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Close to Home: What’s Up on Whitton?

Posted by :James Howden On : September 24, 2019
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Category: At First Glance

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[5-minute read]

They must be wind-protected. (Photo from National Candle Association, literally not metaphorically.)

It was a relief when the police tape came down, but it hasn’t felt the same, not yet. Maybe it’s just imagination, but Whitton Crescent seems a lot less lively now. Shocking violence can do that to a neighbourhood, and it’s not only the besieged and grieving family that will never fully recover from that terrible morning in early September. The perpetrators — just kids, really — and their families are also ruined in their own particular ways. It was another sad day in, and for, Overbrook, my little piece of Ottawa, where a curvy little street is named for Charlotte Whitton, first female mayor of a Canadian city.

It’s a question that came up in my living room on the weekend: Aren’t you afraid to live here? The answer, sadness aside, is a simple No. We chose this area when we moved to Ottawa. We love it. My family lives two blocks from the murder scene, and from the shooting the week before, which we learned to our dismay injured a lovely woman we know well. We’re a two-minute bike ride from the shooting at the “four corners”, where the convenience store and the pizza restaurant have seen too much of this kind of criminal traffic. Though we don’t fear for our own safety — without a doubt my daily commute across town to my high school coaching gig is more dangerous than where my house sits — it’s unsettling. As for everyone in Overbrook, but especially those on Whitton or near the four corners, these events feel far too close to home. So what are we to do? My wife and son and I are privileged folk in many ways, including our relatively easy option to move out, but that has never crossed our minds.  Nor have we considered extra home security, spending less time walking or biking the streets, or (God forbid!) getting suspicious or cold towards our neighbours.

Just the opposite, actually. If darkness has sometimes fallen on my part of town, the thing is to get to work and create more light. “Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,” as the ancient proverb says. When violence strikes at the heart of community, if the threat of it erodes our hopefulness and our trust in each other, then we have TRULY lost. The better course? Build more community. We started by asking what we might be able to do for the victims’ families? We’re trying to go beyond that: what are we already doing that involves us with Overbrook folk or local development? How do we do more of that? We wonder, What’s missing in this area? and then look to take some small action to begin to fill in that gap. Doing something helps us, first, and let’s hope it ripples outward, but mindset is critical.

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Boys in My ‘Hood: “Talkin’ ‘Bout TRAINING?”

Posted by :James Howden On : September 18, 2019
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Category: All About Sports

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They’re bigger now, one a freshman starter at McGill, one doing a prep year with D1 aspirations. Good men.

[5-minute read]

I live in an Ottawa neighbourhood called Overbrook, having moved here from southern Ontario in ’02. (I don’t think we chose it because the great Wilt Chamberlain and other NBA players went to Philadelphia’s Overbrook High, but I can’t swear that had nothing to do with it. ) I’ve been a nutbar basketball coach since well before my athletic prime waned, a lover and teacher of “the city game” decades before I flew the coop on my little hometown. I’ve blown whistles in gyms all over Ottawa, from house leagues to its top-shelf club team to three area high schools. Still, though, I like wandering by the Overbrook Community Centre’s outdoor courts – among the best outdoor venues in the city, at least potentially. And there I was, minding my own business and in broad daylight, when suddenly I was swarmed by a group of youth, must’ve been a dozen of ‘em, and they obviously wanted something from me.

Headfake! It’s not what you might have thought. These were shy middle-schoolers, who had asked an older brother (I’ll call him “Izzy”), “Hey, who is that guy you were talking to?” Izzy and his older brother know me as an ol’ ball coach. We had shot the breeze a bit, and then I left him and his younger brother and the rest of the crew that he was coaching and encouraging in a pickup game. I was sporting a ball, gimpy ankles and a spare tire ‘round my middle. I haven’t really played much since we got back from China five years ago (hence the added girth; I actually got back into half-decent has-been shape on the outdoor courts of Dalian). I just wanted to get a few shots up on the one other basket with a net on it, and think about my neighbourhood.

Before long, with Izzy leading the way, the whole group came across the asphalt courts towards me. Izzy, ever polite, did most of the talking.

“These guys want you to train them. I told them you’re a coach.”

“Train?” I answered. “Are you sure?” I told them that a lot of boys think they want to train, but really they just want to play ball because they like it – and there’s nothing wrong with that! But here’s the thing. Kids have heard their NBA heroes talk about training. It *sounds* so cool, but in fact it takes sweat and patience and perseverance and attention. Were they really sure? Listen, I’ve had a lot of guys tell me they wanted to train, or that they were really grinding, but it either didn’t last or it was fake in the first place. And then I stopped with the cautions. What was the point in being Dickie Downer?

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Paradise Is Always a Garden: The Baha’i Thing, From Then to Nearly Now

Posted by :James Howden On : May 1, 2019
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Category: On Second Thought

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After finishing this piece, I learned of the passing of a great pillar of the Canadian Baha’i community, not to mention an internationally renowned painter. His name was Otto Donald Rogers, “Don” to most who knew him. He was a quietly magnificent human being, and I’d like to retroactively offer this as a small tribute to a great man. Peace to his family and friends.  
[12-minute read]
A rather different (shorter) version of this piece appears at the Baha’i Teachings website: click here for Part 1, here for Part 2. 

