, a man of politics and Sylvia Tyson, well known Canadian singer.

I had moved to New York City after living in Detroit, Michigan. I ended up on the Lower East Side which was a poor neighbourhood at that time. I lived there with my young daughter and my common-law husband in an apartment that nowadays rents for a phenomenal amount back then it was then under rent control which made it a highly desirable location.

My mother wanted to see the Statue of Liberty, so we went down to the tip of Manhattan Island. Id been covering the expenses up until then but when we got the Staten Island Ferry docs she said she wanted to pay for the ride on the Ferry Boat that rode you around and past the Statue of Liberty to Staten Island and back.

I said, Sure, mother, you can cover this! No problem. Then she found out that the fare, through tradition, was a nickel. That was a humorous moment.

Shes sooner have gone to the island the statue is on and climbed up the steps and looked out the hat and so forth but she had some arthritis in her spine and I didnt think that was a good idea.

Now my dad, he was what he was; he had prejudices but he tried mightily to overcome them in my presence. I flourished best in a culturally diverse environment of immigrants and people of colour and what have you.

I was with my dad and we were walking down the street and there was a typical New York street hustler going into a phone booth, probably to make some call about numbers running or dope or something like that. My dad spotted a quarter on the sidewalk outside this phone booth and he was on best behavior. He retrieved the quarter and knocked on the door of the phone booth. The hustler looked around and opened the door. My dad said to him I found this quarter on the sidewalk. Could it be yours? The look of astonishment of this fellows face when this old white man offered him a quarterâ€¦.I wish Id had a camera ...it was priceless. This was a man who thought he had seen everything was very surprised.

The big deal with my mother was shopping but I wasnt going to take her down to 5th Avenue or places like that where shed spend much too much money. I was living on the Lower East Side. I decided to take her on a tour. So, she saw Orchard Street, the pushcarts and all the little stores with the handbags and things hanging like ripe fruit from their racks. We went into Katzs delicatessen where we could read the slogan in the window Buy a Salami for your boy in the Army. Katzs had many salamis hanging up over the counter. It prided itself on rude waiters and free seltzer water. We had a corn beef sandwich there.

We ambled over towards Delancey Street and ended up in a shop that specialized in ladies hose. The lady was trying to sell my mother these sparkly, gold, almost lamÃ© stockings that the proprietor thought were very glamorous and would really suit my mother. My mother thought otherwise. She was trying to find an excuse not to buy these things and said, Oh, Customs will never allow me to take them across the Border.

The shopkeeper replied, No problem. You just roll them up and stuff them in your brassiere. Theyll never know!

I went with my Mum to some other places that was, perhaps, more of interest to me than to her. I felt they were of significant cultural importance, such as the site to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. This fire occurred where Jewish immigrant girls on an upper floor were slaving over sewing machines and the lint built up. The fire escapes were locked shut. There was a great fire and it claimed the lives of 146 young women. Some were the main support of their families, so it was very tragic. This was back in the early 1900s.

This was the 60s so we were able to go to Washington Square Park to hear the folksingers around the fountain circle there and I explained to her that this was important cultural phenomenon, or something like that. We went to some Museums - the Metropolitan Museum of Art and so forth. My mother was a painter.

I think my folks had a good time and they certainly had something to talk about when they went back to Chatham. Not sure they understood my chosen lifestyle but they tried. Parents do.

St Marks in-the-Bowery A.H. Blackwell Blackwell

All That Jazz

Vincent Hickey was a drummer. He patterned himself after a New Orleans drummer called Baby Dodds, who was the brother of Johnny Dodds, a well known clarinetist who had played in Kid Ory's band.

Vince was a member of a radical group I belonged to in the 60's. Vince and I became friends because we both liked traditional jazz and, as he put it, the other members of the group were a 'bunch of tin ears'. In other words, they didnt get it' when it came to music. I sort of 'got it', although I was green as grass.I had already started a collection of traditional jazz music with Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet, King Oliver and Kid Ory, and the like.

I had a plastic slide whistle, sort of a kid's version of a trombone, and I learned to play against those New Orleans jazz records, to improvise. That kind of music, when they're all playing together in a session without the solo bits (and there wasnt as much soloing as there is nowadays) they actually played counterpoint. If you separated out the different instruments, the lead instruments like clarinet and trumpet and so forth, then they each played different tunes over the same chord changes and the tunes all worked together. This really caught my imagination because I'd always loved counterpoint from hearing Bach. My Dad really played Bach a lot. Here coounterpoint was again but it was jazz and that was absolutely terrific. In with the jazz was also that golden root - the Blues.

Vince would come over from time to time, particularly if I fed him. He showed me some things about drumming. He was quite amazing to my neophyte way of looking at it. He could play something called 'the spoons' which was as old time instrumental time keeping trick involving kitchen cutlery. He could crumple up paper and make it sound like brushes. Vince could turn just about anything into a drum kit. He was a good drummer.

He was the son-in-law of Victoria Spivey. Vince himself was half Irish and half Italian and, boy, could he make meatballs! He was married to Victoria's adopted daughter and I got to meet the family through him. I went to the Victoria Spivey (she always pronounced it Speevey) /Lonnie Johnson Reunion at Gerdes' Folk City. That was a stellar night, covered in another podcast.

I continued with my interest in traditional music although what I was hearing around me was the kind of wishy-washy folk music that was popular. There were some really excellent musicians that came out of the folk music boom but a lot of it was crap. In between the cracks there the real stuff was coming though. My ear had been trained by listening to that early jazz music so that when I heard the real thing I recognized it as being part of the root. A lot of this early jazz music was blues-based. The blues had sort of seeped in to New Orleans. W.C. Handy was actually a field researcher for these early blues tunes and copyrighted everything he laid ear to - God bless him.

I was at Washington Square Park one time and an old colored gentleman showed up with his guitar and a promoter. I dont know who he was but he was obviously a known traditional blues musician, a pioneer. When he started to play a herd of young blues wannabees clustered around him quite quickly and started playing too. I dont think it mattered if they were in tune or even playing the same song as long as they could say afterwards, that they had played with this particular blues pioneer. I didnt much care for that. I'd have sooner heard the old guy and what he had to sing but there you go.

Another time in Tompkins Square Park on New York's Lower East Side they had brought in a five part gospel group, just vocals. They were just standing on the grass and singing and it was quite, quite marvelous and what was really good about it was that I knew what they were going to sing in the next line. I had learned. I had picked it up and here it was alive and standing before me. It was all familiar to me. The music of the South had become, mysteriously, my music.

I also heard Gil Evans in that same park and that was another good and real experience of a different kind.

I was wood shedding a lot at this time, learning to play guitar after my fashion. I was singing these old blues numbers over and over again. I never got tired of them. There was something new about them every time. They werent like popular music at all. They had legs. They had staying power. And, of course, they were about real things that happened to real people. It was folk music but folk music that was still alive and still kicking!

One thing that was very much a part of my life in New York City was jazz. It was all around me. The church where I went to during my religious phase, St. Marks in the Bowery, used to have jazz concerts in the old graveyard beside the church and by old I mean really old. It was an ancient church by New World standards. Peter Stuyvesant was buried beneath it.

In the churchyard, where the tombstones were all laid flat because well, they just were, we would sit on the grass or just perch in this iron fenced in little area. There was a tiny stage and local jazz musicians, very avant-guard, would get up and play and we would listen. We didnt always get it . Like I say it was very avant guard jazz but it was free, it was lively and we enjoyed it.

Another group that featured jazz musicians was the Communist Party. Well, I am not now and never was a member of the Communist Party but, speaking of parties, they threw the best parties (fund raisers). They had everything organized and talent lined up and you could go there and have a good time. We would go to their parties which were generally held in a loft or some such and I remember one occasion when there was an avant-guard trumpet player. Now, I remember his name as Freddie Redd but there was an older musician of the same name so I may have that wrong. Whatever his name was he was an avant guard player who couldnt help it he played hot trumpet, He wasnt cool. He played hot avant guard which is .... interesting.

Now I dont have a lot of self consciousness so I would get up with a willing or unwilling partner and try to dance to this stuff. Well, the beat was all over the place. It was like a free form impressionist painting in sound but if you knew a little bit about ballet and modern dance you could fake it which I did probably to the bemusement of the band who were laying down their souls in abstract notes.

Now this same fellow, whom I remember as Freddie wrongly or rightly, was involved in a plot, along with a lady from Montreal and some other people, to (ahhh SIGH) blow up the Statue of Liberty. Now this was before there were a lot of blowups. It was even before the race riots. He was really radical and they were going to do that. There was dynamite and I wont know all the details. It was in the newspapers. I think it was the F.B.I. That got wind of this and they all ended up in the slammer, in jail, including Freddie and I just wonder about that sometimes because he was a delicate little fellow and he must have gone through hell in prison. Maybe hes out by now. I dont know. Ive lost track of all those people from the 60s.

Elvin Jones stayed next door to us on East 2nd Street for a while and youd see him. You could walk down the street and you could see people. Youd see Clark Terry or Lena Horne.

Matter of fact my young daughter was introduced to Lena when my old man spotted her on the street. Said to Lena, Shes going to grow up to be just like you, Lena and Lena said, Just be yourself, honey, just be yourself.

Didnt hear much blues back then except in the folk clubs or on the radio from the white roots bands. I caught Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard and was mightily confused when he played with his back to the audience but it was beautiful sound, beautiful sound. That was the best of the cool. That was it. There was a place called the Blue Note and we went there.

This is not jazz but there was a juke joint on my street between Avenues A &B on East 2nd Street. I wanted to go so bad because Id heard about the roots music coming from juke joints and places like that. They wanted us to come because they thought wed add tone to the place. Always beware of places where you add tone. My old man wouldnt go. He was a jazz guy and he said they were low class, no account people. Well, that was the whole point! Thats where the music started. My old man played a bit of trumpet but he wasnt very good at it. He just faked it. Mainly he was a singer.

There were other musicians around. There was one who was attached to my radical group. He was a bass player and he wanted so badly to play but he didnt have a blue suit which you had to have to be on the bandstand. A stroke of good fortune came his way when Gerry the Marshall kited a cheque and started giving away money (I was out of town when this happened. Heard about it later) So he got himself a blue suit and now he could play because he had the uniform as it were and, gol darn it, couldnt have been more than a week or two days and somebody stole his blue suit. Life is not fair

I already talked about Vinnie who played the drums and taught me a lot about early jazz He got me started and taught me how to play one hand with one time and the other hand another time and back beat and stuff like that. There was Latin music all around us but for me the true sound of New York in those days was then and always will be jazz.

Les Deux Megots - New York Citys Lower East Side In The Sixties

I remember Les Deux Megots in New York city on the Lower East Side, sort of halfway to Greenwich Village. We used to go there in the evenings and drink strong, strong expresso coffee while sitting at a little four chair table - talking and talking and talking.

We were not poets. We were aware of the poets but they were in a different, parallel universe, you might say, and we were in our own. What we talked about was Astrology. My friend, A.H. Blackwell later went on to become an eminent professional astrologer. The others? Well, they came and went. Mainly it was A.H. And me.

We talked politics as well, radical politics, because A.H.s father had been in the Spanish Civil War He was an Anarchist. A.H. had a far broader grasp of politics at 16 than most young men. We thought then that we had the solutions to all the worlds problems. Most young people in the 1960s thought that they had a handle on the worlds problems. Our views, A.H. and I, were somewhat different and we would argue the differences. Whether a collective society could be run without elected leaders and stuff like that.

There was a very special, dare I say peculiar, energy to Les Deux Megots. Ive learned since that it had had a very dynamic proprietor in its heyday. We were there at the nadir when it was not quite ready to close but getting there. It was an important place in our lives. Other places were not like it. We felt energized while we were there. We felt things were possible. We felt importance. What we said and what we did were somehow, in that context, important. There was some sustaining force at the place that brought ideas to life.

Gerdes Folk City

We were there at the end, the last night Les Deux Megots was open. The manager offered us free pastries because, hey, they werent going anyplace since the place was closing. The pastries were a little bit stale. I remember the taste of peanut butter but, hey, they were great because they were free. We ate them with our last strong coffees and mourned the closing of an establishment that had become a special focus point in our lives. I used to go to Gerdes Folk City which was located just on the eastern edge of Greenwich Village, just before you got to Washington Square Park. I dont know who owned it but they sure had the feeling for a trend because Gerdes became the epicente for new talent during the folk boom of the 60s. We would go in there and stand opposite the bar where there was a high wooden railing facing the stage. You could lean against it and catch the action on the stage without paying the cover or tips that you paid if you sat down. We were poor so this was a good compromise. Youd nurse your beer and stand for a couple of set, or as long as you could handle standing and got some real entertainment. The tables beyond this folk singers mourners bench, so to speak, were more expensive but standing you could get drinks from the bar and had a birds eye view of the action.

We usually went on Monday nights for the Hoots, the open stage. I saw a number of first there. I saw Brother John Sellers, who was a blues and gospel shouter and acted as an M.C. He had a fresh-faced boy up there one time. Two of them, in fact, because both of them were young. I dont remember what the other one was called but the one I do remember was called Bobby Dylan. First time I heard him I said to myself, Hell never make it! He only knows three chords and he sings through his nose. Well, I made a mistake because he did make it and he did fairly well off the music business. He ended up leaving Gerdes and Sellers and everybody else in the dust.

Mighty Times these were, as the saying goes. People who were my neighbours got recording contracts. Hugh Romney, a sort of stand up comic, became Wavy Gravy of the Hog Farm and psychedelic bus. Someone you were sitting next to in a coffee house could have become a folk star by the next time you got around there.

I had an interview with John Court, who was Albert Grossmans right hand man. Grossman had Dylan, Odetta, Ian and Sylvia and Peter Paul and Mary under his management wing. My interview didnt come to anything in the end but for about two weeks most of my friends were kissing me off. I guess they figured Id do the same to them once I got on the golden trail.

The Reunion of Victoria Spivey and Lonnie Johnson at Gerdes Folk City.

I remember the return of Victoria Spivey. I knew her son-in-law, Vince Hickey. He belonged to a group I also belonged to and was married to Victoria Spiveys adopted daughter. I met Vicky through Vince. Vince was a drummer in the Baby Dodds style.

Victoria Spivey was a remarkable woman. From Texas originally, she has been the ingÃ©nue lead in the first talking, singing black movie, Hallelujah I saw that movie double billed with Birth of a Nation, two opposites. Hallelujah had a formula plot and lots of clichÃ©s and stereotyping. Vicky was good in it. She was real. She was believable but, most of all, she was Victoria Spivey. Victoria carried that movie experience with her. Her latter years were a bit like a replay of the movie, Sunset Boulevard . Yes, she was a blues singer. She played stride piano very well but youd better not forget that she was a movie star in the old star tradition.

Gerdes Folk City made the reunion of Victoria Spivey and Lonnie Johnson a big deal. Victoria and Lonie had performed together many years ago and were pals. I was there for the opening show. When she first came in Lonnie was already on stage, opening up. He was wearing a gold lamÃ© jacket was was doing those wonderful things he did on guitar. He saw her and reached into what you might call the literature of the blues and said something like, Big leg mama with the meat shaking on her bones. Vicky didnt take too kindly to the notion that she might be fat. She went into a pout and they had to send people to coax her on to the stage. Of course you couldnt have kept her offstage with a bulldozer but it was very dramatic at the time.

When she did come in to do her part of the set she was wearing a white satin gown. Her big hit had been the Black Snake Blues - Get that Black Snake out of my bed. As I said she was wearing a white satin gown and there was a big, velvet black snake with rhinestones and sequins across the front of that dress. It kind of wobbled when she walked. She made quite an impression with that. When she sat down at the piano it was the real thing and she swung into Black Snake Blues and wowed us all. She did a whole bunch of other number and she a Lonnie sang togethr beautifully.

I remember especially a song of Lonnie, not a blues but it stuck in my head,

What a difference a day makes, Twenty-four little hours,

What a difference the sunshine can make to flowers...

He wrote that one and had a hit with it. He also claimed to have written Careless Love. He might have. He was a composer. He might have adapted it and written more lyrics. He felt strongly about this. Lonnie Johnson was a kind and gentle man, a gentleman in a southern way. I had sung one of my songs on the open stage during intermission one time. He heard me and was kind enough to tell me that he liked it. I appreciated that then, and I still do.

Russell Blackwell and one of his doodles Cuba Libre

I came into New York from the wilds of Alberta, by way of Chatham first to recover from the medical complications inflicted on me by a northern 'bush' hospital.

My then husband, Bob Bates had gone down there first to settle himself and get some kind of job. We set up housekeeping in a big room of what had been a hotel but which was now a sort of tall rooming house with shared kitchens on each floor. I used to take the laundry up to the roof to hang it out on the lines available. Hanging laundry in the breeze up so many stories above west Manhattan gave me the whim whams because I have some fear of heights.

The folks who looked after the hotel/rooming house in the sense of cleaning and repair and so forth were expatriates from Fulgencio Batista's Cuba. This was just before the fall of Batista and the exhilaration of his downfall at the hands of Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries.

People dont remember too much nowadays but Batista was a bad guy especially to Liberal thinking people and leftists. He was a U.S. supported dictator. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and the like were the good guys in our eyes

Radical Days

The Chatham Public Library was a good source for all kinds of books, thanks to Louise Schriber the Librarian. I got most of my real education there. I wanted to know something about everything, for reasons of my own, so I read just about everything I could get my hands on - 5 or 6 books a week. Id see a book and say to myself I dont know anything about that, so Id check it out. This led me, in mysterious ways to Thorstein Veblin, who coined the phrase conspicuous consumption and wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class. And to Karl Marx, who was very dull and Hitler who was duller.

A humorous British book called Comrade, 0 Comrade had a profound effect on me. The book took potshots on the various radical movement then current in Britain and the only ones spared were the Anarchists. The author didnt favour the Socialists too much and certainly not the Communists but really thought the Anarchists were kind of o.k.

When I got to New York I sought out an Anarchist group and found the Libertarian League. They had the use a a large room half way to Greenwich Village near St. Marks Square. The landlord insisted on labeling his tenants The Liberian League which may have helped to keep the group safe from surveillance by the three letter boys as we called the FBI , CIA etc.

The Libertarian League

The Libertarian League was led by two worthy gentlemen, Russell Blackwell and Sam Weiner, also called Sam Dolgoff. Sam favoured Anarcho-Syndicalism. He was in the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, also called the Wobblies. His famous speech was called Anarchism and the American Labour Movement, which was given every time another speaker stood us up at our weekly meeting. We got to know that speech very, very well.

Russell Blackwell was an first a Communist . He got kicked out of Mexico for that. He spoke Spanish well. Afterwards he had gone over to fight in the Spanish Civil War. In Spain he became disillusioned with the Communists due to their dirty tricks and went over to the Anarchists.He wandered about there, as was his habit. He would wander into the damnedest places. In the process of doing that after the war had ended, he caught the attention of the new authorities and ended up in Barcelona prison as a spy. He wasnt a spy. He was just curious.

Barcelona prison was apparently in the middle of an artichoke growing district and thats what the prisoners were fed morning, noon and night. Russells wife petitioned the President and the Congress and so forth and finally, after a long while, got him out - with a lifelong hatred of artichokes.Somehow or other he ended up with the Libertarian League. He and Sam put out an Anarchist magazine called, mundanely, `News & Views.

