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Holiday Tourism of the Local Kind

Posted by :James Howden On : December 28, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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I can almost imagine a year when late December finds me breaking the pattern. Maybe I’ll jet my carbon-neutral way to sun and beaches, or more likely to visit some holy place or natural wonder. Maybe I won’t go anywhere at all, just batten the hatches and gorge myself on the movies I haven’t seen, whittle down the stack of books that implore me to fondle their pages. A guy can dream.

But neither of these extremes is likely. This is the time of year when I can curl up with a good movie; at this point, it looks like that may be confined to finally having seen The Queen, which reminded me of Ray, oddly enough: an okay movie but a superb central performance, here by Helen Mirren. Good reads have come more readily, with a second reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved in a month being the recent highlight. But, inevitably, it’s never the cinematic orgy or literary bender that I imagine. And though the last ebb of December is not some spectacular foreign getaway, we do travel to two outstanding Canadian counties. Haliburton and Haldimand. Who’d want to be anywhere else?

As per usual, our pre-Christmas routine found us heading westward along winding, hilly and ever-more-obscure blacktop to visit my mother-in-law in her lakeside retreat near the town of Haliburton. The road to late December is traditionally fairly frantic, especially in my busier years of teaching and coaching like my shoes were on fire. (Thankfully, though, Christmas shopping is a pretty low-intensity imperative for us, as we put more emphasis on Baha’i holy days. If my bride hadn’t been born on the 23rd, I’d have boycotted the malls utterly and religiously.) By the time we descend on Portage Lake, where the nearest neighbours are birch trees and looming hills, things are suddenly languid. Lazy. (This is much easier for me than for HyperBride, but I’m just saying.)

A couple of days before the Day, we had the usual low-key celebration of my bride’s birthday. The princess was happy with her usual perquisites: beef fried in a fondue pot, another song-filled and weepy viewing of The Sound of Music. (Report: The Von Trapps escaped. Again. People regularly broke into song at the oddest moments.) Christmas Eve is another subdued tradition, where Mum-in-law Margery places a shrimp ring gobblefest just before The Main Event: the Portage Lake Plum Pudding Massacre. Flaming brandy. Three sauces. Think you’re ready? You’re not ready. Not even the loons will hear you groaning…

One of the subtle joys of late December is how blissfully predictable and serene it all is, especially on the Haliburton end. On Christmas morning, we eat fresh-baked scones and have the most gentle exchange of gifts among the four of us. No tree, no invocation of sacred rituals and bearded elves. (With my first three, we’d ask them if they wanted to play “the Santa game”, worried that they’d feel left out. Sam is unfazed, though, perhaps in part because about half the kids at his school and all his bus buddies are Muslims.) I predicted: socks for Margery, a low-tech toy for Sam, something warm and fuzzy and hand-knit for Diana, and a gently-broken-in book for me. (Margery has great taste in books, and never leaves crumbs or bent pages or reads it in the bathtub. But THIS time, I am shocked and awed and slightly bent to report, she had believed reports of unread books from Christmases past and broke the pattern!) And more. I got to watch one of the annual Christmas Day NBA games, a much older tradition than Haliburton, but didn’t have the father/son sitdown to absorb the hardwood genius of a genuine Canadian idol, Steve Nash. (He always makes me want to coach again.) Supper was duck rather than turkey, an abrupt and fowl departure from orthodoxy, and a visit from Margery’s basket-weaving friend. Talk and warmth and not much else. Sweet.

