The voice in the grapevine

I was having a genuinely down moment saying goodbye at the end of a physical distancing visit to my son’s home in Hamilton.

We don’t get to see our children and grandchildren often now because of the pandemic. And when we do we can’t hug them, shake hands or even get close to them.

It’s depressing, not just for us but for millions of others.

I was already feeling down when I arrived for the visit. I had fought the miserable Toronto area traffic to get to my dentist’s office. After some less-than-joyful poking, drilling and grinding I was back cursing the Highway 403 traffic en route to Hamilton.

The visit was outside and brief and as we were saying goodbye, my son pointed to an alluring grapevine canopy at the rear of his house. He told me raccoons were driving him crazy, sneaking into the vines late at night and making off with the fruit.

As I listened, I put out my hand and leaned against the grapevine’s trunk. My down mood lifted as the vine’s energy pulsed beneath my fingertips.

“That’s from Compare Frank,” my son said. “He gave me a slip from one of his vines when we moved here many years ago.”

I clutched tightly the trunk, now the thickness of a large man’s wrist, and felt a surge of optimism and love of life. I was feeling the positive energy of my good friend Compare Frank. Although he passed away five years ago, I could feel his spirit flowing in that vine.

Compare Frank was Francesco Covella, my pal and the kid brother I never had. We called each other Compare, the Italian reference for comrade, or godfather.

The energy in the vine got me thinking about the Covid crisis and Compare Frank. How would he handle the pandemic, which has become one of the saddest periods of many people’s lives?

Sad not just because of the separation from family and friends. Not just because we can’t shake someone’s hand, or place a hand on their shoulder, or any of those other signs of goodwill and appreciation.

Sad because of all the hard-working, expectant folks who put their dreams and their money into small businesses that are suffering horribly. Sad because of the folks who are having trouble meeting the rent or the mortgage payment because their jobs have been suspended for months.

In a way I am glad Compare Frank is not here to witness the sadness, suffering and the nastiness that this pandemic has brought. They are the antithesis of his style of living, which was to be happy and work through difficulties with perseverance and patience.

I’ll never forget the scene when Compare Frank decided my old house in Ottawa needed a bigger basement. The project would require breaking concrete and digging out a nine by 12 space with hand shovels.

  

“It can’t be done,” I cried with unrestrained disgust.

Compare Frank turned his calloused palms upward and shrugged his shoulders.

“Compare,” he said, calling me by the special name bestowed when he had become my son’s godfather, “this is not difficult if you don’t want it to be. Let me teach you.”

The basement room got dug out, as I later recalled in a Readers’ Digest story, and in this column.

Compare Frank taught me not just how to shovel properly, but how to work through life’s difficult times.

This pandemic is more difficult than shovelling out a basement, no matter how deep or how hard the earth. There is the stress of having to remember to wear masks, avoid crowds, keep two metres space between everyone, including friends and family, and give up many things that are important parts of our normal lives.

A contrarian attitude about masks and physical distancing, and complaining about the inconveniences, distracts us from the critical work of overcoming the Covid-19 virus. We need to focus exclusively on getting the job done.

A week has passed since my visit and I still hear Compare Frank’s voice pulsing through the grapevine that he gave to his godson:

“Don’t think about how difficult the work is, or how much more remains to be done. Think positive and persevere. Focus on the task to overcome it, one shovelful at a time.”

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Mushrooms and dirty diapers

When I walk the woods these days I realize that I am seeing only a fraction what is here.

The trees, the low-growing bushes and the animals all are obvious. I see the white birches, the maples, magnificent oaks and pines, as well as the ferns and blueberry bushes.

Sometimes a deer or a bear slips quickly and quietly in and out of my view. The insects are not nearly as shy and cautious. They are seen, heard, and felt.

It’s easy to think of these abundant species of the plant and animal kingdoms as our entire world. They are only a part of it.