On The Picket Line

I dont like picketing. It makes me feel like a professional martyr but I was on a few lines. I picketed Woolworths for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). The Puerto Rican kids who always followed Russell around would march around proudly for a while and then dart into the store to buy a candy bar. Theres no way you could explain to them that was not what it was about.

I took part in one street march - something about Teachers Union - and I found out that a crowd can turn into a mob and had a different kind of mind than an individual. A crowd could do some fairly dangerous things once it got started on that path. This helped to form my lifelong pledge to stay a way from crowds and, if I saw one forming, I went in the opposite direction. I had picketed also down at the New York docks with some real Spanish people from Spain against a ship that Francesco Franco had sent as a training exercise for young sailors. The Spanish picketers were very glad to see me and they were lovely people. This was a rather quiet picket line and I marched and marched around in a circle, and then I went home. That was about the end of it when it came to publically doing active radical things. Later, when I went to work for Canadas Federal Government I did not advertise my political beliefs but simply practiced them. I worked for the whole office and not just my little section. I organized a computer club and took an active roll in leading events that were for the benefit of all. I tried to help civilians who came to us for help. I did not recognize boundaries.

When out Union went on Strike I was made aware that they were using goon tactics to intimidate workers who did not wish to strike by calling their homes and frightening their children. I refused to be part of this fascistic approach and crossed the picket line daily sometimes facing screaming mobs of picketers.

Indeed, their cause was just but their tactics were tainted. They did not recognize the will of the individual and that went against my Anarchist principles.

Radical Songs

I remember the radical songs I learned in the 50's and 60's. I'll start with that anthem of the Left, the International. I used to sing a slightly tongue-in-cheek Country and Western version.

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise, ye wretched of the earth! For justice thunders condemnation Arise, a better world's in birth! ...

Tis the final conflict, Let each stand in his place. The international working class Shall be the human race.

The G.P.U. Were a unit of the Russian state secret police. A parody song which I thought was from Dave Van Ronk and Dick Ellington's 'The Bosses Songbook' is actually a Trotskyite ditty and signals the end of the Left's romance with Communism.

When I was a lad in 1906, I joined a band of Bolsheviks. I read the Manifesto and Das Kapital and I even learned to sing the International I even learned to sing the InternationalI sang that song with a voice so true that now I am a prisoner of the G.P.U.

I sang that song with a voice so true that now I am a prisoner of the G.P.U.

A member of the Anarchist group I belonged to, Russell Blackwell, had gone to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Spain was testing ground for the Fascists before WWII. There were all breeds of radicals there Communists, Anarchists, Socialists. The Communists, almost predictably, sold the Anarchists out. In a power struggle the first thing the far Right or Left does is get rid of the Anarchists. A couple of songs from that movement were popular in the 60s are Los Cuatro Generales, talked about some bad guys on the other side.

Los cuatro generales, (The four generals

Los cuatro generales,

Los cuatro generales

Â¡Mamita mÃa! (Mother mine)

Que se han alzado, (They will be hanging)

Que se han alzado

Then there was was Freiheit, which is the German word for freedom.

This was an anthem of the Anarchist civil war movement in Spain.

Spanish heavens spread their brilliant starlight

High above our trenches in the plain

In the distance morning comes to greet us

Calling us to battle once againChorus

Far off is our home yet ready we stand

Were fighting and dying for you

Freiheit

Freiheit!

The other leading light of my small Anarchist group was Sam Weiner. Sam was a long time radical and used to give rousing public speeches in public squares on a literal soap box. He met his wife, Esther, that way. He was I.W.W., the Industrial Workers of the World, otherwise known as the Wobblies. He represented the was the Anarcho- syndicalist/union movement side of our little radical group. Anarcho-syndicalists view labour unions as a potential force for revolutionary social change. We would sing union songs, some of which are still used by todays unions such as The Union Maid by Woody Guthrie sung to the tune of Pretty Redwing

There once was a union aid, she never was afraid Of goons and ginks and company finks And all those guys that hung around the bosses She went to the union hall when a meeting it was called, And when the time came round to vote youd hear her say

Oh, you cant scare me, Im sticking to the union, Im sticking to the union, Im sticking to the union. You cant scare me, Im sticking to the union, Im sticking to the union til the day I die.

Must We still be slaves and Work for wages?

It is outrageous.

Has been for ages.

For the earth by right belongs to toilers

And not to spoilers of liberty....

Ill end this reminiscence with The Red Flag sung to the tune of O Tannenbaum (re-use, re-cycle) and thats sort of a wrap up of my radical, musical days in the 60s. The Red Flag was usually sung at the funerals of our radical brethren. Maybe another time Ill talk about the songs of the Civil Rights Movement which was another singing movement. All the good political movements were and are singing movements.

The Red Flag by James OConnell, 1899

The workers flag is deepest red

It shrouded oft our martyred dead;

And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold

Their life-blood dyed its every fold.

Chorus:

Then raise the scarlet standard high! Beneath its folds well live and die.

Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer

Well keep the red flag flying here.

Crossing The Line

Forty years or so later I came to have a very different view of unionism.

My early years were filled with reading. I was an omnivorous reader, reading any and everything. Two books that radicalized me were Thorstein Veblens Theory of the Leisure Class and Ethel Mannins Comrade O Comrade. From the latter I determined that Anarchism was the best brand. When I got to New York Citys Lower East Side in the 60s, well before it became gentrified,

I sought out and joined an Anarchist group called the Libertarian League. Affiliated with this group was a relic of early American Unionism, the I.W.W., also known as the Wobblies, spearheaded by Sam Weiner. From Sam and the others I learned to venerate unionism. It became self evident that the means of production should be in the hands of the workers. If I had known then what I know now my view of unions might not have been so rosy.

Now these were primarily armchair Anarchists, long on theory but short on practice. From them I learned that the end does not justify the means and long after I left New York I carried this belief into all my future endeavours.

The I.W.W. or Industrial Workers of the World, felt that worker control of the means of production was the way to a true Anarchist society where none would lead but all would participate. The unspoken belief was that man was basically good and, if not tied down by external forces, folks would head in the right direction. Doing the right thing in a morally correct way was very important. T hey were idealists and so I became an idealist too. Dirty tricks, lies and bullying were not acceptable tactics. In opposition to the Communists we did not believe that a worthy end was justified by unworthy means of achieving it.

I was in the group just before and in the time of the Civil Rights movement in the USA. Seemed then like everyone I knew was seeking higher moral ground.

When I came back to Canada I ended up working for a group affiliated with Government. At that time there were many support staff. Bubbling under, during the years that I worked there was a grievance identified as Pay Equity. Support staff were not receiving equal pay for equal work. We were living in the tail end of a top down paternal system which assumed that women would be paid less, no matter what they did. Now, this was a very just cause. No question about it. There was unfairness and it was not being addressed. I went to many union meeting and listened to this and listened to that. As we geared up to Strike I was immersed in union propaganda. I received all kinds of encouragement to go on strike. I was debating the matter in my head.

There were certain people who fell into an area between management and support staff. Their positions were covered by the Union that wished to go on strike. Some of these folks did not support the strike for reasons of their own which I was not privy to. One of these was a friend of mine, originally from Czechoslovakia, and she had been the recipient of the attentions of the Soviet Union during the ill-fated 1968 Prague Spring movement, when the Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia to crush this pro democracy movement.

Certain members of the Union in my own workplace, and Im not saying that the whole Union supported this, were phoning those who refused to go on Strike and threatening them over the phone. My friend had such a call. His children were there and one of them answered the phone. This child was threatened with reprisals by a Union member because his daddy was a bad man who was going to cross the picket line. My friend told me about this.

She said, These people are amateurs. Ive been bullied by professionals.

I could not take a light-hearted view of this, and other instances of bullying. There were others who were threatened with nastiness as well.

In my mind, morally, the end did not justify the means. Without question the cause of the Strike was just. Unfairness needed to be addressed. This all needed to be sorted out but I could not support their tactics, I could not, I could not, I could not support their tactics. Bullying was wrong. I made a decision. I would cross the line.

Cross the line I did. I was faced daily by a screaming mob as I tried to go to work. They never jostled me or physically assaulted me. It was all verbal. These were the people I worked with and their supporters. They were standing there screaming in my face as I tried to get in the door. One time I turned around and retreated. They followed me, almost chasing me, so I stopped and faced them again and they moved back. It struck me then that they were cowards.

At one point they were blocking the door with their bodies. I was nose-to-nose with the one who was closest to the door handle. While they were screaming at me, a businessman, walking by with his suit and his briefcase stopped and said, Leave her alone! They heard that more than anything they might have heard from me.

Obviously a meeting was held and a decision made because the next day there was no more screaming. They just turned their backs on me as I walked in. If a reporters camera had caught the confrontation the day before it would have been bad publicity for them, I suppose. Either that or they may have sensed that I was not going to give in. I was told to use an entrance at the other end of the building where some of the folks I worked closely with were stationed. There, I had some name calling, Scab! and so forth. Management had to escort me in those doors when that became the entrance, a job they did not relish.

Inside, perhaps by coincidence, the air conditioning had gone off, so there was no air circulation, and no-one would come in to repair it. This was in a closed building and the air became very dead and muggy, unpleasant to breathe and hot since this was in the summertime. Everything was deathly quiet. I had to sit at my computer and do what work there was, not too much of that, until the allotted time for working was over.

Things had ground to a halt, due to the Strike. I helped with some technical stuff, accessing data and so forth, which I could do because Im a demi geek.

I was not very happy. I was quite shaken. I would go into a washroom stall and meditate on a pillar of light trying to armor myself against all the animosity. It wasnt easy.

When, finally, the long Strike was over, and they won, working with those who had gone on Strike wasnt easy. For the next several years, as long as I worked there, I experienced animosity. Some folks gradually mellowed but the he die hard Union people certainly didnt. I wasnt best beloved but I was what I was and some of them came to accept that.

I never told them why I had crossed the line. It involved another person and my reaction to the telephone bullying and I just figured they did not have the ears to hear me, so I said nothing. I just kept it to myself and gradually the wounds healed over.

Im not too big on moral stands but in this instance I had to cross the line.

MAGICK, GHOSTS AND VAMPIRES

Magick

When I was living on New York Citys Lower East Side I started writing a novel called Murder by Magic. Not knowing a lot about magic, I got books out of the Library, some of them quite thrilling. I used most of the standard clichÃ©s from in horror movies and fiction. The anti-hero died as part of the plot and I went into mourning for him. This process of identification is, I understand, not uncommon amongst fiction writers.

Doing deeper library research, I found that the occult was not at all like the movies. Later, in Toronto, I started writing another book which I never finished. This second book involved an occult order dressed in black robes with a secret headquarters, secret passages and a heroine the whole nine yards. The book got sillier and sillier as time went on. It became a bit obsessive, so I dropped it.

Anxious to know where I had gone wrong I sought out some actual members of the occult community to find out what was really going on. I had learned a few things already through my research. I wanted to know more. I joined an group called the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis). This was Aleister Crowleys Thelemic group which was sex magick but I wasnt into that part of it. I was, perhaps, the only celibate member of the group but - there you go.

I wrote this song is the 60s in New York. I must have channeled it since my knowledge of magical practice at that time was limited.

All Hallows

The pale moon is riding alone oer the trees

The doves are all resting in dark boweries

I call to my love come away

Quench the lamp it reminds me of day

Come away, come away,

Theres no reason to stay. Come away.

I will plait you a garland of damp forest leaves

We will not be alone in the wild forest trees

The Sabboth of Night comes as last

We will dance in a ring on the grass

We will dance in a ring and well merrily sing.

Come away. Â© Sonia Brock 1965

Fortune Telling

My mother was an excellent tea leaf reader. She had some theatrical experience and read the leaves with a dramatic turn to her voice. Mother seemed to really believe what she was seeing in those little, drowned tea leaf fragments.

There's a house. I see someone going in. Oh, there's a tree hanging over the house. It casts a dark shadow... and on it went. We looked forward to these thrilling sessions which she didnt do too often. Fortune telling to me, at that time, was fun.

This may have influenced my own involvement in Astrology, which I studied rather carefully. I was not good at math and Astrology is, if nothing else, mathematical. I did manage to get the rudiments down and I started reading charts for people, not just their personalities, which were always interesting, but present, past and FUTURE!

I was just a teenager. This was a sport to me, a novelty, something to bring attention to myself and give me a sense of importance.

A lady who lived nearby in the Veteran's Land Act subdivision of Sprucedale had two adopted children. One of them was a 'difficult' case. He was quite unmanageable. This boy would throw his books away on the way home from school. He would walk in muddy puddles and then march around the dining room table grinding the mud into the rug. He seemed to be daring his adopted parents to hit him, as if he wanted to be hit to affirm something. He must have had the experience that everyone did hit him eventually. Perhaps he wondered why these people werent hitting him too. For whatever reason, he absolutely had to test them in many ways. He'd run off and be found sleeping in the side of a dry ditch. This testing went went on and on. Her husband had a heart condition, They didnt want to send the boy back to the institution. She was desperate, quite literally desperate, to know how things would turn out and asked a teenage girl who did horoscopes what his future would be.

Reluctantly, I cast his horoscope. Virtually everything in it was in the House of Prisons and Institutions. The boy would be institutionalized his whole life. I know now that many convicts have subtle brain injuries that came from being beaten about the head as children or from alcoholic mothers. This may have been part of his problem. I knew that I could not give his young adopted mother such bad news. Whether you believe or dont believe in Astrology is not the point. The reading just came out that way and I could not tell her the what the result was, so I gave up Astrology for a while. I didnt need that karma dogging me.

I didnt think too much about fortune telling again until I moved to New York City in 1959. I started doing fortunes again. My best friend, A.H. was an apprentice Astrologer. He later turned professional. A.H. was fascinated by the movements of the planets and he developed his own Sidereal system of Astrology. He stuck by it quite closely and it worked for him. My own Astrological efforts used to annoy him because he was, I guess you could say, a scientific Astrologer. It was all by the numbers and very carefully plotted. I was an intuitive Astrologer. I used a chart like a crystal ball, a sort of starting place where anything could happen. A.H. and I used to have a game where one or the other of us would present a chart of someone known to both of us and I would have to guess which acquaintance it was. A lot of the time I could beat him because this was an area where intuitive Astrology worked well. We would sit with friends over espresso coffee at our favourite East Village coffeehouse, Les Deux Megots, and talk shop about Astrology into the wee hours, to the bemusement of the acting manager who was not mystically inclined. Coffee houses were very popular in the 60s, but not so much on the Lower East side. Les Deux Megots was the only one of its kind in the area. (More on Les Deux Megots http://www.chefjuke.com/mom/drop1a.html)

A.H.'s father, Russell Blackwell, was a member of my Anarchist group and had been in the Spanish Civil War. Their ancestors, A.H.'s and Russell's, had come over on the Mayflower, so they were gentry of a sort, although by no means well-to-do. Living on the Lower East Side at that time in the 60s meant you were not wealthy.

I learned the hard way that when you tell someones fortune they give you all kinds of clues as to what they want to hear. Involuntary movements, intake of breath, facial expressions, words. Eventually, I would only do a reading if the subject promised not to speak. I would do the reading with my back turned to them so as not to pick up on their freely given clues as to what they wanted to hear. This is something to think about in case you are having your fortune read. Dont prompt the person telling your fortune.

I began studying occultism at that time as background for a book I was writing called "Murder by Magic", a really dreadful first novel. Never mind. I learned many things and one of them was the importance of fortune telling in occultism. I moved back to Toronto, had some hard times and then I settled in, got a decent job and had some leisure time. 'Mudder Bar De Door', when I have leisure time!

I joined the O.T.O. which was a occult order, was initiated to a small Degree and learned that these people and this particular philosophy of magic placed great emphasis on fortune telling of various kinds. There was something called Gematria which was derived from Jewish mysticism and involved finding hidden meanings in the numerical value of words. These folks would sometimes change their names so the Gematria would come out more favourably. Fortunately, my own name was in the lifeboat, so to speak, so no change was required. The Lodge Master at that time was an Astrologer with some good 'creds' . Other members read Tarot. I did Tarot for a while.

Tarot readings are sort of about the future but they are more like a weather report for the soul. That phrase is a steal from Truman Capote. In New York City he came on TV to give a weather report as a way of plugging a play of his currently in production. He was was billed as an addition to the weather man that night. What he gave was a 'weather report for the soul' and this phrase stayed in in my mind. The New York TV station personnel didnt 'get it', by the way.

When push comes to shove that's what fortune telling is all about. It's not so much about what is going to happen in the future because, oh my golly, that is such a collection of variables. It's more about the state of where you are right now with certain strong inclination lines indicated. Paracelsus, one of the world's greatest astrologers, said: "The stars incline; they do not compel", which meant the element of free will was not eliminated. Astrology and fortune telling give you a mirror to look at yourself. Perhaps it is a fun house mirror but a mirror none the less. You can look at yourself in a different way and from a different angle. It makes you think about yourself, about where you're at, about the state of your soul, your body and your mind. When you're doing Tarot, Astrology or whatever, all three - body, mind and spirit - come together. There's no split up between practitioners of disciplines - medical doctor, psychologist, priest. It's all combined, as it should be. This holistic approach and the new point of view you get are probably the most important things about reading cards, the runes or the stars.

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Three Ghosts

I never knew whether I really believed in ghosts until I became one.

Ghost One

I had, when I was quite a bit younger, just under the age of consent, stayed with my dear Aunt Addie in Brantford. She was unaware that I was planning to elope with a young man who was quite serious and quite honourable. Being African American he was not looked on favourably by my folks.

Frank and I thought all would be well but I foolishly left a note explaining my intentions. I was captured and put in a local hoosegow jail cell until my dad came to pick me up. I was in disgrace and the elopement didnt work out at all. It was a very agitated and emotional time for me.

Ten to fifteen years later when I was older, if not wiser, I was staying with my Aunt again, although she never quite forgave me for pulling such a dirty trick on her. I was staying in the same room I had been in on the night of the failed elopement of many years ago. I couldnt sleep or rest. I felt agitation.

I sensed, I never saw, but I sensed, the presence of a young girl who was very agitated and full of excitement and full of anxiety. She was very much there. I wasnt just reliving something that had happened. She was there. That room was haunted and the ghost was me. My earlier self.

Ghost Two

Time moves on. My brother was in Chatham. My mother had just moved into an apartment and he was finishing things up at the house she had left.,just checking to see if anything had been forgotten .

He spent the night there but didnt get very much sleep because he was tormented by the vision, and I guess he actually saw a little red-haired girl who would not let him sleep. She was agitated. She was upset. She was moving around. She just wouldnt let him sleep.

I had red hair when I was a little girl. I must have left some trace there. I’m wondering now how many other places I may be haunting that Im not aware of. Its as if a place where something has happened is like a photographic negative that takes an impression of highly emotional events or circumstances. Thats my guess.

Ghost Three

My third ghost story isnt about my ghost. Its about the ghost of a church member. I was active and ran the Sunday School at St. Stephen in the Fields in Toronto for a time. A long-time church member had passed on just before I joined the congregation. She had been very dedicated to the church. I knew her husband quite well. He was a Sidesman, along with my husband.