Then we drove to suburban Cayuga on Boxing Day aft, where the Howden clan gathers in such numbers (and with such a copious food frenzy) that Haldimand appears, next to the somnolence of Haliburton, like Union Station at rush hour. People, people, people, and so dear. But here, changes are more the order of the day. Nieces and nephews come with new romantic interests in tow. (Some even survive for a second Christmas inspection.) We have finally limited the gift exchange, so it wasn’t the interminable round of consumer delight that it once was. It was also our second Christmas without my Mum. We remembered how absurdly and endearingly and predictably overjoyed she would be at the gathering of such a large, goofy and thoroughly wonderful crew. And for the second straight Howden Christmas, not coincidentally, alchohol has returned after our Noels were decidedly dry for decades. The teetotalling curmudgeon of a Baha’i uncle don’t bloody like it. (Stoical but dramatic sigh.)

As I predicted in my holiday crystal basketball, my Sam got as much cousin-time as he could fit in. As I also predicted, I have failed to encounter quite as many old friends or profound conversations as I’d hoped. And after a couple of days to lounge, recover from big sister’s carefully organized food marathon, maybe run by a corn field or two, we’ll soon be ready for the trip back home. My wife will be frantic to get DOING things. I’ll be worrying about whether the backyard rink survived the rain, and cursing myself for not writing more. Sam will be missing his snow-fort and friends. And all will be right with the world.

37 Centimetres (But How Much is That in American?)

Posted by :James Howden On : December 19, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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CBC Radio’s local show interviewed the man in charge of keeping Ottawa’s streets clean and passable. He figured that last Sunday’s snowfall – a one-day record 37 centimetres of fluffy dumpage – was going to cost between $4 and $5 million to clean up. We should hear numbers like this more often; among other things, it’s a good reminder that five million bucks, from the collective standpoint, isn’t really a lot of money.  It costs a tremendous amount to run a city, to provide the services that we taxpayers so often take to be automatic rights. (And “free” ones, too! Because when we’re that blisslessly ignorant of what city work costs, it’s easier to whine about how much we pay in municipal taxes.)

Taxes are, for the most part, a considerable bargain. I know how much private schools for my boys would have cost. I should probably know the price of all the pipes and pumping and purification to bring us clean water, too. But to tell the truth, the connection between the ploughing of my streets and my tax bill wasn’t the main thought that snow brought, thankfully.

I walk the street, with cold crunchy snow and the odd patch of black ice, and I remember hockey on Sutherland East, kitty-corner from Edinburgh Square, between the Timsons and the Martindales. When I was a kid, the streets couldn’t have been salted and sanded like they are now, and it’s not just my childhood-days-were-better hindsight to think that the winter temperatures were generally colder. That ideal street-hockey surface – snow packed hard by the passage of maybe a day’s worth of cars – was not always present, I know; we played eight or nine months of the year, anyway, and were as unstoppable as postal carriers (which my little town was too small to have). But winters then were, well, more wintry than they are now. (And no, no global warming rants today, except maybe for this: Walter Gretzky couldn’t build that famous backyard rink in Brantford now. Not enough chillin’.) And that’s one of many reasons for enjoying Ottawa, where I now live. It may still be considered the coldest national capital in the world. It’s the real northern deal here, especially this week.

Even though I don’t do a lot of winter sports, I still love genuine, made-in-some-idealized-Canada-of-the-mind winters, and Ottawa comes through more regularly than southern Ontario does. I was sidelined from most of the shovelling post-Sunday, as my back has been painfully wonky from a high school typing class injury. (No joke, but not even that good as a story.) And I was ticked off – I LOVE shovelling snow! I’m not quite the pitching machine I once was, but it’s a fun workout. I met more neighbours, even with my limited lifting, on Sunday than I have in weeks. Pushing folks out of snowbanks, commiserating, smiles and mitten-shakes, need an extra shovel? and why not just park it in my driveway for the night? Even though basketball dominates my sporting thought in winter, I live in hockey country and get out for an outdoor whirl and some puck-bashing several times a year. There are times when I idly wish that I was a skier. I do remember, though, how my thighs burned as I snow-ploughed down Mt. Tremblant on my second downhill excursion ever, and as for our region’s superb cross-country trails? Bought the equipment (used, archaic). Took the lessons (humiliating, painful). No doubt the snow angels I live with will try to strap me on to those accursed boards again this year, and I will resist with spotty success. (Course, there’s always hope that I won’t spend so much snowbank face-time, and it is a beautiful thing to be out in the hills and trees…) I love skating on the Rideau Canal, but I don’t get on it more often than an eager tourist does. New season, clean slate, and there is the outdoor rink two streets over.

