Centennial Year

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Headnote: In 1967 there was a fad: a certain stuffed cartoonish arctic snowy owl called an Ookpik (Eskimo word) was selling everywhere; there was even an Ookpik (The owl’s name) comic strip in the newspaper. I’m sure the owls were sold as commonly at Expo 67 as are the stuffed Paddington Bears now selling in the stores near Paddington Station. My sister received one for Christmas holding onto a sign saying, “I hate men.” She said, “That’s what I say when coming home from a date on Friday nights.”

Hello Reader,

Got a favorite year?

This Saturday at Confederation Park, as part of Canada’s 150^th birthday, or “Canada 150,” a time capsule will be dug up. It has traveled through time, carrying to us the dreams of fellow Canadians of 1967. I wonder what they were eager to show us? Did they put Ookpik in the capsule? In ’67, as the original Star Trek showed an idealistic federation of peace and harmony, Canadians took pride in their confederation: con is Latin for coming together.

The most popular song that year went: “It’s the hundredth anniversary of… confederation! Every-body sing!” Another line went, “Frere Jacqua, frère Jacqua, merrily we roll along, together, all the way!”

Having a hundred years of continuous democracy was a big deal. The French were on their latest numbered republic, East Germany was still communist, Spain still fascist, and India hadn’t gotten democracy and statehood until the late 1940’s. By world standards, we were doing pretty well. The telephone book cover showed the horse and buggy days, captioned 1867-1967: as our hearts swelled with innocent pride.  

By the next year, innocence was waning, leading to a few years of monotonous bomb threats all across our land, while back east were a few French-speaking “Pure Wool” (white, not ethnic) terrorists, as movies seeped out of Hollywood with pointless violent endings, sexploitation and Blacksploitation.

But the previous year, still innocent, a syndicated newspaper magazine ran a narrative-style article on soldiers of the future, complete with their jet packs and infrared goggles. I think that year had a cover story about a “Top Gun,” a German submarine captain who sunk the most ships in the Saint Lawrence. Today I suspect magazine editors would not present such things, not because Canadians are too liberal, but too squeamish.

The successive year, less innocent, that magazine had a book review, with scary illustrations made for the article, of the novel Killing Ground about a future Canadian civil war. In January of 1968 Middle Americans were to hear Walter Cronkite, their most respected TV newscaster by far say, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war!” Innocence drained rapidly after the Tet Offensive.

But 1967 was golden.

That year people went to San Francisco with flowers in their hair, (link to song lyrics) while Canadians hitchhiked to see Canada’s world exposition, Expo 67. A man fixing my furnace once told me, “By the next year hippies were hitchhiking, and spoiled it.” In 1967 the Boy Scout magazine, Canadian Boy, did an innocent article about hitching across this land, called “Thumb-ting to Sing About.” The magazine also did an article on the wonders of Expo. Somehow, I doubt the later World Expo of 1986, in Vancouver, held the same cross-country pride and excitement.

As for this year of 2017, let me tell you, I am just not feeling anywhere near the same hoopla for “Canada 150.” Of course I’m older now, not in school, not watching TV as much, so maybe, although I listen to a lot of CBC radio, maybe I’ve somehow failed to notice any prevailing winds of excitement, but still … let me tell you how we celebrated back in my day, for our 100 year birthday.

In schools the children all got a centennial medal—I got heck for taking mine out of the plastic wrapper, as my parents thought it would tarnish. Servicemen in the armed forces all got a campaign medal to show they were in the service that year, while Girl Guides and Boy Scouts all got a special badge to sew on.

School kids in all grades did athletic testing (situps, runs and so forth) and then received a big centennial crest to put on, in gold, silver, or bronze. There was a smaller rectangular one in red to show participation. I don’t know if we would want our kids to be so visibly competitive today: This was before “losing” in Viet Nam led Terry Orlick to devise “cooperative games” such as children surrounding a parachute to bounce a ball with no score, no losers.

