In Jay's Corner

   Ten years ago a determined young couple bought the Firehouse Restaurant beside Ox Narrows on Haliburton County’s Kushog Lake. They worked doggedly to develop it as a casual eating and gathering place for the cottagers, full-time residents and visiting outdoor enthusiasts who enjoy the wild beauty of this lake country.

The Fire House on Kushog Lake

   The couple, Jay Manning and Anita Maracle-Manning, expanded their restaurant vision into a base camp for exploring the extensive wilderness trails developed for ATVs, snowmobiles, canoeists and campers. They also offered more outdoor enjoyment through fishing derbies and golf tournaments. In short, they did everything to develop a solid business that would provide enjoyment for others.

   Last fall their vision suffered a devastating blow. Jay was told he had a brain tumour. He went through surgery and radiation treatment and now is into a second round of chemotherapy. Through all the medical treatments they have been trying to keep the business running.

   Now, Jay and Anita are not only fighting his cancer, they are struggling to pay for the drugs that his doctors say are needed to help him win the fight. The Ontario hospital insurance system will not pay for these drugs, which friends say are costing tens of thousands of dollars. One of these friends, Ellen Wiley, has started a campaign to help Jay and Anita.

   Ellen said in a recent email: “They have provided us all with sincere friendship for years. It is now time for all of us to step up to the plate to help them.”

   People can help by spreading the word through social networks, offering support, and if they wish, through financial donations to the In Jay’s Corner campaign. Anyone who wants to help or to receive more information should contact Ellen. Her co-ordinates:

Ellen Wiley

email: ewiley@coldwellbanker.ca
Coldwell Banker Wiley Real Estate, Brokerage Dorset

1-800-563-7593
[705]766-2182
Fax: [705]766-1230

Ellen also has established a PayPal account at: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=4U52NGYVE35EN

Never Forgetting February

   November is the traditional month of remembrance, but for some of us February is just as important.

   In February 1943, 70 years ago, the American troop ship Dorchester was torpedoed in the North Atlantic. Roughly 700 of the more than 900 aboard perished, including four chaplains, one Jewish, one Catholic and two Protestant.

   There was panic on the decks of the Dorchester as soldiers desperately scrambled for life preservers. The four chaplains tried to calm the soldiers and in the end gave their own life jackets to men without them.

   The action of the four chaplains has been called one of greatest acts of heroism of World War Two.

   One of the Protestant chaplains was Captain Clark Poling of the Dutch Reformed Church. He was the seventh generation of Poling ministers and his father was the Rev. Daniel Poling, editor of the Christian Herald.

   Decades ago the U.S. issued a stamp commemorating the heroism of the chaplains. A chapel in Philadelphia was dedicated to them.

   Time, however, slowly buries remembrances. The story of the Four Chaplains is unknown now to most people.

   This week the Los Angeles Times helped to keep the story of the Four Chaplains alive. It’s recollection of the Dorchester sinking can be found at: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-four-chaplains-20130211,0,3355001.story

Addicted Governments

More new evidence supporting the opinion that governments are addicted to tobacco revenue but less than committed to helping people, especially Natives and the poor, escape the smoking habit.

   The American Lung Association is reporting that U.S. state governments are taking in $25.7 billion in tobacco revenue annually but spending less than $0.5 billion on smoking prevention and control, which is a fraction of the $3.7 billion recommended by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The same situation exists in most governments around the world.

   In Canada, federal spending on tobacco control has dropped by 40 per cent in the last six years, tobacco info.ca (www.tobaccoinfo.ca/mag10/federal.htm) reports. Canadian governments take in $7.5 billion a year from tobacco revenue and tobacco taxation continues to increase and help fuel the contraband market.

   A cynic would say governments really can’t be dedicated to reducing tobacco use when they are so dependent on it.

   They certainly are not showing much commitment to reducing smoking among Natives. In Canada, roughly 50 percent of natives living on reserves still smoke compared to 19 percent of other Canadians. Thirty-two percent of American Indians smoke compared to 19 per cent of non-Indians.

   Smoking is most prevalent among the poor and those with poor access to good education. No wonder there is an Idle No More Movement.

More on this in Smoke Signals: The Native Takeback of North America’s Tobacco Industry (Dundurn Press).

Resolved: That Families Eat Together

So, it’s resolution time once more. Following a long-standing tradition, I won’t be making any. Why torture yourself? Resolutions are really wishes that are difficult to fulfil.

   Just plain wishes are much better. If they don’t come about, there’s no huge disappointment, but if they do it’s a wonderful bonus.

   There are so many things to wish for - wishes that would improve the world. So many, it’s best to pick just one.

   One that would make our world a better place concerns eating. But not just reducing how much and what we eat to lose weight.

   My wish would be that families, no matter how you define them, sit down to eat one meal together every day. No television, no smartfones, no iPads. Just people eating and conversing. Sharing thoughts. Sharing observations and ideas. Understanding each other and bonding relationships.

   A study in Britain recently found that fewer than one-third of British families sit down to eat together every night. Fewer than 10 per cent do not eat together once a week even though 42 per cent adults try to encourage family meals together.(you can read more about the study at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2235161/ ) 

   Other studies in different parts of the world show that eating together makes for better grades in school, healthier eating habits,  builds relationships and strengthens the ability to face problems and resist peer pressure.

   There is plenty of reading available on this topic, including The Surprising Power of Family Meals by author Miriam Weinstein.

   Happy New Year and best of luck with those resolutions!

A Voice of Strength and Hope

    Fresh fallen snow protested beneath the crush of my gumboots breaking trail down the unploughed lane. Dry, sharp squeaks, not unlike the cries of cheap chalk cruelly scrapped against too clean a blackboard.