Winter’s great, even if I’m not gliding down hills. I like striding down the middle of snowbound roads when the sidewalks are stuffed. I like watching Sam climb the mountain of snow collecting in the vacant lot down the street, or furiously excavating his front-yard fortress. And one of my ongoing pleasures, ridiculously and quintessentially Canadian, is building and maintaining our tiny townhouse backyard rink. Sam is seven now, and still wanted the rink, even though two hard skating strides necessitate a hard turn, even for him. He’ll have no choice but to learn stopping and turning; he’s been on the ice several times already this year. Perfect conditions, and so much earlier than the last three seasons!

One problem. Thirty-seven centimetres is a lot of snow — in Canadian or American — especially on a fenced-in rink with already maxed-out banks. Every shovel load needs to be pitched over a six-foot barrier into the common ground behind, and I figure it ain’t kosher to fire it into the neighbours’ yards. Although Diana wielded a mighty shovel on the driveway during my lameness, she draws the line at backyard silliness. Sam isn’t strong enough. I’ve had one very careful, old-mannish, bent-kneed session of human Zamboni-ism, and I’m looking at another two slow hours. So far, my back has made only grudging complaints, but I can’t afford the screaming spasms of last week. Slowly, ol’ buddy. Easy does it.

But now my weather report calls for RAIN this weekend! Five degrees! (Nearly 40 for metric deniers in the USA.) What is this, southern Ontario? Indiana? How’s a dad supposed to Gretzky-ize his son and keep his ice hard when spring comes in December?! (And that’s among the most emotionally compelling signals of climate change for Canadians, next to struggling polar bears: the northern migration of the home-made outdoor rink.) Hey, presto! I’ve just found what every Canuck carries as standard equipment: a reason to complain about winter weather. It’s just NOT COLD ENOUGH!

I’ve already spent more time hosing my backyard to flood the rink than I did in watering the tomatoes last summer. It’s looking good, or will when I excavate a few hundred more kilos of snow. Rain, rain, go AWAY / Fall as snow so we can play…

The American Idea

Posted by :James Howden On : December 17, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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The Atlantic is a magazine with which I have a turbulent relationship, or at least an up-and-down one. I have subscribed periodically, excited by its cover stories: long, smart, profound discussions of issues that shake and shape the world. And then I get bogged down, behind, and occasionally bored by its tendency to obsess about the American political system. It’s a great magazine, but I sometimes get lost in its density and its preoccupations. And the articles are too long for reading on the commode.

I’m about to enter another period in which, subscription abandoned, I will be free to wander retroactively through issues that still have weight and relevance for me, months or even years after urgency has passed. But I probably won’t. It’s one of those promises I guiltily make in the full knowledge that I won’t follow through. There’s so much to read, and grim obligation is such a poor prod to do so.

The Atlantic’s 150th anniversary issue came out in November. (I’m already reading it!) Referring back to a promise its founders made in 1857, this issue returns to what might be called the magazine’s central focus with a cover story on “The American Idea”. The editors invited dozens of American thinkers and commentators and builders to submit a short essay on the general theme, and they are brief and bracing pieces. There are the expected paeans to American freedom, energy, innovation, and destiny. (Early report: nobody writes more blandly on these things than the politicians, although Arnold Schwarzenegger does the unheard of, actually admitting a mistaken and overly partisan approach. God help me, but the guy is interesting!) But the voices don’t sing from the same all-approving hymnbook, and it’s a great reminder that, whatever you might think of the United States and its dominant position in world affairs, its leaders of thought are bright, contrary, and pretty darned brave. Here’s a taste of a few of them.