As I wrote earlier this month, the Ca-na-da song music video, of a pied piper leading singing children over a grassy field, caused the CBC phone to ring off the hook with requests for lyrics. Also on TV were exciting calls to “Plan your centennial project now.” The clip I still remember is of a few people in formal eveningwear on the top of a mountain playing their symphony instruments. Those TV ads were aimed at individuals.

While individuals “did their own thing,” at our community level we built the aforementioned Confederation Park, while down in Lethbridge volunteers go involved to spend 25 million in 1967 dollars on a real Japanese Garden. (No flowers) A contractor volunteered to work out a cost estimate—he was almost bang on. (Try doing that today) Japanese royalty attended the opening. Some of the emperor’s family will be back to experience the garden for the Canada 150.

Elementary school kids raised money for centennial projects. For example, Project 100—and there was a poster in the classroom showing forlorn children of color—was to raise a hundred dollars for children overseas. That year students created and staged many stage plays and such, while charging a few pennies—back when one cent bought a big candy. I remember a fashion show where many of the girls modeled three-piece bathing suits. The third piece, of course, was a snug strip across their middle. That was back when boys and men were wearing jockey style swimsuits. (non-speedo) There was cultural funding that year for young grownups to come in and do plays with audience involvement… part of why I still remember is that such things didn’t happen in succeeding years. We had just one kick at the can.

Until only a few years ago, downtown, on the sidewalk across from the Hudson’s Bay Company, by the church, stood a turquoise molded one-piece plastic bench. It had the centennial logo: a maple leaf made of triangles. Now, that’s the kind of humble centennial project that warms my heart. The Canada 150 logo is a leaf made of diamonds… I wonder, since our government on Parliament Hill today seems full of young whippersnappers, if anybody on the hill besides the artist noticed the similarity in the two leafs? The golden year of 1967 was so long ago.

My favorite year.

Sean Crawford

Late June

Calgary

2017

Footnotes:

~Some old memories only surfaced in the writing of this essay—how nice, while others I had been reviewing so as not to lose them for the last fifty years. “Reviews it or lose it.”

~For me, the Japanese garden (link to images) alone makes the drive to Lethbridge worth the trip.

~Following a reader’s outrageous suggestion, in 1967 Canadian Boy magazine ran a science fiction story, starring kids from a previous three-part story, called Who Stole Expo 2067? (The expo was orbiting as a space platform; the bad guys turned it invisible) Say, I wonder what the 2067 maple leaf logo will look like?

~I wrote about the centennial song (with links) being ignored by whippersnappers in my essay Sawhorses Blocking the Forum in June of this year. Once again, here is a link to some children singing the song at Expo 67.

~Terry Olick gets a broader mention in my essay-and-book-review of Backfire, about Vietnam, contrasting bureaucrats (civil and military) with citizens, archived September 2010. That essay is one of my top ten for reader stats.

~I so despised the contemptible, cowardly, costly, cover-your-ass paperwork of Vietnam, that one semester at university, without asking my professor first, I accepted a lower mark in university to go do one (of two) of my term papers on “red tape,” instead of on an a proper course related subject. I still passed.

There’s lots of research out there to show that, like cancer, red tape can be beaten. (Of course by “costly” I don’t mean in terms of money or man-hours—you know what I mean)

~As it happened, my course was on “social workers and the medical system.” About the time President Bill Clinton was trying and failing to bring in affordable healthcare, my professor had heard, at a U.S. university conference, a U.S. politician, a name you would recognize, lying through his teeth to his fellow Americans about Canadian medicare. It would seem poor Clinton was doomed before he even started. How President Obama ever managed to pull it off is a mystery to me.  

I sure hope the Yankees, by 2067, will have finally achieved world-class health care. I’m still chuckling at a recent Canadian editorial cartoon of an American health care “draft” manual, covered with shabby post-it notes on rumpled pages, next to a very tall stack of pristine manuals with the names of first world countries… Sometimes, being an arrogant American is its own punishment.

Human Interest with Muslim Demons

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Hello Reader,

If God made me white and liberal, then God had a reason. “I won’t be made (guilty), nor be idle with despair.” As Jewel sings.