Maybe you’ve been obsessing about the NHL or NBA playoffs. (No Canadian teams left in the quest for the hockey grail. No LeBron, no more Spurs.) Or wondering if spring will ever come. (Spoiler: it will. It’s underway. Just ask flood victims all over everywhere, but don’t mention climate change. That would be rude!) But for the Baha’is, it’s coming near the end of the “Most Great Festival” of the Baha’i calendar, and I’m all in.

This is not the original Najibiyyih Garden that Baha’u’llah called Paradise, but it evokes the same spirit.

This festival is called “Ridván”, an Arabic word meaning “paradise”, and the best my Canadian mouth can manage is something like ‘Rez-VAHN’. It’s a 12-day period that celebrates the public “mission statement” of the Faith’s founder, Bahá’u’lláh, in a Baghdad garden in 1863. This Persian nobleman, already stripped of wealth and social status and banished from his homeland, was turning a supposedly humiliating further exile into, well, a mighty big party now celebrated by millions around the globe. It’s Day 11. Two nights ago I prayed and partied with a small group not far from my house. I’ll do it again tomorrow night on Day 12, but on April 21, I joined in with a big crowd of Baha’is and their friends for the Big Ridvan Opening, where we were invited to consider how the Baha’i community got from 1863 Baghdad obscurity to the world-wide reach it has today. I’ve been trying to follow Baha’u’llah’s mighty System of knowledge and practice for a long time now. Sometimes it feels I haven’t gotten very far, but I’m still walking, and the Baha’i Big Picture is bright and ever-developing.

Anyway, it all got me thinking about histories: my own, that of the Baha’i community over the past century and a half, and even of earlier crossings into New Millennium territory.

And I thought: I would have made a very poor 1st– or 2nd-century Christian. I would’ve wanted the Kingdom to come NOW! But the growth of Christianity was slow, and the times were confusing. Heck, Pope Gregory wouldn’t be born for centuries, so the Gregorian calendar that dates our lives based on Jesus’s life hadn’t been invented; 100 years after Christ, the word “Christian” was just beginning to distinguish this tiny community from the many other Jewish cults and sects that had arisen. Even 300 years after the life of Jesus Christ, His followers were found only in tiny pockets in what we call the “Middle East”¹, Turkey, northern Africa and southern Europe, basically within a few donkey-days journey of the Mediterranean Sea. They were just beginning to organize their scriptures and get their doctrines and dogmas together, 325 years after Christ’s life, and the Christians wouldn’t become a major population even in the Mediterranean region until the 6th century. Today, it’s the most widespread religion in the world, of course, and we all take its supernatural degree of influence and prestige for granted. But I would have been so impatient as an early Christian!

¹ Ever noticed how Eurocentric that term is? As if everyplace should be measured from London or Paris (which, for many centuries, it was.)

So listen: when I joined the Baha’i community as a 1970s teenager, I began to wonder, Why are other faith groups, often younger than we are, seeming to grow so much faster than we are? I was noticing the Hare Krishna chants on Toronto streets, or the sudden North American splash, in news media and in recruitment, of the Unification Church, the so-called “Moonies”. I wasn’t tempted to join them, or even emulate their methods, but their bursts of public prominence bugged me.  A wise Baha’i elder answered our youthful questions in his deep, heavily accented but utterly logical way. (If you want to channel the voice of Dr. Danesh, imagine American diplomat Henry Kissinger, but with a Persian rather than a German accent, and with a devotion to the psychology of peace and justice rather than to strategies of conflict.) He calmly explained it this way: Think about what we are trying to grow. If you look at two plants in their first season of growth – one of them a pumpkin, one of them an oak tree – your conclusion might be easy. The pumpkin is obviously more impressive, vines and bright flowers and, within months, gigantic orange fruits! Meanwhile, the oak looks like a tender, fruitless twig. The community of Baha’u’llah is growing like an oak tree; as impressive as pumpkins seem to be, at the end of a year you have a few pumpkin pies and maybe a rotting jack-o-lantern, and that’s it.

That made sense to me then. (The reference to pie and jack-o-lanterns is probably mine, but you get the point.) There must have been a host of movements, 1900 years ago, that would have soundly defeated the Christians on a “Most Likely To Succeed” ballot. But the followers of Jesus, in the above analogy, were a slow-growing but eventually mighty oak tree, not a flash-in-the-pumpkin-pie-pan. I still have a lot to learn about patience, but the evolution of the Baha’i community, from its quietly intimate beginnings in the rose-coloured Garden of Ridvan to what I see now, is enough – barely – to keep me hopeful and sane. It’s over 150 years since Baha’u’llah announced his mission in Baghdad, which isn’t as long ago as our present-focussed obsessions and shortening attention spans can make it seem. His writings confidently predicted the growth of world-wide attention to his teachings and of the community that would arise in his name:

It is incumbent upon all the peoples of the world to reconcile their differences, and, with perfect unity and peace, abide beneath the shadow of the Tree of His care and loving-kindness….Soon will the present-day order be rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead.