The writer Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) uses that ever-influential American text, Huckleberry Finn, to argue that the strength of the American idea is that Americans regularly depart – “light  out for the territory,” as Huck insists he must – from the most rigidly conformist expressions of it. While there’s a lot of fear-induced group-think going on in American life, there are also many who will challenge orthodoxy and “hope to be a little less ‘sivilized’”.

As an example of this, the columnist George Will begins by questioning the very concept of the American idea, arguing that the country gets in trouble whenever it thinks of itself as having one central concept, and therefore one predominant purpose. Because, he says, the lightly sleeping “missionary impulse” that is never far from American consciousness can take over; the current mania for bringing American-style democracy to the benighted world comes to mind. So listen to this: Will calls the greatest challenge to America “the false idea that American patriotism is inextricably bound up with the notion that being a normal nation is somehow beneath America’s dignity”. (Read that sentence again!)

Another broadside against the perverse elements of the belief in American “exceptionalism” comes from the wildly prolific novelist and commentator Joyce Carol Oates. “How heartily sick the world has grown,” she begins her mini-essay, “of the American idea!” It has become “a cruel joke, a blustery and bellicose body-builder luridly bulked up on steroids…” (Wonder what she thinks of The Arnold?) She questions the overweening pride implicit in the whole notion of an American idea: “Our unexamined belief in American exceptionalism…makes our imperialism altruistic, our plundering of the world’s resources a healthy exercise of capitalism…[and makes it seem that our] political goals are always idealistic, while the goals of other nations are transparently opportunistic”. And she heaps scorn on the resolute and wilful ignorance of the motto, “my country, right or wrong”. Oh, and full disclosure: I may have been also swayed by her persuasive statement of the “higher degree of civilization embodied by Canada”. Wouldn’t you be?

There are many notable submissions. Bernard Lewis, a scholar and British World War II vet, observes that Americans are “unteachable”, insisting on doing things their own stubborn and sometimes ignorant way, but that they are also quick to recognize and remedy their errors. The wonderful David Foster Wallace makes a plea for modern society’s least-invoked virtue – sacrifice – arguing in effect that Americans by quiet consensus feel that 40,000 annual traffic deaths is an acceptable price to pay for the freedom of driving; therefore, why should a markedly lower toll of “terror” deaths lead to such mad curtailment of liberties as we continue to see? (Much of his mini-essay is in the form of questions, yet its own stand is clear.) Historian and poet Robert Conquest speaks of the “lethal certainties” – the worst of Marxism, or Naziism, or jihadism – that have faced Americans, and their own need to retain “a sense of proportion” and avoid the pitfalls of being cocksure. Columnist Arianna Huffington harks back to the Declaration of Independence and its famous credo of “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”, suggesting that the Founders didn’t have in mind “the blessed-out buzz induced by drugs or shopping sprees”, but rather “the happiness that comes from feeling good by doing good.” Talk of sacrifice AND service?? What decade are we in? Nice to hear. So much else, too, that is good and thought-provoking. Or irritating.

Two back-to-back submissions startle by their utterly opposite views of U.S. problems. Sam Harris, fervent anti-religionist and author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, bemoans Christian extremism and its “pious phantasmagoria” of distracting concerns: school prayer, gay marriage, etc. He longs for the boost to reason that America could give to the world if it wasn’t so hobbled by an ignorant Christian majority. Meanwhile, the essay immediately following, by the Christian pastor Tim LaHaye (he of the Left Behind series of novels about Rapture and “end times”, where the faithful do mighty tricks and the faithless burn), laments the godlessness of American life and the secret machinations of the “scientific humanists” who have undermined the “country more blessed by God than any other nation in history”. Shudder. Sam Harris blusters and exaggerates, but I must say that the writing of LaHaye – no doubt more circumspect and gentle than usual given the audience he’s writing to here – makes me wish for a sickening instant that I wasn’t a person of faith. (Perverting Groucho Marx for my own purposes, I’m inclined to ask, “Why would I want to belong to a club that would have him as a member?”)

