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He Said/She Said: Bill Bryson (and Sarah Selecky) (on WONDER)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 9, 2026
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Category: At First Glance

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[3-minute read]

There’s a writing coach around whose e-bay window I occasionally lurk. She’s always pretty and smiling, or pensively curled up with notebook and pen. She entices me to write more, and more satisfyingly and more deeply, and to link up with other scribblers. Her messages sometimes inspire in a general way, they encourage without fail, though they may be too jasmine-scented, too chamomile and meditative and soft for me. (I sometimes write with Jeff Beck or The Propellerheads blazing in the background.) Perhaps I just resist for the sake of loonie-pinching resistance, carrying on in my own solitary way. Still, she has me wondering, and doing math about it…

Sarah’s recent e-blandishment was to join a virtual writing community that has a new emphasis each month. May’s is Wonder. She writes, “In their great new book, How to Design a Meaningful Life, Dave Evans and Bill Burnett share their wonder equation. Here it is:

curiosity + mystery = wonder.

When you know the equation, you see that wonder is always available. It’s a choice. You can find it in ordinary things, once you start looking. An apple, when you really think about it, is completely unfathomable…”

This image comes from Amazon, but please buy from an independent bookseller!

I wonder why and what?! and how?! and who was she in high school? and when will it be?… and I’m off to the races. We all are, when our curiosity isn’t strangled by routine or petty distractions — not to mention that my reflexive question is this: do these slim answer machines that we’re leashed to actually stunt or misdirect our engagement with life’s questions? My big sister loves her iPhone, and quick-drew it on me last weekend more than once to respond to my idlest who won/when’s the next game? queries with an encyclopedic recitation. Fair’s fair: I did ask, but there was precious little mystery attached to my bland microdose of curiosity. My question about smartphones stands, though I do admit that smartphones and the algorithms that fuel their constant use really can (he argues hypothetically, but without much conviction) prompt profound and useful investigations of mysteries more lofty than can you believe what this cat/these guys just did? 

But I wonder, I do, how much and how often this kind of outsourced thinking encourages genuine curiosity about truly mysterious things. They are more likely, in my experience, to excite thoughtless engagement with banal and repetitive images, without a single idea in sight. I wonder.

Now, according to my notes, the force-of-authorial-nature Bill Bryson was on my Sunday Magazine CBC wireless radio as 2025 wound down. (Vacuum tubes, static fuzz-hiss, carefully calibrating the dial so I could listen while shovelling coal into the furnace.) (Okay, no, the CBC still lives in modernity; I mostly listen to its shows as podcasts on my iPhone. Driving. Walking. Or in this case, I believe the Mother Corp soothed and informed me while I loaded the dishwasher.) Bryson is mainly known for writing rich and funny travel books – Notes From a Small Island (England) and A Sunburnt Country (Australia), for only two best-selling examples – but I especially liked his 2003 departure, A Short History of Nearly Everything. It was an avowed non-scientist’s gigantically ambitious attempt to write the story of scientific discovery from the ancients to the 21st century. For the first two years of my family’s five-year unplan in northeastern China, nightly readings of Sciencey Bill Bryson composed my young son’s science curriculum. (When Dad’s an English teacher, you come to expect science as an exercise in storytelling, and what an amazing work of narrative non-fiction it was!)

And is, still and again and even more so! Bryson was interviewing with Magazine host Piya Chattopadhyay about his 2025 complete revision and

Bryson in 2020 (from The Guardian, a fine news site).

update: A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0. (This, despite his 2020 “retirement” from writing at age 68, as delightfully chronicled in The Guardian.) It was a tasty, engaging conversation, chock full of fun and fascination and – yes, I did remember where I was headed with this! — wonder. Piya wanted to know, after all these books and the over 20 years that had elapsed between original publication and this renewed re-telling of the greatest (and latest) adventures in scientific discovery: what feeds Bill Bryson’s curiosity? What makes the wonder mill keep on grinding?

I loved his answer. He’s a humorist by nature, but a relentlessly thoughtful and wonderfully wise one. He said,

“Here we are….We have this very short window of existence. Before we existed, there was this great eternity that we didn’t take part in, and when we die eternity will go on….But in between, there is this moment where we have the exhilarating privilege to exist. And I think it’s such a shame that we take it all for granted.”