Unseen – actually hidden from us – are many thousands of species that are an important part of the forest. In fact, this forest would not exist without them.

These are the 144,000 of known species of organisms that make up nature’s third kingdom – the kingdom of fungi. Some experts believe there may be as many as two to almost four million species of fungi.

Despite those huge numbers, fungi have not been given the same prominence and amount of study as plants and animals. Only now are we starting to understand the importance of fungi, and their possible help in solving the problems of our future.

My interest in fungi was limited to mushrooms, so prominent this month on the forest floor after the recent rains, or the brown fungus that sometimes forms on a toenail. Other commonly-known fungi are yeast, rust, mildew and mould.

That has changed since a friend gave me a fascinating new book titled Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. The author is British biologist-writer Merlin Sheldrake, a magical moniker for a magical subject.

It is a complex book, but fascinating and readable, with page after page packed with information about the importance of fungi. I finished reading it with a sense that study of the fungi kingdom has been neglected in favour of plants and animals research.

Yet it was fungi that helped plants to begin living on land millions of years ago.

Some biologists believe that 90 per cent of living plants have a life-giving relationship with fungal networks entangled in their roots.

It’s a really cool relationship – tentacled fungi networks living deep in the dark soil help the tree to absorb moisture and minerals. In return, the tree collects sunlight, carbon dioxide and moisture from the open air to produce nutrients that it shares with fungi.

But most fascinating is the idea that fungi are not just the dumb and dirty little organisms that cannot communicate the way animals and some plants do. Entangled Life notes that some experts believe that fungal networks monitor large streams of data as part of their everyday existence.

Sheldrake speculates that if we were somehow able to tap into those fungal data streams we could learn more about the ecosystem, including soil quality, water purity and pollution.

We humans believe that a brain or mind is needed to have intelligence and cognition. Fungi do not have brains or minds but maybe they have other ways of gaining intelligence and knowledge and understanding – ways that we cannot see or understand.

Naturalist Charles Darwin, best known for his theory of evolution, wrote 150 years ago:

“Intelligence is based on how efficient a species becomes at doing the things they need to survive.”

Fungi certainly have found some way of staying alive and helping plants and animals – we humans included – to do likewise.

Fungi are important to humans. They help to provide us food such as mushrooms, bread, cheese and, of course, beer. They are important in making life-saving medicines such as penicillin, and chemicals.

Some fungi have powerful appetites for pollutants. Entangled Lives notes they can consume cigarette butts, some herbicides, crude oil, some plastics and even baby diapers.

One research project showed that a certain fungus consumed 85 per cent of a mass of soiled diapers over two years. During the process, the fungus produced edible oyster mushrooms that had no trace of human disease.

Anything that can turn dirty diapers into delicious oyster mushrooms surely offers some good possibilities for cleaning up our increasingly polluted world.

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A little dab’ll do ya!

From Shaman’s Rock

By Jim Poling Sr.

I am hopelessly out of touch with the world of 2020.

My hair has led me to that realization. I haven’t had it cut for five and half months and people have started to call me Doc, after Dr. Emmett Brown, the absent-minded professor in the movie Back to Future. Doc, with his wild grey curls, often looked like he had just stuck his finger in an electric light bulb socket. 

So, I needed something to tame my wild and crazy mane. My mind quickly drifted back decades to the days when my dad introduced me to Brylcreem, a favourite men’s hair cream in those days.

That memory set off a famous jingle dancing in my head,

“Brylcreem, a little dab’ll do ya!

“Brylcreem, you look so debonair.

“Brylcreem, the gals will pursue ya,

Simply rub a little in your hair!”

Brylcreem, a dab the size of a dime would style, strengthen and condition your hair. I wondered if it was still being made so I asked Google.

Google told me that Brylcreem was invented in Britain in 1928 by a company called County Chemicals in Birmingham. It was an emulsion of water and mineral oil stabilized by beeswax. It rapidly became popular, notably among Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots during the Second World War. These guys became known as the Brylcreem Boys.