   Skuur-eek, skuur-eek.

   The boots ignored the sounds. They moved on, ribbed rubber bottoms and laced high leather tops creating a meandering wake in the ankle deep snow. To each side of the trail, drifted snow leaned tiredly against the backsides of the bungalows, dropped there to rest by an impatient Christmas Eve blizzard just passed through.

   Faint strains of music joined the squeaking as I approached our back fence. I stopped to hear the music more clearly, now identifiable as singing voices escaping through an open window. I shuffled forward and listened to the notes float out crisply and clearly, then mingle with smoke rising from the chimneys. Notes and smoke rose together into an icy midnight sky illuminated by frost crystals set shimmering by thousands of stars, and the frosty moon the Chippewas called Manidoo Geezis, the little spirit moon of early winter.

   I held my breath to hear better and determined that the music was the Christmas carol O Holy Night, and that the notes came from the window in my grandmother's room. It was open to the cold because most people smoked cigarettes back then, and at gatherings cracked a window to clear the air. They sang the first verse, and when they reached the sixth line, the other voices ceased and one voice carried on alone:

   "Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices! O Niiii . . .iiight Diii…vine! . . . ." That's the part where the notes rise higher and higher until the singer reaches an awesome note.

   The solo voice belonged to my grandmother, Louise LaFrance, and I knew she hit that high note while sitting on the edge of the bed that was her prison. She was crippled with limb-twisting rheumatoid arthritis and suffered searing pain and the humiliation of being bedridden, a humiliation that included needing a bedpan to relieve herself and having her son-in-law lift her into the bathtub.

   The others stopped singing to listen to her. Each time she hit the high notes at the words 'O Night Divine', a shiver danced on my spine.

   When she finished singing O Holy Night, the other voices started up again, this time with Silent Night and other favourite carols. I went into the house and found Christmas Eve celebrants - my mom, dad and some neighbours - crowded into the 10-foot by 10-foot bedroom that was my grandmother's world. They sang long into the night, mostly in French because the neighbours were the Gauthiers who seldom spoke English to my grandmother and mother.

   The crippling arthritis had attacked my grandmother not long after my birth sixteen years before. It advanced quickly, twisting her fingers like pretzels, then deforming her ankles and knees. You could see the pain in her eyes and from my bedroom I could hear her moaning in restless sleep, sometimes calling out for relief. She took up smoking to ease the pain. Late into the night I would hear her stir, then listen for the scrape of a wooden match against the side of a box of Redbird matches. Then the acrid odour of sulphur drifted into my room, followed by the sweetness of smoke from a Sweet Caporal. Sometimes I would get up and go to her door and see the red tip of the cigarette glow brightly as she inhaled and I would go in and we would talk in the smoky darkness. Mostly the talk was about growing up and sorting through the conflicts between a teenager and his parents.

   After the singing ended that night, my mother served tortiere, which I slathered with mustard. Then we gathered at the tree and opened our gifts.

   I have long forgotten what I got that Christmas, and it doesn't matter. My real gift came many years later, and was an understanding of how that frail and twisted body came to produce such powerful and sweet notes. My gift was the realization that those high notes were not solely the products of the lungs. They were driven by something stronger than flesh - an unbreakable spirit. They came from strength far beyond anything that a mere body can produce. They came from the will to overcome.

   Adapted from Waking Nanabijou: Uncovering a Secret Past, By Jim Poling Sr., Dundurn Press 2007

We Pretentious Canadians

   Canadians. We are such pretentious pains in the ass.

   We immediately started the finger wagging and scolding as our American friends and neighbours tried to hold themselves together against the shock waves of the mass murder of 26 school children and teachers Friday.

   CBC National TV news, being far more intelligent than Americans and its own declining Canadian viewership, intoned how America just can’t seem to control the problem of guns like Canada has. Its reporters shook their heads sadly, pontificating that Americans probably never will get it right.

   The Toronto Globe and Mail rushed in with an editorial saying it is time for the U.S. “to cure its sick gun laws.” It seemed annoyed that yet again it was “forced” to write about mass shootings in America. It called the U.S. a murderous society led by a president who has stuck his head in the sand.

   In times of tragedy, real friends put their arms around those who are hurting and keep their yaps shut. They comfort and they give help, if and when they are asked.

   Americans will debate and eventually solve their problems with guns, and without scolding from holier-than-thou neighbours to the north. But first they need to deal with their grief.

Missing in Action

   It was hoped that the literary fad of omitting dialogue quotation marks in novels would simply slip silently away into the night. Regretfully, it has not.

   The fad appears to have started with Cormac McCarthy, who became hugely successful with his novels The Road and No Country for Old Men. McCarthy has said there is no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. (That’s a quote, incidentally). If someone can do something outside the norm and still be successful, others definitely will follow the Pied Piper.

   I've just finished reading Hologram for the King, which is a strong parable but takes some thought to figure out the messages the writer is trying to get across. Thought that is constantly interrupted by the use of a single long dash to denote the start of direct dialogue. There is nothing to show where it ends. It’s hard to figure out who is saying what, when and to whom.

   I finished Hologram and started into The Round House by Louise Erdrich, a favourite writer whose work grows stronger with each outing. Alas, Erdrich has been swept up by the fad: there are no dialogue quotation marks in the book. My mind is regularly distracted from the story while trying to figure out who has started and finished talking.

   Why make a reader work figuring out dialogue and risk distracting him or her from the story? Not using quotation marks is a silly, unnecessary technique that adds to the public perception that literature is pretentious.