So here’s the math: add Bill Bryson’s furious, curious desire to understand to the vast slowly revealed mysteries of the universe? The sum total is WONDER. Reverence. Amazement. And he moved me to want MORE.

Jim Rohn (on discipline and regret)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 4, 2026
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Category: At First Glance

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[3-minute read]

I had never heard of Mr. Rohn until years after his passing. It appears he was one of that prototypical tribe of American salesmen – “born poor, a millionaire by 30, broke by 33, etc.…” – who come to prominence in their quest to make influence, personal development and individual psychology into an alternative faith tradition. I don’t mean to trash the field entirely. After all, I am a Psych grad and a frequent consumer of PD content; Tony Robbins and I have gone a few rounds, and I learned some useful things. Jim Rohn wrote many books, with titles like The Power of Ambition, Take Charge of Your Life, and The Day That Turns Your Life Around. He inspired the Chicken Soup guys (Hansen and Canfield) as well as Master Robbins. So, that’s coaching. That’s influence, and I can think of a pile of so-called “influencers” who are far less valuable than what Mr. Rohn’s body of personal development work appears to offer.

So. Here’s the Rohn quote that brings me here.

“Everyone must choose one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.”

It’s pithy and blunt, and it got me one day back in 2025. I don’t remember, but it probably came from a basketball coach’s email subscription. Now, let’s talk about an out-of-context quote! It’s the kind of thing, my research tells me (though I might have guessed it), that you can order from Amazon in kitschy suitable for framing on fridge magnets form, but I haven’t been able to find what book it appeared in. On Reddit forums and Facebook pages, it often comes accompanied by the reminder that “discipline weighs ounces, but regrets weigh a ton”. I don’t know how much of his life pitch I would buy, but since I stumbled on THIS one, long after Jim Rohn had passed beyond this vale of human development, I haven’t been able to kick it out of my way. That’ll be useful for my players, I told myself. (Of course I did!) I do love coaching, from basketball to poetry, but recently I have challenged myself anew to accept coaching — and to reconsider my own levels of discipline and regret.

Coach Creede, meanwhile, has accepted the challenges that come from working with an egotistical writer, teacher and coach who has been accused of that worst of sporting crimes: being uncoachable. (That would be me.) Like Apollo (Rocky’s boxing frenemy), this Creede is beginning to punch through my phalanx of weaponized bad habits, mindset disorders, alleged neurodiversity and gigantic appetites for distraction. She asks Those Questions, simultaneously wonderfully encouraging and also barbed. Before long, I found myself making promises that I often don’t keep when I only make them to myself.

The pain of discipline? It’s real. It’s hard to put a lock on the doors of whimsy and impulse. This teacher and mighty slow learner is only too aware: push yourself away from the table, sir, or you’ll still be carrying extra kilos around without a wheelbarrow; if you don’t manufacture time for your writing, ol’ buddy, it’s unlikely to just fall into your crumb-laden lap!

HOWEVER. You’ve all heard this bold statement: I live my life without regrets! So say many contemporary influencers, entertainers and sports stars. It seems foolish to me. Juvenile. While I’m all for throwing off the slimy burdens of useless guilt and chronic self-loathing, it seems to me that people who claim to live without regrets just aren’t reflecting sufficiently on their lives. (Unless they’re psychopaths.) We are meant to take stock of our lives, and decide what is worthy of us and what we should leave behind. Certainly, for me, it’s the reality of various forms of regret that encourages me to stiffen feeble habits, that reinforces my general desire for a more disciplined sort of life.

Is that too old-fashioned for you? Don’t be afraid to comment below, or to share these thoughts with folks who might value them.

Thanks for reading, friends.

Going All *Gregorian* (though not necessarily in a timely fashion)

Posted by :James Howden On : January 14, 2026
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Category: At First Glance

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[And lo, he wrote a poem about OldNew Years and promises of scribbling. And a Happy 2026, headlines notwithstanding, to you!]
[2-minute read]

Going All Gregorian

And I said, Lo, this is an ancient and decrepit choreography for the

Changing of the Temporal Guard,

With attenuated powers of renewal and jangly echoes fading along

consumptive corridors of materialist advancement and

post-hangover promises.

Ridiculous spot for a “New Year”.