The original “Ridvan” garden, on the shores of the Tigris River in Baghdad. There were roses, roses and nightingales, and joy.

Ridvan now feels like a mighty Declaration, but back then even an attentive neutral observer might have missed the planting of that seed. Baha’u’llah confirmed publicly, to only a few people, what many of his family and friends had quietly known: that he was the one who would lead us to the long-promised day of peace and justice. He thus transformed his upcoming banishment into his modern community’s greatest festival. So how did we get HERE from back THERE? The Baha’is then were few in number, decimated by persecution, and frankly their fellowship seemed like a rather hopeless little twig. I seized on five pivotal years in the steady, seemingly unspectacular growth of the Baha’i community into the beautiful young tree it is today. Here is annual snapshot number one:

 

1892. My father’s parents were young, and would soon meet each other. It’s a little over 125 years since then, the year when Baha’u’llah passed away, leaving his son and family and a still-tiny band of followers to carry on the astounding, world-changing mission he had described and put into motion. Baha’u’llah (an Arabic term, meaning “splendour/light of God”) was not much more widely known than Jesus Christ (“the anointed one”) had been on the cross. His son, ‘Abdu’l-Baha, still a prisoner of the Turkish empire, was left to encourage and inspire a few thousand believers, in a few Middle Eastern countries, to live as his father had prescribed, and to tell the world of Baha’u’llah’s message of world peace, world unity, and the essential oneness of humanity. Good luck with that, folks! But listen: they began.

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Reading With Phyllis in Ottawa

Posted by :James Howden On : April 28, 2019
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Category: At First Glance

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[8-minute read]

The more we read, the bigger the “To Read” pile grows. It’s mysterilicious.

We’ve missed her, but we carry on. This past March, her friends marked a first anniversary, grieved with her husband and family and, oh yes, be very sure of this, a sweet ripe bunch of them felt grateful for her life as they read and reflected on another fine book they’d likely never have heard of without her. And then they did it again in April.

I write here in remembrance of Phyllis Perrakis, a woman I knew only a little, though I felt lucky all the same. It is also a brief history of a book club, full of women, of course, plus one token oddball. (That would be Yours Truly.) I will also offer notes on the BIHE, an educational institution based on courage, justice and belief, but these seeming sidetracks all lead us back to Phyllis, a quiet, unassuming professor of literature. You would not have found her Very Professorial, if that adjective strikes notes for you of bombast or intellectual arrogance, but she surely glowed when she was sharing thoughts about a book she loved. BOOKS. Only now, far too late to learn more from her, do I find out that she was an internationally recognized scholar on the work of the Nobel Prize-winner for literature, Doris Lessing. But to better understand how we came to be Reading With Phyllis In Ottawa, first we need a side trip to Iran…

Once upon an early 21st century time, there was a book. It was written by Azar Nafisi, an Iranian professor of literature who had fallen exquisitely in love with American writers: Twain, Baldwin, McCullers, and the Russian-born Nabokov. It may not surprise you that Nafisi’s prospects for professional advancement in her homeland, after its Islamic Revolution, were bleak, and she has since moved to the United States. But before she did that, she found a clandestine way to share her literary enthusiasms with young women, the ones that she could never engage with publicly in studying “decadent” Western texts. Her book Reading Lolita in Tehran spoke of tense arrivals, a relieved doffing of the hijab upon entry into Nafisi’s home, but above all the rich delights of forbidden conversations among trusted friends about officially banned books, Lolita among them. Nafisi’s account was brilliant and popular and I highly recommend it, but that’s just the beginning.

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Rebuttal: Face Painters, Spectators and Couch Potaters. (*Should* We All Be Witnesses?)

Posted by :James Howden On : March 15, 2019
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Category: All About Sports

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[4-minute read]

Two days ago, I wrote praising the ongoing excellence of a little-known sporting dynasty in Ottawa, Canada, my city. (They are called the Carleton Ravens. They have achieved an astoundingly effective process, and their results are unprecedented.) I also lamented how little Ottawa appeared to care about their less-than-mobbed return from the U SPORTS national championship in Halifax earlier this week. I’ve been thinking. I write in modest (and partial) rebuttal of Wednesday’s post.¹

¹ The great writer on education and culture, Neil Postman, wrote a book early in his career called Teaching as a Subversive Activity. A few years later, he replied to himself with Teaching as a Conserving Activity. He once wrote that even his book-length arguments could end, “On the other hand…”

Where the hell *is* everybody? I’ve asked at Ravens home games, at national championship finals, and last Monday, as I watched video of the Carleton crew descending an escalator in the Ottawa airport. I don’t mind being in the minority; heck, I have several areas of my life where I’m enthusiastic about things that aren’t exactly trending. (German films. Canadian literature. The St. Paul High Golden Bears. The Book of Certitude. I could go on.) Still, it wrankles, how little respect is given to the furious brilliance shining from a modest gymnasium in south Ottawa. But then, hold on a minute: why *should* we measure the worth of something by how many eyeballs are on it?