My dad did not serve in the RAF but he was a Brylcreem Boy. He always had a tube of it on his dresser. And, as part of my growing up ritual he made sure I had a tube of my own.

I used it faithfully, trying to slick back my curls in hopes of developing the duck-cut style of the rock ‘n roll generation. But I never recall the gals pursuing me.

Then came the brush cut era and Brylcreem and I parted company.

Google tipped me that Brylcreem was still alive and reasonably well despite its advanced age. Unilever, that British-Dutch giant that sells more than 400 brands of food, products, drinks, and personal care products in almost 200 countries, was selling it in stores across the U.S. and Canada.

So out shopping I went, breaking the pandemic isolation that had me looking like Doc Brown. I really needed a tube of Brylcreem to get my head slickly under control.

My first stop was a popular large department store with a personal care products section the size of Yankee stadium. There was row upon row upon row of shelving loaded with enough shampoos, conditioners, and hair goos to grease 100 rock bands for a lifetime.

The last time I had gone looking at hair products, a few bottles or tubes of shampoo and hair conditioners occupied a tiny corner of one shelf. Now there were hundreds of all shapes, sizes and labelling screaming, “Pick Me!”

There was a shea butter conditioner with your choice of bentonite clay or charcoal. And, a ‘strong roots’ coconut oil with a label showing sliced coconut, plus an extra virgin oil conditioner with a photo of some tasty-looking Frantoio olives.

Back in the old days, mom scolded us to eat our fruits, vegetables and nuts, not rub them into our hair.

Most appetizing of all was an egg protein hair product whose label featured a golden waffle being smeared with egg yolk and maple syrup. I couldn’t imagine someone plastering their hair with such a scrumptious meal in a bottle.

I wondered if the 2020 version of Brylcreem would be that yummy. I never tasted it when I was a boy, but knew of someone who did. In Season 2 of The Sopranos, Junior Soprano said to a colleague:

"The Federal Marshals are so far up my . . . I can taste Brylcreem."

He didn’t describe the taste.

Despite the hundreds of hair goos and other hair stuff on the endless rows of shelves, there was no Brylcreem.

I did find it online, however, and when I need more I won’t have to go to a store and become confused about whether I’m in the hair products or grocery aisle.

Better still, maybe the Covid pandemic will end someday, I’ll get a haircut and Brylcreem can return to the past.

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Cool air and a warm blanket

If I stand on tiptoes this week I can see August. That makes me happy because I’ve never been a fan of July. Too much heat. Too many people.

August is a much better month, with thinning summer crowds and the first hints of cool fall air. And, of course, the further August progresses, the cooler the temperatures become.

My Northwestern Ontario blood likes coolness, which gets me thinking about pulling out the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) point blanket. That blanket on my bed is a sign that the hot, muggy nights of summer are being pushed aside by temperatures more to my liking.

This year, however, I’ll pull out the HBC blanket with some discomfort. These blankets are a significant part of history, and history and the objects that it reflects, are under attack.

Monuments, statues and other memorials are being torn down or defaced in many parts of the world. It all seems to have started with the U.S. Confederacy and slavery, but has spread to other historical issues and historically prominent persons.

The HBC blanket could be easily identified as an item with some history that no one should glorify.

The Hudson’s Bay Company introduced the wool point blanket with its coloured stripes and points (black markers) in 1779. It got the idea for the blanket from French weavers who developed a point system as a way to specify a blanket’s finished size.

The points were simple black lines on a corner of the blanket. One black line or point indicated a small blanket; five indicated a large one.
Blankets became a currency during the fur trade, with merchants pricing them according to their number of points.

Point blankets were taken in trade by Indigenous people for furs. They became valuable household items used as sleeping covers, robes and for gift giving. But for some Indigenous people the HBC point blanket represents colonialization and the dispossession of their land and culture.