I played guitar at the folk mass, which was held before the regular service at this Anglican church. They tried to get me to sing modern made-up white hymns but I claimed I didnt know how and mostly played Southern gospel hymns, both black and white, which I coerced them into learning. We were doing our little folk mass quite simply in colloquial English.

At a certain point in the Mass you do Prayers for the Living and then you do Prayers for the Dead. While we were having the Service there was quite a commotion in the church. Doors were opening and closing with loud bangs. Winds were blowing. There were rattling noises. Things fell down. It was a ghostly agitation.

Somehow or other I knew sometimes you just know things that this was the lady who had passed on who had been so dedicated to the church. I started, because she was so active with banging and wind blowing etc., to put her in the prayers for the living. I stopped myself, I waited and then, under my breath, I put her name quietly spoken no one else heard me in the prayers for the dead.

I felt and I still feel at this time, thinking of it, this tremendous warmth. Someone came up behind me and put their arms around me and gave me such a warm and loving hug. Of course there was no-one visible there but all the noises stopped and everything was quiet and peaceful from then on. I realized, then, that sometimes ghosts dont know that they are dead. I had, almost accidentally, done this lady a great favour by telling her that she was indeed amongst the departed, that she could now move on in peace. She was no longer needed at the church. Her duties were over.

These events are very subjective and personal but they are also very real.

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Vampires

Vampires have been a recurring them in my life. It started with the old black and white horror movies with Boris and Bela bringing the monsters to life. It all started with the book. That Irish fellow really knew how to work out a terror tale. He was wise enough to follow along with existing European folklore mixing legend with fiction.

I am a fan of horror fiction. Ive read most of the classic stuff and some of the newer stuff that sort of segues into science fiction and fantasy. In spite of Stephen King saying that the vampire has (ahem) no more steam in his shorts, every now and then up pops another take on the vampire theme.

I think the vampire theme is based on a kind of psychological reality that is subliminally touched upon in vampire stories. Vampires are very, very needy creatures. They are perpetually unsatiated, unsatisfied. Demanding that we participate in their unending ritual of I need. I need. I need.

Now, in this sense we all have some of the vampire in us. We have our own neediness above and beyond the call of what we actually have use for. The object of desire is wanted but, in the true sense of the word, not really needed. The eye never tires of looking. We always need new stuff. We want new shoes, new clothes, new toys It never ends. No matter how much we have, we always want some more..

I found myself thinking yesterday, I need...I need a shelf stereo system. Well, I dont need it. I have three of them. Granted, the tape cassette deck doesnt work on one of them and another of them, an earlier model, is the size of a small airplane hanger but I dont need another shelf stereo system. Thats just the inner vampire in me, telling me I need things.

There is, however, another kind of vampire. I met one very recently. Theres a local group where, if you got stuff that you dont want. then you can give it away to someone who needs it. People on this forum post messages saying I want this or I have this and its up for grabs or this has been taken , so dont bug me.

I posted thre a book that people could have for free. It was a lengthy tome on Fibromyalgia. This fellow showed up to take the book . He was a nice enough but he sucked the soul right out of you with his neediness. He was a psychic vampire. I was very glad to give the book to him and get him out of my life. I had met his kind before.

I have met other psychic vampires that suck you into their world, an artificial world, not real. They make you part of their scenario to help fulfill their wants because they are so very, very needy. They are also control freaks. Its part of their fantasy world that what they desire has to be contained, controlled in order to meet their needs. A peculiar feature is that, if the present need is met, they are only briefly satisfied. Like the vampire, they are perpetually hungry.

Often they have the power of voice, something that is spoken of in the Dune Trilogy where the Bene Gesserit Order used it to attain their ends. Something in their voices can be like a good radio voice . With it they just work their will on you. You can end up supporting their fantasy world, fulfilling their artificial needs because its such a strong demand.

So, theres more than one kind of vampire. There are vampires in fiction, in film and in fact and, sometimes, I am the vampire.

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Computers, Pagans And The Wicnic

I am, myself, not socially mainstream. My mind still harks back to my hippie days on New York Citys Lower East Side before it became the East Village. I developed, early on, a fascination with computers and that fascination soon translated into useful job skills. My hobbies sometimes become jobs. Computers arrived before the computer- skilled staff at my workplace. As the only computer hobbyist on board I became, for a brief time, the computer Guru in residence. I wore my crown lightly being more interested in the technology than my temporary fame.

I formed a User-group where people could share knowledge. We met in the main boardroom. Reluctant secretaries were pressured into going to these meetings by their bosses. We talked about the new technology and computer programs. It soon became clear who were the front runners, and who were the reluctant tail draggers. My moment of glory would be brief. Those secretaries, once they learned a few necessary pieces of software, became the guardians of knowledge.

This knowledge they fed in trickles to their bosses. Knowledge is power. The word IT stands for Information Technology and it is the branch of engineering that deals with the use of computers and telecommunications to retrieve and store and transmit information.

LAN stands for Local Area Network which is a local computer network for communication between computers; especially a network connecting computers and word processors.

The new IT staff were on their way. All at sea, management got it half right. They hired a very capable woman to teach all of us, secretaries and officers, word processing. We were unaware of the underlying scheme to have the guys do their own typing, and the great downsizing of secretaries that was to follow.

Their second choice, for the LAN and IT Manager, was not so lucky. They listened to the candidates and chose the most verbally accessible. He was what we used to call in CB lingo, a bucket mouth. Good technical staff are often taciturn to the point of near muteness. Management chose a man with a great line of bull about how great he was, zero social skills, good hardware skills and some software knowledge. This was a recipe for disaster. Techs tend to be either hardware or software guys. Some can handily combine both but, often, this is not the case. Edward was a hardware guy in a software position.

The company hired outsiders to come in and wire up the LAN. Edwards job was to make the software run and work with us, the oddly named, end users.

I was doing most of the software support in my division and, tired of being lied to, I said to him once, Edward Go piss up a rope! The phrase was new to me. I thought it was very funny. Edward didnt. His large and fragile ego was punctured and I became his enemy for life. Fine with me. I worked better without him.

When the computers were rolled out it was management that got them first. My boss, then, was of the father knows best school of management. He favoured liquid lunches once a week on Thursdays. After such a lunch he would come r-o-ll-i-n-g back to the office, tanked to the gills and would sit behind his desk, planning great plans. He had his new computer placed behind him, where he could not see it. It was always turned off, except when I logged into his account and printed his email for him, all of it, whether of interest or not, both English and French, ALL of his the email. Many a tree was sacrificed to this mans refusal to view his monitor. Sonia, I feel like its watching me, he told me once in confidence.

As an aside, managers, to a lesser extent and, more importantly, top brass had visions.

No humble officer or support staff member would dare to have a vision. In the case of the lower orders such a vision might be categorized as an hallucination. Every year, certainly, and possibly every six months, we got a new vision to implement. These visions were vague enough to be one size fits all. I suspected that they sprang full-grown from the inebriated minds of executives after a Thursday liquid lunch.

An unrelated Anarchist vision I recall said Put the tools of production in the hands of the workers. Looking back to my old office I can see that the introduction of desktop computers fitted quite handily into this vision. Top down management was about to take a lesson from the bottom-up democracy, fostered by computers but that, as Kipling would say, is another story.

Administration thought that computers were for word processing and accounting and all manner of serious stuff. I knew they were for web surfing, gaming, email and organizing people into niche groups.

Some early adopters of the Internet and computers were journalists. These newspaper people had to slap the rubber cups from their luggable computers on to a pay phone and send the story back to the mother ship.

Then there were the pagans...... Why pagans? Well, Paganism appeals to computer guys and gals. Given the power of communication they did not seek to proselytize.

(As the Jewish vampire said to the blond lady waving a cross at him, Sorry, lady, Im not that kind of vampire )

Instead they saw it as a means to share texts of importance to the initiated with each other and, more importantly, as a great way to socialize. Although many pagans are solitaries they like to club together for social events. One great social event of the year, for us, was the annual WicNic.

Now there was a reason so many techno-pagans were solitaries. Theres many a slip twixt cup and lip. Little covens and special groups of brethren breed rivalries that can become deadly when mixed with off-brand religious belief. Such groups are havens for little Jim Jones emulators and other tin pot messiahs. If you want to believe the great god Pan has returned, then you might also believe that Brother Joe is incarnating him which is a sobering thought.

Cyber pagans are remarkably free of such delusions. There is something about the terseness of text messaging that takes the punch out of declarations of godhood. Also, the logical training of the computer literate causes them to question such assertions, or ignore them.

Back to the WicNic:

The WicNic was an annual affair organized through the Homestead Knowledge Bulletin Board System (or BBS, an early, local Internet Forum). I was the communications arm. I collected email addresses and send out bulletins to the effect that The WicNic is coming, Hooray, Hoorah!! then I would give out the particulars. We had to be in a Park with a fire pit, for which we would obtain official permission. Knowing the drill, we would drift into the area in twos and threes, until a critical mass was reached. Then we would form a circle and participate in whatever home-brew circle ceremony the nominal priest and priestess had prepared for our edification.

The ceremony I best remember was created by the System Operator (Sysop) of Homestead BBS and involved a technical metaphor comparing life and its troubles to a computer system, most especially the hard drive.

Spin, Spin, Spin. Protect us from all viruses and malware. Defend us from the Ad Bots and spyware, Defragment and join back together the broken bits of our lives. Optimize us that we may function well. Blessed be our zeros and ones, so we may prosper.

All present understood the technical references and grooved on their spiritual application.

My limited computer skills have been bolstered all along by kind souls who actually understand the technology. I count such folks as friends. I appreciate their logic and clarity. I also appreciate the willful abandonment of same when having a good time in a park with cyber friends I otherwise seldom saw in person. Our mutual and somewhat comical suspension of disbelief for ceremonial purposes was welcome as was the shop talk and community gossip. As I write, my section of the globe is in the cold grasp of a late winter. Although I have moved on, I miss casual commingling with my cyber friends in the warm summer days and sitting about the fireside with food and drink and laughter.

SHOW BUSINESS

Folk Music

My interest in folk music started with a trip to the Chatham Public Library. . Looking for new reading material, I found a tiny section devoted to folk music and borrowed a book of American folk songs and started picking through the tunes.

My mother was a trained musician and church organist. I had learned a bit of piano, so I could play single notes.

That Christmas (1955) I had been given a ukulele (an instrument made popular at that time by the well-known TV host, Arthur Godfrey). I discovered that folk music consisted primarily of three chords and, guess what? I knew three chords on the ukulele!

I learned a few simple tunes like:

â€¢ Down in the Valley

Finding that too easy I branched out and learned:

â€¢ Go Tell Aunt Rhody

I found a Canadian radio program hosted by Rawhide and got to hear other people singing folk music too. They sang:

â€¢ Dark as A Dungeon

Gradually, I learned about Canadas East Coast with all that wonderful Irish/Scottish/Canadian music. I learned also that folk music is dependent on regional accents and I started trying to learn the basics of these special speech pattens.

â€¢ Is the Boy That Builds the Boat

â€¢ Squid Jiggin Ground

I started to read about the history of the music and about Appalachian folk music, while struggling with the regional accent that was part of it. I would talk the lyrics to try to get the rhythm of the speech then sing it.

â€¢ Wildwood Flower (talk it first)

â€¢ Bury Me Beneath the Willow (talk it first)

Nobody would mistake me for a native but I was getting there.

I began to turn to gospel music, not because I was particularly religious but because of the grand energy of it.

â€¢ Poor Little Jesus

I found there was something called a back beat that swung the music and turned it on its head.

You can almost hear the wheezing of the harmonium in the straight version of

â€¢ What a Friend (straight) Put in a backbeat and its a whole new song.

â€¢ What a Friend (swung)

Then I got married and moved to New York.

One Easter Sunday I went to 5th Avenue to catch the Easter Parade. Right at the beginning of 5th Avenue is a little park called Washington Square Park with a round cement fountain, which then was always dry. As I walked up 5th Avenue admiring the Easter bonnets I came to this park and heard music, familiar music. Guitars and tub basses and voices rose in song.

â€¢ This Land is Your Land

I had discovered the roots of the new folk music boom and, guess what I was part of it! I never became a professional folk musician. Its not in my nature to perform publically for a living, but I know and remember those songs and I always will.

â€¢

Its not easy for me to talk about the blues because the blues are such an integral part of my life. First I fell in love with the poetry of the blues. Those wonderful words resonated within me and carried the culture into my psyche.

I needed to believe in that sunshine coming along.

Then came the music. I would pick it out on my guitar from song books and learn the melody line. Then Id sing it and teach myself the chords on the guitar and sing it some more and sing it and sing it and sing it again - until it became part of me.

I stuck to the old chestnuts, tried and true,

Every Day I have the Blues St. Louis Blues Backwater Blues Sporting Life and on and on.

Every time I sang them I found something new and different; a turn of phrase, an increased depth of meaning to the lyric, a slightly different rhythm. I never grew tired of them. It mostly started in New York. My husband had moved to New York City to become an off-Broadway actor. His success in this field was limited. We ended up living at 171 East Second Street on the Lower East Side. The Lower East Side had been a ghetto for new immigrants for nearly 100 years. I was surrounded by echoes of poverty and striving. There was no place to go but up.

I learned things that were not in the lexicon of Chatham, Ontario. Gefilte fish, and Buy a salami for your boy in the Army ( that was a sign in the window of Katzs delicatessen). There were pushcarts still, a wheeled cart and you were in business. There were also drug dealers, numbers runners, petty thieves, muggers, welfare recipients and folks left over from previous waves of immigration.

We were not well to do. Times were hard and the blues definitely suited my lifestyle. I even wrote a few blues numbers. This was at the beginning of the folk boom. Everybody was singing. Being a musician seemed simple. Pick up a guitar, learn four chords and you were set.

Michael, row the boat ashore

I would go to Gerdes Folk City, especially on open stage nights, to hear Bob Dylan and other folk notables. Ian and Sylvia debuted in New York at that wonderful venue.

I heard Jimmy Witherspoon and Lightnin Hopkins, Brother John Sellers (he was the emcee), Victoria Spivey and Lonnie Johnson.

It was was good to hear and see what I had garnered from books and records and radio made real on Gerdes tiny stage.

I was thirteen years on the Lower East Side - from Senator McCarthy and the Communist witch hunt years, to Lyndon Baines Johnsons presidency.

I went back to school, to college, Pace College to be exact, it was an academic business college. There were student riots at this time and I thought a business-orientated college it would be safe.

Hah! Construction workers barreled through the plate glass entrance to the college, injuring students in the process. They were seeking student radicals and by accident they came to a business college. So you could say that the blues followed me to school.

I didnt check out Woodstock I dont like crowds.

Didnt join the march on Washington for the same reason. Gave my tickets to somebody else but I was there in spirit and I sang their songs.

â€¢ A Night At The Apollo Theatre In New York City And Some Comments On The Chitlin Circuit

(written for a Guest Spot on BLUZ.FM on jazz.fm http://www.jazz.fm)

The black urban theatre circuit, popularly known as the Chitlin Circuit, stretched across the United States.

Ill name some of these theatres. There was the Apollo Theatre in New York Citys Harlem where I spent a memorable evening, the Regal Theatre in Chicago, The Howard Theatre in Washington. D.C., The Uptown Theatre in Philadelphia, The Royal Theatre in Baltimore and the Fox Theatre in Detroit.

These venues were very special. When blues and what not moved out of the country and into the city it became a different kind of music. African American entertainers, comedians and musicians played this circuit to great effect. Audience participation was a given. These were people that appreciated their musicians and told them so in more ways than one. The Chitlin circuit was the starting place for acts like Cab Calloway, Pearl Bailey, Ike and Tina Turner, Patti LaBelle, Louis Jordan, Fats Waller, Etta James, Nat King Cole - and more - Gatemouth Brown, W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, The Jackson Five. The list goes on and on and on.

Movie houses, back in the day, had elaborate prosceniums, gold trim and fancy double curtains. These were palaces of entertainment.

There was a special item at the Apollo Theatre in New York Citys Harlem. This was a round platform which was part of centre stage. This platform could be lowered and performers dressed in their stage attire could step on to this platform down beneath the stage, invisible to the audience, and slowly rise up through the stage - the head, then the shoulders, then the rest of them would come into audience view. In this day of rock shows and special effects this is maybe not such a big deal but it was a very big deal back then. To see a headline performer coming up through the stage that way was an amazing thing.

These were the acts that I caught when I went to the Apollo. Red Foxx, Pigmeat Markham (famous for his courtroom parody Here come de Judge), and Tito Puente. Now, you might not think that Tito Puente belonged in such a venue but he was from the hood, from Spanish Harlem. He was known and respected for his wonderful drumming and his band.

Ruth Brown came tripping out on to the stage in a gold lamÃ© gown so tight around her legs and feet that looked like a mermaid she could could barley tippy-toe, waddle up the the microphone but once she was up there and started singing

Mama he treats your daughter mean..... everybody knew the song. Everybody was with her.

Then Pigmeat Markham, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, came on and did his Here come de Judge routine. There were screams and roars of laughter because these people had been through the court system, so seeing it parodied on stage, with black folks playing judges and cops and so forth, was just a real hoot.

Tito Puente came on. Tito was a native of Spanish Harlem in New York, so he was from the hood, as it were. The audience liked his music just as well because, golly, it had the rhythm, it had the beat. So, they were with it. They were really, really with it.

Now, if you didnt perform up to standard and there was a very high standard, you could be in a mess of trouble, particularly on open stage night. There was a guy with a long waist high hook who would come out from the wings. I may be remembering this from another performance. It might have been a clown-like figure with a noise maker. Performers was were not up to audience specifications would try to duck the hook or noisemaker and eventually it would haul or drive them still gamely singing off the stage into the wings. You dont really find that sort of thing in, say, a polite folk club nowadays.

Very much a part of the show at the Apollo, or in any of these venues, was the audience. You get a very special kind of audience reaction when youve got common culture. The entertainers played to this commonality and told jokes about sorghum and blue gums and what have you and got the audience going along with them.

Urbanized country folks were part of the audience. Here was a place where the audience was on fire to hear their own people performing and these were often class acts that later on became very, very famous.

The audience knew these performers were good and knew they were theirs, their own people on stage. The audience was on top of everything that happened on stage - every reference, every musical note, they knew the language that was being spoken. It was theirs and they dug it!

In a white world, before the civil rights movement took hold, you could step into a theatre and hear your talk, your people talking about things that concerned you. Making fun of it. Making music out of it. The rhythm carried it and it was just total immersion in a vibrant culture.

People up here in Canada are really nice but, sometimes, theyre too polite. Sometimes, the absolute best thing to do is to get down and dirty with that performer. Yell when you like it and say when you dont and maybe even get out the hook. Both audience and performer will be better for it.

â€¢ Burlesque

Im taking a look at feminine and female dance forms. Ive done a little bit of research on this and I have some past history I can talk about. One of the things that got me started was a dancer my dad spoke about. He was in WWI in the R.A.F. and he spoke of a music hall turn featuring a lady called Lottie Collins.

I looked up Lottie Collins in Wikipedia and found out that she wore flouncy skirts and that she kicked very high, revealing her stockings held up by sparkley suspenders. People could see her whole leg! This was scandalous in those days. She was British and a very popular symbol of the Naughty Nineties. . Lottie went abroad to dance as well. Her dance was a skirt dance, a sort of Can-Can done as a solo dance with the flouncy skirts and the very high kicks. Heres the song.