Why *should* we reflexively insist that if something is good, the rest of us should all WATCH? My old mentor/buddy Don loved to say, “I could watch somebody do anything, as long as they were the best in the world!” This is still an interesting idea to me, though it was not true in practice; the range of things he paid his quiet, careful attention to didn’t stray too far from baseball, Garth Brooks and basketball. But the point – really the foundation of the whole professional sports enterprise – is that when somebody is superb at what they do, the rest of us should siddown and *watch*. Well, at least if it’s a sport; not much of an audience for watching a brilliant mathematician at a blackboard, or an outstanding chemist in her lab.

Maybe this is not ideal, as fine a player as LBJ has been.

More possibly over-serious questions: Why *should* we “all be witnesses”, as the sky-high Nike billboards for LeBron James would have us do? Wouldn’t it be better to *emulate* excellence, to be inspired by it to DO OUR THING in the same spirit? This may come closer to the way that Dave Smart, the Carleton U coach, thinks about it. I doubt he fires pep talks at Carleton students, trying to get them and their cowbells and their painted faces out for Friday and Saturday night home games. He pays little attention to the crowd experience, and other than picking up one of his two young boys as soon as the game is over, doesn’t acknowledge the fans. I am convinced he would detest the grind of handshaking, radio shows and alumni-flattering that is essential at big-time American colleges. At Carleton, he coaches. Simple. But part of  Smart’s coaching has always been youth development. If you stumble into the Ravens Nest on a Sunday morning, you might see him helping out with a practice for 5-8 year-olds, his little guys among them. His legendary Guardsmen youth development team has morphed into the Ottawa Elite, a series of seriously coached age-level teams inspired more or less by his basic ideals: play against the best, defend, develop skills and next-level teamwork, and learn to how to work and compete. His Ravens regularly work with them, and these teams are far more important to Smart than how full the stands are for his games

So why should I care? Why am I writing laments, as I did Wednesday, for how few people are at games or going all rah-rah at the airport when they get back from Doing The Job They Went To Halifax To Do? Or as my effervescent kitchen-mate said this morning, eyes dancing with visions of trails and trees and the perfect match of wax and snow: “Why watch basketball when you could be out skiing?” (Ah, so that’s what it was: everybody was cross-country skiing or doing yoga or otherwise self-actualizing when the Ravens arrived at the Ottawa airport. EXCELLENT!) Do we really need more spectator-sports-obsessed, doughy-middled couch spuds getting virtual joy from watching while the select few get to Actually Do Stuff? Probably not. Still, it would be nice if folks paid more attention to greatness they could see and appreciate right up close – hey, and maybe use that as inspiration to help kids know something of that thrill of getting-better.

But on a day like today, to paraphrase late-life Leonard Cohen, I want it darker, so forgive me if I darken things up a little. We’ve all heard the grim news from New Zealand, which makes my knickers-twisting complaints about attendance at the local basketball barn seem a little silly today. In the wake of ANOTHER of those dreadful reports, this time of mosques targeted in Christchurch, where a “man” crucially starved of education and morality live-streamed his hateful assault on worshipping Muslims, yes, maybe this is a good day to say it. Don’t watch. DON’T be a spectator.

Don’t watch his twisted, narcissistic video, certainly. But maybe I can challenge my own thesis from Wednesday, and go so far as to say: Don’t watch anybody. Don’t be a spectator as life parades on by. Do good. Build a little something instead.

Ignoring Excellence: Sport At Its Best, Barely Noticed

Posted by :James Howden On : March 13, 2019
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Category: All About Sports

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[8-minute read]

They were coming down the escalator, the whole team and its coaches and support staff, and there must have been a few dozen friends and family members along for the ride, too. I was virtually there thanks to the randomness of the Twitterverse, watching video shot by somebody at the Ottawa airport (#YOW!) as the Carleton Ravens men’s basketball team returned home, victorious again, from the Canadian university championships. I kept waiting for the punchline, the birthday shout of “SURPRISE!!” Confetti, maybe? A brass band? Something.

Ravens at the Ottawa Airport. That’s Marcus with his back turned, Big Eddie left of the banner with a suitcase, gritty Mitch on the other side. (photo by YOW staff)

I was waiting for the welcome, but I wasn’t actually expecting one. I’ve seen this show before. I retweeted the video, added a snide comment – they must have edited out the adoring fans and their roars of appreciation! – but it would have been surprising (and delightful) if there had been a crowd there. After so many championships, such unremitting quality, most Ravens home games are nowhere near sold-out, even though it’s a modest size and every seat is close to the action. Those lunatic student sections we see on American TV? At most Ravens home games, there are fewer students in the crowd than there are cheerleaders. Large swathes of Ottawa residents get right giddy if the local pro hockey millionaires so much as sniff the playoffs; the Senators are routinely mediocre and often appear to be poorly run. But the Ravens? Ottawa is just not that into them.