Of course I like my “citizen” essays, but since we all like to hear about human beings, well, it’s time for a “human interest” piece about my life, or, if that’s too hard for me to share, at least about my flaming opinions. Self-indulgent maybe, but hey: It’s a blog thing.

As you may recall, blog is short for “(world wide) web log.” Originally, young folks, comfortable with computers, who rightly thought their lives mattered, would post a log (Stardate 3141.59) about their days and their fears, complete with photographs of what they had for breakfast. This required some effort. Today our “need to get attention” is more easily served by briefly tweeting. Like the U.S. president does.

As for me, I’m just as modest about my “ordinary half-boring life” as was my favorite dead-tree essayist George Orwell, or my three favorite essay-bloggers: Modest, all of us. For example, I barely know, in passing, that the other essayists have wives, but I don’t know what the wives have for breakfast, or what kind of shirts they wear… as their kitchen counter radio plays Major Tom. (Space Oddity)

If you and I didn’t want to get some attention, through our blogs, tweets, media and our conversations in-person at the watering hole, if instead we were totally self-effacing, then I guess we would be saints. And verily our lives without attention would be as plain as supper without salt: Oh well, at least as saints we’d save on the cost of beer and cigarettes.

As for thinking we all count, I’m still chuckling over someone’s T-shirt I spotted down in the States. You may recall the Yankees have been saying, “Black lives matter.” This T-shirt had big block letters to proclaim:

At the top: ALL LIVES MATTER

At the bottom: except isis, fuck those guys.

You might say those words against ISIL are “demonizing the enemy.” I would agree. I saw the T-shirt out in the Arizona desert, among plastic lawn chairs, as in: “the white seats,” as in: the expensive up-front section of a big outdoor country music festival. A performer reminded us to support our military. He added, “If you think supporting our military is political, then you can just leave now. Because supporting our American military is never political.”

That’s historically true: When little republics like Athens or Corinth would beat the drum everybody would rally around the flag. The drum, to use a metaphor, was kept silent until there was unity. Any political talk among the people mingling in the forum would happen before they finally voted and all clamored for war. Then: All of the people would support some of the people to carry out the wishes of the people. Historically.

What if, foolishly, we would attempt to fight before we felt an appropriate certitude in our decision? The Bible has that covered: “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” and “A house divided cannot stand.” If you do, God help you, blow an uncertain note, if the people “blow it,” then it still remains appropriate to emotionally support your “countrymen at arms,” beyond all politics, while at home we are acting as swiftly as possible to sort out our political conscience.

Historically, such is the way of a healthy republic.

Sidebar History:

The classic “uncertain note” would be the “Vietnam conflict” —the official army term— during my youth. Americans used under-voting-age Cold War conscripts—the conscription being ALREADY in progress—as part of the greater Cold War effort.

The smaller localized conflict in the Republic of South Vietnam was never formally endorsed nor declared to be a war by the U.S. people, the “body politic.” In fact… even though the contested battleground was officially the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, to convert them to democracy, while preventing them from converting to communism… it is documented that all of the important leaders in Washington, let alone regular citizens, could not have passed a simple community college exam on the hearts and culture of the Vietnamese.

The Americans never called up their National Guard and their reserves; they had no recycling, or any other sort of war effort, on the “home front.” Such a dim uncertain trumpet.

As for me, as a Bohemian sings, “I’m just a poor boy, from a poor family…” and yet I easily mingled enough, in the desert, among affluent fans in the white seats. I can say with assurance the rich people had ample empathy for working people, trailer trash and, as Loretta Lynn sings, a coal miner’s daughter. Furthermore—here starts my flaming opinions—those country fans could sympathize with the dear boys and girls whom America would send into harm’s way. Unlike certain elite

—Oops! I wonder if I have just offended some Guilty-White-Liberals? You know, the elite so comfortable to stay-at-home while letting impoverished guys like me do all their fighting for them. As for that anti-ISIL T-shirt, before my Canadian readers call it prejudiced against innocent ISIL-Arabians, remember this: The U.S. has declared War on Terror. This means, by definition, Americans have to “demonize the enemy.”