And yet it has been a new and Sunday sort of Day

And I’ve been thinking that even a busted, rusted tabula rasa

still offers that shopworn but still clean-enough board of

resolution.

(And resolution came into my language* to express a bringing-into-focus

of things seen darkly, as with camera or dialled-in microscope

of the kind I never used very well in the biology labs of yore)

(* in which your humble scribe lays claim to English)

So I’ll dig a little every day, using Seamus Heaney’s brand of shovel,

not worrying (much) about the impossibility of spading up

soil as rich as that Irish hero spelunked and spelled out.

I am deskside, armed with twentieth century penmanship and apparently

writing a POEM fergawdsake!

Although, reading Heaney aside, that was never the plan for this First Day

But I will X-marks-the-spot each day in January until the calendar scoffs.

And listen: this hardly hurt at all.

Retrofitting a Fancy

Posted by :James Howden On : April 1, 2025
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Category: At First Glance

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“I was an educator of some sort,” began my scribbling about a recent dream.

(This was also true to life. What “sort”, then? This sort: high school; English Creature; one for whom Dead Poet’s Society probably meant too much; taught like world peace depended upon my chalk-stained energy; raced to the gym many an after-school day; teacher-coach; regularly heart-broken but deeply committed, happy and perhaps absurdly proud to be so. “Uncle Jay,” a niece who had been with me in Room 2011 once wrote, “is, um, colourful.” Unlike my sons, she didn’t have to deal with me on the basketball court. And the ghost is still in the machine. I continue to haunt the corridors and the hardwood of Endless High School. “I guess that this must be the place…” (Talking Heads) One of my places, that’s sure.)

I was an educator of some sort, wandering through tight spaces in a huge, high vault of a warehouse. I couldn’t get out, or get where I needed to go, and was also frustrated that I couldn’t escape the dream itself. Moments of am I dreaming here? alternated with me writing on various found surfaces and random papers, here and there, so I wouldn’t forget what I was seeing. And then I’d forget where I left my urgent records. But I was amazed by all I saw in that enormous, high-walled building: old dictionaries, reams of stationery and computer equipment, redundant textbooks, tables, racks and shelves of building materials, fossil remains of art. There were a few rancid corners, but mostly it was filled with odd and dusty and stolidly interesting things. It went on and on. Does anybody realize that all this is still here? I had to get the word out, that all the old-school material — steel and wood and paper and thought — in this building, not to mention the real estate it sat on, had to be worth a LOT. It should at least be recycled and/or sold off! I made notes, lost them, wrote others.

All this STUFF! All this SPACE! Somebody should KNOW about all this! I gotta get this written down (AGAIN!) before I lose or forget it (again!)!

I went for a walk that morning, shared a few choice words with the sun and sky, cocked my head at a certain point and knew, without thinking hard or directly, what that dream was trying to tell me. (Most of the time, I find my dreams are just stacks of frustration dripping with a slurry of random events-from-the-day. I don’t expect revelation, or even meaning. But I’ll take it when I can get it.)

Ha! It was a Writing Dream!

Let’s say the storage area was my life and mind, my understanding, maybe even my imagination. Let’s say that, despite my distrust of my capacity for mysticism, I’m not above looking for signs and portents!

***

All this is a long way of saying that I’m having another kick at the Can. The Writing Can, the I-can Can. A.T. helped me resuscitate this old repository of my stuff. I’m spraying Lock De-Icer on my fingers, and sprinkling hopefulness on my spirit. You’re reading a wee result. Thanks for reading.

 

[I have also dumped, *just* over there in the “It’s All About Sports!” section, a lengthy essay on basketball coaching. It’s a ‘State of the Disunion’ address, slightly different versions of which I’ve been trying to share with coaches in my region, the wider basketball community, and anybody who can tolerate (or venerate) the idea that sport and education can “share the same space for a minute or two”, as the mighty David Byrne used to sing.]

Canada Day: It’s Complicated

Posted by :James Howden On : July 1, 2024
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Category: At First Glance

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[5-minute read]

Eh? What’s that? Time to put on red ‘n’ white clothes and fly the maple leaf flag on our barren flagpole?