Lottie Collins lost her drawers Will you kindly lend her yours Cause shes going far away To sing Ta-ra-ra Boom-Te-Ay

Ta-ra-ra Boom-Te-Ay Ta-ra-ra Boom-Te-Ay and so on.

I looked up skirt dance and apparently even respectable ladies back in the gay nineteys would do a graceful skirt dance, leaving out the high kicks but, perhaps, allowing an occasional shocking glimpse of ankle. Can you imagine!

When I went to youtube.com to try and look up skirt dance what came up was belly dancing. My goodness, the costumes those ladies wear! Aside from being a belly dance this dance form, with the costume, and the pompoms and the spangles and what have you, is a skirt dance!

Leaving out the all the percussive effects with the heels and the castanets when you just look at the costume you can see that Flamenco is also a skirt dance.

Now Burlesque, and thats what Im working up to, is not a skirt dance. No, the skirt is off or, if it is on, pretty soon its off. My first husband I decided to take our vacation just around where we were living which at that time was Detroit. I had never been to Burlesque and I wanted to see what it was like. We went downtown to this hall that was like an old movie palace. There was even a pit orchestra, absolutely essential for the timing to emphasize bumps and grinds and for the drum rolls needed by the comedians for their punchlines.

Comedians like Eddie Cantor and Milton Berle got their start in Vaudeville, which was a theatre show featuring an assortment of short acts sometimes called bits or sketches. Burlesque was the last shimmy-shake hurrah of vaudeville. There were actually baggy- pants comedians but Ill get to them in a minute but first the ladies.

The ladies wore pasties with tassels on them and one very talented dancer could twirl these tassels in different directions. I wondered if she had a motor or exactly how she did that.

Each artist that came on, as we watched this revue, had a different shtik , a slightly different take on the same old thing and the music from the pit orchestra was a hoot because it was going

Boomp ta boomp,

Boomp ta boomp boomp BOOMP! as they moved their flesh in different directions

Boomp ta boomp - there goes one hip. Boomp ta boomp - there goes another hip. Boomp ta boomp boomp boomp - a triple pelvic thrust.

I found it entertaining. I wouldnt say it turned me on. The chaps in the front row were certainly very interested.

Then, they brought on one lady who was certainly well past her prime. Her dimpled flesh resembled cottage cheese due to cellulite and you felt that if you poked a finger into her ample thigh that the impression would stay. She got up there and did basically the same boomp ta boomp routines as the other ladies but it was really strange to see it being done by this over-the-hill person. She was well over-the-hill, but she knew the moves and just about made it work because she knew the moves.

Now, the comedians. Oh, my goodness gracious! The reason for those baggy pants was they did these blackout sketches in which the talent and the comedians would set up various unlikely scenarios with the exotic dancers as their foils, also known in the business as straight men. I can tell you that the exotic dancers were much better at bouncing their flesh around than they were at acting. Ive never ever heard such wooden dialog in my life but there they were. They were beautiful and the comedians just, basically, carried it.

The comics would get up to a point where they were going to do something very very, very naughty with these ladies. Then theyd reach into their baggy pants, held up by suspenders, searching for something down there and BINGO! The lights would go out. It was a blackout. They did quite a few of these blackout sketches. It was a standard routine. The comedian were pretty funny, in their own fashion. It wasnt prime time television humour but it was what it was. It was was the last gasp of vaudeville and the vaudeville comedian before their act were cleaned up and moved to television.

Trouble in mind, Im blue But I wont be blue always That old suns gonna shine On my back door some day

RADIO AND TECHNOLOGY

Computers 101

I like new technology so I caught the computer bug early on. I took a night class where they told us about mainframes and Basic programming and showed us punch cards. We got to write our own little programs on punch cards. Mine was much too complicated for a first try. I figured out later that Dungeons and Dragons was not the best model for a first attempt at programming. This exposure, however, satisfied some of the itch for the new.

I lusted after some very early computer models. I used to go into the downtown Eatons Department Store and stare at them. Through watching them, I learned to program a loop, so the computer screen would say, endlessly, Hi, Im a machine or whatever. It was a big thrill to give that first command and see it obeyed.

These early models were sold alongside scientific calculators. I would hang around and look but I wasnt ready to buy yet. I really wanted something called an Exidy Sorcerer which was featured at a little startup store on Queen Street East.

Being downsized from my job with an life insurance company, I took a portion of my retirement funds and studied on purchasing my first computer.

There was a man called Harold who was the driving force behind the local shortwave listeners club here in Toronto (ODXA). He knew technology and was a very practical man. I trusted his judgment. Whatever he was going to buy, I was going to buy. So I watched and I listened and wrote him emails and made a general nuisance of myself. Then, I got exactly what he got, an Apple II+, an early Apple clone. It was one of the best investments I ever made. Apple did not turn out to be the model most businesses chose but every job I got thereafter was based on my knowledge of computers. Even knowing just a little bit about the new technology went a long way in those early days. With the Apple I got my feet wet. I used to go to Apple Usergroup meetings in a big high school auditorium. This auditorium would be pretty well filled by computer hobbyists, early adopters of the technology. Floppy disc sales were at the back of the hall. I would study the list of programs and games available and buy little programs on 5 1/2 inch floppies.

Eventually, I ended up running the telecommunications SIG (SIG is short for Special Interest Group). We met at a local library and the staff let us run a long extension cable, after hours, from their phone to our 1200 baud modem on the meeting room machine. We could go on line thus proving that we could. There wasnt as much to do then on line as there is now but, hey, we were there.

I also got involved in Unix and attended a local group called Unix Unanimous. Yes, you heard that right. Unix Unanimous was the name of the group.

I also got involved with Usenet. A very kind man, Bruce, helped me to get started there. I had by then segued over to an Amiga, an early multitasking computer with excellent graphics and a Unix flavour. With Bruces help I was able to set up my own Newsgroup. The first in Toronto to do this on an Amiga 500, which was a big deal in those times.

I joined an Amiga user group called ABUG and later ended up chairing the group at the 519 Church Community Centre in Toronto. ABUG was popular with a small group of loyal fans. I scoured the Internet for public domain programs to demo at this group. Like most such groups, it was a hands-on Show and Tell kind of production.

In the meantime, at work, I had learned to use the AES Word Processor/Computer.

AES Data, successfully marketed its brand of word processors worldwide until its demise in the mid-1980s. It was a true office machine and organizations, such as medium-sized law firms, could afford an AES. A big selling point for the AES machine was that it could be learned and operated by secretarial staff. They were big clunky machines. The printers were extremely noisy and had heavy plastic covers to mute the noise so you could hear yourself talk during a print job. Technicians used to come in regularly about every two weeks and fix them up. They broke down a lot. Later on, I learned to run a few simple CP/M command line instructions on the AES Data machine

A law office hired me as a temp because I had some computer background. That first AES job was a baptism of fire. Had to figure everything out myself but, thereafter, the AES machine was my meal ticket, as a temp at Environment Canada and later as a temp and then full time employee with Industry Canada.

CB Radio

I inherited from my father a sort of compulsion to try new electronic gadgets. He was always the first to have the latest electronic whizzbang. This compulsion led me to getting any number of devices for which I had no real need, such as a Scanner radio receiver which allowed me to tune in on police, air, fire and private company broadcasts on special radio bands. Listening in meant long moments of boredom interlaced with a few moments of great excitement when the cops were chasing somebody or some gangster was having an argument with his girlfriend over their cellphones.

Because it was on sale, I got myself a CB Base Station at the time of the CB radio craze. A Base Station is different from a car CB. A base station is meant for your house. I knew nothing about antennas and all sorts of things that you need to know to get on the air. There was a fellow who went by the handle, George, the Book Bandit. Everybody had Handles, that is to say Nicknames. You might get to know their real names eventually, or not. It didnt much matter. George ,the Book Bandit, was a CB hobbyist, big time. He caught my very faint signal, as I tried to reach out to talk to people. He happened to be on the Channel I was trying to broadcast on. My voice was as strong as I could make it but my signal was very weak but he heard me. This was a man who managed to pluck out a broadcast from the Solomon Islands that came in on the skip very faintly on an odd channel. George had good radio ears .

The Skip happens when the scattered patches of relatively dense ionization that develop seasonally within the E region of the ionosphere reflects and scatters radio frequencies. When frequencies reflect off multiple patches, it is referred to as multi-hop skip. E-skip allows radio waves to travel many miles beyond their intended area of reception.

George and I managed to make contact on air and he got me set up with a Radio Shack big stick antenna which was mounted halfway down my back yard. George put my big stick up and anchored it with guy wires. Then I had a very strong signal. This was really important because there were characters out there called carps who liked to walk over another CBers signal, to drown them out. If you had a base station with a good antenna the carps didnt stand a chance.

Eventually, a group of adults came together on air. We werent interested in hurling insults at each other or talking nonsense about nothing. Well, we talked nonsense but it was about something. We started to congregate on the channel that was just above the dime. Channel Ten or the Dime was the channel that regular CB radios ended on. More expensive CBs had the upper channels above Channel 10. You got rid of a lot of the riff raff if you worked above the Dime. We gathered up there and talked. I got to know some of the regulars like Ingmar. He was a computer systems guy who remembered when mainframe computer tubes were bigger than beer cans. There was the Blue Goose. Heavens! There were all ll kinds of people.

Then, I heard Mike, the Irish Viking. I was kind of stuck on him for a while. He had this great, deep radio voice and I have a weakness for radio voices. Through Mike I met John, the Earthworm who lived in a basement apartment. Along came Starfighter who was a born communicator. Starfighter, also known as Craig, later went to to do some regular radio broadcasting as a DJ on AM radio., not making much of a living at it but still.... At that time I was into Dungeons and Dragons. I was a Dungeon Master and ran games where I made up the plots and told players who had won each fight . I transferred Dungeons and Dragons to the CB radio. We met on one of the legal upper channels and had a game going with dungeons, of course, with grey stone corridors and with great hairy monsters with green dripping fangs and red flashing eyes and swords of magical power. I would throw the dice for the gamers. We had quite a good game going there.

One time, a trucker, who was just cruising the dials, started sandy-bagging, just listening in but not speaking) . Finally he couldnt stand it any more and he shouted out. What do you mean theres a green hairy monster coming down the corridor after you and you pulled your sword and youre going to stick him in they eye? YOURE ALL CRAZY!!

Well, maybe we were but we had a lot of fun. We grew quite close in the game. Role- playing games are funny. They have a gestalt, a sort of a group existence. At one time if someone was wounded in the game, seriously wounded, then an accident would happen to them in real life and that got a little Oooh, oooh, oooh spooky. It was all part of the game.

The big event I remember in the Dungeons and Dragons game on the CB radio was when John the Earthworm fought Death and won. His father-in-law had just passed away. John was very fond of his wife and had seen her suffering while watching the old boy go, so he had a bone to pick with Death.

When he came into the game I, more or less, extemporaneously, created a skeleton monster called the Death Man, or something like that. John was a Paladin, one of the good guys, he got out his sword and he fought death. It was a fierce fight and the dice rolls were going against him but he kept on. He lost some blood and he lost some points and then he WON! That was a really, really big deal.

You heard tales on the CB from older folks who had some kind of story worth listening to. There was an old trapper who got on one night and talked about the guy he knew up in the bush who had a mink jock strap. The fur was on the inside. Go figure.

Then, there were veteranss of WWII who had been in battle and would talk the strategy and tactics of certain battles in their corner of the war. George the Book Bandit had been in Germany in WWII and he had had some adventures there.

CB Radio had its time in the sun. Nothing lasts forever. The CB radio was a really great fraternity of radio people and I learned from it. CB radios legacy is that I can still talk about anything to anybody, anytime - and that is useful!

Voices

I have been impressed by the power of the human voice. I spent about a year fooling around on the CB radio. I listened to many other amateur broadcasters and found that certain voices have the power almost to hypnotize. A fellow, Mike, that I met over the CB, had a real radio voice , deep and reassuring. He had followers. There are a bunch of channels on a CB radio. When he came on a Channel the word would spread and people would throng on to that channel. If he said something nice about someone that was a big deal.

Guys, and ladies too, who are radio announcers will tell you that fans out there think of them as friends because theres a one-to-one quality about radio. It is as if the presenter were talking only to you. People become mesmerized by the voice of the presenter and tune in every week for a nice visit.

I was flipping around the dials and I hit on a program on Torontos jazz.fm called bluz.FM with Danny Marks. The first thing that caught my ear was his voice which was deep, resonant and friendly. You felt like this guy could be anybodys friend. I felt like he was talking to me. I later learned that this is the sign of a good radio host. Danny is also a very accomplished guitarist.

More than his voice, there was the music taking me back to the 50s and 60s, when I listened to rhythm and blues from the Detroit radio station. Here was all that music all over again sounding as new and fresh and wonderful as the day it was made.

I started emailing Danny. Hes good because he works with his audience. He writes back to everyone. Its his signature that he does this. We got a little correspondence going which was mildly flirtatious, until he found out how old I actually was. When he did find out there was an awkward pause and, then, I adopted him and I adopted his Show and thats how I became, in his words, the Blues Mama. It all just started with a friendly exchange in email.

That email conversation ended up with me running his website and Ive done 25 guest spots on his Show. I specialize in blues history which I research mainly on the Internet. I review his Show every week, because entertainers need feedback. In the beginning, before I came to know him, I was just simply mesmerized by his voice.

Voice in the Dune novel was training originated by the Bene Gesserit, permitting an adept to control others merely by selected tone shadings of the voice.

There was a fellow, early on in my online Guild Wars multi player war game who had this power of the voice. He built a team of accomplished players. He was a very good player himself because he pretty much spent his life in the game. Later I found out that, outside the game, he didnt have much of a real life but in the game he was a towering figure.

We had something called Teamspeak which let use use our computer microphones and headphones to talk to each other while the game was in progress. Without Teamspeak our fearless leader was just another player. With Teamspeak and the power of his voice, we would follow him into the most terrifying depths of the Underworld. He had fatal flaws and even the veneer of his mesmeric voice could not hide these flaws over time. I ended up leaving that guild but for a while, oh God, I just lived to follow this fellow and fight things with the rest of the team. We all had our roles and our special armor and we were good at the game.

In another Guild now, I have been invited to use this microphone and headphone capability but I have refused. Ive learned my lesson. I have a suggestible personality and knowing this, I am careful.

I have received an occasional piece of fan mail from listeners to my Podcasts in England, the USA, Brazil, Mexico and even Australia. Something in my voice and the stories I tell has reached them there. We all have, to one degree or another, this power of the voice and with power comes responsibility.

â€¢

Back to my association with radio.

I have access to a whole lot of blues music. I was interested in blues history. Danny invited me to be a guest on his Show. That was kind of nervous making but I made a good decision on the way to the interview. I decided I was going to breathe and relax, breathe and relax. I would slow down and just talk about what I knew. Hes a very good interviewer. We did some questions and answers, some of which were surprising, and I just relaxed and talked. We had a friendly conversation on air and people seemed to enjoy it.

Ive done 25 of those guest spots now, and counting, doing different perspectives on the blues. Weve covered different sections of the USA like the Piedmont area of Carolina, New Orleans, Texas and you name it. No competition with Danny in all this. Although we like the same kind of music our picks are quite different.

Friends have told me that our conversations are as important to them as the music. They like the banter between Danny and me. Hes more than a a bit of a comedian and that makes it fun.

Doing real radio was new to me. I had to learn to talk into a microphone, I had to learn how close to speak into the mic and how to angle it to get rid of those explosive plosive sounds - the Ps and Ts.

I had thought of a radio station as being a glamorous place. Not really. Where you do the recording is like a large closet with different kinds of sound baffles on the walls so that they dont pick up ambient noise and so forth.

I didnt realize how much editing went into doing a Show. We did a few retakes, not too many because Im pretty much a straight on performer. He has a tendency to ramble and would listen to himself and say, Well, thats not really important. Lets cut it out. This helped tighten up the final take.

I learned a lot from the experience of being a radio guest. I learned how to edit. I got a notion of how a sound board works and the kind of music that worked with the Show and how to talk about things that were of interest to people. When we were talking it was like two people having a private tÃªte-Ã -tÃªte to which everybody was invited, which was great.

Jazz.FM is only partially funded by advertising. The rest of its operating budget comes from listeners. This helps the Station be a little more open than a commercial radio station. I chip in during fund drives and between times with my body, going in there to do the guest spots. Its been fun. If you need something to do Id recommend adopting a radio show.

Torontos Jazz.FM can be reached on the web at http://www.jazz.fm and its 91.1 on your radio dial.

Listening In

To say Im a radio fan is an understatement. I listen in all kinds of ways. I started, of course, with regular radio. I have some favourite programs. On Saturday nights its Danny Marks blues show on jazz.fm 91.1 here in Toronto, Ontario. During the week I listen to CBCs Radio One: Quirks and Quarks, Stuart McLean, Randy Bachmans Vinyl Tap and Eleanor Wachtels Writers and Company.

I am an early adopter of technology and got this USB computer attachment which allows me to transmit audio from my computer to my stereo system in the next room. I like to listen to some BBC programs on the Internet so I started beaming them to my stereo.

Dave Raven creates his program, Raven n Blues from his houseboat on the Thames just outside of London, England. Its a really good show and I listen to it often.

I have a friend who is from Great Britain. Before he got a high speed connection, up north, I used to record a BBC program called Sorry I Havent a Clue for him on my computer. When I had recorded a nice handful of them Id send them on to him along with other stuff that I hoped hell find interesting.

From the BBC and Radio Netherlands I went further afield and discovered Australian radio. I discovered that some regular radio programs could be downloaded as mp3 files, which saved me a lot of recording. Thats how I got into the Podcast world. A Podcast is just an Mp3 sound file that can be listened to when you have time, either on the computer on on an iPod or other Mp3 player. I went online and purchased some software called FeedDemon to collect my favourites for download. I like to listen to Mark Blevis from Ottawa with Electric Sky. I subscribe Dave Ravens program too and Austin Riffs.

I started putting my radio and Podcast mp3 files on a Creative Zen mp3 player, so that I could listen to them at night. I have a condition called Restless Leg Syndrome which keeps me awake sometimes, so I always have something interesting to listen to: talk shows, documentaries, drama and music. A Podcast called Thomas Edisons Attic has early music -- some pieces taken from wax cylinders and some from very early 78s. Its like having an ear into the past.

I like radio theatre: plays and skits and early radio sitcoms like Burns and Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, the Great Gildersleeve and some dramatic programs like Inner Sanctum. In radio they seem to like dramas that have you on the edge of your seat the boat going down with all hands or something dreadful coming up from the basement. I have a fair number of those.

Im picking up little catch phrases from listening to old time radio skits such as saying, for someone whos a skinflint, that theyre tight as a toreadors pants. We always used to say tight as the bark on a tree but I thing toreadors pants covers it, ahem, adequately.

Im doing my own Podcasts now which gives me an appreciation of what goes in to producing these things. It takes some learning.

What Im trying to say is that through the Internet you can listen to the radio from anywhere around the world, including the USAs NPR (National Public radio is big) and PRI (Public Radio International). Im getting a full-fledged education just lying in my bed and listening to the world.

I sometimes take my Mp3 player with me when Im traveling around and people wonder why Im so plugged in. Well, Ive got something to be plugged into.