I live on planet reality. Maybe on fantastic Mars the patriotic social workers and saints, during wartime, are flying in their bombers and pressing their buttons while sobbing, “This will hurt me worse than it hurts you.” Not me. I would look down through my plexi-glass at the flashing anti-aircraft guns and say, “Screw those bastards.”

Historically, no one has ever been able to make war-time sacrifices, such as great tax increases… or leaving their crops half-grown in their fields, or leaving their college degree half-finished, or leaving their National Football League cash-cow to go off and join the fight, not until they had first demonized the enemy.

My dear Canadian readers: If, hypothetically, Canada declares War on Terror, and then, if you and your friends don’t demonize the enemy, then to me it logically follows: You might as well do tax decreases just like Bush junior did, and let your war be fought by “others” such as civil servants. In uniform. Which would suit corrupt liberals just fine. But know this: You surely are confused or a liar if you call that a “war.” I know one thing for sure: Even a bigot hates a liar.

A thought: If someone asks in bewilderment, “Why do some people view Hilary, Obama and Bush junior, despite their diversity of gender, skin color and party membership, as being all the same, all elite, all peas in a pod?” then at last I have an answer… Now, during World War II, young Bush senior was in uniform, a pilot, shot down by fascist AA guns in the Pacific and then rescued by a submarine. Yes, but can you imagine those three young peas, Hilary, Obama and Bush junior, serving out in the Pacific, fighting on Hacksaw Ridge? (Film) Me neither.

In contrast, I can imagine a (future) President Kennedy volunteering in WWII, President Truman volunteering in WWI, and President Lincoln volunteering in the Blackhawk war, where his peers elected him to be a lieutenant. Everyone respects Lincoln: By his plain words and his down-to-earth humor, we know he had too much inner dignity to ever want to join the elite.

Forget the elite: I can easily imagine President Trump sharing my foxhole. I’d probably have to tell him to keep his head down as he occasionally fired off a few rounds and shouted insults across no man’s land at the evil Nazis. When the time came to race across the field to the enemy lines, through thick dust and smoke, so thick that no one would ever know if we secretly wimped out or not… I could surely count on Trump to keep up with me as we dashed into the fire...

…

As I was saying at the top: Of course we all want to get attention, but let’s not tell false news with our tweets, blogs and social media, not about ourselves. For example, I would hope that by honestly blogging that I have an “ordinary half-boring life,” my readers aren’t struck by FOMO—fear of missing out. And hey, let’s not get confused about the definition of war. Let’s not lie to ourselves.

Sean Crawford

May

Calgary

2017

Human Interest Religion Sidebar: held back for some other week.

Footnotes:

~The used bookstore in Sundre has a separate room for treasured old books; I drive the nicely scenic 22 north from Cochrane.

 ~The movie Hacksaw Ridge is like Saving Private Ryan: heavy casualties. But the grim film is still worth it, being a moving testimony to one man’s faith, a God-fearing man. He wouldn’t touch a rifle, yet he won his country’s highest honor, presented to him by President Harry Truman. At the end of the movie, people clapped for a long time. I have the old hardcover version, unearthed in Sundre, on my shelf. (The Unlikeliest Hero by Booton Herndon)

~A person of color, with laughing eyes, teased me, “But you’re a liberal.” My eyes flashed, “But I’m not guilty!”

~If God made me white and liberal, then God had a reason. I won’t be made guilty, nor be idle with despair. As Jewel sings.

Respect and Red Tape

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Show me where your focus is, and I will tell where your heart is.

European proverb

Before there was red tape there were people of respect, so I will start with them.

I know two very nice mentally handicapped people, a man and woman: call them clients. They have two “supportive roommates:” call them staff. The four are close in age. The supportive staff act mature and respectful, both to each other and to their roommates. I like seeing respect, partly because I can imagine other homes and situations where people are disrespected and devalued.  