Maybe so! Lady Laughter and I did finally slide our narrower (and much nimbler)  son out of our bedroom window in early May to take down the tattered flag that barely survived the winter. It was a drapeau of Earth, one of those photos-from-space of our little blue planet, and it had come to be a horrible reminder of the war-torn regions and generally fraying tapestry of the human world’s tentative movements toward oneness. While I do think that we obsess, in an unseemly and hugely discouraging way, about our destructive tendencies – sudden, violent, other-making, spectacular – and that a little more dwelling on the pleasant things of life – construction, kindness, vision, unity – would do us enormous bunches of good, that disintegrating rag of blue and green was a WAY too obvious metaphor. And to take the symbolism farther: we didn’t have a new Earth banner to put up, either.

And we totalled our car, got the gardens underway, dealt with contractors, listened to podcasts, and many other lively pursuits. My bride, it should be said, is a working person, while my retirement has me even less tethered to timelines that don’t involve high school hoops. June came. Events occurred. And then we went east. (Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Maine, Quebec. It was lovely, thanks!)

We got back to Ottawa, car-worn and happy, on June 30. I woke up to Canada Day, none too early, and remembered that we did have a Canuck flag tucked away in a drawer. We haven’t flown it for a while, certainly not since a convoy of “freedom”-seeking protesters tied our city in knots for a while back there. For most of my life, Olympics aside, my fellow Canadians and I have not been big on flag-waving. Even our recent afternoon drive from Bar Harbor, Maine to the Quebec border, which is predominantly middle o’ nowhere forest, was notable for how much more likely American homes, businesses and every second telephone pole in the woods were to fly the stars and bars. Such conspicuous and rampant patriotism doesn’t suit us; at least, it doesn’t suit me.

However, a time came when disgruntled, irritated, peevish and me-first (me-only) Canadians took to flying our flag from trucks (alongside various iterations of “F— Trudeau!” and “government SUCKS, ‘cuz, like, vaccines and taxes and shit!” and you’re not the boss of ME! signs) and cars, making the humble red-and-white Maple Leaf suddenly a signal of rejection, it seemed to me, of the traditional Canadian virtues. Peace. Fairness. Good government. Order. The common good. Loyalty. A sense of proportion. Politeness. And, since the ‘70s or so, ethnic diversity has also become our very good friend, at least the idea of it. We used to call it multiculturalism, and some folks still do; unity in diversity is even better.

It bugged me that I felt unable to fly the red ‘n’ white because of what I uncharitably thought of as its (mis)appropriation as the flag of selfish yahoos. Mind you, even before the notorious “trucker convoy” protests, I had reservations. I wasn’t eager to be more jingoistic, in the American “my country right or wrong” vein. I was increasingly aware of associations that flag-flying might have for, say, Indigenous peoples or Black Canadians. Many citizens seek greater truth-telling. Many call for reconciliation between the undoubted pride and good fortune that most of us feel to be Canadian, and the unquestionably unjust choices that our country and its Eurocentric majority peoples have too often made. Beyond that, I have long been working to nourish the mindset, and the accompanying lifestyle and actions, of a global citizen. You know, trying to see all humanity as one family, that not-so-old idea.      

So, it’s been a few years since the Maple Leaf flew from our second floor pole, but Happy Canada Day anyway! Eh? And yes, despite his even more rampant youthful discomfort with The Whole Canada Thing, my lanky son was out on the roof again earlier today to do his father’s diffident bidding. There’s a red maple leaf, about 4′ x 6′ (and no, I don’t know what that is in metres!) waving outside my window once again. There’s a part of me that feels I should be lettering a bedroom-window disclaimer of all the things that we *don’t* mean in letting our not-so-freaky flag fly. I may yet.

In the meantime, we don’t use the Leaf to signify any of these things. 1. An undying loyalty to the red-and-white of the Liberal Party of Canada. (I vote, but partisan politics is all the more obviously the divisive force that I have long believed it is. In this and other degrading ways, we’re getting more like the Americans.1) 2. A belligerent antagonism toward the Liberal Party of Canada. (Ditto.) 3. A resentment of paying taxes. (I am often impressed, despite bloat and inefficiency, by the services our governments provide, education and health care and snow removal and so much more, for just about everybody.) 4. Some petulant desire to have our country be the more male-dominated and white-skinned place that it used to be. (I intend no self-hatred when I say that unipolar ethnicity and mouldy conceptions of masculinity can be boring, to say nothing of the hateful and retrogressive extremisms they can produce.) 5. A bitter rejection of broader loyalties, and signs of a planetary order. (What, you’d prefer planetary disorder?! The Guardian of the Bahá’í international community called all to a greater consciousness of the oneness of humanity, but also affirmed the value of “a sane and intelligent patriotism”, in which affection for one’s country was no impediment to loving the world.) So no, none of that.   

