Week 6: Remembering the 50's...

All of us at one time or another listened to our grandparents telling us how things were in the good old days.  Some of us rolled our eyes heavenward silently mouthing, “Oh, no, not AGAIN!” We were NEVER going to grow old like them complaining that things these days just aren’t what they were. No siree. Not us. But nearly 60 years have gone by and I find that I LIKE remembering. So if you’re young and you’re listening in on this conversation go ahead and roll your eye balls if you must but it won’t stop me because I am finally at that point of life where I can begin to say, “I remember when...”

The richest memories are of family and neighbourhood where on weekends  almost every  kid could be found at the Bayview Theatre’s Saturday Matinée.  The cost?  25 cents plus a dime to spend next door at the penny candy shop.  We’d wander into the theatre clutching little paper bags filled with the likes of black balls, powdered sherbets with licorice ‘straws’, ‘Thrills’ gum and some tiny candy bits called ‘Sen Sens’ which burned our mouths. Theaters were designed to gracious proportions with second floor ‘smoking lodges’ and although the big MGM studio days were drawing to a close movies were still a big event. Excitement was palpable as heavy red velvet drapes would draw aside announcing the start of another feature film and a hush would fall over the crowd. We still had movie REELS in the 50's and these required changing midway through films.  So intermissions were filled with  draws and excited kids would check and recheck ticket stubs hoping to win something from the mountain of prizes up on stage -  like the blue and black striped vinyl beach bag which I won and just adored, carrying it with me everywhere.  And there were other events like YoYo demonstrations - remember ‘walk the dog’? - or hula hoop contests.  

TVs were the new ‘big thing’ in the 50’s - ‘I Love Lucy’, ‘Donna Reed’, Jackie Gleason’s ‘The Honeymooners’, the iconic ‘Ed Sullivan’, Jane Meadows in ‘Our Miss Brooks’ and then the family shows - ‘Leave it to Beaver’, ‘Make Room for Daddy’ and ‘Father Knows Best’ in which Robert Young invariably DID know best each and every week. On Fridays Mom would buy a package each of peanuts and jube jubes (which USED to taste like real fruit) and mixed them all up in a bowl before we settled in to watch Raymond Burr solve his most recent case in the long-running hit, ‘Perry Mason’. Television changed the way we ate and the creation of TV frozen dinners was pretty much inevitable.  We would all eat at least occasionally off of wobbly ‘TV tables’ parked in front of our Admirals or RCAs. This was a big departure for us 50’s kids who were the end of that generation which sat around the dining room table together EVERY NIGHT talking about school and work and what WERE those neighbours up to?

I remember Hallowe’en when it was spelled with an apostrophe and it was a night to go out to scare and be scared. Every kid was known by every adult on the street and no one worried.     Mr. and Mrs. Gregg (we NEVER called adults by their FIRST names or the sky would fall, wouldn't it?) 3 doors down always made sponge taffy and we kids bee lined over there not wanting to miss one single sticky burnt-sugar bite.  Costumes were pretty simple and home made and usually involved sheets or ballet outfits or something else we could find around the house. But there was nothing mundane or simple about how excited these costumes made us feel. 

Schools were the hub of neighbourhoods in the 50's and Moms knew that’s where their kids would to be found after school - playing ball, skipping, shooting alleys.  It all felt and was so safe. ALL the Moms in the neighbourhood were the boss of us back then. Telling us to go home, do up our coats, eat our bread crusts and TAKE OFF YOUR MUDDY BOOTS! No one was bussed or car pooled in and teachers remembered all our brothers and sisters - saints and sinners alike - whom they had taught in preceding years.  We sat in straight little rows in class and our teachers (we each only had ONE teacher) knew us almost better than did our families. We wore uniforms back then and proudly sewed on them our badges of scholarship earned for being good students (what choice did we have in the 50’s?) and singing in the choir.  