I can imagine, hypothetically, there being a lack of respect between the children in a big stressed family, especially if, say, there’s a ten year gap in age between two brothers. During their growing up years the oldest boy might devalue the youngest one: Besides the obvious ways to devalue, he might not care to explain things, or to share what’s going on in his life. The two boys would live in two separate worlds.

But in later years, as grownup brothers and sisters, we all know better. As mature citizens we “get it” that all people and minorities are equal. Nevertheless, I can imagine some adults devaluing people with handicaps. I am not excusing this, especially from non-handicapped staff; I’m just saying this can happen.

The scene: at a kitchen table, wheelchair accessible. On one side, using power wheelchairs, two clients, a man and a woman, are sitting with their feet under the table. On the other side, one of their roommates sits leaning forward, holding his ipad to show them. He is displaying a picture of gorgeous frothy water at granite falls, explaining to them how he had used a very delayed exposure, and a neat lens filter, after hiking past the falls… He thinks they would genuinely care to know about his life, his hikes, and his craft of photography—And he cares for their good opinion of him.

A week later, I chanced to see the man alone, as he was looking through the camera lens of his cellphone. I said I liked how he explained things to his roommates because, I told him, the staff at the client’s Day Program never would. The man was startled: “You’re kidding!” I wish I was.

Perhaps, if I were charitable, I might say the Day Program staff were a little overworked with red tape, and pressured into behaving like adolescents, adolescents who may walk along in a group of three with two of them behaving as if “two’s company and three’s a crowd,” rudely ignoring the third person. But I don’t want to make excuses for them.

                           

Because the man looked so startled, and because I don’t work Day Program myself, I thought I’d better do a “reality check.” The next day three of us were sitting outside on the sundeck, two in their power wheelchairs, and me in a kitchen chair I had dragged outside. We were enjoying the sunshine; I was reading aloud some full-page sports section features about a fired NHL coach (They are hockey fans) I also had them laughing from my book How to Walk in High Heels. I took a break from reading aloud to ask them about the Day Program staff: Would the staff share their lives?

“They are stuck up” was the bitter answer, adding that if a staff had a cool photograph on her cell phone then she would show it to other staff, not to any clients. Bitter. They named one staff, just one, who was not stuck up. ...In fairness, they would have named other staff too if given time to think.

I would guess this is a problem with Day Programs all across our time zone. It’s too easy to devalue people: Not a problem that can be fixed with measureable paperwork. Things like lapsing into using a foreign language in front of clients, is a problem to be solved not by paperwork, but by building an agency culture.

For creating a good culture, paperwork could be a false goal, a serious distraction, a golden calf. Equally bad: Filling out forms during working hours, in front of clients, can be a serious misuse of man-hours and energy—you can’t be socializing and explaining your life and valuing when your back is bent over a paper. Unfortunately, in very recent years I have seen the pressure of paperwork always increasing, never decreasing. (No jagged graph line) The pressure gage needle seems to only go one way. Once the needle goes into the red line, something has to give: And then it’s the culture, and it’s the clients, who suffer.

It makes me shudder, but at least no one’s being killed. I am reminded of the war in Vietnam. Remember? Everyone in Canada and the U.S., including our armed representatives overseas, agreed that communism was evil; we all agreed we had to “win the hearts and minds” of the villagers, converting the South Vietnamese to preferring democracy over communism… but the villages, one by one, went over to the dark side. Such a waste.

Why would the villagers “go communist” even as we were giving candy to their children and patrolling among them? Because we failed them.

Because for us our paperwork was easier to “measure” and fill out. Valuing red tape was easier for us than trying to build the hard-to-measure culture of, say, socializing as an equal to win the hearts and minds.  Instead of "honour, duty country" it was easy to focus on measurable things like the dead enemy “body count.” Easy to create a culture of filling out forms—even as the brave young soldiers in the field thought the attention to forms, especially the wimpy “cover your ass” sort —which the men derided as CYA— was losing the war: The young men called silly forms “chicken droppings.” But who would ever ask them for their opinion?

Easier to default to being a typical “Ugly American” than to think of human equality, or work on having a culture of excellence and professionalism.