The British infected trade blankets with smallpox as a chemical warfare means to eradicate Indigenous populations. Jeffery Amherst, commander of British forces in North America, suggested this during the 1763 Pontiac Uprising in Pennsylvania.

“You will Do well to try to Innoculate [sic] the Indians by means of Blankets, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race,” Amherst wrote in a letter to a subordinate.
Amherst is considered the architect of the British campaign to take what is now Canada from the French.

His name is honoured in Canadian streets and towns – Amherst, Nova Scotia, Amherstburg, Ontario – but those namings are being reconsidered. The city of Montreal last year renamed Amherst Street Rue Atatekan, a Mohawk word denoting equality among people.

Although Amherst was prominent in military campaigns in Canada, there is no evidence of infecting blankets, or of even suggesting the idea, in Canada. Some writers have said there was but that is pure speculation based on what happened in Pennsylvania.

Such a monstrous action certainly would not have benefitted the Hudson’s Bay Company. Killing customers is not smart business.

Wanting to topple historic monuments and cancel tributes given to some prominent historic figures is understandable, especially when you consider cruel racists like Amherst. 

However, despite knowing the history of trade blankets, I plan to keep and cherish my HBC point blanket. To me it is an important reminder of past wrongs and the racism that continues today against Indigenous peoples.

It is a reminder that the times and the people were different back then, and many thought and acted in ways that most of us now find repulsive.
I wrote “most of us” because it is evident that despite the passage of time allowing us to create a more diverse and better educated society, intolerance and racism remain a problem.

The Bolsonaro administration in Brazil and the U.S. Trump administration both are attacking Indigenous lands and rights in favour of special interests. Here’s one Bolsonaro quote from the past:

“It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians.”

Closer to home we have Prime Minister Trudeau and RCMP Commissioners Brenda Lucki both admitting systemic racism exists in the national police force. 

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The Riddle and the Madness

The riddle and the madness

 

From Shaman’s Rock

By Jim Poling Sr.

 

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

 

That’s the question the Mad Hatter asks Alice in Lewis Carroll’s fantasy Alice in Wonderland.

 

Alice ponders the question but does not have the answer.

 

“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter prods.

 

“No, I give up,” Alice replies. “What’s the answer?”

 

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” says the Mad Hatter.

 

That scene from the Hatter’s tea party is today’s reality. Our world has become a whacko tea party with characters just as nutty as the Hatter, the March Hare and the Cheshire cat. 

Too many people don’t have the slightest idea of how to conduct themselves during this awful Covid pandemic. We are living in a world of Mad Hatter mania with crazy behaviour increasing everywhere.

Confrontations over wearing protective masks have become numerous and ugly. They have led to racist rants and violent scenes resulting in injuries and deaths.

Last week’s police shootings of disturbed elderly men here in Haliburton County and outside Detroit, Michigan are examples. Both began with arguments about wearing masks.

 

There is Mad Hatter-style frenzy on the roads and highways. The Canadian Automobile Association (CAA) says 59 per cent of Canadians polled reported having seen an increase in dangerous driving since the Covid crisis began.

 

Speeding topped the list of observed bad driving behaviours. Forty-four percent of those polled by CAA said they saw drivers speeding in the last few months.

 

Speeding has not been in the top five of CAA’s observed unsafe driving behaviours since 2013.

 

Aggressive behaviour is being seen more often while shopping. Racist rants are being reported more frequently.

 

Clerks have lost some of their previous pleasantness, and you can’t blame them. Despite precautions, they are exposing themselves every day to customers who might be carrying the virus.

 

Customers also have become more unpleasant. A Home Hardware in Vancouver has seen enough bad customer behaviour to post a sign telling customers that disrespecting and abusing staff is unacceptable.

 

The sign reads:

 

“If you think you will be unable to behave in a calm, respectful manner and accept our current situation with empathy and an expectation of compromise, we kindly ask you to shop elsewhere.” 