I have a fairly extensive website and on it are some pages of interest to the listener.

My listen live links where you can choose a radio station to listen to are at http://www.quartette.com/sunny/listen-live.htm

I have a page for world radio at http://www.quartette.com/sunny/world-radio.htm

When I did this chapter as a Podcast I put a little sound clip at the beginning that was taken from a 1902 Edison gold-molded record from http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php where they have thousands of these early recordings, many on wax cylinders that have been transposed for listening in. I put it in to illustrate that folks have been listening for a long, long time.

I was at Hughs Room in Toronto to hear Maria Muldaur not too long ago. At the same table were Suzie Rotolo (Bob Dylans former lady) and Bob Harris, a well known presenter from BBC Radio 2.

Suzie was surprised that I listened to WNYCs Leonard Lopate on a regular basis.

Bob Harris and his friendly associate were also surprised to learn about my collecting I Havent a Clue from BBC Radio 7 and that I also listened in to Dave Ravens Raven n Blues and Westway, a radio soap opera. We had an instant commonality. Radio is the tie that binds.

Im listening away and Im picking up my guitar and vocal skills to begin and exit these little Podcasts because people like music and they especially like it when its free.

My Adventures In Podcasting & Listening

Since this book is taken from the transcriptions of my Podcasts I thought Id go into some of detail on how I got started recording these autobiographical Mp3s for what has turned out to be a global audience. A series of events cascaded to produce that first Mp3. I bought a Stereo Receiver from a local electronics store and I turned out not to need it. Feeling sorry for the salesman, I traded it in for a Creative Zen MP3 player. Now, I had a player with quite a lot of memory in it and all kinds of features. What could I do with it?

I started collecting all sorts of Mp3s to listen to and then I tripped over Podcasts. Podcasts are produced in Mp3 format and can be played on any type of Mp3 player. I started working with an aggregator, called Feed Demon, which collected Podcasts for me. It just polled them from my list of favourites to download on command.

I found out that some Podcasts were too long. I preferred listening in shorter bursts. Maybe I have a short attention span. Sometimes when travelling, the shorter Podcasts are better. On Replay Radio I discovered something called Mp3 Magic which allowed me to take an hour long Podcast and break it into 15 minute segments seamlessly. If I was interrupted while listening it didnt matter because I could go back or on to the next segment without fiddling too much with the controls.

I started to refine my interests. I liked documentaries, so Radio Netherlands was a natural for that and the BBC, of course. Some BBC programs and many CBC programs, like Quirks and Quarks, are available as Podcasts. I was learning how to Podcast by listening to them. I also monitor a few Blogs but Blogs are written not spoken. I discovered a Blog that operated out of New Orleans at the time of the hurricane. They were operational during the entire time of the flood and gave daily, sometimes hourly reports from inside the city. It was operated by an Internet Service provider who kept their own site and their clients sites up. They started rescuing other companies data for them from computers which were in high rise buildings well above the water line. The actual job of the fellow who was running the Blog was Security. He was ex Special Forces with a technical background and had a the ability to communicate in simple language just exactly what he was seeing. It was almost like being there on the ground. Although they were ten floors up, in downtown New Orleans using a generator for power.

I discovered WNYCs Morning Stories and others.

I got into vintage radio programs. I discovered that listening to Charlie McCarthy and Fibber McGee and Tallulah Bankhead and Bob Hope was really interesting. I felt like I was back in time to a place where I was quite safe and some of the bad things that were happening now werent happening. I got into really early music, Edison cylinder and disc record rarities, many not heard since the old man himself stashed them away. I heard Tin Pan Alley pop songs, ragtime, vaudeville comedy sketches, flapper dance bands, old-time country tunes, historic classical music, laboratory experiments and other musical and spoken artifacts all dating from 1888 through 1929.

I used to listen to Jeff Healeys jazz from the 20s to the early 40s on his jazz.fm show My Kind of Jazz. From him I relearned an appreciation for the fine musicianship back then. I was able to download some vintage big band Podcasts with Harry James and Red Nichols and His Five Pennies and so on. The commercials were interesting too. My goodness, did they ever talk up cigarettes in those days. It was almost seductive how they went on about how round and firm and fully-packed they were.

I listen to the Podcast programs at night mostly. Sometimes I have trouble sleeping, and they put me to sleep. Certain kinds of voices on the radio will do that. They lull me off to dreamland. Lord knows what subliminal messages Im taking in :-)

In the morning I delete the programs Ive listened to and add some more from the Podcasts Im downloading on a regular basis.

I started recording my own Podcasts in a series of short sound files. I put them on line and a fair-sized circle of fans enjoy them quite a lot. For the technically inclined I record in Mono at 44100. Not all Mp3 players can reproduce stereo properly. It also saves some bandwidth/download time.

I have lived a longish life. Im 71 and gaining. Ive had some interesting times, living in the Canadian north and Chatham, Ontario; Detroit and New York City. Back in Toronto Im combining my experiences to tell stories about my life. Its my audio biography to share with my daughter, my family, friends and perfect strangers who stop by and listen in. Note: That small circle of friends and family has expanded into 7,000+ hits a month. I had a nice note from a lady in Brazil telling me she enjoyed my Podcasts and used them to help her learn English because I spoke slowly and clearly. I guess that explains why my Statistics show I have 7% subscribing from China. A nice man in Mexico wrote to tell me how much he enjoyed them and when I wrote back and mentioned the book he wanted to buy a copy.

My Podcasts can be accessed on line in Mp3 format at http://www.soniabrock.com/index.html and the Feed is located at http://www.soniabrock.com/Podcasts/chatham1.xml

Precious Memories

(How to Get Your Granny or your Senior Citizen Mum to Podcast Her Memories)

Your senior citizen granny or mum or auntie probably doesnt own a computer or, if she does, she uses it for emailing the kids and for family pictures. She might belong to an on line Forum but thats unlikely.

Her thoughts on Podcasting might be:

Microphones, Oh my God, and youre on stage, How embarrassing.

I dont know what to say, unaccustomed as I am to public speaking.

Forget about it!

Get yourself something that will record telephone conversations to your hard drive. Granny is used to the telephone. She can talk quite a while on the telephone, especially if reassured that the cost is minimal because you are using your computer to call her. I bought a service called Gizmo where for about $12.00 Canadian I get 6 hours of phone time. I can phone anywhere in Canada or the United Stated to a regular phone. For 15 minutes it only costs me about 50 cents, maybe less. The important part is that while you are talking to granny on the telephone using Gizmo, or Skype with some additional software, you can record your conversation to your hard drive. I found the audio quality to be fairly good; not nearly as good as a commercial recording but fine for the somewhat less exacting medium of Podcasting. A Podcast is A method of publishing audio files to the Internet for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. In other words you record, edit and then save the file in the Mp3 format for playback on the listening device of your choice.

Heres a word to the wise. Do not let Gizmo or any other Internet phone service pluck out contacts from your Microsoft Mail otherwise it will send cheerful notes to all your contacts. Type your contacts in manually and do not include their emails.

Call Mum or Grannie up and get her talking about the old days. Dont barrage her with a whole bunch of questions. Have a few really good questions ready to prime the pump. Encourage her to ramble on. Dont worry if she doesnt follow your mental script. To quote the sound engineers famous last words Well fix it when we mix it!

Get a good piece of sound editing software. I like a free program called Audacity for first takes and then I edit the resulting sound file in Adobe Audition. You save the good bits and you discard the boring bits.

Plug in a few reminders. Granny remember when we used to go camping and we had a tent and there were mosquitoes and bears.

Shell go on about how the bears stole the blueberry pie and how she hooked your dad in the eyebrow when he was trying to teach her fly fishing. The local vet pushed the hook through and snipped it off but wouldnt take any pay because he wasnt supposed to treat humans.

Now, you piece those memories together. To older folks the past is sometimes more vivid than the present and the whole interview process should, therefore, be a pleasant experience.

You can get the good stuff because you know where the buttons are. Youve heard these stories more than once but what you want is to have a sound file with her voice telling them again. Just nail these stories down and your interest in what she is saying is going to put enthusiasm in her voice which is what you want, her natural voice (or his natural voice in the case of Granddad).

Once its edited play it back for her. You shouldnt put it out there on the public scene unless shes had a listen. Emphasize the fact that its for family and grandkids first. It would make a nice Christmas CD.

She may be very pleased with the whole thing and quite proud of herself. Never mind that you spent several hours editing what may end up being a relatively short audio file.

Its probably best to do these thing in 7 or 10 minute bursts of storytelling. When you are recording you can stop periodically and save and then start again. Its easier to edit short files and you can paste them together later. This tutorial is just a guideline on how to record your family members and then put the Mp3 sound file out either as a personal family CD or as a Podcast. Once youve got the hang of it you can interview Uncle Ted and Aunt Addie, or Cousin Bill. Theres no end to it!

You might even be brave enough to use a computer microphone and recording software. I use Total Recorder or Audacity to record that way. You may have to fiddle with the settings to set it up for Microphone. Total Recorder is nice because you can schedule and record Internet radio broadcasts but thats another story.

I should mention that, although I am a Podcasting Granny, I am also a demi-tech. I used to do software application support and Im a retired Web master. Im used to public speaking and entertaining. Ive been a communicator my whole life. That doesnt mean its easy for Granny, so give her a helping hand!

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My Virtual Life

As I wrote this, it was August, and it was very hotthere, and theyd had forest fires. We chat online in the game and used to do quests and mission together. After joining an Australian Guild (The Blitzers) with many European members, I used to have a little world-time thing on my status bar telling me what time it was in Spain and in Australia and so forth. Eventually the global time differences started to be an impediment, so I left the Blitzers and joined Aeon, an American Guild. My buddy in the Canary Islands is on my friends list. I can see when hes online and chat with him and do a Mission or two.

Some folks I know met online and ended up getting married. Its funny how in an email or a text chat you can get a very good perception of what the other person is like, just from the way they use the written language. The current Leaders of The Blitzers Guild recently got married. Guild members met together in a suitable amphitheater-like place in the game framework (Henge of Denravi, in the Maguuma Jungle in Kryta) to bear witness and to raise a virtual toast, as the leadership of the Guild was passed on while they took two weeks leave for the honeymoon. There was free virtual beer. Theyre Aussie so beer is important.

Ive also been party to organizations with a real-time existence but my connection to them was mostly virtual. I do publicity for groups from time to time. You can get all kinds of people coming out to a meeting that is organized entirely through email or an online Forum, such as Meetup.com. This non-tangible way of reaching out to people brings their actual bodies to a place at a given time. This communications method has been used to good effect by cyber wags to organize (Im making this up) Everybody meet here and wear a false nose and a virtual mob descends on a real time location. There are also flash mobs that act as virtual vigilantes but that is outside my personal experience. For many years, I forget how many but it must be about 12, Ive been going to EMCC, a computer systems programmer matinÃ©e beer bash at the Imperial Pub here in Toronto. We go upstairs where they have old time classics on the jukebox, Dave Brubeck and Peggy Lee and so forth. There we sit with a nice Guinness and talk computer shop and anything else that comes to our attention. Their keen, analytical programmers minds (Im not a programmer but they are) can dissect just about anything. I remember one discussion about whether camels were kosher. With the help of the barkeep and a Google wifi connection it was determined that they were not kosher. Wrong kind of feet. They chew the cud but they only have partially split hooves. Giraffes are kosher but their necks are too long, making Kosher butchering problematical.

This group keeps in touch virtually. We mail each other obscure computer-related jokes and snippets of news. Our fearless leader reminds us of the date of the next meeting through emails. I wont go into the origin of the EMCC name of the group. Its obscure and computer-related.

Theres a sort of interweaving of virtual life and real life. I havent made any virtual enemies that I know of although there have been a few virtual tiffs. I have run across a few virtual predators, mostly harmless. In my case, early on, it was teenage boy trying to connect with a female, any female. The usual line was I LIKE older women. I dont get hit on too much. Guess Im not cyber cute and a little too inclined to say, Well, youre being silly, arent you?

Now in the pre-Internet days back in my home town things worked a little bit differently socially. I remember that sometime after my mother became a widow she was paid a visit by a older farmer, also widowed. He came to see if he could have some of her corn stalks from the back garden for his pigs. She gladly gave consent for him to take the stalks but did not encourage him by asking him to come in and sit for a spell. He came back a few more times and finally admitted that he had absolutely no need for corn stalks as he had plenty of his own. He just thought she might fancy a clean old man as a suitor.

People Google me or find me through my Podcasts and write to me. A young gentleman in England, interested in magick because of the current Harry Potter craze, wrote to me. I have a Podcast on Magick with a k on the end. He found it and we corresponded a bit. Im not out to sell anything in the magickal line, so I just warned him politely about some of the attendant dangers and pitfalls.

That Podcast on Magick got over 4,000 hits in July 2007, which is a lot for me, not for someone else, but a lot for me. The popularity will pass. The hits corresponded with the release of the last Harry Potter book. These things go through phases.

Speaking of magic, with or without a k on the end, I remember a sleazy stringer for The Toronto Globe newspaper, a so-called Christian, who wrote a tell all piece of slanted journalism that appeared prominently in the weekend paper. He had lurked and listened on a Pagan Bulletin Board System I frequented. He then wrote a piece coloured by his own religious bias. It was rather nasty. He came back on the system briefly to catch the furor and I organized a Lets out Jesus him and turn the other cheek campaign. He simply did not know what to do about being forgiven by Pagans.

I have a daughter in Montreal and we dont always get along in real life but through cyberspace we manage, now and again, to connect and share news. There we form a relationship that doesnt exist in real life, only online, but still, were connected.

If there is any point to this somewhat rambling discourse, it is to say that cyberspace has interconnected with my life. Its real. I am part of a global community connected by the gossamer strands of email and Internet links.

HOBBIES AND INTERESTS

Cloth Dolls

INTRO The Clapping Song

My Momma told me Clap, clap

If I was goody Clap, clap

That she would buy me Clap, clap

A rubber dolly Clap, clap

My Auntie told her Clap, clap

I kissed a soldier Clap, clap

Now she wont buy me Clap, clap

A rubber dolly Clap, clap

Cloth dolls move and theyre soft. They can be hugged. They are people.

When I was smaller my mother used to read the Raggedy Ann stories to me. The most fascinating part was that, when the people were away, the dolls would stop being still and come to life . They would have lives of their own, doing things and having adventures. In my mind, this became a sort of template for what dolls do when people arent around. As time went on I continued to make dolls, mostly for younger relatives. I was making the kind of pretty, cute dolls popular at the time. I found patterns for them in magazines like McCalls Needlework & Crafts. My approach to doll making has changed over time. I still make a fair number of Raggedy Anns but now but I also make the politically- incorrect but dearly-beloved Golliwogs.

Raggedy Ann is a stereotype doll but shes also iconic like Marilyn Monroe or other cultural icons. Raggedy Ann is an important culture icon. She represents an innocent time when dreams were real. Such dreams tell us things about ourselves, about our childhood and about our world. They are a kind of shorthand for larger ideas. Raggedy Ann has readily identifiable characteristics: red hair, usually curly, black shoe button eyes, a red- triangle nose and a smiling mouth with a little red center. She has a heart embroidered on her chest. She wears bloomers. She has a calico dress and a white apron.

Later on it became important to me to make dolls that were different. Dolls made from my own patterns or from the other original doll-makers selling patterns that were not in the common mold. These dolls were different.They had character, and were NOT for children.

I dont think an artist chooses an art form or a musician chooses his instrument. The art form or instrument chooses the artist or musician, and dolls chose me. Friends have asked me Why dolls? Youre talented. You could do anything, meaning I could do something more acceptable or commercial. The implication is I am wasting my time on cloth dolls. Its not a waste. My small universe, my apartment, has every surface covered by cloth dolls. There are dolls of various kinds, various shapes, long-haired, short-haired, smiling, frowning, wide-eyed, sleepy-eyed. I cant say why they are important to me but they are.

Dolls develop as you craft them. You start out with one concept and it morphs into another one.

I dont know why I make cloth dolls.

I do know that I have to.

When I get an idea for a cloth doll a whole little world opens up and the creature Im making starts to talk to me, to tell me what kind of hair she wants, and what colour clothing in what design and how her face should be. The act of creation becomes a two- way street.

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Stitches

I just bought a new sewing machine. Its a Janome in the 400 class. I already had a Janome in the 300 class and, well, I broke it again. I was making a purse and the fabric layers were too thick. I pushed or pulled a little too hard. It didnt go over the hump and that bent the needle and threw the timing off and this is the second time this has happened. I cannot begin to describe my extreme panic at being without a source of mechanical stitches. I sew. I make cloth dolls. Ive made them for years, art dolls and folk dolls and what have you but my latest thing is purses.

I am prone to obsession. When I start doing something I do it full-tilt boogie and here I was, mid-purse, and I had no working sewing machine. I fiddled with it and said to myself, Maybe its the thread and this and that and back and forth then, finally, I bit the bullet. I found this lovely place where they come to your house on a service call. Sure, it costs you but they come and tinker with your machine and make it work again. However, I was NOT going to be in the position of having no sewing machine ever, ever again!

I wanted to buy a second machine. I thought of buying one that does heavier stitching but, guess what, theyre commercial class and they start at $700.00 for the most basic, used model and go up from there. No, thanks. Then I thought of getting a reconditioned machine, maybe a Singer with only straight and zig zag stitches, not top-of-the-line, and already having seen some use. I found out I could get a newer Janome, which is my favourite machine brand, for half as much again as I would pay for a reconditioned machine.

I had to reach into my reserves to get the new machine but, again, I bit the bullet and bought it and, boy, am I happy with it! My new machine does smocking and buttonholes and, Lord knows what all. It is familiar because its similar to my repaired Janome but it has more features.

Speaking of needs and wants, what I really needed was a decent, large, flat-screen computer monitor. I play war games on line. I need to spare my eyesight. My large CRTs flicker was doing me harm, but when I found I was without stitches my choice was clear. I needed a flat-screen monitor but I wanted a new sewing machine. The sewing machine won.

Im very happy with my new sewing machine. Having reached into my reserves for it Ill now be able to save up more quickly for the needed computer monitor. Im stitching away making a Humbug bag, in the shape of a British hard-candy of the same name. Im knitting purses and doing linings for them too.

Im really into retro purses which look like they are from 1920 or 1930. Ive figured out how to get old vintage photographs on to fabric, using special paper-backed fabric for the printer. Once printed I cut them out and stitch them onto the purse or create a crochet flower border to stitch around the printout, so the purses have a little nostalgic touch. I can add old fashioned buttons too. I use the kind of handles that were once fashionable. The vintage aspect of all this is really fun. Theres a whole crafting niche our there of ladies who make purses of various kinds, some of them artitistic. When push comes to shove you only need one of the darned things. When you wear it out, you get another purse in basic black or navy and youre ready to roll. Thats much too mundane for we ladies who sew purses. Now, when I go out I have a different purse to take with me each time. I have one with an African-Violet, patterned fabric that I take to African Violet club meetings. Its whats called a wristlet, a simple zippered rectangle with a strap that just hangs from your wrist and contains just basic stuff - a comb, a wallet and your keys. Im making a bunch of wristlet bags for people. These handy items are themed on what the person is interested in. In one case its a lady who is obsessive about her pug dog and shes going to get one with a pug dog playing a drum kit on it. Shes in the music business.