It would take another life time to remember it all.  Some things I really do miss like milk deliveries- including buttermilk although Mother said it wasn’t as good as it was in HER day when the cream rose thickly to the top of the bottles.  We could still brag of glass bottles in the 50’s and milk delivered directly into quirky little milk boxes built into the side of every house in the neighbourhood - long since gone or bricked up now I imagine. And Mr. Giovanni would park his truck right in the middle of our street to sell families Italian bread warm still from his ovens. Garbage was put out in paper bags and mail got delivered TWICE a day at Christmas. Loblaw’s had GREEN STAMPS and after licking thousands of these into endless books my ever-practical mother cashed in ours for a bathroom scale.  How DID my young imagination survive?

Baby-boomers grew up with a collective memory of peaceful times, stability and future vision.  Born after the end of WW2 and at the onset of terrific growth in technology, science and medicine, we were wrapped in a sense of security and an open ended vision of our futures. It wasn’t anything that was said to us - we just knew it.   Looking forward there was nothing we couldn’t achieve. We all understood the same code of conduct - good manners, respect for elders, hard work, obey the law, go to church, save your money, don’t waste time and don’t buy ‘on time’. My mother would have insisted I add, “And, don’t spend money on Monday or you will spend it all week long!” And we looked up to adults. Every policeman was our friend. Teachers were THE LAW - there was no disrespect tolerated and none contemplated - we were all too terrified of adult authority. And if our teachers didn’t catch us you can be sure our parents would! 

No one is going to put real fruit flavour back into jube jubes or reintroduce the 25 cent matinée. But the times were gentle and dear to us and for that reason we want to remember as much as we can for as long as our gray cells can manage the effort. 

Thanks for travelling with me on my footpath this week...

Gillian

BBPP Weekly Health Check:

Mind:Having lived in Bracebridge only 2 years, it still all feels pretty new to me here.  Getting out and about with a camera and taking pictures of various places and objects makes the town feel more 'familiar'.  It's like being at a party where you only know the host - and him just slightly.  But once you start working your way around the room and getting to know people, you begin to relax and feel at home.  Taking pictures makes me feel more at home every walk I take with places and even individual trees and birds taking on a familiar, friendly association.

Body: Another 2 pounds bit the dust this week.  Over the past 2 months the systolic pressure has dropped by 30 points and the diastolic by a dozen or so. This is one time when 'nowhere to go but down' is a GOOD thing!  And it all results from walking about enjoying the beautiful town of Bracebridge.

The Artist Soul:Did you hear that lonely robin singing at 3:30 a.m. the other night?  Smell the lilacs?  Feel the cool spray from the Falls? 

Week 5: On the theme of solitude, or “How I became a card-maker”.

