The Old Man's Christmases

The old man goes on beyond his earned years

though heart misses beats and legs grow weak

and memory fades for recent events,

wondering why he’s still here

regretting harsh words of a long time ago,

and his selfish actions in having his say.

Yet he is still around at the top of each day

to count each blessing on his way,

with his friend for life of sixty-four years,

who brushed off her tears after all his misses

and backed up his play in spite of her fears,

since they met in the snow that long ago Christmas.

The old man remembers even longer ago

when the world, as now, was ill.

He was only six with no why’s or how’s,

in another new place with strange inside toilets,

with tonsils, scarlet fever and poverty,

depths of Depression and urban rebellion.

Even then the old man was grateful each day

for the grace and goodness of a lovely teacher,

the seasonal gathering of all the clan

and the sudden thump on the rented porch;

a huge turkey hamper in that strange urban isthmus

that gave the old man a new idea of Christmas.

In his last years the old man sees changing ways

of living for ME and fun and games,

of anthills of trillions of zeros and ones

all alone though in constant abbreviated contact

with Facebook friends and theTwitter tweet,

never knowing who they will “friend” or meet.

But then the old man thanks his artistic niece,

Linda the Activist, for using real English in reality style

Praising goodness and love in music she sends

created by boys and girls of Paraguay’s Landfill Harmonic Orchestra

and the Welsh Only Boys Aloud male chorus causing tears to amass

behind the old man’s admiring eyes this Christmas.

But last of all the old man sees a world of greed

of strife and hate, of wars and separation,

of incarnate evil, of madness and guns

and twenty grade ones and six young teachers

butchered in minutes by one spurt of madness

in the midst of seasonal joy at Newtown.

Yet the old man sees love and courage,

forgiveness and hope rise out of the grief,

a coming together of friends in their pain

and worldwide admission that we must change.

May all you abbreviated zeros and ones join a new class

to change the world to the old man’s true Christmas!

- 30 -

Escape: Dust Bowl to Rain Forest

“Uncle Sam, let me in!” According to my mother’s oft repeated story through childhood and youth, I coined that phrase in the U.S. Immigration Office at the Sumas, Washington border crossing in April of 1929. My parents had just been refused re-entry into their original promised land after trying to persuade officials to relent because my slightly older sister and I had been born there. I tried to console them with the threat that when I grew up I would return to that place to insist on my rights as an American born citizen.

So, insult added to injury, on the family’s return to our temporary home and reporting to Canadian Customs on the Huntingdon side of the border when questioned on the reason for their crossing to Sumas, they were informed that if their 1924 Studebaker was to stay in Canada, a duty on the value of the vehicle had to be paid. If they couldn’t raise the cash it had to be returned to Huntingdon for impoundment.

The old man’s memories of that event some 84 years ago returned after his recent viewing of the new Ken Burns photo story called The Dust Bowl. The many photos and stories going back to the twenties and thirties forcefully reminded me of my own family’s experiences, told as part of my parents’ story, A Family Diaspora, a book I self-published in 1997. In the chapter I called Footloose and Rootless in America I recounted the then personal memories, writings, family photos and other records which I thought then were exhaustive, provided by my siblings and myself. Some of my conclusions were in error as I discovered later.

In this issue I won’t go into the family travels from Russia to Germany, thence to the American arrival at New York’s Ellis Island and the arrival at Halstead, Kansas in December 1922. Their sponsors and bank loan guarantors were Mom’s American Schmidt cousins. That respite lasted four years during which Mom was the centre of attention in that community and thought she had achieved the American Dream. Dad worked in the flour mill, paid off the travel indebtedness, acquired a Model T touring car and seemed to be thriving.

In 1926, for reasons still unclear to me, the family packed up an old Model T truck piloted by Dad and the car driven by my then 13 year-old brother with the rest of the family, including me as a foetus, along gravel roads, camping and working our way through Idaho for a parcel of land in Coeur d’Alene County, Washington, where I was born. That lasted but briefly, and with money and cars gone, we answered an ad for farm help by an Ohio Pennsylvania Dutchman who advanced rail fare for the family. He turned out to be a boorish bachelor type with very unpleasant household habits and aggressive goats that considered the house part of their territory, so that ended in favour of taking over a share-cropping arrangement in the Archbold, Ohio area.