This is surely a place I go and a thing I write to feel special, in a why doesn’t anybody else GET how GOOD this is? sort of way. I’m not completely alone. There are plenty of others who understand how astounding are the accomplishments of this under-appreciated athletic powerhouse. Even cable giant Sportsnet’s Tim Micallef – once a year, mind you – brings real enthusiasm and knowledge to his praise of U SPORTS¹ basketball in general, and the mighty Ravens in particular. The final games in the tournament had high production values to go along with the fine play. What’s more, back in 2014, the American sportswriter Jordan Ritter Conn obviously *got* it; Conn wrote a comprehensive feature for the lamented Grantland site, subtitled “If a team wins nine out of 11 national championships in Canada, does it make any noise? Meet the Carleton University Ravens.”

¹ U SPORTS is the third different moniker for the national university sports body. When I tried out for varsity basketball (cut at *two* different schools, beat that!), it was the Canadian Interuniversity Athletic Union. The CIAU gave way to CIS (Canadian Interuniversity Sports), but that acronym wasn’t bilingual, either, so U SPORTS is now the brand. I still stumble over what to even call this association I pay so much attention to.

At the time, the Ravens under coach Dave Smart were on the verge of matching one of those “unbeatable” sporting legacies: the immortal John Wooden and his string of ten national championships in twelve years at UCLA. They’ve left that hallowed mark far behind now. Last Sunday’s 34-point blitz of the Calgary Dinosaurs in the U SPORTS national final in Halifax marked a FOURTEENTH TITLE IN SEVENTEEN YEARS. The Ravens are always at Nationals, where only the top 8 teams in Canada qualify. In the three years where, major upset alert, Carleton did NOT win the title, they were edged out by good teams playing superb games. But get this: in those 17 years, when the Ravens get to the championship game, they are 14-0. Fourteen times they’ve reached the highest rung along with one other team, and never lost. This can’t be true, but it is.

No, THIS way! Coach Smart. (Getty Images)

More preposterous? The 34-point smackdown of the Dinos this year doesn’t actually stand out that much. The Dave Smart Domination of the Canadian university basketball scene started in 2003, but of the first six championship games, five were decided by six points or fewer. Nearly all Carleton’s players were from Eastern Ontario, many of them developed as kids by Smart himself in his club teams. (Fun fact: four of his nephews played, starred, during his first decade as a coach. “He’ll run out of nephews eventually,” the cynics said. He did, but that didn’t matter.) They did not have overwhelming talent. Since then, though, as the Ravens began to attract players from across Canada, there have been some shocking feats of season-ending domination. 20-point wins in ’11 and ’12 were followed by a 50-point shellacking of Lakehead in 2013 and 2015’s crushing of UOttawa, again more than doubling the score on their crosstown rivals. A 22-point victory over Calgary the following year foreshadowed last Sunday’s extinction of the Dinos.

How does this happen?

He wouldn’t like this answer, but it’s obvious: it’s all Smart. (He credits players who buy in, sustain the expectations from year to year, and allow him to coach them feverishly.) For his career, he’s won well over NINETY PERCENT of league and playoff games. He is a basketball savant, and sees the game with a detail and precision that yours truly (a pretty confident hoops coach) can barely conceive of. He has incredible energy and focus, relentlessly challenging his players to be perfect and then to be better. (I don’t know how he sleeps. Maybe he doesn’t, at least at Nationals.) He is a master motivator. He was an effective recruiter who promised nothing but year-round effort and a coach’s chronic dissatisfaction – well, that plus improvement, success and brotherhood – until his reputation as a teacher of the game and his litany of WINNING did a lot of his recruiting for him. He is notably hard to play for. (I’ll never forget him berating fifth-year star Phil Scrubb for an error with under 2 minutes left, up by, oh, *48* or so, in the 2015 UOttawa massacre. He relentlessly chases perfection. I also remember Scrubb looking right at him, nodding understanding, as his players uniformly do. They all accept, even welcome, his urgent, desperate entreaties to do it right.) His teams practise with a furious intensity that somehow never ends in fisticuffs, and endure an internal level of competition that: A) makes game pressure pretty familiar, and B) somehow produces not antagonism but an amazing level of team cohesion, mutual respect and collective accountability. The Ravens rank with the greatest examples of TEAM play, the strongest rebuttal to the me first mentality, that I’ve ever seen or even heard of. They are the ultimate in unselfishness.

Which brings me to Marcus Anderson.

Anderson is a defensive menace. He’s in his fourth year with Smart, an internationally respected defensive guru. (Ever heard the trope “Defence Wins Championships”? The Ravens have. And they do.) Marcus doesn’t score much, though he can get hot from three-point distance, but he has been guarding the Ravens’ best offensive opponent for three seasons now. For the last two, he’s been selected as U SPORTS Defensive Player of the Year. Naturally, last Sunday, he drew the assignment of guarding Calgary’s do-everything star, Mambi Diawara. (What a great name!) He lured Diawara into an early offensive charge, but also got caught for two 1st-quarter fouls himself, and headed for the bench. His main replacement, a talented transfer named Isaiah Osborne, was clicking offensively and did a more-than-adequate job on Diawara. The team was humming, and unless I’m mistaken, Anderson never got back in the game. He played only six minutes, far below his usual contribution. And yet: there he was, standing at the bench, hollering instruction and encouragement to his mates on the floor. There he wasn’t, pouting or feeling sorry for himself over not contributing more in the Big Game. In the post-game huddle, after the bouncing and yelling and water-pouring exuberance of the Ravens’ celebration, there was Marcus, addressing the team. I don’t know what he said, but I know what his face communicated: I love you guys, we did it, all of us, and every bit of trial and sweat we’ve gone through is worth the world to me. Let’s keep going!