Late last evening I bade good night to the laptop, the computer and the stuffed St. Bernard which sits - undusted - on the printer.  Time to find a new cat pal.  Ya think?  Something that breathes and moves and maybe meows back once in awhile.   A little furry person that would make demands and run by in the occasional blur. People sometimes ask if I don't find it hard to live and work alone spending so much time in silence.  Since much of the day is given over to emailing customers, suppliers and friends, I'm not sure how deeply that silence extends anymore.  And I do love some pretty noisy kinds of things - Klezmer music, railway trains, raccoons fighting over fish in the moonlight and fire engines going full blast.  You betcha. But yes, for the most part, I do live in quiet and solitude, embracing it fully. And it has been pretty much life long.  Even at 5 years of age - too little to read much - I would leaf through my older brother's Rand McNally Atlas hunting down quiet, lonely looking places to dream about.  I suspected these would be without tall buildings, cars and the city noise there was even back in 50’s Toronto.  I’d stare hard at the unnamed places high at the top of the map of Canada, wondering and restless. This wanderlust was helped further along by an old 45 rpm vinyl I would play over and over and OVER again to the saintly forbearance of our neighbours, the Dorseys. And, lord forgive me, I sang right along with it:  “The Westward wind... is a restless wind... a restless wind that yearns to wander..."  Such a dreamy, earnest child. I knew very likely these map places with no names were different from any I'd experienced in my young life.  And this bore true in later years, when I made a journey to the arctic, travelling up the MacKenzie River to the delta region by boat into Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk and then finally over water by plane to Banks Island and Fox Inlet.  And yes, it was quiet there - a whole vast island of solitude - and it was quite wonderfully different and mysterious. We boated in crystal clear waters, ate fresh arctic char right out of the icy waters and feasted on local caribou.  We dug our ice cream out from the natural permafrost freezers in the ground.  No need for Frigidaires up there.  What I remember most about it all now in retrospect was the howl of the incessant wind, the Inuit people’s sing-song voices and the cry of the circling sea birds high overhead all filling that solitude and quenching the soul. The theme of silence prevailed to such extent that in my late 20's and over a period of 10 years, I began to look at the question of living life as a nun - very particularly the life of a contemplative. I visited a cloistered monastery spending time with the sisters sharing in the rhythm of their day.  I recall awakening early each morning to a bell ringing at my door and Sister who would call out each of our names - calling us sequentially to consciousness and chapel.  There I would mouth sync along not wanting to disturb the pure notes rising from their Gregorian chants and the sung ‘office’ - the official prayers of the church - which rose clear and high as one awe-inspired voice of praise and reverence.  We started the day lightly tidying and cleaning and later I joined them in making altar bread, the work which financed their lives. Even nuns, I discovered, have bills to pay.  There, as in the arctic, I did find peace, mystery and food for the soul. But the questions of our lives and our hearts can be hungry ones and in the end, despite witnessing those lives so beautifully lived, it did not fill my heart or answer the questions asked. Nor did life at another convent where I eventually did enter to become a nun.  I left there within the year.  It was not for me and not my particular call to solitude.  By now I was devastated and truly without compass. Who on this earth takes 10 years to decide anything about anything? Yet here I was and quite at the end of knowing what to do next.  I had tried every door and it had been such a long process.  Life’s ‘call’ is called a 'call' for a reason though and really when the sacred asks questions in our lives, we just have to answer them.  It's like a loud door buzzer that just will NOT stop buzzing. You gotta go see what and who is there - and what they want - or risk one giant headache. As with a lot of things in life, the best answers can be laughably simple and arrive simply too if we give them a chance.  One night at home after supper with a few friends, I asked one of them, a painter-artist:  “Frances, what do I do now?”  To which she replied without skipping a beat, “Make cards”.  Don’t laugh.  That’s all it took.  I started full time that week and here we are 23 years later - Card City.  I suppose there are lots of morals to this story. I’ll leave that part of the story-telling up to you all.  For me, at this moment what’s important in the retelling of it is that in pulling these threads together I can see more of the cloth of my life - brought together into one single-slide view. Thanks for travelling with me on my footpath this week... Gillian BBPP Weekly Health Check: Mind: Too busy this week.  Some times it's hard to keep life simple.  Have begun working on some camera tricks.  ISO, landscape shots, metering distance.  One button at a time. Stay tuned... Body: Lost another 2 pounds but the BP is sky high.  Again.  Need to keep the faith.  Walked every single day to great enjoyment. The Artist Soul:  Had a couple of lovely visual moments along a trail here in Bracebridge which leads up to Woodchester Villa.  The first surprise was to see multiple patches of red trilliums followed moments later by white ones.  And then, still on the trail as I rounded a turn, there lay ahead a most beautiful collage of limes and dark greens.  It was the late evening sun brilliantly hitting spots in a patch of trees and ground cover.  Took my breath clear away.  Tried a photo and captured it a little bit at least.

Week 4: On discipline, moderation and the soul's passion..

Work is piled up this week - Mother's Day orders to get out, birthday and wedding crackers underway, new card catalogues to print, and a big corporate order to fill. It takes lots of discipline to work as an artisan studio filling highly customized jobs and juggling irregularly arriving orders with all-too-regular bills; working into the wee hours many nights of the week. Sigh.


Thankfully the biz has generated piles of work this year and I feel oh-so-gratefully relieved.  It’s been years and years and YEARS with agonizingly slow growth. And the birth of it all can’t come a moment too soon for this old girl and the friends who have ‘angsted’ right along with me. Honestly I am physically, mentally and spiritually pooped by it all. BRING ON SUCCESS, I say!


I remember, gratefully, my wonderful Doctor empathizing with me over this years ago, saying, “Gillian, you have so many ‘NOs’ in your life!”