My young niece is into cherries. Theyre a fad at her school, so, obviously shes going to get one with cherries on it, and so it goes.

Im pleasing myself and pleasing my friends and family. Ive got a new sewing machine and a redundant machine thats been repaired and Im one happy camper!

Cat Poem

What a particular miracle is a cat,

Wrapped in particolour,

Softer than milkweed down and warm,

Resonant with purring hallelujahs.

What a moving miracle is a cat,

Claw-pawed or kneading softly,

Kitten shadow wrestling or ice-eyed hunter,

Walking the fence between the wood and the tended corn.

What a sleeping miracle is a cat,

Belly up, paws half staff,

Eyes serenely closed

Breathing careless breaths - but step near and in a flickering,

Alert in readiness to fight, to flee.

What a loving miracle is a cat,

Leaning towards affection, As to a source of sustenance,

Dearer than milk,

As if lacking it were death

And drawing out in response

A human love forgetting gulf of species

Head to head the minds respond

Each to its nature and together.

Knitting

Tara had an opinion on most things, from a cats point of view of course. She was not loath to express this opinion vocally, sometimes very vocally. Tara was a world-class complainer, telling me where to get off on many occasions. Although not perfect -- was picky about her food -- Tara was very affectionate and a loving companion. I miss her. Fur is so comforting. Cat plumpness (because they like to eat) is wrapped in warm fur and purrs. Its a comfort to have a cat beside you, interested in whatever you are doing. Having something to care for is important. It is important to think not just about yourself but about another living being who relies on you for sustenance , shelter, love and brushings, the w-h-o-l-e nine yards. Rest in peace Tara diddle, Tara the cat.

The same week that Tara passed on to her reward, my sister and I went down to the Humane Society. There I picked out another lovely cat. She has a wonderful temperament and shes a talker. My new cat, and I are bonding very nicely. I still miss Tara but Smokey is filling that cat-sized hole in my life.

Smokey is a six-year old Tortoiseshell, very muscular and friendly. (She just climbed up on me and gave me a back-of-the-neck massage while I was watching TV). My sister thinks Smokey has some Siamese in her because shes got the skinny tail, the squeaky- hinge voice and shes very smart. Smokey got out the front door onto the patio and went walkabout, in the rain, for some time. She was back, however, in time for lunch which shows that she knows where she lives already.

My comfort during this time of stress has been knitting, rediscovered after a longish absence. I now have four, even five knitting projects on the go. Im knitting dishcloths with knit and purl designs on them. The one Im working on right now has a motif in the shape of a cat. Another dishcloth on the workbench is a leaping dolphin over waves. Then, theres a mystery dishcloth from a Mystery Dishcloth of the Month Yahoo forum. We receive 10 pattern rows a day and try to guess what it will turn out to be. The first part of the month is a dishcloth with a pattern on it. - a lighthouse or an oak leaf or something like that, worked with knit and purl stitches. The second knit-along of the month is patterned or lace stitches, which is a wonderful way to sample stitches in a small, do-able project. A dishcloth isnt very big. You do it in pretty colours, then roll it up, tie a bow around it and theres your stocking stuffer. If you dont need it yourself, youve had the joy of knitting the thing. I use them as washcloths and theyre wonderful for that

The best pattern so far was the leaping dolphin over fancywork-patterned waves. I may make another one of those and turn it into, you guessed it, a purse!

I used to be devoted to cross stitch and have a charting program for it called PC Stitch. With the Stitch-Along you only get 10 lines of the pattern at a time. Like cross stitch it is based upon a grid of small squares. At the start of the month I just chart the pattern as it comes along and then view it in my cross stitch grid. If I like the picture, I can knit it up and it is great fun trying to guess what the picture is going to be as the pattern is sent to the Forum bit by bit.

This way I save my needles for the mid-month patterned stitch-along.

Purses are my current obsession. Ive knit several purses and felted one in a mossy-green, variegated pure wool. I got the wool on eBay. You knit an item to be felted bigger than its shrunken size, and on larger needles. Next, put it in the hot washing machine for 15 minutes with some heavier washables. It comes out smaller, thicker and denser, felted. You pull it into shape and set it to dry. This process is also called fulling which is A finishing process in which the woven or knitted cloth is subjected to moisture, heat and friction causing it to shrink considerably in both directions and become compact and solid. In heavily fulled fabrics both the weave and the yarn are obscured, thus giving the appearance of felt.

It took a while and people kept saying What are you knitting. Is it a scarf? because a bag when you start knitting it looks an awful lot like a scarf.

I also knit up a sampler purse of various patterns on circular needles using mainly moss and seed stitch. Its finished. Im creating I-cord on a knitting knobby which is one of those spool knitters with 4 pegs that creates a long hollow tube of knitting. You work it by putting loops a yarn over the pegs. It creates a nice strong cord. When this cord is is threaded through the loops created for that purpose while knitting my sampler bag will have a very Victorian or 1920s look. Nice, if I do say so myself.

Im addicted to wool now and have started to accumulate a pretty fair-sized stash. Stash is an important word if you are into any kind of crafting. I have a collection of stashes from various crafting adventures: beads, cloth, glues, paints and now, wool. Im a real yarn collector. Oh boy! Stash is everything. I have to have these yarns, both wool and synthetic, and their combinations, and cotton yarns too for the dishcloths.

During this time of grief I have comforted myself with wool more expensive than I usually buy. It helps, as does the moving meditation that knitting is.

I am prone to obsessions in handicrafts. One obsession was making purses - all kinds of fabric purses, lined and quilted and what have you. I use them. The problem is you sort of have to have a purse kit containing your keys, wallet, comb, credit cards etc. all ready to go so that when you change purses you dont forget your keys, your coin, your cards whatever. Im getting the hang of that. I only forget my keys now and again.

My knitting obsession started when I began to knit a purse and it snowballed from there.

Theres an on line facility called Meetup.com (http://www.meetup.com) which helps niche interests, no matter how obscure, to meet up at local venues such as coffee shops, restaurants, etc. I joined up with the local Stitch and (starts with B and rhymes with stitch) group that meets on Wednesdays in a coffee shop. Fifteen or so of us, maybe twenty, sit there for two hours and just knit! We talk about everything. These are very intelligent ladies with decided opinions. Knitting, particularly the fancier bits of knitting, are not so simple and require a certain amount of brain power and persistence,. Knitting acts like a filter to get a bunch of lovely, intelligent ladies together. I really enjoy it. I go every single week and I sit and knit. Ive learned not to take my more complex patterns to the meetup because you get to talking and youre going to drop a stitch or miss part of a pattern. So I just take the simple stuff hats that are knit in the round, scarves and things like that.

Speaking of scarves, oh my gosh, there are fancy yarns called ribbon, ladder or eyelash yarns and for my young nieces I have put together scarves made with eyelash yarn that are very fluffy, fancy and colourful. I added a nice brooch to go with them because they are short scarves. The brilliant pastels make them really fun to knit and to give.

I get bored fairly easily or I have a short attention span, something like that. In any case I need variety. Some dont like this phrase but I practice a form of knitting that I call knit and hurl I have, a whole bunch, of knitting projects on the go right now. Two scarves, 2 hats, a pair of socks, a cotton dishcloth, a dress for Barbie which Im trimming with some extra eyelash yarn to see what it looks like, a lace pattern bookmark and, oh yes, another hat. When I get tired of one project I pick up another. It keeps me from being bored. Ive got plastic bowls with handles which I got cheap at a dollar store. I keep my knitting projects in them and move the plastic bowls forward or back, depending on which of them holds the project of the moment..

Thank goodness for the Internet! What a wealth of patterns are out there, quite unbelievable. I was looking for a pattern for a bolero shrug. Im not quite up to sweaters as yet. Im sticking with smaller projects because Im afraid of getting bogged down. I found 6 or 7 bolero patterns before I settled on the one that I wanted. You can get these patterns free because 1) knitters share knowledge 2) wool companies need to sell wool.

Knitting is fashionable right now.

I took my knitting to a local pub for the computer folks EMCC beer bash. These system programmers and the like meet every 6 weeks. Being a senior I was immediately classified as Miss Marple because of my attained years and bag of knitting. I get along with these guys and gals, been with them for quite a while. I sat there doing my knitting and sipping my beer. Ive scaled down from Guinness to Upper Canada dark lager. We had a wonderful time. Theres something about knitting that promotes conversation. It was almost as if my computer-folk outing had turned into my knitting group, although I was the only one knitting. That was funny.

Knit I must and everyone will get a scarf or a hat or a dishcloth this Christmas. Thereafter, Ill have to go into production for myself. I think Im going to have to focus on socks a fair bit or start knitting purses again. I dont know how long this obsession will last. I never do. Cloth doll making lasted most of my life. I hope knitting lasts a while because Im enjoying it very much and I have a LOT of wool now!

Seashells

This Podcast is about my mother and and her hobbies. My mother was a keen hobbyist, a craftsperson. She should have been a professional but shied away from that. Somehow being a professional didnt seem like the right thing to do, especially when it related to things like art. I dont know why some women are that way but they are, and I am too to some extent.

My mother had any number of hobbies over time. She would catch a fever for doing some particular craft. I remember seashell jewelry. These were made from tiny, little white shells from Florida dyed pink and green and yellow, even purple - you name it. Their chalky white surfaces took well to pastel dyes. Clear plastic circles and ovals were used as a backing whereon these tiny seashells were glued. Clear cement for gluing the shells had recently become available to general hobbyists back in the 50s, beyond their more specialized use for gluing model airplane parts together.

Mother would meticulously, using tiny tools and toothpicks and things, torture and manipulate these little coloured shells into various designs, often as rose petals.

The flowers could be large, taking up the whole backing, or smaller, forming a bouquet of variously-coloured blooms.

This was an ephemeral art, somewhat fragile. I was just on eBay seeking out old-time shell jewelry and there were a few good examples there. Bidding for them was fairly fierce. I was outbid twice on one shell jewelry collection I had my eyes on. Oh well, I didnt really need them. It was just for the memorys sake. Theres something about being on eBay and rummaging in the western worlds attic that is curiously addictive. Any hobby or craft from time gone by is out there, hanging on by a thread. Collectors are a special breed and will traverse all obstacles in search of the desired item. Another phrase for collector is pack rat.

My mother would spend hours making shell jewelry brooches. Im not sure that she wore them much. She wore them somewhat. The excitement was in the making of them, pulling all the bits together to create a beautiful, artificial bouquet. It was a conversation piece.

Then the fever passed, making way for another fever. Some of these fads lasted longer than others. She took up oil painting. Our family friend, Moyna would drive us out into the country in search of a good scene. We kids would play around in the fields or, as often was the case, in an ancient country graveyard where the tombstones made a good place to perch while eating a picnic sandwich.

My mother would sit on her artists stool with her easel in front of her and paint. She painted a fair number of trees, trees were good. She had talent. A professional artist once complimented her work as being neat by which he meant well-composed and thought out, tidy and well-balanced. She was very careful about her compositions. It gave her work a sort of mannered style, but it was art. She ran out of storage space for her canvasses and the less-favoured ones were stacked up on a high shelf in the garage. The better ones hung on our walls, of course, or were given away as gifts but were never sold.

In her later years she went into pottery, making pots and bowls and plates and mugs - all kinds of things from clay and, again, she was very, very good at it. She had been persuaded to initial her works at this point by someone she had taken a course from. There are pieces of pottery all over southern Ontario bearing the initial P.F., for Phyllis Fricker, on their bottoms. They will be around long after most of us are gone because pottery is rather durable. She worked with glazes and had a kiln and wheel to do her pots on. Again, she refused the title of professional.

She wove. She was a weaver and made articles of clothing and rugs and placemats and hangings. Her colour sense was a bit primary. She liked orange and red. I think it was part of the palette of the times. Different eras have different palettes. She had a beautiful four-harness loom and other looms. A whole room upstairs was devoted to wool. Apparently there is some wool packed up in my sisters basement which I am supposed to take sometime because - Guess what? - Im a hobbyist too and a craftsperson.

My own fever, at present, is for something called ATCs - Artist Trading cards.

These are little 2 Â½ by 3 Â½ inch pieces of cardstock decorated with decorated with a montage of bits of art, ephemera, postage stamps, etcetera. They can also be stamped with rubber stamps. They are to art what sampling is to music. Some of them are hand drawn or painted or digitized but, for the most part, they are accumulations of bits until the whole is greater than the parts.

Not unlike, in some ways, my mothers seashell jewelry.

The first day of Christmas my true love gave to me A Partridge in a Pear Tree... and a whole bunch of other stuff I didnt really need. I think I have too much 'stuff'. All my life I've been collecting 'stuff'.

Back in time, when I was in Grade School I got to work as an humble page,in the school library which was a subset of the Chatham Public Library. There I learned to shelve book according to the Dewey Decimal System and repair books. I developed a taste for peppermint library paste which was not harmful. It was a lot like ordinary flour paste. We used that to apply leatherette to the spines of books. When they were past mending, no longer popular, or dated, guess who got her pick of the discards? Yes, me! The discards were added to my book collection.

My book collection, now the size of a small elephant, started back there. I found a second-hand store that had antique books, not really good books but interesting books because they were old. Someone's collection of sermons, in an old binding with yellowed pages, with the stamp of history upon it. You dont read it. You just collect it and I did. I got one of those.

I started in on records, 78 rpms at first and then 33 1/3rds/. I collected Gene Autry and popular jazz.

Stuff, stuff, stuff! It was starting to pile up a bit.

When I moved to New York I became moderately expert at finding stores where there were odd things, Ethiopian crosses and strangely-patterned fabrics and so forth. I collect fabrics because I sew. In collecting the components of a hobby you end up with a stash. If your hobby is knitting you end up with a wool stash. If you're into sewing or quilting, then it's a fabric stash and on it goes.

Like my mother I have had multiple crafting and hobby ventures throughout my life. I remember that one of her crazes was for shell jewelry. She collected tiny little shells that came from beaches in Florida and elsewhere. I know she bought a lot of these shells when she went to Florida on vacation. They were dyed in pretty pastels pink and blue and yellow and green. You used the kind of glue that makes you high, airplane glue and put it all together on a piece of clear round plastic. This would become a rose made up of little pink shells with a fake pearl in the centre and little green leaves. These shell rosettes were actually quite attractive. Not built for the ages but while they lasted they were nice.

I've gone through, oh my goodness, so many hobbies. One was cloth doll making, the components of which take in almost every art and craft, so you end up with pieces from painting and stitching and beading, weaving and, you name it. It all goes into a pot and out comes a cloth dolly at the other end, a so-called art doll. I question the art part in that, because its artsy-fartsy, artsy craft - never mind.

I started knitting. I have 4 bins of wool -I will never knit it all - and there's always more wool to buy. My Stitch and Bitch group every now and again has a yarn swap where everybody tries to get rid of their extra yarn, their stash, and ends up walking away with more yarn than they came in with. Everyone has come in with their extra yarns and they're begging you to take their yarn and you do. Thus, instead of diminishing my stash, I somehow increase it.

I remember collecting spices. I use 5, at the most 10, common spices,condiments, herbs and so forth, in my cooking. Still, I had to have them all because some recipe someplace, sometime, would probably need fennel, so I got some, as well as everything else featured in the store's spice shelf. They sit around for years. I have more than one spice rack where they're all in alphabetical order. Sometimes it's useful. If I happened to need ground cloves I can find them. Others I will never use but I had to have them. It's called being a 'completist'. You have to have them all or the collection is incomplete.

When I worked downtown I made more money than I actually needed to live on and, instead of sensibly saving it, I would go out each lunch hour and look for something to buy. Something to buy was usually books. I haunted the sales tables in bookstores. I have shelves and shelves of books. I'm gradually now giving them away. I try to find out whether they are going to good homes because books are sacred. You dont burn them. You dont throw them away. You pass them on. I'm trying to do that.

I was a seller, for about a year on eBay. My main stock items, aside from doll patterns that I was no longer using, were books. I did fairly well because I had a really large occult book collection. There are people out there in search of a means to power who really dig this stuff. Occult magazines were collector's items and sold well.

Speaking of magazines, I was into cross stitch and I had to have those magazines and innumerable patterns. I have a pile of maybe ten cross stitch projects on the go, many of which I'll never finish. I sort of nibble away at them from time to time. Thar fever has passed. I no longer have to cross stitch all the time. Part of that came from a pseudo Fibromyalgia caused by the statin pills I was taking for blood cholesterol. They gave me muscle weakness and pain. All I could do was sit in a corner and cross stitch for about nine months. Other activities were too much. Then, I figured out it was the pills, after reading several reports on the Internet. I threw the pills away and I was better in two days. I have a lot of cross stitch and embroidery stuff and books on the blues and music in general and books on folk music. I have a awful lot of reference books on everything from wild birds to pharmacopoeias that I got before the Internet was as popular as it now.

Now, I collect graphics from the Internet, and Mp3s which I buy legitimately on line to avoid possibly picking up nasty viruses from the free ones. I have lots and lots of software, much of which I also buy on line. I need an ever-increasing hard drive size to fit in all this stuff much of which I use once and then forget. Still, you never know when you might need it. Most software that I do use I'm just utilizing the tip of the ice berg. The rest remains unknown to me while I just twiddle around fixing the colour balance on some photograph or some other simple task.

I'm trying to get rid of my stuff. I really am. One of these days I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and all that stuff, like the obsolete computer hardware sitting around in bins. There is a lot of computer hardware stuff the purpose of which Ive forgotten: all of that has got to go bye bye. I'm hoping to have a technical friend of mine over to look at it and tell me what it is and if it's okay to throw it out.

Just cataloging what I have is an effort in itself. I must simplify. I must practice non attachment. I must get rid of all this stuff. I dont own stuff. Stuff owns ME.

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Martial Arts

Over the CB Radio, some time ago, I met an interesting chap whose handle was Mike, The Irish Viking. I have a weakness for good radio voices and he certainly had one of those. Mike played a Fighter/Hero in my CB radio D&D game, and he played his role to the hilt. He was into the mythos of martial arts. Bruce Lee was his hero. He'd seen a number of Bruce's epics more than once. I became interested and, being a doer more than a dreamer, I signed up at a Tae Kwon Do gym. Mike was dumbfounded.

Now started a more rigorous physical regimen that was completely unfamiliar to my sedentary office body. It was like paying to join the Marines.

I learned the difference between good and bad pain. Good pain comes when you're pushing your body to its limits. Bad pain is from an injury. You work through the one but not the other.

I have a physical anomaly. Cant do aerobics. Once my heartbeat gets up to a certain level it starts skipping a beat and oxygen does not get delivered to my brain in a timely fashion. At least that's how it seems to me.

I could get through the warm ups in martial arts classes but once I'd done them I was functionally stupid. Couldnt learn the fancy moves for beans. Adding to this problem was an inability to form pictures in my head. I think in abstracts. Works for me. Doesnt work in Tae Kwon Do or Tae Chi or any of those disciplines with fancy moves in sequence. If you cant see them in your head, you cant do them. End of story.

The classes tired me out a lot so I went on Fridays, so I would have the weekend to rest up afterwards. This is how I met my doom. Fred, the martinet, was the teacher on Fridays and he didnt allow anybody any slack at all, at all. I never got beyond my lowly white belt BUT I did develop a lovely turning back kick. My one skill and a powerful weapon in unarmed combat.