But I am. (And I don’t ask.) While the American Bahá’í community has been regularly warned about the materialistic excesses, the substandard morals and the racist poisons infecting their country, the United States is also regarded as having achieved an exemplary level of civic cohesion. The States, in other words, through trial and many errors, have actually been  something of a beacon to the world by remaining united. It is ironic that the government of these United States has, in recent years especially, been so dismissive and even distrustful of the United Nations and its work to extend such civic harmony to the world level.

I recommend the November issue of The Atlantic, still likely available on newsstands, for anyone wishing to better understand this powerful and complex nation. Particularly if you tend toward reflexive anti-Americanism, you will find much to convince you that Americans do not speak with one under-educated voice. To brand those damned Americans for whatever hubris, intrusion or exceptionalism most irritate you is akin to absurd comments like typical male or just like a woman or [insert ethnic or religious minority here] are all alike. It just ain’t so. There’s a lot of brilliant, contrary and incisive commentary here. The essays, though a few are longer, are mainly about 300 words long. (A quarter the size of the woolly beast you just fleeced.) Together, they make for an interesting tapestry of American thought, a sort of U.S. Studies 101 if you’re inclined to education.

Death of a Centaur: An Essay on Updike

Posted by :James Howden On : December 11, 2007
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Category: On Second Thought

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A classic tension in life and fiction lies between the poles of unfettered individualism and the imperatives of the wider society. North America, and the United States in particular, became in the 20th century the home ground for an ethos that favoured individualism – especially the rugged, masculine kind – as the supreme value. Even religious inclinations were understood primarily in the context of personal benefit. The life, liberty and pursuit of happiness so central to the American project were interpreted increasingly as individual quests, rather than collective ones.

The ideal of the Self-Made Man, grown iconic in the stories of Horatio Alger and the reputedly solo exploits of Lindbergh, Elvis, even Einstein, becomes a problem in the relationship of a father and son. How can a man lift himself by his own bootstraps and still follow in his father’s footsteps? The failure, even the refusual, to recognize the debt owed to paternity is one of the less-known consequences of individualism, especially for males in American culture. The men’s movement that found its strongest – if occasionally cringe-making – expression in works like Bly’s Iron John is based upon one fundamental perception: that fatherly guidance is shockingly minimal in the experience of modern men, that for many there is a smoking hole where a father should be.

Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories from the early 20th century flirt with this theme. The father figure is either remote, implied, someone to be respected in his absence by recalling his views about drinking or literature, or he is suddenly and overwhelmingly present, exposing Nick to struggle and death in a way for which he is utterly unprepared. In Kurt Vonnegut, we see a retrospective longing to understand his distant, disappointed Dad. (Accounting for Kurt the younger’s long retention of the “Junior” in his pen name.) Recently, the most remarkable feature of the apocalypse imagined by Cormac McCarthy in The Road is a fiercely protective and starkly intimate relationship between an anonymous father and his nameless son. We wonder if only such a world-devouring flame could make such interdependence and devotion possible.

***

Given this framework, consider George and Peter Caldwell, the father and son central to John Updike’s 1963 novel The Centaur.

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How to Know You’re a Nerd

Posted by :James Howden On : December 11, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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One sure indication of this FINE and immensely under-valued condition — Nerditude — will be your interest in turning to the On Second Thought section of the site. There, Your Nerdiness may find, for all your insomniac needs, an essay that I just completed for an undergrad English course in 20th-century American fiction. Hemingway. Anderson. Faulkner. Pynchon. Nabokov. Erdrich. Morrison. And among these greats was John Updike, of whose many novels I had somehow managed to read precisely none before this enforced novelizing. I read The Centaur, one of his least-known novels. Twice. And then I wrote about its depiction of a father and son.