  1 And just to be clear: there are all kinds of ways in which Americans are marvellous. (Never forget.)

It’s my country’s national day, and there’s still lots to be grateful for. Canada still stands for worthwhile things, and it is composed of magnificent and favoured geography and a tonne of mainly beneficent folk. It’s my country, and I’ll party if I want to. Still, I probably won’t join the masses on Parliament Hill for the concerts, the boozy downtown celebrations, or gaze in childlike wonder at the fireworks displays, as magnificent as they will no doubt be. Some of that’s just being an older dude, and some of it is not really being much good at celebration in general. Maybe I’ll read an Alice Munro short story, or crack open J.R. Saul’s A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada (2008), a way of thinking about my place in the world, one that I’d like to understand better. Let’s make reading great again!

But then again, our garden needs some attention, and cutting grass is a way of “standing on guard”, I suppose. I foresee a long walk along local streets, after all our tramping about down East. There will be more than the usual frequency of friendly nods and waves. And I’ll maybe buy myself an ice cream sundae, because Canada Day comes but once a year…  

Where We Found Them

Posted by :James Howden On : June 3, 2024
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Category: At First Glance

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[1-minute read]

I felt my bumbling way, blindly and bemused, back to a website I used to be frenemies with. I won’t be coy: it’s this one. Surprise!

To those generous humans who’ve subscribed to this thing – and let’s not be too precious about this, the price is no barrier to entry! – I say thanks, folks! and strive to go “on without apology”, as Big Bill had Romeo say at the point of crashing the Capulet ball. But hey: It’s my website! And I’ll post if I want to!! (Yeah, I’m riffing on an old song most people have never heard; I’M BACK, BABY!! Semicolons and all! [You are free to mentally insert the amusement emoji of your choice here.])

All this to say, again, that I’m going to scrape the rust off this now-antique whatever-it-is. It helped, after it hurt to see the gap of three years since I had anything to say here, to re-read my last two posts. One was local and light-hearted, and the other was global and everything but. They were my only two posts that year, but I really really liked them! I couldn’t restrain myself from frowning over this little bit of awkward punctuation, or that weary word choice, but mainly I had that consoling reminder that comes from reading old stuff and thinking, Hey, this guy’s not bad, even if he *is* me! I confess: I enjoyed these two articles, and wish I’d done a little more with them back then. But we takes our confirmations where we finds ‘em…

I will still hive off athletic ruminations into the “All About Sports” nook, and quarantine quotes from others (and my reflections on same) into the “He Said/She Said” file. Both the pieces above sit, along with this little greeting, in the “At First Glance” section, though the second one probably belonged in the “On Second Thought” compartment, since it ran deep and feeling and long. Come back anytime, friends, neighbours, citizens of Earth.

Having Fun While Me

Posted by :James Howden On : December 7, 2021
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Category: At First Glance

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Big house, great sound, respectful audience, super popcorn, and MOVIES! (photo from Playback magazine)

[4-minute read]

Sunday night was Double Date night – no second couple, in this case, but just my bride and I bopping from one Ottawa cultural heartthrob to another. After a light and early supper at home, we were off to the Mighty ByTowne cinema (yes, kids, it’s back!) for a mouth-watering bite of history. Then we hopped on our pony and bustled to the western edge of downtown for a Writers Festival event (yup, pardners, they’re back, too, in Three Entire Dimensions!).

This was my fifth or sixth Return to the ByTowne since its new ownership re-opened that grand old videodrome in the fall. All my fears of it having been blandified (or turned into condos, he shuddered) have been dispelled. Many of the familiar staff faces are back, the popcorn hasn’t been meddled with, and the slate of movies remains rich, diverse, international and occasionally quirky. The Power of the Dog with Cumberbatch and Dunst, C’mon C’mon with Joaquin Phoenix and Gaby Hoffmann, are both still bouncing around my brain days or weeks later. Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, strangely current even all these years after his prime and then his passing, had me sobbing repeatedly. (Vonnegut does this to me regularly, but I was still surprised at how hard this loving documentary tribute punched me. Hi ho.)