After some back and forth over the CB, Mike and I arranged to meet in a local park. He wanted to test my real martial art skills against his imaginary ones. Bad move Mike. He tried to CATCH a turning back kick and ended up with a badly sprained wrist and severe embarrassment.

I observed several interesting things in martial arts class.

Two attractive, upscale, young ladies of the evening came in to learn to defend themselves and they were the most dedicated and sincere students you might ever hope to find.

There was a piece of arcane equipment on the dojo floor. It was a rope with a loop in it run through a pulley in the ceiling. You put your foot in the loop, grabbed the other end of the rope and pulled your leg heavenward. Limb flexibility and stretch were prized objectives.

The room just before the marital arts practice floor served as a kind of parlor and in it were stacked the trophies won by students for the Master. Most of these trophies were quite tall and spiky. They were everywhere, on shelves and on the floor. You'd could have met your demise in there, if you'd tripped and been speared by a trophy.

The Master of the Tae Kwon Do establishment was doing reasonably well. He decided to open up a more palatial establishment across the street and one flight up. It was done up splendidly with polished hardwood floors and fancy fittings. A party was held there to celebrate the grand opening. The Master sat on a throne-like chair with his teachers around him. The students of varying degrees hung about on the edge of what would later be the practice floor but which was now a dance floor. Music was playing but no-one wanted to be the first to step out on that pristine hardwood. Black, brown and red belts all held back and waited and waited. They were, God forbid, embarrassing the Master.

A tune came up that I liked. I think it was 'Eye of the Tiger'. I stepped out on the floor and danced solo for about one minute. The ice was broken and the other students began easing out on the floor to dance. The Master smiled a little smile and his head teacher gave me a very formal martial arts bow.

I won that one! War Games

I am now and have been for some time a war gamer. It all started with chess. Chess is not an easy game but I tried to learn it and I became a chess player on the Internet playing with various people online or by email. I played with Monta Machan, a retired war veteran in British Columbia. We sent each other an email move-a-day for years. Monta and I had a lot of good games. He won some and I won some. We were about the same level, which is a good thing.

When I was younger I got interested in a game, called Dungeons and Dragons, also known as D&D. D&D was entering its craze phase. There was a store in Toronto called Mr. Gameways Ark that had all kinds of games, board games mostly. They had a Dungeons and Dragons section and I used to haunt it. Then, I found out they had kids who played on site. You could come there in the evening after hours and go upstairs and play. I joined in and the kids were a little weird about playing with an adult but they tolerated me and I learned about playing live.

I discovered another place that sold D&D stuff and got invited to one of their games offsite games. I went out on a very rainy night to a high-rise apartment building, taking my life in my hands, but I found out that war gamers were, as it says in Douglas Adams book, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, mostly harmless. I guess they take out all their frustrations in the game. We sat there and played but I decided that I was a damper on that party too. A significant part of their playing was smoking weed and I wasnt really into smoking weed with strangers, miles from nowhere on a rainy night. So I trekked off again having learned some good pointers from these stoner gamers.

I studied the D&D books and formed a group at my local church hall. There were some young people, my nephew amongst them, who were very intelligent but they were unsocialized. They didnt fit in anywhere. They didnt fit in at school and were halfway to delinquency. My Ministers son and my nephew pulled in other players and we started a game - all boys, of course.

D&D is is a great socializing mechanism. It brings together folks with brains and imagination and lets them play in terms of the game. These boys went on to become friends and associates and they still keep track of each other. I would say that it made them sane. Instead of being outsiders they were insiders, with a special clique of their own and friends and other things that came out of it. It was a good thing, a really good thing.

Now there was one kid in the game, I wont name him by name, but he was what I call a splodger . A splodger is, well, people dont believe in telepathy and empathy and that sort of thing but I have to explain it in those terms. A splodger is someone whos mind is broadcasting static continuously because theyre in a negative state. This boy came from an abusive home environment where the kids got hit and the kids hit each other and so forth, so he was in that mind set. I took about as much of it as I could but I could feel it in the game, When he got excited he just dumped mind waves of agitation over the whole thing.

Finally I said, Look, this is what youre doing and I cant handle it because Im an empath and I hear this stuff. What Ive got to do is put you out of the game for a while.

That was a big tragedy for him because the game was very important. It started him on the road to controlling the mental static. Now, hes a new-ager and carries around big crystal rocks and stuff like that.

Another kid was a (too smart for the group) shit disturber. I ran an in-game voodoo ceremony and transferred his mind into the brain of a chicken. He was stuck there as a chicken for quite a while. Didnt like it. He quit eventually.

All this was in interest of the game gestalt. Everybodys got to play together in a certain way, as a team. Friendships are formed this way. I went on to form a second group made up of little kids. Bringing them through and they just loved it! My first group hated them.

When I went to visit my sister in San Antonio, my young niece and I started playing. She was using her smaller toys as avatars for the various dragons and monsters and knights and so forth. She really got into it. Sitting down to do that daily game-playing became a very big deal. I dont know if I had any influence but shes now in graphic design and has worked with Electronic Arts in British Columbia.

My siste in British Columbia introduced me to Guild Wars. Guild Wars is a competitive on line role-playing game and is fiercely addictive.

In another part of this book I talk about playing D&D over the CB Radio but thats a whole other story.

In short, I like war games. I like Diablo, Dungeons and Dragons and now I really like Guild Wars. Its not just about killing thing, spilling pixelated blood. Its about social gathering and teamwork and winning against odds.

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Guild Wars

I started playing in the massive, on-line, multi-player world of Guild Wars towards the end of December 2005. I am sort of addicted to war games. Im always playing one of them, Dungeon Siege, Diablo and so forth. I used to be a Dungeon Master in Dungeons and Dragons. That was a long time ago. Ive made friends in Guild Wars. Ive joined a Guild. You can play solo but, if you want to get ahead in the tougher parts of the game, you need to join a Guild. The game is based in large part on co-operative game play with other, real live human players located all around the globe. I found my Guild through my sister on the west coast of Canada, who was then a member and recommended me. Her niece had tired of the game and gave me her account. Now, I have two accounts and around 19 different characters. All of them go through basically the same scenarios, they share the same adventures. In these shared adventures each character has different talents.

You and your party are alone in the game,except for game-generated characters called NPCs (non-player characters) and monsters. It is a challenge to the intellect, to reflexes, to character building (called Builds). You have a choice of skill to put in your skill bar. You give points to a list of characteristics like strength, tactics in the case of a Warrior character. Weapon strength, your armor and how many runes youve applied to your armor help to protect you and give you advantages. It takes thought and experience to do this well. Players often share Builds with each other, so a body of common knowledge is built up.

One of the more interesting characters is the Necromancer who is always saying, Kill more! I need the bodies. He resurrects these as zombie-like minions which fight away on your side until they sort of fade off like old soldiers. I should mention that there are a number of character types, so the build and talents of a Necromancer differ from those of the healing Monks or battle-ready Warriors. I like to have a character for each class, so it adds up. New installments of the game have added new character classes such as the scythe-wielding Dervish and the Ninja-like Assassins.

You bring your character along through various hairy adventures of gradually increasing difficulty. You fight your way through all kinds of terrain, The scenery and graphics in the game are gorgeous. You go through the fire-blasted landscapes of post-searing Ascalon, through the wintry Shiverpeaks fighting Ice Imps, or through Kryta, a semi- forested area. Then, theres the jungle where there are poisonous spiders and Trolls and other hideosities. You might fight a very nasty group of NPCs (non-player characters) called the White Mantle who are conspiring to do dreadful things to the Chosen, whom you have sworn to protect.

Then, theres Prince Rurik, who is royal but stupid. Youre always protecting him because, if he dies, then you dont succeed at that Mission. Each Mission gets you to a different part of the map and you work your way through until you reach the Crystal Desert where there are, oh my goodness, Hydras and sand lizards and all kinds of thing running about and nipping at your heels.

If your character is a bow-wielding Ranger you can have a pet and train it up. My current favourite pets are a dune lizard and a wolf. I generally keep the sound off because the wolf has a tendency to howl.

I have a Mesmer character and she mesmerizes. She casts her spell and mesmerizes the enemy so that they are inhibited in their fighting skills.

I have an Elementalist who plays with the Elements earth, air, fire and water. My Ranger shoots poisonous arrows and lays traps. My Warrior is just sort of hammer happy and hits everything. There you go. Thats his job.

One of the most popular characters in the game is the Monk, the healing Monk. Oh my gosh, the party cant go out without having a Monk. Some Monks are a temperamental bunch of neer-do-wells but I tend to play my Monk fairly straight. Her name is White Tara, named after the female incarnation of the Buddha, and I have another one called Blue Tara. Shes a pretty decent Monk. She does the right thing by her fellow players, to the best of her ability.

This can be a solitary game. I do many quests and mission solo. For the more difficult areas I venture forth with other online players or with members of my Guild. The Guild I was in when I wrote this was run by a crazy Welshman called Jenkins with a slight fondness for the bottle. He had a wild Irish sidekick who liked Irish Cream and had no sense of humour. There were some lovely ladies from the southern United States and another from California. There are players from Alaska, New Zealand, and then theres myself, from Canada.

We text chat within the game but a lot of it is done with a side program, called Teamspeak. Using Teamspeak you can talk over the Internet and listen to what the other players are saying . The leader can give directions such as, Hold back! Let those Mursaats pass! and Were all attacking and targeting the Mesmer Boss. A Boss is a high level monster created by the game software You you can sometimes capture valuable Elite spells and excellent weapons from these Bosses.

Military-style commands from the leader, spoken and heard by the players, are actually quite useful, especially during difficult Missions. One of the better young lady players is an ex-Marine and her husband is a Marine too. No wonder she was so good in a fire fight.

At the time I wrote this there was great excitement because a new installment of the game was coming out, called Factions. Once youve bought this game or one of its different Chapters (Basic, Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North) then it is free to play on line.

Within the game there is a thriving economy. Guild Wars and other on line war games help support young men in China who play to acquire gold and weapons which are sold from Internet sites. In the past Ive bought gold and Ive bought a few weapons when my character needed that extra edge. I dont recommend doing this any more. The gold is soon gone and Id sooner farm when I need more. Farming is a term used for doing repeat search and destroy forays to get stuff stuff, which can be sold to a Merchant NPC in the game for gold You need the gold for better armor and high-price runes to empower it, etc.

There are other ways to get the fancier green weapons in dreadful places where you can go and fight horrific monsters and, very likely, die. These monsters sometimes drop some very nice stuff, if you can live long enough to collect it. The game can become obsessive. Somehow, the little triumphs in the game can make up for lack of same off-line. The game can become a habit that is hard to break.

Still, I owe a lot to the game. More for friends made on-line than for the adventures which are nearly forgotten once completed. Now, excuse me, Ive got to go and kill some Corsairs.

Photoshop

In Photoshop I am presented with a series of small problems to solve when creating a work of digital art. Right now, for instance, Im working on a fantasy sea lion; combining a regal, male lions head with a sea lions body. Ill put in a background and bits of scenery to suit. This process of combining images is called photoshopping. Really, you can no longer believe any photograph that you see since anything can be pasted, believably on anything. This digital editing of photos is a favourite hobby of mine and I belong to several online forums devoted to the pastime of photoshopping.

Im learning to use the tools and a series of shortcuts, Alt key this and Shift key that, or the V letter key to pick the Move tool, or any number of other alphabet keys and combinations. These are tricky at first but once memorized they save a LOT of time. When working with a brush, for example, I can hit the left or right Bracket keys to make the brush head smaller or larger which is a lot better than switching back and forth to little drop-down menus.

The work I do is progressing much faster with these aids. When I wrote this I was focusing my attention on Artist Trading Cards. Artist Trading Cards, or ATCs for short, are 3 1/2 inches high and 2 1/2 inches wide, or visa versa. On this small canvas a miniature piece of art is created as a collage. Photoshop is often about collage and the Internet is full of public domain clip art of various sorts. If the graphic was created before 1923, chances are the pictures are in the public domain and can be used freely.

This fixation on before-1923 has produced a groundswell of digital-collage artists. Some do paste up with real paper and special glues and bits of whimsy and ephemera. Ah, ephemera! That can be anything from an old black and white photo, to actual old ads and paper material from long ago. Some - and alas I am not one of these - can actually draw or paint art upon the card and are thus freed from glorifying silent movie stars and the like. I am drawn to digital paste-up and that means Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or any one of several fractal-generating programs.

I am working my way through various levels of learning. I have found to my delight that there are a fairly large number of short video tutorials I can access on the Internet. These give me an introduction to using the Tools and some fine points in the Settings. This helps to build pathways in the mind, so I can see and remember that I go here to Distort, or there to Fade, and so forth. On eBay, from a British supplier, I bought two fully packed collections of Actions aimed especially at Photographic work. Actions in Photoshop are a series of machine- memorized steps that allow you to do some pretty fancy footwork automatically. An example would be the two Actions I created myself for my eBay listings. One would take my scan of an item such as a dress pattern front cover and reduce it to the smaller, thumbnail-size shown at the top of an eBay listing The other Action would create the properly-sized larger shot for displaying further down in the listing. Actions save time and make you look smarter than you are.

Then there are Plugins, which are more elaborate than Actions, almost like little programs. I have one called Flood, from a company called Flaming Pear, which I used extensively in the series of 6 Artist Trading Cards on the theme of Bathing Beauties. The Flood plugin allowed me to add a convincing layer of rippling water at the feet of my aquatic beauties with a realistic reflection to boot. Some of the ladies in these Artist Trading Card Bathing Beauties swap were rather prim, pre-1923 semi-nudes.

When someone, like the publishing house Dover, pulls together a collection of public- domain clip art the collection is copyrighted but individual items, as many as 10, can be used in a single, composite work of art. I know you really wanted to hear that.

I should mention that the Cards Im rattling on about are produced with the intention of trading them with other card makers in a series of swaps. Typically, this could be a named theme. A fixed number of cards are sent in before a deadline date. In due course 6 cards, each by a different artist, will come in the mail to be added to an ever-expanding Collection. This trading is global in nature and the artist of one may be in Kansas and of another in Australia or even France. Trades are usually organized in Internet messaging forums. I keep my cards, thus received, in 9-card plastic binder pages or in individual sleeves which are widely available since they are used by the Sports Trading Card bunch.

Ive been mounting my completed Cards on the web at http://www.flickr.com/photos/soniabrock/ which is a good graphics hosting site. ATCs are a niche group and there are a multitude of such special interest groups on Flickr.

I print out my cards, still at 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches, but at a higher resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch) on glossy 8 x 10, photo card stock. I get, therefore, 9 cards to a page and cut them up carefully with scissors for post processing. I add a few baubles and beads, bits of lace or trim, and other suitably flat, lightweight paste-up ornamentation. This makes them more tactilely interesting and more appealing to the paste-up crowd. Paste- up ATCs are close in technique to the current Scrapbooking and Cardmaking hobbies. The digital Artist Trading Cards are closer to the computer graphics and photo enhancing hobbies.

When Im working on a specific theme for a group swap, such as The Arrival of Spring or St. Patricks Day, it focuses my mind and I produce more. Im starting now to work on personal themes. My current works in that area illustrate folk songs such as Tom Dooley or the playing card sung about in the ditty Jack of Diamonds. You have to figure out how best to capture the idea visually from all the various bits and pieces that make up the composite canvas. On the web what you often see is a small picture or thumbnail, which you click on to see a larger picture. The placement of the various objects in the card are such that even when seen in the small form, it attracts the eye in and makes you want to see more. This element of composition is another interesting problem.

Ive almost stopped on-line war gaming. Oh, I drop in every now and then to keep my account active but for the most part I no longer play there, because Im too busy learning and using Photoshop.

Another thing Im busy with is collecting the various artistic bits and pieces. This is done either through purchase or on some wonderful sites that have collections of public domain ephemera. Theres a great group on Flickr that does this.

Im building a library of images, so chances are, whatever it is I have to do, I can reach into this digital library and retrieve something relevant. Then again, each new challenge asks for different things. I never thought Id need a sea lion, for instance, or a Confederate Army uniform for Tom Dooley.

In other words, Ive got myself a brand new hobby for as long as it lasts. I hope it lasts a while because its really interesting. Im a little old, right now, for it to turn into a job This what usually happens with my hobbies but one never knows ...

ARTICLES

The Mall

Back in my home town in the 1950s, folks who were smart got out of town pretty fast. This left a work force, somewhat less than smart, to man positions in the banks and store. Thus was created a sort of endemic stupidity in the workforce. These were nice people. They were simple folks without a lot of intellectual depth. They were what they were. Things are different now, of course, but back then that was how things were.

I have found a sort of recreation of this process in my local Mall, which I call the Brain- Dead Mall. When you go in there and ask for service they dont have a clue. Theyve worked in the store for some time and they do what they do. There will be one Supervisor whos a smart person and everybody else will be really borderline. If you asked them a question that doesnt have a standard, canned answer, you were in a lot of trouble. Trying to find out something technical is virtually impossible. They may not know what a grommet is. Theyre pleasant enough but extremely self-centred. Like everyone else, their world view revolves around themselves and the way that they see things. By asking a fancy question you become an instant outsider. You see things differently. They have a strong suspicion that you see things that they dont and maybe youre trying to be a smart ass on them. Well, that wouldnt be too hard to do.

Now this is sort of a malicious piece because its talking about people who are about two cents short of a full load but somebodys got to staff these positions in stores in not very popular Malls. The pay is wretched and the work place is second-rate. I wish I could think of a song about that but melody escapes me.

In your wildest dreams you could never imagine talking to these people about politics, religion, or books. You could probably talk to them about television. I have a biased view about the kind of things they watch. They probably watch Gerry Springer a lot because, well, it doesnt challenge them and it goes to show that there are people dumber than they are by quite a bit.

Now, theres a famous story by C.M. Kornbluth called The Marching Morons, originally published in Galaxy magazine in 1951. Those were the days. This story is a Science Fiction classic. Except for a minority of intelligent people who are holding the whole structure up, the whole earth, is full of the unintelligent. Some guy who works in a menial position as a bus driver or whatever is actually keeping these people from destroying themselves. They have cars which have artificial elements that indicate that they are going at a great speed but actually they dont travel very fast because, if they did the stupids would kill themselves. Someone rescued from the past develops a scheme to send them into space to an alleged paradise of a planet. Bye-bye!

All this was due to a low birth rate among the intelligent and a much higher one amongst the unintelligent. Perhaps there is a lesson in this.

In any case this is the end of my Boxing Day rant against the intellectually challenged.

The next piece will be a little more positive. I promise.

Influences

My good friend Jack said, Run out of topics? Let me suggest some.

His suggestion was that I talk about folks who had influenced me over the years. The folks who influenced me came, mainly, from books.

I started working in the Chatham Public Library when I was in Grade 6. There, I became an omnivorous reader. I was determined to know everything about everything. In the course of this pursuit of knowledge, I started reading biographies.

Ernest Thompson Seton was a Naturalist who wrote books suitable for young people. His book Two Little Savages had a profound influence on me. It was about 3 boys one sickly, one a farmers son and one a little redneck. They all worked together to learn Indian ways and build teepees. They did all sorts of interesting things in the woods, guided in part by an actual frontiersman. Through this I really got into natural history and woodcraft . I ended up joining the Girl Guides (thats Scouts in the USA).