They must have had a kindly landlord, because they did well enough to preserve most of their chattels. Incredible to me, that included tools and belongings dragged along through all the trials and tribulations from Russia as well as a Phoenix treadle sewing machine Mom purchased in Germany for fifty cents American sent by the American cousins in 1922.

In Archbold, Ohio, my brother, aged 14 in June 1927 had been used by the non-driving landlord as the driver of a new Buick the man bought that year. Somehow, likely with the Buick owner’s backing my brother engineered the purchase of a used 1924 Studebaker sedan within the next year. He loved that car and the sound of its authoritative aah-ooh-aah horn, often lording it over the pip-squeak beeps of the Model T’s he passed.

As they had done for centuries, the Russian Mennonites kept in touch by letter throughout their communal wanderings. During this Ohio period, Mom heard from her much older sister and her husband. They had somehow made it to Canada during what was by then the Stalinist crackdown, and eventually made their way to a new Mennonite community in Canada’s Fraser Valley. They extolled its rain-forest virtues and the possibilities for a new Russian style religious village community just begun in 1928. With summer harvest done, without thought about citizenship status or border crossings, the family packed all chattels and family in and on the 1924 Studebaker and started out Okie-style (a term not yet invented then) to freeload, camp and work their way to the new village promise but still looking along the way for alternative places where the family might settle in a genial community all grown up family members could agree on.

Remember 1928 was still part of the Roaring Twenties. Americans were getting rich on the stock market and Herbert Hoover campaigned to succeed Calvin Coolidge that year with the slogan, a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. That must have seemed a very empty promise to my family as we rough travelled through the country looking for work and a home.

One of our stops along that way was a grassland farm at Montezuma, Kansas. One of Dad’s former World War 1 Siberian internment fellows by the name of Miller had settled there perhaps a year earlier. The location is not that far from the Oklahoma Panhandle in Western Kansas, considered in the Ken Burns photo story to be the centre and worst part of the Dust Bowl. According to that story, the grassland farmers had bumper crops in both 1928 and 1929, and I suspect my family stopped as Miller guests for a time and perhaps considered settling there. My oldest sister left snapshots of the youngest children, including me eating an apple, and the one of the Studebaker, inserted here appearing generally unloaded and with mud on the tires. The people around the car show a young gallant in double breasted suit, likely a Miller son, eyeing my twelve year-old sister behind the car, my brother Henry at fifteen left of the driver’s door, Miller with foot on running board and Dad leaning against the back of the car.

From Southern Kansas the search went west through even more arid States to California and north to British Columbia. Our well laden, well travelled 1924 Studebaker caravan eventually reached the Canadian Border at Huntingdon, BC on December 7, 1928, almost six years to the day after my parents and their three surviving Russian born children were admitted as immigrants to the States at Ellis Island in 1922.

My family’s arrival at this new “promised land” in the Fraser Valley did not improve our lot. Relationships between my parents, between parents and my older siblings, and between all family members and the church community worsened. Reasons and speculations on the causes of this downward spiral are covered in my Diaspora volume, but the arrival here could not have been well blessed, as the following highlights may indicate:

• The family must have applied to return to America within 3 months after their arrival because the family documents included a letter from the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration dated April 6, 1929 at Sumas, Washington stating in the first paragraph: “With reference to examination of yourself and family at this office on April 2, 1929, and especially with reference to your appeal from the decision of the Board of Special Inquiry, denying you and your family admission to the United States, as the charge that yourself and family were likely to become public charges was made subject to reopening and as it is desired to clear up all doubtful points before the case is submitted to Washington, DC for final determination, you are requested to submit to this office, at your earliest convenience, proof of such money or other resources as you claim to own.” There were further requirements as well but of course proof of resources was not forthcoming.
• Our beloved 1924 Studebaker was impounded by Canadian Customs pending payment of 27.5% Duty on the value and a 5% Excise Tax on value and duty added together, for a total bill of $124.43. The family scrimped and saved and got it released on payment of that amount on October 18, 1930. It was in use sparingly for a year or two after that but sat on blocks in our barn/garage shed through the rest of the Depression, much beyond our means to operate. I spent many an hour sitting behind the wheel in the closed shed in useless fantasy.
• In their six years in the States, no matter how strict the family discipline and religious observance may have been, my three Russian born siblings, in early or mid-teen years could not be under constant supervision. In all their scrambles around the country they were the main communicators for my parents who had learned but little English during those years. The kids spoke American English by then without the tell-tale Mennonite accent, which I recognize to this day in Canada even in some public figures of perhaps third generation Russian Mennonite families. From stories my older siblings have told, especially my brother, I am certain that my parents were totally unaware of the many shenanigans they got up to, constant work demands notwithstanding.
• Through the Depression, my village theocracy grew. Many of the refugees from Stalinist atrocities by way of church guaranteed travel expenses had settled on the Canadian prairies, generally on grasslands granted to the CPR as part of the trans-continental railway construction deal. They soon suffered the same kind of drought, crop failures, and grasshopper plagues as the Burns Dust Bowl film describes. They left for greener pastures in Yarrow, my village theocracy, arriving from Mennonite area towns like Herbert, Beechy, Rosthern and Coaldale. We called them prairie chickens and soon the back road parcels of Yarrow were dotted with new shacks. Yarrow became a thriving German speaking community and soon filled the original Mennonite Brethren Church to overflowing. Under the strict leadership of the Rev. Johannes Harder the place indeed became a tightly knit village theocracy.
• The Harder story is told in a biography by Saskatchewan Professor Dr. Regehr titled A Generation of Vigilance. I reviewed the book from a personal memoir point of view in an April 2010 issue of The Old Man’s Post. It was obvious, though, that the Nickel family, with its earlier American arrival history and the freedom our teen children experienced there, did not quite fit in. The differences can be exemplified by one experience. One warm summer day my two older sisters walked along the central road in the village wearing short sleeved dresses. They were stopped and accosted by one of the church elders, publicly accused of indecency by appearing on the street as ladies of the night and advised to change their sinful ways and make their confessions to the congregation.

In spite of all our differences in the community and the trauma they entailed for an inhibited kid, I am forever thankful that we could not return to Kansas to partake of the American Dream. We survived through Depression and the unpleasantness of World War 2 animus against our German speaking village on a productive four acre patch of poorly drained land right next to the Vedder Dyke. Though we lived long on credit for essentials like flour and feed, I never went hungry, I always had work of some sort to do, I had time to wander behind the dyke and along the river and to dream of better times, to misbehave and learn bad habits and generally to develop some sort of humanity. What more can the old man expect?

You can note that by the time I had to make a citizenship choice, I had become a proud Canadian, the yen for the American Dream long dispelled. Though it is but a five minute drive from my present home, I have never returned to the Sumas border crossing from Canada to demand, “Uncle Sam, let me in!” And since my Canadian Passport expired and having no plans for foreign travel I refuse to acquire a cheaper border crossing identification card even to buy the cheaper pharmaceutical prescriptions, gasoline or groceries offered there. I have always preferred to buy in Canada where I have earned a living and where my heart is.

- 30 -

conservative conservation?

As signs of the biblical end of days scenario appear to increase in the form of earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, droughts and melting ice-caps there are also signs of a public awakening to planetary change. The old man has also recently heard a few decibels more from the voices of those who could be converted to Small is Beautiful economics.  Media attention to the global warming problem and the extent of human responsibility has been particularly acute since the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey in the States.

Within that period I have noticed a number of national television broadcasts, mostly on PBS, dealing with the phenomena. Further:

·       A Republican mayor of New York City publicly supported Democrat Barack Obama for the presidency because he recognized the dangers of global warming;

·       Opinion polls indicated a much larger percentage of the general public now believed that global warming was real, though most still denied human causation and carbon emissions for its recent rapid increase;

·       More frequent news reports on environmental protests such as the Occupy Wall Street movement and anti-capitalist and oil company greed and corruption antagonism included numerous book reviews and films on near midnight end of world events, such as a technology filled remake of the 1951 sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still and long discussions about the human causes of prairie erosion and the showing of the eight hour long Ken Burns film about the prairie dust bowl of the thirties.

Among such reviews I was particularly impressed with an hour long Bill Moyers and Company program broadcast on the Seattle PBS channel November 18 last, titled Hurricanes, Capitalism and Democracy. In that program he talked at length with attractive young Canadian journalist, Naomi Klein. She sounded most rational and amazingly articulate but she was obviously married to one anti-big capital and global conspiracies line of attack to stem global warming and the striking economic imbalance between the rich and the poor. She did respond to some of her critics by saying she was not against capitalism but favoured a type of decentralized capitalism. I found that suggestion congenial with my own early thoughts against “bigness”, against the constant need for more, against the need for instant gratification and communications and my later interest in Small is Beautiful economics. You may view the entire PBS program by clicking on the Hurricanes, Capitalism and Democracy program of November 18, 2012 on billmoyers.com .