How long can this sort of unprecedented athletic dominance continue? Can the Ravens keep this up?

Short answer: YES. Marcus is back. So are tournament all-stars Munis Tutu and first-team All-Canadian Eddie Ekiyor. So are Yasiin Joseph and TJ Lall, the other starters. The Ravens lose the Mighty Mitches, hard-grinding forwards Wood and Jackson, and role-playing guard Troy Reid-Knight.

(A quick word on Mitch Wood. His whole season was a little like Marcus Anderson’s game. A far-undersized power forward at 6’4”, Wood is one of the toughest men you’ll ever see on a basketball court, and had been a sometime-starter in his previous four years. But with the ascent of Ekiyor as a dominant inside player, and with Smart having gone to a more guard-oriented lineup because of the logjam of talent there, Wood’s role was reduced this year, at least when it came to playing time. Didn’t matter: he was never anything other than a high-effort lynchpin for this team, and a quietly rugged role model. I loved a stretch during the second half of his last university game, when if the Calgary men had any glimpses of hope, Wood snuffed them out with a series of hustle plays in which he nabbed at least four of his game-high 5 offensive rebounds. These are relentless-effort, unyielding-determination plays that sap an opponent’s will, and which had Wood’s teammates standing and roaring their appreciation. They were thrilled by his career-ending contributions, the essence of what makes for a brilliant team culture. These Ravens have that by the truckload.)

Everybody but Troy and the Mitches is back. There is star power in the freshman and sophomore classes that most haven’t really seen yet, since it’s very tough to defend and rebound with the precision and fury that Smart demands.² There were five talented young men who sat out every game this season as redshirts, learning to practise like a Raven does, and aiming to score a game uniform next year. (One of them was on Canada’s U-18 team last summer, for crying out loud.) It’s awful news for the rest of the men’s basketball programs in Canada, and for the NCAA teams that come north to get spanked by the Ravens next summer (as, famously, the Duke Blue Devils refused to schedule Carleton on their Canadian hype-fest last summer; can’t let a defeat gum up the works of an ESPN DukeFest!). Next year’s Carleton Ravens could be A LOT BETTER than this year’s 37-1 championship squad.

² My favourite Raven is Yasiin Joseph, a local Ottawa high school star that I coached a little bit. He played barely at all in his first two seasons as a Raven, and politely cut me off one time when he knew I was about to give him the “hang in there, buddy” speech. “Hey, don’t worry about me. This is awesome. I’m learning so much.” He earned a starting job in his third year after a brilliant performance in leading a comeback win against Alabama and Collin Sexton in the summer of ’17, and was the leading scorer in Sunday’s final. Great hands, great heart.

And still Ottawa yawns. And most Canadian sports fans barely notice, let alone understand the incredible talent, effort and culture-creation that the Carleton Ravens basketball program³ represents. The good news is that I can still easily get last-minute tickets for games, and can take my high school players at great prices – if only I could convince them that it’s worth their time.

Short trip, I know, but it drives me NUTS. March Madness, indeed!

³ AND THERE’S MORE: I’ve written about the Ravens frequently over the years, most recently HERE and HERE and HERE. You KNOW you want to deeper…

 

A Letter I Never Sent (To a Friend I Can’t Remember)

Posted by :James Howden On : March 12, 2019
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Category: At First Glance

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[4-minute read]

Have you ever stumbled across a letter you wrote (or an essay, or a birthday card) that for some reason didn’t get where it was supposed to? I was looking through my ‘Drafts’ folder in Gmail for something that should’ve been there, and wasn’t. Then I wondered why I had so many drafts; mostly, I use that folder to keep copies of pieces as templates I might use again, such as letters accompanying a writing submission or the kind of email response I make repeatedly.

Dalian is a coastal city of over 6 million, nestled on and among hills. Like all Chinese cities, it is constantly changing. There is already much we wouldn’t recognize.

I don’t know what happened to the text below, or why it was still in Drafts. It looks like it might have been intended as a friends’n’family newsletter, and maybe it did form a part of something like that. Or maybe I plumb forgot to finish an email to whoever-it-was, but in any case, the piece moved me. It effortlessly flung me ten years backward. We were in China, my wife and 9-year-old son and me, approaching our first Christmas of what turned out to be five straight Decembers in the northeastern city of Dalian. We were adventuring, and escaping workplace frustrations, and trying to be of some use to the fledgling Baha’i community there, and learning our ever-loving heads off. Lately, as we approach the fifth anniversary of our permanent return to Canada, we have been reminiscing and brooding about the friends we left behind, many of whom we have little or no contact with anymore. I had left teaching high school (and an earlier stint writing in the Canadian government), while Diana was on sabbatical from environmental policy work. Our son Sam turns 19 soon, still speaks Mandarin well, and his coming of age and future vision push us all back to remembrance and wonder at that epic phase in our family life. What follows is how I looked at our first few months of life in Liaoning Province:

Though we are distressingly mortal, and have known the truth of the culture shock that often hits even the best-intentioned after the “honeymoon” period ends, we are well and prospering. China is an astonishing place. In practical terms, there are frustrations, but it is really not too difficult from the physical point of view. But it is a dazzlingly opaque culture to we foreigners, we moles, blind to even the most obvious of things. (To a friend, in front of our complex of apartment buildings: Kai, we need to find a photocopy place. Do you know where we could find one? Superb, resourceful, devoted Chinese friend: How about the one right there, across the street? Ah, yes. The big yellow sign with red characters. That one.)