When I look at Day Programs across this time zone, I wonder how many leaders prefer ever increasing amounts of red tape, including CYA, for giving leaders external control over staff, including a culture of fear "we have to prove to the government" rather than creating a culture where each staff member is a “professional” having internal control. I don’t know. I am just one small toy soldier surrounded by madness.

Out on the sundeck I cheerfully tell my clients: “The way to learn to walk in high heels is to push a shopping cart at the supermarket.” We laugh.

Sean Crawford

On the Great Plains

July 2016

Footnotes:

~ “But who would ask their opinion?” According to history, neither soldiers nor civilians were asked. One day some very experienced, knowledgeable young war correspondents in Vietnam were given the chance, as a little group, to talk privately with the minister of defense, Robert McNamara. Sounds too good to be true? It is. The journalists were forbidden to say anything about the military situation. (Only about the economic situation)

Maybe I’m getting too cynical about our ability to reform, for I see I’ve deleted that incident from my essay Halberstam was a Harbinger, archived June 2015.

~ As for the U.S. forces in South Vietnam, the marines did significantly better at winning “hearts and minds” than the army did. Someday I hope a graduate student will research this difference. (The research could then be used for supporting persons with disabilities in their natural communities, and for valuing communities in the homeland (maybe we could ask if there's a good reason they do drugs) during the War on Drugs)

~ Truly, I have a strong impression the government disabilities department I mention above does not make their new improved plans in cooperation with stakeholders, but instead merely draws up their plans within hothouse government walls, and then announces orders… I realize that sounds crazy; I will not speculate here on why this could be possible. 

Two Heartfelt Quotations

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First Quotation

First Interlude

Second Interlude

Second Quotation

Too bad people don’t do poetry anymore. Our grandparents found it eased their toil through this life to memorize scraps of verse. Today I offer two tragic prose quotations as I struggle with “the meaning of life.” The second quote offers me comfort. The first quote I memorized years ago.

First Quotation

Imagine a big WWII prisoner of war camp. The prisoners retain their rank, and associate with peers of their rank. Why? The Geneva Convention, certainly. Folks of higher service rank will be in charge of the committees for things like justice, entertainment and escape. But what of a camp where they are crowded and mistreated like so many rats: Unlike Nazis, the Japanese don’t honor Geneva. There is very little group purpose for the prisoners, no escape committee.

As I see it, in both war and peace, hierarchy is human. For example, any professional sports team will give higher status to those on the varsity, less to those on the second string. When the superstar speaks, every athlete listens. When a collection of individuals come together with a group purpose, whether for sports, a service club, or whatever, the best status goes to those who best help the group achieve its purpose: the president, the tireless volunteer, the treasurer.

If people are penned together without a group purpose, such as in a high school, then, according to essayist Paul Graham, the hierarchy of status degenerates into a “popularity contest.” (Link) Graham noted how the fluttering palace courtiers of French kings were vicious in their pursuit of empty status. I would add that in small towns the social hierarchy for adults is not only frozen, but serves no sane purpose that I can see.

In a healthy army, within a healthy society, the best status will go to whoever is best helping the army to function. Competence at the top means competence at the bottom: The best cavalry will take care of their horses; in the best army, the officers will cheerfully go to the very end of the lineup for the mess hall; a competent general will not, during a mass retreat, push a private out of his jeep to make room for his personal refrigerator. But this actually happened in South Vietnam. (Two years before the fall of Saigon)

Saigon simply did not reward competence and honesty. (And since the U.S. Army was there to advise, not occupy, they could not hire or fire any Vietnamese) And this meant Saigon had lousy officers: Such a cliché, applicable to many governments in the past.  

And the future? Must corruption, political and economic, continue down the generations? The science fiction satire End of Empire by Alexis Gilliland is based on lessons learned from history. The novel opens during the desperate last hours of a mass retreat by civilians. A competent honest colonel puts a space shuttle container (think railway car) labeled as a specific general’s “furniture” off to one side. This means one more container of desperate refugees can be flown up to safety. It turns out the “furniture” car was actually full of expensive artworks being shipped by that general. The general is furious. Throughout the novel, the general keeps tugging on his white gloves and saying to his high-ranking fellow losers, as regards the honest colonel, “…after all, he is not one of us.” No wonder the empire falls.