Though I spent most of my life on the fringes of big business and have personally benefited from the growth syndrome through periodic inflation if nothing else, I have been opposed to the notion that “bigger is better” and have attempted to give effect to that idea in my own undertakings. That may stem from my roots and traditions in a rather closed religious community. I did not find its separateness or its religious strictures congenial, but although its members generally assisted individuals in extreme exigencies of need, individuals competed with each other and were responsible for their own welfare and the sustainability of their holdings and their debts. The world was not that much with us in the twenties and thirties when I was a child. The enticements of affluence that constantly assail everyone now in an orgy of consumerism through radio, television and the Internet to distract us and make us dissatisfied with our lot, did not affect us then.

You may have noticed that my title for this issue of the Post is a small “c” conservative conservation? The term stems from a job I accepted in my last year in law school to avoid further delays in earning a living and starting a family. One of my older classmates said, “If you go to work for Imperial Oil you’ll have to eat, drink, live and breathe the company.” He was right and the company expected total and exclusive loyalty and constantly advertised to the public and expected its employees to believe and preach its creed that it was a gracious corporate citizen. In turn it nurtured its employees like a mother nurtures its young and from May 1952 I experienced the joys of “bigness” and suckled at the breast of Mother Esso for seven years before I was weaned.

Through the rest of the fifties I drank of the milk of plenty to develop the muscle of ambition and competition, prod my lethargy, develop right thinking (I plumped for Diefenbaker in the “follow John” federal election of the fifties) and learned the power of the cheque book, the sanctity of contract and the prospect of unlimited resources.

Resources, I learned, rewarded as a matter of right and justice individuals and companies willing to risk all to exploit them. Conservation in those years had very little to do with leaving resources to the environment. Conservation, to exploiters and government regulators (including those of socialist Saskatchewan) alike meant the task of complete recovery and utilization of resources. The environmental movement had not yet made a splash and the word ecology was unknown to me. I resigned on March 23, 1959, stating my reason in part as “I have come to the conclusion that in a small law practice I can contribute more to the community, my family and to myself, than I can as Division Landman or an even better position for Imperial.” I had to clean out my desk and leave the premises within the hour.

Back in the Fraser Valley, I joined a firm started in the early twenties. It had changed but little when I joined but the changing sixties moved in with me. A populist western conservative political group brought the growth syndrome to British Columbia in the fifties. The province became a hive of interference with nature when highway construction, river damming and international power grid development as well as oil and gas pipeline construction became the order of the day. Power of both capital and labour became centralized in the capital so that local community independence and self-sufficiency were hard to maintain.  On boards and councils I kept arguing for community consolidation and to halt the one size fits all trends but eventually the same expansion-growth trend found its way into my small partnership. Having developed debilitating diabetes and strained relationships I left the firm to its expansion and abandoned my partner of 14 years to start a solo firm a few miles away, intent on proving that remaining small was still possible.  Through this period I contributed to my service club by editing the twice monthly newsletter. My editorial comment in a fall 1974 issue illustrates my contrarian thoughts about both today’s all-engulfing technological consumerism as well as the environment:

Our luncheon speaker last week was erudite and enlightening on the wonders of cash-less banking and other technological marvels. I did consider his subject matter and the reaction of Rotarians to the scientific wonders he revealed worthy of comment and perhaps a little disturbing. It seems that Rotarians can hardly wait for the twin goblins of coaxial cable and computer to shower their many benefits upon us. Take heed then of the words of John Ruskin written in the youth of the Industrial Revolution:

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell once upon a time, divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and evening—Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light—walking in fair procession on the lawns of it and to and fro among the crags. YOU cared neither for gods nor grass, but for cash; you thought you could get it by what the Times calls “Railroad Enterprise”. You enterprised a railroad through the valley—you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone and the gods with it; and now every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange—you fools everywhere.

All these many years later the definition of my titled conservative conservation adopted by governments of all stripes and the capital developers has not changed since the old man’s Mother Esso days described above. I suggest that whether right, centre or left, and whatever the talk of environmental protection and carbon limits, the results are still the same, especially in Canada and the States.

