Travelling across the Midwest by car and Western Canada by airplane, I have, of course, seen many bathroom-stall-hook faces in the last few weeks.
Today was my first coffee-cup-lid face, courtesy of Tim Hortons.
It was also my first face with a Fu Manchu moustache.
It’s December 13th, so is this the first day of Christmas?
Is that how it works?
As we hurtle along the I-40, the speaker — a radio DJ on Sirius — isn’t accessible for correction, but no, that’s not how the 12 days of Christmas work. I understand the confusion. I tend to see Christmas Day as the culmination of a season of plenty of plenty, but the 12 days start on Christmas Day. Signalling the start of something else, perhaps?
Last year’s video celebrated a select few of our 150 National Treasures — a Canada-wide perspective. This year’s version limits itself to celebrating a few of the wonders of my current home, Ottawa: the apolitical aspects, at least.
Never mind the irritatingly bouncy melody. Try not to be bothered by the forced cheeriness as well as the forced rhythm of the lyrics (mine or the original). Just relax and enjoy this new take on a traditional Christmas classic. Sing along, if you like.
Above all, enjoy Christmas Day this year. May it be the start of something new for yourself and for us all.
As we launch from home on our 4,000-km road trip to metro Phoenix, Willie Nelson plays in my head.
The next five days are a steady trudge across the USofA on a route carefully planned to skirt just south of the usual snow/freezing-rain belt, while also minimizing distance. In many places, it is not a route that requires any tricky navigation.
But in many places it does turn out to be a route that reviews some of the music in my memory.
Some is triggered by the State we’re zooming/trudging through.
Some is triggered by the town we’re staying in or by the exit we’re passing.
Friends in Low Places (as we stop for the night in Yukon, original home of Garth Brooks)
Some is triggered by the desert rushing past our windows along so much of the route.
And some is triggered by the late-afternoon sun at the end of every long day.
And it occurs to me how different everyone’s own play list would be, driven (haha) by the music they know and by their own unconscious associations.
Thanks to Wayne Holst for this thoughtful piece from the United Church Observer on the Huron Carol (National Treasure #126) and its complicated provenance and meaning.
The writing of Jesous Ahatonnia, as with all de Brébeuf’s work in North America, followed the Jesuits’ particular missionary strategy: full immersion into the culture of the targeted community — including adopting its language and customs — in order to earn people’s trust and convert them. “Thus after gaining [a potential convert’s] confidence we shall meet with better success,” wrote Jesuit founder Ignatius of Loyola. “In this sense we enter his door with him, but we come out our own.”
Here’s a link to the first photos from my mission to the sun, written about here.
I flip over my Audobon Birder’s Engagement Calendar 2018 to the day’s photo: a blue-footed booby, looking typically, um, stupid. The shot below is my photo, shared earlier in these pages, but IMHO all booby photos are much of a muchness in this dimension. They just never look astute, you know?
What?
I flip the calendar over to read the commentary accompanying their booby photo (taken by Patrick J. Endres). And I quote . . .
Innocence is often equated with stupidity. Hungry sailors, landing for the first time on tropical islands, found Blue-footed Boobies (Sula nebouxii) clumsy on land and easy to catch. Thus, they conferred on these big seabirds a lasting derogatory name. Yet these boobies, on Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands, are adept divers for the fish on which they live.
At the outset I was struck by that “innocence being equated with stupidity” comment, but by the end my attention had veered onto another tack.
Clumsy on land, but adept in the water, eh? Like walruses, seals, and penguins, I guess. Forty years ago at Sea Life Park on Oahu I saw penguins swimming in a three-storey glass tank: Talk about your “zoom zoom.” These little birds that stagger around awkwardly, almost comically, on land, are torpedoes under the water. Bats out of hell have nothing on them.
Clumsy on land, but adept in the water? Yeah. We all shine differentially in different environments: I myself might reasonably claim to be clumsy in motion, but graceful in stillness.
G.K. Chesterton, whose work I’ve been reading lately, might well have taken this notion in his own distinctive direction; perhaps saying something like this:
If we are clumsy in this world
it is because we are made for the next.
I can’t quite get there, but it’s an interesting thought. Maybe if we’re clumsy at one thing it is because we’re made for something else. And I’m pretty sure that it would be a happier world — or at least that I would be a happier me — if, when I see myself or someone else doing something laughable, I don’t laugh but, instead, think to wonder what it is that we do “do well.” And to marvel at that.
In Glasgow, one of my photographic targets — after the more-important bridges, of course — was the central train station, dating from 1879. Methinks it’s had a few updates since then. Continue reading
O wad some Power the giftie gie us,
to see oursels as ithers see us!
– Robbie Burns
With a father of Scottish heritage, I was introduced to this Burns quote early. But it wasn’t until today that I actually looked at the source poem: “To a Louse: On seeing one on a lady’s bonnet, at church.”
Yuck. Continue reading
With the dental hygiene appointment having run a tad overtime, I can almost hear the parking meter — which is now several blocks away — counting down. With some time pressure and with the wintry wind cutting between the buildings, I’m hoofing it pretty smartly through Ottawa’s mean streets. Or so I think until I note women of an uncertain age passing me pretty regularly. Sigh.
Never mind. I’m on a mission to get some exterior shots of Centre Block before the 10-year renovations begin. Who knows what it’ll look like next year? Continue reading
Posted: 2025 Jun 21
Thanks to John Whitman for this slightly dismayed face from downtown Ottawa.
This space is available for other submissions.