We were there Sunday for Julia. For anybody over, say, 40, who has been around American television shows, filling in the last name might be easy as omelettes. Julia Child was a towering presence in popular culture, especially from the 1960s through to the ‘90s – and not just because she was 6’3”. Her monumental first book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her subsequent presence as the “French chef” on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) made her an icon. Julia tells her life story in lavish detail, and with stunning re-creations of many of her most famed recipes, and shows not only her fame and cultural impact – yes, her show was parodied on Saturday Night Live! — but also “how important she was, is, will be”, as one of her admirers puts it.

On set in 1978: Julia Child, TV star, at 66. She was far from finished. (Wikipedia)

She was the first person to make cooking on television attractive, in spite of her plainness and age. I had thought Meryl Streep’s voice for her in Julie and Julia (2009, another Child-focused film I hadn’t expected to greatly enjoy, StreepLove aside) was a bit clumsy and overdone — until I saw Julia, that is. I hadn’t connected her to the rise of real attention to good eating in America, but she profoundly influenced young chefs and helped spawn “foodie” culture. The silly, materialistic extremes of that movement don’t undo the value of eating good food, lovingly prepared, which was Child’s essential oeuvre. I also wouldn’t have thought of her as a feminist icon, for example, and in hindsight I’d have been wrong. Julia involves some time travel, painting a vivid (black and white) portrait of the life of one unusual woman in the first half of the 20th century and her flowering, in her mid-50s, as an ambassador of French cuisine. The film is funny, informative and absolutely delicious to look at; the gorgeously framed contemporary food-prep sequences are big-screen-worthy, even for a culinary primitive like me.

We raced from the ByTowne, skipping the end credits (gasp!), to Christchurch (Anglican) Cathedral, the most common recent venue for the live events of the Ottawa International Writers Festival. We went from one local arts treasure to another, and from an American TV icon to a pair of Canadian ones. Linden McIntyre is a Nova Scotian journalist (most famously hosting The Fifth Estate, and then famously retiring to save one younger person’s job at the beloved and beleaguered “Mother Corp”, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Also a novelist (he won the Giller Prize for The Bishop’s Man), he was our laconic and charming interviewer for a younger Maritime star, Newfoundland’s comedic genius Rick Mercer. Once the “angry young man” of Canadian comedy, He has written something longer (and mildly less angry) than the 90-second “rants” and other satiric slices that have made him beloved across the country. Talking to Canadians is a memoir that my wife and I will read with delight.

You might have heard the echoes of his (in)famous “Talking to Americans” segments in that book title. Among the many irreverent stories he told

Striding down Canuck streets, ranting.
(from the Globe and Mail)

at Christchurch Cathedral was of the genesis of that thoroughly Canadian project; it is something of a national sport to enjoy Americans being foolish. (Thinking they can beat us at hockey, f’r’instance.) While Mercer was filming in Washington, D.C., a passing American public servant was savvy enough to determine that the “Canadian Broadcasting Corporation” printed on an equipment case meant that Mercer must be from..…(wait for it)…..“Canada!” It was a gift to a young satirist there on other business: Guv Guy was completely gullible about the absurd name Mercer gave to Canada’s Prime Minister (“Benmergui”, which true CBC-lovers chuckle at as a reference to former radio host Ralph), but was quite prepared to explain the concept of “alphabetical order” on camera when Mercer pretended, to this pompous ignoramus, that Canadians weren’t familiar with this clever new method of organization. From his sudden starburst on the national scene, to his membership in the This Hour Has 22 Minutes¹ crew, to The Rick Mercer Report to his current return to stand-up comedy and whatever comes next, we all got to be spectators as MacIntyre prodded Mercer into story after story, and even his closing punchline “I’ve been glad to be that prick.” (Had to be there, folks!)

Jay and Diana went out on a date, and an icon-fest broke out. And that’s why Ottawa isn’t “the town that fun forgot”! ²

¹ Such a CBC-centric occasion, in so many ways. True dévotées will remember not only the show, but its sly naming echoing an ultra-serious 1960s CBC TV news magazine called This Hour Has Seven Days. 
² As I am wont to do, I refer here to the acerbic and ever-living Allan Fotheringham, who described Canada’s capital in this unfair and fairly accurate way, depending on your definition of fun.