Another influential book was Robert Louis Stevensons Treasure Island. In my mind, I was Jim, the cabin boy, having adventures on the high seas and especially on Treasure Island. Thats why my little gang called itself The Bloody Pirates Club.

As I grew older I became interested in towering figures, such as Mahatma Ghandi. Reading his biography I was very impressed by the freedom movement in India, the march to the sea to make salt and all of that.

Earlier on I had been impressed by Rudyard Kiplings Kim. I read that book aloud to my daughter when she was young. I had read it myself several times over when I was younger. This is not the Disney version but a tale of a Caucasian child raised as a native in the Indian Raj. He meets a holy Tibetan Lama and becomes a spy as well. Its quite a story. My daughter later became a Tibetan Buddhist nun and I think reading the book aloud to her at an impressionable age may well have influenced her decision to take vows.

On the flag of India there is a spinning-wheel because Gandhi preached about making ones own clothes, from cotton thread hand-spun. This was instead of buying European- style garments manufactured in Britain from Indian raw materials. He respected the work of the hands. I took this as a very great lesson that I should always be making something with my hands, and this was a worthy thing to do. As a result of this and also from the influence of my mother who was a great sewer and potter, painter and crafts-person, I always have some kind of needlework ready-to-hand, whether it be cross stitch, garment sewing, cloth doll making, knitting, crochet or beading. My hands, when not typing on a computer keyboard, are almost never idle and, as strange as this may seem, I owe that, in part, to Mahatma Ghandi.

Another person who had a great influence on me, again through reading his biography, was George Washington Carver. Not too familiar to people nowadays, he was a prominent African-American agricultural chemist. He helped to popularize peanut butter. He was a brilliant and public-spirited man. His father had been a slave and his mother was stolen back into slavery. He developed a series of procedures to create almost anything from a peanut. He found over 300 uses for the peanut and worked tirelessly his whole life for something he believed in, sometimes under adverse conditions. He developed a crop-rotation system that revolutionized Southern agriculture

Ill add one more to this trio of folks who influenced me and this third worthy will be Peter Kropotkin, sometimes known amongst my Anarchist brethren as Prince Pete. Peter Kropotkin was born to a noble Russian family. He became an Anarchist. He believed in mutual aid. The ability of people to help each other was an integrally-important characteristic of an ideal society. His views, which I obtained from his book titled Mutual Aid, had a great influence on how, in later years, I worked with groups. I ended up working for the Canadian government, where I was considered to be an unusual employee because I put the good of the whole office, the group, above my own little cell or silo. I worked for everybody and over time this affected the whole office, partially because of communication. It made me a natural bridge between separate groups in the office that would not otherwise talk to each other.

Books and people have legs. They help to take you through your life and make you what you are.

Diabetes

My doctor had told me that I had borderline diabetes, which is also called impaired glucose tolerance. Well, I was kind of fond of cake and cookies but, apparently, its not so much about that as it is about getting older, and being sedentary and a bit overweight, that plus heredity.

I didnt pay too much mind to it because it wasnt bothering me any. I was on a diet for a while but then I went off it.

I started to get really, really sick. I was tired all the time and rest didnt help. I couldnt breathe properly. I had to have the head of my bed raised up at night to help my breathing. My vision got blurry, especially in the morning but also, periodically, throughout the day. I wondered if I was losing my eyesight. I was making more trips to the washroom than I could count. Parts of me started to swell up my feet and my hands.I went into the doctor and told her I thought I had a heart condition. She took a look at me and all the things that were wrong and said, Diabetes. She cut right to the chase. She said it looked like I had full-fledged Diabetes 2. Well, darn!

Diabetes seeks out the weaker parts of your body and produces symptoms there.

I had the A1C blood test and, of course, my figures were over the moon. I had to learn everything there was to know about diabetes now, because thats the way I am, if something goes wrong I research it. My first resource was the Internet. I went looking for Diabetes Forums with Chat Rooms and found some.

A Microsoft Network group called Diabetes Fun and Friends was very helpful. They were mostly from the southern USA and were very polite about my being from Toronto, Canada. I found out that there were people out there who had Diabetes symptoms one heck of a lot worse than I did.

I got books to help me understand it all and I learned that Diabetes is a disease where you have some control. You can manage it, and are wise to do so, by watching your diet and your blood count and taking your pills as required. I studied these books about diabetes and my symptoms. What had happened to me with the breathing was edema, pulmonary edema and its serious and thats why I had to straighten up and fly right. My diet became very, very, very strict and I got a blood glucose meter and strips. I leaned how to punch holes in myself with little jabbing needles and use my strips on the little drops of blood The little test machine turned these blood samples into numbers that meant something. I couldnt get my figures down where they should be. I tried one medication and proved to be allergic to it. Tried another and I wasnt as allergic but it didnt work very well. Now, Im on a third medication which is working so far. However,diabetes is a progressive disease so I may have to change this medication by and by.

I cant do too much exercise because I have arthritis but that also acts as an excuse. I have to do as much exercise as I can while avoiding that No pain, no gain slogan and easing off when it started to hurt. Slow and steady wins the race. Gentle, low impact exercise is a good thing.

Diet is another story. I eat more whole grains now, lots of vegetables and fruit and lean meat in small portions. That part of the treatment is under my control.

I dont mean this article to be a downer but, rather, an advisory in case someone else out there gets the early symptoms. I want to say its not the end of the world. In fact, Im feeling better now than I have in years, and thats progress. Thats due mostly to diet with some exercise.

Ive started taking 1000 International Units of Vitamin D daily and my blood sugar counts have improved a lot since Ive been doing this. We northerners have to watch that we get enough vitamin D because of our long cold winters. Some tests are starting to show that extra vitamin D supplements are effective. Better safe than sorry, I say, so I pop that 1000 mgs of vitamin D twice daily, along with a multivitamin, folic acid and calcium supplements.

If youve just been diagnosed with diabetes bear in mind that coping with the disease through positive strategies will help to rein it in and youll definitely feel better for it. Non-diabetics should note what my doctor says, Everyone should eat like a diabetic.

On Aging

As my 70th Birthday approached I found myself having to come to terms with reality. Im very good at fooling myself. Most of people are.

I once fooled myself into thinking I was a body builder This was when I was younger. I went into the gym with the big guys. I lifted weights and I used the machines and so forth. The net effect, was stronger arms and legs. The other effect was that I went up a bra size, not in front, from the muscle development in my back. I also gave myself a knee injury from which Im still recovering, (Dont try to press more weight than you reasonably can and expect your bent knees to hold. Ooops!) My other self delusion was that I could do Martial Arts. I claim that I got my pink belt. Actually, it was white, the lowest rank and I never got any higher. I cant remember dance moves or Tae Kwon Do moves or Tai Chi or anything like that. I dont have visual memory. I cant see pictures in my head. If you cant do that, then you dont have the necessary map in your head, needed to do a chain of movements, and youre sunk!

To digress a bit, in computer war games you need to map. There are vast terrains and missions over them and so forth. I am heavily dependent on the online Wiki database that exists for my game, Guild Wars. For Missions I depend on PUGs (Player User Groups) which join together, however briefly, to do a Mission and then disperse. I carry my weight, Im a good fighter. I just cant map.

Back to reality, it doesnt matter how much makeup I slather on, or whether I go to the hairdresser or whatever. Im still seventy years plus. When I went to the hairdresser last we got to talking so she just kept fussing. When she was almost done she picked up the curling iron and, because I was a *sigh* Senior Citizen she made little tight curls all over my head. My hair is getting rather thin and is quite white. This was interesting, not my normal style but there you go. Then, I went to a reception for volunteers at jazz.fm and my friend, Danny Marks, hauled me up on stage where I did a rousing version of Midnight Special. I rocked the house. The spotlight on those tight curls and sparse white hair made me look BALD in the resulting photographs. Oh well, Im still 70 and counting, so thats par for the course.

Another thing that does not improve with age is short term memory.If I need to do a bunch of things such as the list below:

Buy a table Send a Get Well card over the Internet Add items to grocery list Tell Don I cant make it to the computer Beer Bash this time Make egg salad for sandwiches

I get stuck on buy a table over the Internet to the detriment of all the other items listed. Then, another item will pop up at random, so Ill do that and worry vaguely that there was something else I needed to do. Bit by bit. most of the items surface, triggered by who knows what, until, with luck, I get most done. Sure, you say, write it down. Well, I do. By the time Ive got to items 3 and 4 Ive forgotten 5. It will surface later when I get hungry enough to remember I meant to make egg salad sandwiches. You can only deal with this fragility of short term memory philosophically. Remember what you can and let the rest go hang. Some charitable researcher said that this weakness comes from having too much information in our heads. Too bad you cant do head cleaning the way you can do house cleaning.

In my family we look about 10 or 15 years younger than we are, until one day the boom descends, and we suddenly look older. People dont realize that I am at my attained age of 70 plus. Its about time, however, that I started realizing it. Ive started looking at older faces with a more discerning eye, looking for the beauty that is there, if you look for it. We are so predicated in this society on youth, on idolizing youth, but one day thats all gone and it aint comin back. I had to revise my self image, which was permanently set at about age 45. That was a reset from many years when it was permanently set as a 16 year old boy. I was a tomboy when I was a kid. Took me a while to grow out of that too.

So, I was permanently set at age 45. Well, Im not 45 It was hard to give that up. I had a bout of depression and then I decided Theres not a darn thing I can do about it. I had to accept something that I could not change and that wasnt easy. It was a real reality check.

Here I am and, apparently, Im going strong. Things that used to interest me no longer interest me as much. Im not as competitive. I take up some new things. Im still growing plants and reading and knitting and sewing a bit. I go out every 6 weeks to my computer guys beer bash with other old geeks and demi-geeks like myself. We sit around and talk about whats wrong with Microsoft and why we may or may not like Linux and so forth. There are a few other social outings too. Its a good life that I have. Im very lucky to be alive and reasonably well, even if Im aging.

Sayings

Do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb? That was a common joke saying in Chatham. We figured it would take an outright flood to do any harm to rhubarb. I didnt know, then, the joke answer, Not if it's in cans and I just found out it was a line in the Gene Kelly / Judy Garland movie Summer Stock.

To me it epitomizes the dry humour favoured by farmers, like the Irish travel directions.

How do I get to Galway? Well, if I were you I wouldnt start from here. and quite a spell of weather we're having which is vague enough to suit kinds of weather.

Another weather-based saying was, Never rains but it pours, eh? but that was a bit more mystical, more in the line of Trouble comes in threes. I still find myself, in times of misfortune, counting and hoping to arrive at that final third event.

In my family, recently, my youngest sister had emergency gall bladder surgery, my other sister had a fall and got a cut that needed stitches. Niece had skateboard accident and is all over bruises. There! That's three and let that be an end to it. Never rains but it pours.

"And let that be a lesson to you!" was said after after plans went awry. The example given was of the overweight, middle-aged man who went into a drugstore soda fountain on hot Summer day and ordered a full glass of cracked ice. He swallowed the lot in short order and died on the spot from a heart attack and let that be a lesson to you. Blown to smithereens! is another familiar phrase and without knowing its origins it is still easy enough, in the mind's eye to see something blown to bits and scattered.

A friend added to this collection with a deliberate substitution of Old-Timer's Disease for Alzheimer's Disease.

Someone whose appearance is none too neat "Looks like he was dragged through a hedge backwards"; a tradition which I try my best to uphold. He might also seem to be like "The Wild Man from Borneo", a sideshow attraction named after the Bornean Orangutans. They have long hair which makes them appear unkempt.

A computer friend told me, My grandfather (and his family) used to use a good one to let you know that they had enjoyed a meal and were full.

"My sufficiency has been suffonsified. If I were to partake of but another morsel, I would most assuredly burst."

I though that was uncommon but apparently it is a Canadian standard saying.

Since Hector was a pup is a bit more involved. Hector's mother, Hecuba, got turned into a dog for killing the murderer of her older son, Polydorus. Thus, Hector by extension was a dog's son and he lived a long time ago. The phrase seems to have become current in the 1920s and was a favourite with my mother, who had been a flapper then.

I figured Plant you now and dig you later came out of the 1960s but I was wrong. Apparently, it dates back to sometime in the 1930s and migrated from black street slang into the Beat generation vocabulary. It shows up in Pal Joey as hip street talk.

My friend, Joan in Wiltshire wrote:

I met a Scottish lady the other day and it was so good talking to her. She came from Edinburgh, whereas I am from the West coast. We were comparing places which we both knew and had a chat about them. She did make me laugh because she mentioned one town where she reckoned they considered themselves upper class. "You know what I mean" she said, "Fur coats and no drawers!" (All show and no substance.)

I'd almost forgotten that this is how most Scots talk. They do tend to call a spade a spade. To me that is a good thing because you know exactly how you stand with them and most wont tolerate anyone trying to belittle them. Anyway, she was a breath of fresh air that day and it cheered me up no end.

My father was a salesman of pianos, home organs and heavy appliances at the Eatons Department Store in Chatham, Ontario. He had a favourite saying which I consider to be his legacy. Like most salesmen he was not canny about saving his money but his favourite saying has carried me safely though thick and thin. It was "You can slide further on bullshit than you can on gravel!"

"All done up like a Christmas tree" was a saying of my mother's. She also liked Done up like Lady Astor's plush horse. Lady Astor was a well to do American-born lady who became, through marriage, a British upper class lady. She held a seat in the British parliament. Another favourite with my mother was I'm so mad I could chew nails and spit rust!"

"I'll break your arm off at the elbow and hit you over the head with it" was a mock threat used by my mother. Dont know where it came from and there are too many words for a credible Google search or so I thought until I published this piece on the Internet and found out I was now the source.

She also used "Your eyes look like two burnt holes in a blanket" to cover any degree of illness or fatigue.

When I asked friends for familiar family sayings they would tend to say I should just get them off the Internet. Well, the Internet is good for research but I wanted original folk sayings instead of an Internet list. Disney has taken over our childhood mythologies and Disneyfied it with cute bottoms and quirky little cartoons. The Internet, in a somewhat similar fashion, is homogenizing our memories.

My friend Steven C. from rural Illinois contributed

"Feel like I'd have to get better to die" and "Feel like the little end of nothin' whittled down to a point."

"Hot as the hinges of hell!" was another common saying from my childhood.

I pick up little catch phrases from listening to old time radio skits, such as saying, for someone who's a skinflint, that they aretight as a toreador's pants. We always used to say tight as the bark on a tree but I think toreador's pants covers it, ahem, adequately . I'm sure many of my mother's sayings came originally from radio and movies in the 1920s and 30s.

When defeat was confirmed beyond all doubt we could say they "beat us all hollow".

"Had the biscuit" was another common saying from my childhood. I looked it up and found that it refers the the Catholic last rites when Communion was given to a dying person. the communion wafer was, in this case, the biscuit.

I'm sure I will run across other common sayings over time but for now I've had the biscuit. Selling Online

Having a lot of interests, I accumulate a lot of stuff. I decided to sell some of my surplus stuff on line. I started first with eBay. Doesnt everyone? I gathered up a collection of all kinds of things sewing patterns and books and magazines as well as Golliwog dolls which are popular with British ex-expatriates and Australians.

I did fairly well with the books on eBay. Then, I got more professional and moved my book stock to an operation called AbeBooks online. They had a wonderful down- loadable, catalogue-utility program where I could plug in the ISBN number. That's important for selling books. Every modern book has an ISBN number. I typed in in the other details, such as the condition of the book, and uploaded my listing. People looking for a book can do a search on Abebook online and, if you have the book on the topic searched for, it will show up on the website listing showing its details, condition and all pertinent data.

In one phase of my existence I was accumulating occult books and I had quite a few of them. In Rosedale, which is a high income neighbourhood in Toronto, someone put out boxes and boxes of books at the curb. One of my relatives grabbed them for me and hauled them over to my place. I catalogued them all.

My sister reads a lot of mysteries so I ended up with quite a mystery-novel collection.

I was selling off parts of my own book collection because my shelves were groaning with books. I had books I had acquired and books I no longer needed, so I started selling them. I met a lot of interesting people. These were simple transactions. You want it. I've got it. You buy it I mail it. I used PayPal, of course. Credit card transactions through PayPal are a mainstay of online selling.

I should emphasize that, in selling online, the most important thing is honesty. You have to be scrupulously exact in describing what you are selling.

I bought a little postal weighing machine on eBay, so I wouldnt have to go to the Post Office. I'd just set my item on the little scale, then calculate the postage from the Post Office tables on line.

I got a postage meter, which was a bit of overkill, but I also sell CDs online for an entertainment group, so I needed to have the postage meter for that. Now, I use the excellent Canada Post Internet utility called Ship-In-A-Click

Between eBay and AbeBooks I did about $2,000.00 worth of business one year. A fair amount of work went into setting up listings, especially on eBay. There, you need a picture and a description and you have to categorize it and state the time frame of the auction and so forth. You have to decide on a price that will attract eBay buyers, because they're all bargain hunters on eBay. You set your initial price not too high and not too low. Then, you wait to see if the fish will nibble at the bait.

In the beginning I was looking all the time to see who was hitting on my auctions, not bids but traffic, which would show up in the counter I had on my listing. Then, I found out that counters made for slower load times. People's attention span on the web is remarkably short, so the less load time it takes to bring up a webpage the better. You dont really need to know who's looking. You only need to know who's bidding.

If you have a lot of listings, eBay has good software to handle and keep track of all of them.

I had a lot of cloth-doll patterns I was no longer using. The named-designer patterns went very well. The occult books, too, went very well. There was reproduction item of Crowleyana that was sold to a fellow in Florida. I think he ran a bookstore. They were having a heavy-weather event there. This was just before Hurricane Katrina and everything was flooded and discombobulated. I was just about to cancel that auction, because it was taking too long for him to pay, when a desperate note came from his friend's computer in another State saying, Hold on! As soon as the water goes down he's going to pay you! and he did. He certainly did.

If I was going to give tips for selling on eBay I would say, have a very clear picture of the item and work on your description and your key words. Your title is really important because it's a grabber. Sometimes that's all they really see. Research the pricing, so your item is placed not too low and not too high. If someone else is selling the same thing in the same frame of time, you might want to hold off, or you could price your item a bit lower. Pennies count.

I learned while selling books that the most off-beat thing, like mountain climbing in Peru, will have a niche audience. A little pamphlet about an obscure automobile, published by the company that made it, with cartoons, years ago, has someone wanting it because they are a collector. You can look up prices on the Internet to get an approximate worth for your item. The auto pamphlet went to someone in a museum in New Zealand. That's the other thing. You are selling globally. I sold a fair amount to the Far East, to Australia and, as mentioned, New Zealand. I sell primarily into the United States and Canada, where I live, but I have sold to Britain and to France, parts of Scandinavia, to Holland and so forth.

It's quite exciting when you send your parcel off into the ether. Postal services quite wonderful. It continues to be amazing to me how a parcel sent from my corner mailbox can safely arrive in France.

That's my story about selling on line. Basically, anyone can do it, if you just have the patience to list stuff in the database or on eBay, each in their own special fashion. It was fun while it lasted but I'm burnt out now and I'm not going to do it any more. I've got over 600 positive responses (called Feedback) on eBay, with no negative Feedback on my record. I'm proud of that but, like I say, Game over.

I still buy on eBay. There's stuff you can get there you cant get anyplace else.