 

Businesses, on top of suffering huge financial losses, are seeing an increase in crime. Commercial break-ins in Vancouver between March 18 and April 15 were up 147 per cent compared with the same period last year. Residential break and enters were up 51 per cent.

 

Police forces in Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, and York Region also are reporting increases in business break-ins

 

There are various theories about why folks go bonkers during stressful times. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the Russian author whose novels often delved into madness, believed that madness is a manifestation of moral or spiritual crisis.

 

I believe our current craziness comes from the many stresses of modern living finally reaching the boiling point. We live with worries about the environment, changing climate, overpopulation, out-of-control drug addiction and an unstable economic situation. Then, along comes Covid-19.

 

Social media is aiding the madness. Anyone can pull out a smartphone and rant and rave and spew misinformation and other nonsense to an audience of millions.

 

Atop all that is a disheartening lack of strong leadership. Here in Canada, government responses seem to be to keep writing cheques. That’s helpful in some ways but it would be nice to have regular assessments of the impact on the national debt and how it will get paid down. Therein lies another potential future crisis.

 

What’s happening in the United States, which has Covid-19 problems worse than many banana republics, makes the Mad Hatter’s tea party look calm, reasonable and sane. Watching TV reports of the U.S. governments’ responses to the crisis is like walking through an 1800s madhouse.

 

There are many difficult riddles about how to kill this terrible pandemic, how to open schools safely, how to get economy back on track while keeping people safe. So many riddles and so many leaders who haven’t the slightest idea.

 

Meanwhile, the Mad Hatter’s riddle remains: Why is a raven like a writing desk?

 

The answer is obvious to me: Because Edgar Allan Poe, the American writer of stories dark and macabre, wrote on both.

 

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The water lily’s lesson

The pleasures of summer are numerous, but one of the best is passing a pond or lake edge where water lilies have made their home.

These plants, with their large, flat floating leaves, are in bloom. Their dazzling white star-shaped flowers with golden centres provide a snowy coolness on summer days that have become far too hot.

It’s not just the beauty of the water lily blooms that catches our attention. There is no shortage of blooms at this time of year. Roadside daisies, thistle, milkweed and many others have blooms that brighten the summer landscape.

Water lilies are extra special because they offer a lesson about living. It’s an important lesson in these times of pandemic and the changes it is bringing to our lives.

These plants have developed what scientists call evolved adaptations; special characteristics or traits that allow them to live in abnormal environments.

Their broad floating leaves, and the stems that support them, have wide air spaces to hold the carbon dioxide and oxygen needed to make the plant’s food through photosynthesis. Those unusually large air spaces provide buoyancy that holds the flowers and leaf pads on top of the water where they can collect sunlight and allow pollination by insects and wind.

The lily pads are like solar panels that capture the sunlight needed to provide energy to the plant.

The flowers open into a bowl shape when touched by the sun, and close when it begins to disappear. The petals fold over themselves when they close, making them watertight, another neat adaptation.

These adaptations, evolved over centuries, have allowed the water lily to live productive lives in an unusual environment.

Water lilies are not just pretty. They can be useful to humans and some other animals.

Parts of the water lily are edible. Their raw leaves can be chopped and added to soups. The flower buds can be cooked or pickled. Seeds from the flowers contain protein and oil and can be ground into flour.

Various societies have found medicinal uses for water lilies. The plants contain gallic and tannic acids, often used in the pharmaceutical industries. Parts of the water lily have been used in poultices, eyewashes, gargles and for a variety of minor ailments such as upset stomach.

Moose are regular users of water lilies and other aquatic plants and can be seen at this time of year standing in ponds, slurping water lily pads. They are an important part of a moose diet because they have sodium content higher than woody vegetation and moose require sodium.

Moose will dive to get at parts of plants growing beneath the water surface. Their large nostrils act as valves that keep water out when they go underwater. Moose are believed to be able to dive as deep as six metres.