Flipping My Lid: “It’s a Revolution!” (Well, it was *something*…)

Posted by :James Howden On : January 27, 2021
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Category: At First Glance

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An attack on goodness. (Image from abcnews.com.)

We’re three weeks out now and it seems so calm. Capitol Hill has now seen another Presidential inauguration, quiet and with a brooding military aspect to it, but also a reaffirmation that maybe the adults are back in charge of the Excited States of America¹. Major media are celebrating the Biden/Harris Reset, at times with a gushing “America is back! This is who we really are!” relief that is mildly embarrassing. Canucks like me are used to American excess, like what my football-loving big sister always eye-rolled as “another Pride-Of-America halftime show”. They still believe in comic books, redemptive violence and superheroes. The noble sheriff is back in town. Batman Returns! But listen, don’t get me wrong here: I’m also relieved, as many are, that the American government seems to be on more solid footing, but these are not days of wine and roses.

¹ Tip o’ my ballcap to the great Allan Fotheringham, another one we lost in 2020.

Three Wednesdays ago, as we were treated to video of a tear-gassed woman giving her name and city, and the explanation “We’re storming the Capitol! It’s a revolution!”, and much more jaw-dropping footage, I flipped my lid. I stomped about. I muttered darkly. (I couldn’t write at all.) I was outraged. Indignant. My bride was bemused. She was thinking, It’s not my country. It’s sad to watch it suffer, of course. But it quickens the process – people are going to be shaken up and realize how much they’ve ignored the cracks in the walls. Racism. White privilege. Bipolar resentment. System failure. She’s a pragmatic person. But she wanted to understand, in the days that followed, why I was so combustible, and simultaneously so deeply disheartened, by a mob – stoned on deception and wired on the skewed perception of having been robbed – storming the Capitol building in a mighty country next to my own. I tried to explain my bubbling anger to her. I mean, I know I was fried that day, having run too far for my fitness level. And I *am* an old fart. Maybe Seasonal Affective Disorder is an Actual Thing. (“SAD AT.”) Covid-crankiness? I can’t dismiss that, either. But this was much more.

I came up with three “reasons” to explain how January 6 had knocked me on my arse. (Rationality played only a minor role.)

Actual Reason the First: I love white men. My father, brother, and most of my best buddies and mentors have been white men. I feel a brotherhood, narrow as it might seem, with white men, and in the way that family arguments can grow bitterly excessive, incidents like the Capitol storming turn me inside out. I friggin’ h–e white men. (How dare they stoop so low?) When they kill women they can’t manage, or abandon them; when they take faux-heroic stands against unsuspecting targets of their twisted resentments (a synagogue here, a Black church there); when they “revenge” themselves against innocents who happen to wander into their crosshairs (Virginia Tech, Las Vegas) or target women at a Montreal engineering school, or children at Sandy Hook elementary school – well, I’ve been known to flail about and blister the Interwebs with angry words then, too.

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GUEST Post: MP Freeman on Persons With Disabilities

Posted by :James Howden On : December 3, 2020
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Category: At First Glance

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[This is a short guest post by my friend Michael Freeman, written to help us think about one of the many designated “days” we have to raise our consciousness. Mike knows from the *inside*; he’s one of the most stubbornly capable people I know. It’ll take you 2 minutes to read this.]

 

Don’t Forget to Remember

Persons with disabilities are some of the most resilient and strong-willed people that I know. They seem

to take bumps and hiccups all in stride; something of a challenge, yet still achievable. Not

insurmountable. To some, those bumps and hiccups look all-consuming, or even life-crippling. But to a person with a disability, there is a way to manage.

There has to be.

There is no other choice.

It just needs to be found.

And find it we do.

But for some, that strength and resilience is only a façade that is held tightly, as if in a display for the public. In some strange way they believe that that strength and resilience is what the public wants to see, even needs to see so that they can go about their day and their business without giving a second thought, and for some without giving even an initial thought, as to the actual well-being of another.

Because, let’s face it, why would they?

Everything seems okay.

Everything looks okay.

What do you mean, “Things may not be as they seem?”

Out of some sense of self preservation, some insular sense of self-protection, the public gets the façade while behind the façade is not what the public would be led to believe.