And there have there been many NO's – in spades.
“NO, you can’t afford new shoes” and “NO you can’t garden this weekend, dear girl. there are ORDERS to see to” and “NO you can’t have your prescriptions filled yet - JUST STAY WELL ANOTHER WEEK.” and "Walk away from that tomato, darling, because it is NOt in this week’s grocery budget” and, annually, of course there is - “NO, there can be NO cottage vacation this year...NO you may NOt have another cat-pal just now... and NO, there can be NO new i-Mac.” and, finally,  “NO, girl, you definitely, very most definitely, canNOt have that second muffin!”  No, No, NO!

Well, shoot.


It has taken SO MUCH DISCIPLINE. Isn't discipline another word for ‘moderation’? A little reining in of one's self in order to keep life on a middle path, avoiding the penalties of extremism. After all that’s why we don’t eat that second muffin, right? So I am kind of amazed to find out at this late stage that really discipline has been an extreme in my life – my personal Abraham Maslow-ian path to meeting the ‘hierarchy of needs’; to keeping the light of creativity burning, however tentatively at times, in the soul. Because somewhere so deep inside that I can’t even tell you where exactly the place is, is the need to create. And for that I have been willing, even almost gladly and needfully willing, to embrace extreme discipline and to give up just about everything in grateful return.


There is an inner spring-shoot of personal, spiritual passion that keeps insisting it’s way up though the grounds of moderation. You just can’t trample on it forever and still keep on really 'living'. It’s that simple. Grow it must - to be what it was born to be. I think we all can be a little afraid at times of extremes, tending to rein them in. And it’s not just all about the excesses of second muffins and fat hips we are worried about. We are wary to startle or burden others with what we fear may be our excesses. Wary to scare them or drive them away with the passions in our hearts and of our dreams. Wary to scare ourselves even in the course of trying to express to ourselves, the passions that lie so very deeply within us. We think possibly we might find, should we try, that all hell breaks loose and we can’t put Pandora back in her box. Our self-understanding and relationships with others may irrevocably change and THEN what will we do! And so we go on with life dressed in muted personas but with a growing, uneasy suspicion there is a personal message we are not hearing and there is something we need very deeply to be doing - and are not.  And the clock that waits for no one, ticks on.


Being an artisan there is an inborn drive to express passion and to midwife creativity and dreams– to realize these no matter how much or how long this might take us. But, as I get older, I realize that even the creativity of my work is not all of my soul's work and is not the sum of my human soul’s passion. Now, approaching 60, I find there is an additional kick-in-the-pants, to meet with whatever honesty and integrity I can muster, other, unlived passions of being human. This is a highly personal place to be. And it is sacred. I don’t know what the biblical equivalent would be. It’s not a ‘Moses at the burning bush’ kind of moment. 'Have been there, done that' anyway, as the saying goes, when I entered the convent many years hence and again when I became a card-maker. This is another, more mature moment.  It is, I deeply believe, a moment in preparation of our meeting with God.




I was working on my line of quote cards this week and came across this gem from Eleanor Powell: “What we are is God's gift to us. What we become is our gift back to God.” So I am on this footpath trying to meet - full monty - life's passions, know them, dance merrily with them, cry with them and discover in them the most sacred gifts that they are. No answers this week. Just a kick in the pants. Just the start of a long walk.


Thanks for travelling with me on my footpath this week...
Gillian




BBPP Weekly Health Check:


Mind: It’s hard to find the time to give the mind the freedom to just flow. The work and financial pressures are so unrelenting. But I am sticking to my plan grabbing one whole block of time each week for the Bracebridge Photo Project. My mind now has a little oasis to look forward to every week – time to ‘see’ with the camera, time to reflect and let suppressed thoughts flow. It is freeing up more mental space for the work week too. Took me 23 years to figure this out? Duh.

Body: BP took another dip this week. Legs are limbering and feeling stronger, pulse rate is slowing. YEAH walking!

The Artist Soul: (Written mid-week while sitting on the summer dock, feet dangled over the Muskoka River at BraceBridge Bay.) We’ve had a long dry spell and the waters over the falls are greatly diminished; yet the river continues to run fast. A late day sun is kissing the water with shine and sparkle. A steady breeze is travelling the length of the river carrying with it the strong fishy smell of spring. And also the voices of the two women discussing how, in concert, to turn their canoe in the waters. A black fly has zeroed in on my space and I heartily decline acquaintanceship. Time to go home and make dinner.