Though my job is a job, it has the benefits that other teachers told me would be here: deeply serious and enthusiastic and appreciative students, and a general cultural framework in which education matters (sometimes even too much) and teachers are honoured (almost whether they deserve it or not). I am a week and a half from finishing my first semester as a teacher of conversational English and Western culture to Masters and Doctoral students, and I can say with certainty that I have learned more than the grand majority of my 408 (but who’s counting?) students…

Diana, though sometimes missing her professional and voluntary environmental work, has filled her days with the practicalities of making life work here, and with making friends and sundry human connections. She is so good at it. (For example, our good friend Anna visited again this week at our home, and her stories are greatly appreciated!) Diana is the centre of our shared life of service, and we have made many (most of them university students, as we live within walking distance of three universities) wonderful friends here, many of whom share our love of learning about matters of spirit and an ever-advancing civilization. When school resumes, she will be pioneering two courses in Environment and Business at one of the neighbouring schools (not mine) as well as teaching some conversational English to undergrads. And life will get a little busier, but our essential purpose will not change.

Sam, we sometimes think, has the hardest job of us all, as we have placed him in a local Chinese public school where he often has felt bored and alone. But he likes being in Dalian, in general, and has made fast and furious friends with an American boy (and his sisters). The first two months were very tough for him, but it gets better and better. Thankfully, he really enjoys the teaching and be-friending activities that so frequently bring new people into our orbit and into our apartment. He happily sings the prayer that begins “O God, guide me” in a Chinese that sounds pretty fluent to my ears, and with the help of “Alice”, another of our dear co-workers and friends, his Chinese speaking (and some writing) is progressing speedily.

Being here is a little like going on a spiritual fast, or some great quest: every day, whether we like it or not, we are vividly aware of our life’s purpose, and more in tune with the needs of the age, as well as we can understand them. And when the fruits arrive, often at the end of a sometimes frustrating or disorienting day, they taste wonderfully sweet and we think, This is the life…

And it was, you know, even if it was occasionally maddening.

Even if, now, I can’t quite remember who Anna was.

Marilynne Robinson (on civilization)

Posted by :James Howden On : May 4, 2018
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Category: He Said/She Said

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May she keep on teaching and writing. Marilynne Robinson, photo from an article in The Guardian newspaper.

[3-minute read]

We hear it all the time. Human beings are naturally aggressive. We have always had wars, and we always will. Some of the more pessimistic among us – and listen, such people are not deranged; there are reasons aplenty to cast a stink-eye on our history  – go so far as to suggest that war is the natural condition of human societies, and that peace is an intermittent and temporary reprieve. This is nonsense.

Among many other reasons, it is foolish to think this way because, first, it is too easy, and second, it is too damned discouraging. Third, and most important, to consider warfare as our default mode is slippery and false because it allows us to excuse and even justify  (to ourselves, to our fellow foreign policy analysts, to our tough-on-crime cronies, to any of our partners-in-expediency) the use of brutal methods to address problems. Meanwhile, we routinely fall into the lazy assumption that human beings have hair-trigger predispositions towards violence or other anti-social qualities, yet most of us wouldn’t say this about the people that we actually know and interact with. (“People are AWFUL! Well, not my people, they’re mostly pretty great but, you know, those people out there…”)     

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Pardon the Interruption

Posted by :James Howden On : May 2, 2018
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Category: At First Glance

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We are all our own monsters. (photo from EntertainmentTime.com)

[2.5-minute read. NOTE: this post has nothing to do with the sports-men, Kornheiser and Wilbon, and their high-energy exchanges. I only interrupt myself.]

Jumpstarting a depleted battery. Cranking the old Model T. Applying the paddles to a flatlined patient. Making the Monster LIVE!

Whatever. (Insert your own favourite new-life, Renaissance, man! analogy here.)

I’m back at the controls of the Good Ship Howdy. Hurray! Below, I exhume and quote from an older piece of mine. I just re-read it, quite by chance, and it felt like a good way to help recharge by weary bloggish batteries and get GOING. It also serves to remind readers of one of my favourite things to do on This Little Site of Mine. (I’m gonna let it shine!) Yes, it’s been eerily, fear-ily quiet here at The Howdy. I keep telling myself there’s a silver lining: my recent inactivity has meant that a special piece, much more important than the bookish or sporty matters I often obsess about, was at the head of the Howdy Queue for months. (It’s just down below, in this “At First Glance” section, which is the main one.) A celebration for the age.)