The truth of the matter is that living with a disability is exhausting and isolating. It’s those little things that seem so insignificant that add up to a mountain of extra load. It’s those missed opportunities, or the avoidance of situations, that further deepens the sense of isolation. Persons with disabilities sometimes do things for all the right reasons, yet achieve all the wrong results.

Don’t forget to remember.

Check in with people, all people; persons with a disability or not. Establish, or deepen a connection on a heart-to-heart level.

Respect the façade but also look through it; let wellness be your guide. Be a part of the lives of the exhausted and isolated. Help them to remain resilient and strong.

Michael Freeman is a teacher, union leader and writer. (He is also a never-say-die fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs.) He works for the Education authority of the Six Nations of the Grand River, Canada’s largest Indigenous reserve.

20-20 Remembrance

Posted by :James Howden On : November 13, 2020
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Category: At First Glance

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Touching the past. Poppies are sacred here. (Image from TV Ontario.)

[November 11 is Remembrance Day in Canada, and it’s not so far behind me that I’ve forgotten it already. Hurray for me!  This being Covid Year and all, it was a slightly oddball experience but I cherished it all the same. Here’s a quick look-back.]     [4-minute read]
[Oh, and over THERE in the “He Said/She Said” section is a short piece setting up a related quotation from the mighty Kurt Vonnegut, on why Armistice Day is just a better name for what his countrymen call “Veterans’ Day”. It’s a companion to this piece.]

 

She dragged me outside again on the 11th. (Let’s be dramatic – Bruce Cockburn sang it this way: You tore me out of myself, alive!) It was, to be precise, about ten minutes to the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of this old year.¹ In Canada we call it Remembrance Day. Once upon a time, it was Armistice Day, honouring the moment when the guns of the Great War (when ‘great’ meant ‘ginormously large’ rather than ‘famously supercool’) stopped blasting in November of 1918. I was going to stay home, listen to CBC Radio’s Remembrance broadcast, but instead I went Outside. And, of course, my lovely Accompanist was right again.

                         ¹  Yes, ‘Oct-‘ refers to ‘8’ and ‘Dec-‘ to ‘10’ and November was the ninth month of the ancient Roman calendar. And in 2020, it is the ninth month (at least in my part  of the world) of what seems several years of Covid-19.

It doesn’t take me long to remember, Ah, right, moving. That’s a good thing. I like this body-working hypothesis. We walked, my bride and I, who tends to think that sacred acts are better done with other humans. It was only a few blocks to a little patch of green, a corner lot that developers didn’t get; it’s been preserved not only for kids to swing and play, or for elders and others to perch on a maple-leafy bench and watch the world go by for awhile (or to monitor their likes). No, the Riverside Memorial Park, though tiny, is a local monument to the neighbourhood fallen and to all the veterans from our corner of the capital.

We were around 20 souls, two city councillors and a greying crew of neighbourhoodies. It turned out that for the ceremony, we listened, around a memorial stone be-wreathed and poppified, to a Bluetooth speaker that transmitted the CBC Radio broadcast. Public radio, indeed! It felt odd and tinny at first but then suddenly was Actually Just Fine, Thank You! And I remembered these things, all in a serried line:

  • How grateful I am for a solo bugle and the Last Post. I loved hearing it live, some years, during my high school’s 11 am Remembrance Day program. It was often some old fella in an ill-fitting uniform that probably brought bemusement to some students, eye-rolls for a few, until he started blowing that horn. Chokes me up without fail, even via Bluetooth at the corner of Queen Mary and North River as the bus goes by.
  • That repeated short last line of a poetic verse that most of us – the older ones, anyway – have more or less to heart in Canada; it’s so powerful. There’s not much militarism here on November 11, but rather a widespread attitude of “never again!” and “consider what we’ve lost” and “let’s pray for peace”. I fiercely muttered, along with my handful of fellow Rememberers, the fervent echo, “We will remember them.” They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: / Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. / At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them.

(Every Remembrance Day ceremony in “America’s attic” now includes this fourth verse of seven in Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen”, written in 1914. It’s called “the act of Remembrance”, and is a reminder that there are also some fine things about the post-colonial British heritage in this here Canada. We will remember them. “Nous nous souviendrons d’eux.” And I remembered other things, too, as the prayers and tributes went on:)

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