The lesson of the water lily is that to have a productive life that helps others you need to be able to adapt to changing conditions.

We can’t quickly change the physical aspects of our bodies. That’s an evolutionary process that takes centuries.

We can, however, change our thinking and our ways to adapt to a world being altered by a changing climate, increased population densities and more new diseases.

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The inconvenience of Covid: Just suck it up

Look deep inside the pandemic and you’ll see other sicknesses. Not simply sicknesses, but full-blown epidemics. An epidemic of selfishness, plus an epidemic of misinformation. 

Both are making it more difficult to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic that has infected millions and killed hundreds of thousands. 

Despite the rising tolls, people are having a hard time accepting - or are refusing to accept – restrictions and procedures that take away some of their pleasurable pastimes and cause inconveniences. 

There’s much whining about what we can’t do. Can’t have parties. Can’t go to the bars to have fun with friends. Can’t have those fabulous beach parties. Can’t go to a baseball game. Can’t go to the movies. 

If all the energy going into what we can’t do was directed to what we can do, it might help us to return to some semblance of normal. 

Those who won’t wear a face covering can’t seem to understand that wearing a mask helps to protect other people and creates confidence and trust. 

What would you prefer: to walk into a store in which no one is wearing a face covering, or into a store where everyone has their mouth and nose covered? I’ll take the latter choice, and I’ll bet many others would as well. 

Wearing a mask provides some protection, and creates the confidence that shoppers need to spend time in stores. More people less fearful about entering a store, means more spending and help for a devastated economy. 

Some say wearing a mask infringes on their personal freedoms. Crises sometime require that personal freedoms give way for the common good. 

Yes, wearing face coverings and physical distancing is inconvenient. The medical experts, however, say that without a vaccine and effective medications those two things are the best defences against spreading Covid-19. 

Too many of us are focussed on the individual inconveniences. That’s selfishness, when this cruel pandemic demands thinking in terms of community, not individuals. 

Selfishness is a harsh term and perhaps not totally fair in a time of crisis. Selfishness and self-preservation are close relatives and when a person senses danger, self-preservation can turn quickly into selfishness. 

Some of what appears to be selfishness actually is ignorance by people who have underestimated the seriousness of the virus, or imagine that anything they might do could never exacerbate it. 

These are people who have not absorbed what is happening in hospitals. If they viewed the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients coughing up foamy blood, or being zippered up in body bags, they might accept that not wearing a mask when appropriate or attending crowded gatherings can spread the disease.

Complicating all this is an epidemic of misinformation. Antonio Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general has said the world is fighting a “growing surge of misinformation."

"Harmful health advice and snake-oil solutions are proliferating," he has said. "Wild conspiracy theories are infecting the Internet.” 

This bad information often spreads faster than truthful, fact-based information. It causes confusion and drives the gullible and the poorly-informed to become Covidiots who do dumb things. Like the person who put $50 bills in a microwave to sterilize them. Or, the apartment dweller who covered the elevator buttons with plastic wrap to prevent spread of the virus. 

I hate to keep harping about the SARS experience of almost 20 years ago, but it gave us important advice on getting through a pandemic – communicate clear and truthful information and keep politics out of conversations and decisions. 

Following that advice builds public trust, which eases fears and helps people accept individual restrictions and inconveniences. 

Politics introduced into a pandemic is as dangerous as the virus itself. That is obvious in the United States, now collapsing under the wild advance of Covid-19. 

The Ontario commission investigating SARS did not find evidence of political interference back then, but noted that many people suspected there was. 

“The mere perception of political interference, whether true or not, will sap public confidence and diminish public cooperation,” the Commission said in its reports. 

The tools for fighting Covid-19 are clear as a cloudless sky:

Wear a mask, follow physical distancing, don’t listen to political nonsense, ignore social media nonsense and other sources of misinformation. 

Restrictions and inconveniences? In the lingo of the younger folks, just suck it up.