Here I go again. A week ago, when I wasn’t watching, this space hit a small milestone. (It’s a small consolation that, even when I’m not grinding at the word mill, humans are still reading my messages to the universe. Sweet.) 40,000 page views is a decent month for many sites, and it’s taken me quite a few years to get here, but it’s something. I insist that many of those views involved people actually reading what I’ve written, so there! Yes. Thanks for reading, for reading me, for reading just about anything. READING MATTERS. And now this, a blast from the Oh-So-Quotable! JamesHowden past (complete article here):

He Said/She Said… Did you notice this FAVE-QUOTES section? It’s just down there, on your right, if you’re looking at this on a laptop or other big-screened device. There’s no up-top tab for this “He Said/She Said” section, but you can find it if you try hard, maybe?

I’m always looking for the right words. Some people look for the magic bullet – the easy lazy remedy, the simple common-sense answer. Some look for solace and conviction in chemical form, but for me it’s nearly always an incantation. If a problem can’t be solved with words, I’m often not interested in it….

I’ve collected quotes forever. Once upon a lucky break, I was suddenly being paid well to write with her Right Honourable Self¹, and she loved quotations, too. So I scavenged everywhere, tore from newspapers, scribbled in the margins of novels and other good reads, and I cheated: I went to Bartlett’s, to John Robert Columbo, to Cosmo Doogood’s Urban Almanac, to on-line sites like Empyrean. I love to find just the right words….

There be monsters in the quotable woods, though. I remember Mr. Hill’s comments on a high school essay that I had just larded with some of the best quotes ever. Problem: some of them I hadn’t fully understood, when removed from the context in which they were written, and “this is the evil of Bartlett’s”, quoth Mr. Hill. Who knew a treasure house of words could be evil? And then there was my recent discovery that one of my favourite quotes of Ralph Waldo Emerson – beginning “To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children…” and ending “This is to have succeeded” – is “almost certainly not his”, according to a scholarly website that I accidentally consulted….

All this to say that I have a wee quote box just down there to your right, underneath the “On Second Thought” section…

¹ In the middle of the Aughts, I wrote correspondence for, and later 18 months of vice-regal speeches with, the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, during her term as Governor General of Canada. It was fun. I had deadlines then. And an audience.

Two Centuries Back: Anniversary for the World

Posted by :James Howden On : November 3, 2017
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Category: At First Glance

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[5-minute read. A different version of this same piece appears at www.BahaiTeachings.org, always a good place in which to wander about and think.]

Your retroactive invitation. Festivity’s over, but the party doesn’t end.

October was a big month in my little world. (Ah, but I’m always working to See the Big Picture, and to train my eyes on a World-Embracing Vision. In between laundry loads, basketball practices, and grinding away at That Book.) Just to be annoyingly clear, I’m not referring to the retail assault that was Hallowe’en, that will be BlackFriday/Thanksgiving in the Excited States of America, and which already hounds us to be frenzied consumers so baby Jesus can lay chocolate eggs under the reindeer tree — this, all over the “Christian” world and well beyond it.

No, the event I’m talking about didn’t make anybody any money. There was growing public awareness and appreciation, tributes from heads of state and spiritual dignitaries, but no ad blitzes, no junk-food tie-ins or “free” vacations on offer. No price of admission, either: come as you are, dress up if you’re able. Full disclosure: I think my wife did buy a new pair of shoes, and I bought a Dairy Queen ice-cream cake for my basketball boys. Heck, it was a celebration…

And on an October Saturday night, our family hosted a dinner party for a wonderfully mixed-up group of neighbours. Some had been our friends for a decade and a half, while others were in our home for the first time. Of course, we were celebrating the bicentenary of the Birth of Baha’u’llah. (Wait, WHAT? You didn’t hear about the 200th anniversary? Man, woman, hey kid! come ON! This wasn’t on CNN or Fox News, Al-Jazeera or ‘The World at Six’ on CBC Radio, but it’s the biggest and best behind-the-news story there IS. Seriously.)

(And I hear you over there, saying, “So how come you know about this supposedly ‘IMPORTANT’ event that most people are either totally oblivious to, or just sort of shrug about?” Answer: dumb luck.)

After my love’s famous Thai soup and other delicacies, I tried to explain what the Baha’is are so excited about. You see, I’ve been hanging around the Baha’i community for years, as many of my readers know. I try (and often fail) to live up to Baha’u’llah’s call for personal and societal transformation. I do my bit here and there, I guess, but it seems like pretty small potatoes sometimes. In October, though, it didn’t. It felt like being in a junior church choir that got to sing with a massed chorus from many congregations, one small voice in a great big HALLELUJAH! Right? So I talked about what this anniversary means to Baha’is and to the world. By doing so, at least I gave our friends a few minutes to do some main-course digestion before the unveiling of Diana’s Apple Cheesecake. I wanted to say something like this:

Friends and neighbours, as you know, Diana and I are members of the Baha’i Faith. It’s a worldwide movement dedicated to a few gigantic ideas: that the human race is one family, that we have to start ACTING like it, that there are principles and mechanisms that really can make it all work, and that it WILL work.

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