Requiem for a Coach

Posted by :James Howden On : December 11, 2007
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Category: At First Glance

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My first thought was brilliant — they always seem to be — where else could the wake for Coach Wright be but in the tiny, tiled box of a gym where he spent so many thousands of hours with his “kids”, this never-married father of none? The Caledonia Sweatbox, the dim, cramped but comfortable Blue Devils’ lair, where half-court shots were no longer than an NBA three-pointer, where big-footed forwards needed to turn sideways to get their Chuck Taylor high-cuts completely out of bounds…

But what if there are only twenty people there? That gave me pause; even in that bandbox of a gym, twenty voices would make for some unfairly desolate echoes. As it happens, my grand thought was punctured, and for the best. As it is with too many aspects of sporting and educational life these days, the bureaucratic and custodial hoops we’d have had to jump through were too many, so we didn’t celebrate Don Wright’s life of ball-bouncing generosity in the centre court circle of The Gym, as madly poetic as that might have been.

We did better. The community hall we got was perfect. (Its hardwood floor was a far better surface than we ever played on in the old town high school.) What do you need, really, when it’s time to pay tribute to the life of a man – once painfully shy and young and slender, but by his last days grey and limping and carrying too much goddam weight – who gave to our youthfulness and to our kids whatever he had? Nothing but the people, as it turned out, and they were there. We were referees, athletes’ parents, fellow coaches, former players and friends. (I was all of these things. A five-time winner.)

Dave B was there. He had been to Don something I never was: a young coach who got to discover, years later in repeatedly teasing conversations, that he had cut the man we were honouring when Don was an earnest and under-skilled twelve-year-old. Dave and his wife Georgia had made sure, for the last several years, that Coach Donny had a place to go for Christmas dinner. (They also did most of the coffee-making, cookie-dealing and cleanup for the memorial. The Basketball Family lives.) Dave, the nearly legendary “Bart” of the Hamilton hoops community, had been with Don one of “the usual suspects” when it came to college and high school basketball games, especially for girls’ and women’s teams. His eulogy at the service had some good laughs, but it was serious business. It even allowed a glimpse of anger, for Bart wanted it known that his friend, our friend, was more than might’ve met the eye. Bart had seen and heard too much of those who dismissed the Coach as either a has-been or “some old guy, whatever”. He made earnest and teary amends.

Most of those who spoke after Bart were former players, though there were some old friends and fellow coaches that he’d never blown a whistle at. (Come to think of it, he rarely blew one at any of us. He had no interest in the whistle. He wanted his voice to be enough. It was.) The sharing was utterly informal, as Don had insisted and would have liked, but at least one former Ontario West university All-Star, an experienced teacher, had written her remarks in order to have some anchor, some way to not “lose it”. Mind you, she’d already lost it twice before her turn came, and duly lost it again, but my goodness, weren’t these the best kind of “losses”: of composure, of emotional restraint, of the kind of busy life-living that sometimes leads us to forget to say “thanks” to those who built us? Cindy and I weren’t the only ones to lose it more than once, and we gained so much by really feeling what we felt.

There were about 100 of us. It was a grand reunion, including the core of my own high school team from three decades gone. Present, too, were about ten young women, high schoolers who looked a little bewildered and felt, for a while, out of place. They were members of the last teams that my old buddy Don, sore and often discouraged, gave his last weary hours of coaching to. They honoured “Mr. Wright” by their presence, and they went away knowing more of the man than they had, and wishing perhaps that they had found a way to give something back to him. We all did.

So long, Coach. Thanks for all the sweat, the hope, the ideals. Keep caring for us as we do for you. Fare well, brother.

[I also wrote an “In Memoriam” for Donald Edward, and it’s in the “On Second Thought” section. It gives a more clear picture of the man and what he did.]