Meanwhile, back at the 20^th century Japanese prison camp, depicted in the novel King Rat, by James Clavel… an honest junior British officer, Peter Marlowe, notes the senior officers hanging around together, and tugging on figurative white gloves. A dirty senior officer has bribed a young officer by promising him a permanent commission after the war. Later, the officer later says to his corrupt senior peers over a card game: “My God, what bloody nerve—to think I’d recommend him for a permanent commission. That’s just the sort of guttersnipe we don’t need in the Regular Army. My God, no! If he gets a permanent commission it’ll be over my dead body.”

When the servicemen are finally freed, at the end of the war, young Marlowe looks back and wonders.

Marlowe is processed; he learns his father, in the Royal Navy, was on the allied convoys to Russia’s arctic coast to supply the port city of Murmansk. Sometimes the convoys would steam really far north hoping to avoid the wolf packs of U-boats. Sometimes that worked.

Marlowe is told his father was killed.

Marlowe thinks of his respected senior officers; he wonders about a class system with corruption and incompetence, with no relation between rank-status and serving the army, or the greater social good. Like bureaucracy, this seems to be what every respected senior officer, by his actions, believes in. Maybe Marlowe could conform, maybe go along with everybody else, but he has just been through hell—what did it all mean—what is Right?

“And Peter Marlow knew, tormented, that the only man who could, perhaps, tell him, had died in freezing seas on the Murmansk run.”

First Interlude

My own small equivalent of poor Marlowe would be the years I wondered if I should ignore the lessons of Vietnam, and instead “serve the bureaucracy” like everyone else does. Did the war mean nothing? In the end, I left work that would take me away from serving clients by inappropriately serving red tape; in the end, I lowered my university grade by going off topic by doing my second of two term papers not on the class subject, but on “red tape.” My professor apologized for having to downgrade me, but I told him I was still passing the class, and that was fine.

Second Interlude

It seems to me that just as people have anger issues with their heavenly father, they can have issues with their earthly father too. My family was British and alcoholic and we sure as hell didn’t use the word “love” around our house. Did they care? Have concern? Today I would think so; back when I left home I felt like a prodigal son, “not good enough.” At least, while I was living over a dozen mountain ranges away, I had the sense to seek the clarity of a counselor and the comfort of a church. Was my parent’s love real? In their old age, when first they came to use the L word, I didn’t know quite what to believe.

When my father came to my university graduation I didn’t tell him about lowering my mark; I never asked him about leaving my job. He died last year.

Second Quotation

Connie Willis spent five years writing her grim Doomsday Book—time well spent.

The winter solstice, Christmas, is traditionally a symbol of death, as the earth lies in winter’s grip, and also a symbol of birth, as the world begins at last to move back towards spring. Doomesday Book unfolds both in Oxford in the future, and in a village in the medieval past. Both time-locations have Christmas, and God, and a deadly plague. (Oxford invokes a police-patrolled quarantine)

For research, the university has a time machine portal. Time travel involves a so-called drop zone, or “drop.” Because of the science of time-linkages, it’s crucial to be back at the drop for your pick up, or else be lost...

A young graduate student, named Kivrin, is sent back to a few years before the plague will arrive and, of course, Something Goes Wrong. As the book’s back cover explains, Kivrin misses her drop…

Kivrin has surgically installed a futuristic recorder, hiding it in a fake wrist-bone spur. She had promised an archeologist, before she left, that if, by some terribly unlikely chance, she missed her drop, then she would try to be buried in a local churchyard: They could dig her up, look for her bone spur, and learn about medieval life. In Kivrin’s final recorder transcript, she is talking to her old professor.

“It’s strange. When I couldn’t find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not the Black Death nor seven hundred years, nor death nor things to come nor any other creature could ever separate me from your caring and concern. It was with me every minute.”

Sean Crawford

April, 2016

Calgary