I woke this morning with a head
like a fermenting pumpkin, ready to explode.
No, I do not have a late winter
cold. It’s just that I’m stuffed to the sinuses with unhappy news overload.
The UK is leaving the EU. Scotland
is leaving the UK. The Dutch and the Turks keep yelling at each other. Bad Vlad,
the new leader of the modern world, is busily sowing evil seeds in everyone
else’s garden.
Forrest Trump, the nutbar
president, ran out of people to insult this week so had more time to spend at
his Florida golf course making America great again.
The only cure for bad news
overload is to let the mind drift back to days long passed when the daily news
was more fun, certainly a lot less threatening.
Many folks who collected and wrote
the news back then did so outside the corridors of huge populations and power.
They were a lot closer to real people living real lives.
I always enjoyed reading Margaret
‘Ma’ Murray’s (Aug. 3, 1888 – Sept. 25, 1982) writings in the Bridge River-Lillooet
News from the B.C. interior. Her stuff was earthy and loaded with acid that
peeled the pretentions off people who thought they were much smarter than the
rest of us.
She told it like she saw it
(“that’s fur damshur!”) enraging politicians and others, who often threatened
her with legal actions or lickings. She rolled with the criticism saying:
“It’s a poor turkey who can’t pack
a few lice.”
Then there was Edith Josie who
wrote a column about life in the remote Yukon community of Old Crow, a place
you’ll never hear about these days unless some calamity or tragedy occurs
there.
Josie (Dec.
8, 1921–Jan. 31, 2010) was a Gwich’in whose Here
Are The News column appeared in the Whitehorse Star for 40 years. It told
of the comings and goings of life in the isolated village above the Arctic
Circle.
She was single woman
who had three children and wrote about giving birth to one.
“At 8:30 p.m. I had
baby boy and he’s 6 lb. . . . . I give it to Mrs. Ellen Abel to have him for
his little boy. She was very glad to have him cause he’s boy. I was in nurse
station and Miss Youngs sure treat me nice. Myself and baby I really thanks her very much for her good
kindness to me.”
Her writing was in
broken English and ungrammatical but it gave the outside world clear pictures
of life in that place, and presumably places like it.
Neither Ma Murray nor
Miss Edith had much formal education. Ma left school at age 13, Miss Josie at
14. They didn’t know many rules of writing, but that did not matter. What
mattered was the story.
You don’t hear many
stories these days from tiny, tucked away communities like Lillooet and Old
Crow. That’s a shame because the news of those places can tell us a lot about
Canada and Canadians.
And these places
produced stories that often brought you laughter. One of my favourites was
about a famous parrot in Carcross, Yukon and was written by my talented Canadian
Press colleague, Dennis Bell, who has since passed.
“The world famous Carcross parrot is probably
the oldest, meanest, ugliest, dirtiest bird north of the 60th parallel,” Bell
wrote.
“He hates everybody.
Which is understandable, because the damned old buzzard has resided within
spitting distance of a beer parlour since 1919 and has had to endure 64 years
of beer fumes, drunks who mash soggy crackers through the bars of his cage, and
phantom, feather pluckers.”
Bar patrons amused
themselves by feeding the parrot beer and shots of booze. Sometimes it got so drunk it fell off its perch. But then
someone taught it to sing Onward Christian Soldiers and it found religion and
quit drinking.
One day in the 1970s
it was found drumsticks up on its cage floor. It apparently died of old age. A
public funeral was held, which included a procession down the hamlet’s main street.
After the burial everyone went back to the hotel for drinks.
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