The record of the Harper government in Canada, appears particularly disappointing and contradictory in its northern policy. It sends armed forces and scientific vessels into the Arctic to claim national jurisdiction over large areas of the continental shelf. One would hope that information would be used for protection of the area and its flora and fauna. Yet the concentration seems to be in exploiting the resources made accessible by the receding ice in competition with the Asian, European, and Alaskan adjacent areas. At the same time in attempts to promote economic advantage from fossil fuel production, our government considers selling large interests to a Chinese government owned corporation to increase foreign control of “our” resources.

The Alberta and Canada policy on tar sands production seems a special insanity to the old man. By using all the latest technology the oil conglomerates are now mining and producing a sort of petroleum sludge that will travel through pipelines. They despoil and deplete already limited fresh water in the process, which uses nearly as much energy to produce as it creates in sludge form. In order to make a deal with China for the energy it would provide to them, a trans-mountain pipeline to the west coast near Kitimat is in the offing. All governments believe it essential and our BC premier simply objects because she wants BC to have a piece of Alberta’s revenue from the sludge that flows through the province. In spite of all the advertised (paid for by the taxpayer) double piping and tanker hulls, I believe it is an inevitable environmental disaster of unprecedented proportions in the making.

In the States, in spite of Obama’s fine rhetoric on developing renewable energy sources, he is still backing all sorts of fossil fuel development as well. He too is a captive of the lobbying of the likes of supporters of the tar sands pipeline to Texas, of drilling on federal lands for heavy oil, of coal mining companies, of expanded off-shore drilling and of the T. Boone Pickens shale gas drilling empire. In his first post-election press conference he admitted that no short term political action to limit carbon emissions in any meaningful way was possible. Drill, baby, drill!. There simply are too many people who still claim that carbon is favourable for the environment. After all, trees need it to live. Personally, I don’t blame global warming entirely on human destructiveness of our planet as we may be entering a new inter-glacial period due to some shifting effects in our solar system, but I also believe that all species have contributed to the changes that occurred over millions of years by destroying habitat wherever species multiplied.

The image of the Arctic ice shown at the top of this issue was copied from Dr. Jeff Masters wunderblog, where it is credited to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. Readers may be interested in reading some of the information in that blog, available at www:wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters .

- 30 -

The Few and the Many

Beware of one of the Few for he has seen heaven and become as a god. So often history tells us he becomes so resilient, so truly human, he knows he is created in the divine image. Having achieved this self-image of absolute knowledge he must then disperse his Truth to those of the Many who are worthy of him so that they too may follow his path to resilience, even if they die in that effort, as many of those so driven do. So says the old man from his dotage in a faint whisper of response to the wisdom of the good Reverend Dr. Symeon Rodger in his website article, The Many and the Few on August 14, 2012, which you may read at http://globalresiliencesolutions.com/the-many-and-the-few. 

The old man is incapable of such single-minded passion. He never has, could have or desired to achieve the dedication to become a RESILIENT person, who is defined in the Reverend’s article as “someone who is on the way to becoming a true human being, to exploring and living out the full potential of a being created in the divine image. [sic]… a warrior with great courage.”

The Few absolutely know the Truth and are so persuasive as Leaders, so strong as Teachers, the passion about the possibilities they see so inflames their souls that “you can’t talk to one of these people about their passion without coming away with some of that flame yourself… if, of course, they think you’re worthy to hear about it.” At least so says the Reverend Dr. Symeon Rodger in his article. To help us recognize the Few (and they are many indeed throughout history) Dr. Rodger describes them as beyond self-interest, principled, demanding brutal honesty and truth and described by the cowards (the many) who surround them as disruptive, “loose cannons”, dangerous and inconvenient. He includes in this number Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela “and many others”. One could add to the “good” side of that ledger such people as the Bhudda, Socrates, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism and even ancient Confucius, though he is one of my favourites because  he, like the old man, and perhaps even a little like Mahatma Gandhi, was unsure about the nature of the “divine image”. There could be many more among the Few on the debit side of that ledger who were equally persuaded of their Truth and determined to die for it, including Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, David Koresh, Jim Jones, and Osama bin Laden perhaps, though I doubt any of them would be chosen for Dr. Rodger’s list because they are not “beyond self interest” though they would have denied that.

A closer look at Mahatma Gandhi, the only example Dr. Rodger gives a few extra lines in his article, indicates that Gandhi certainly did not begin as the saint he was considered by most Indians and much of the world after his story became known. He was very slight in stature, very dependant on his parents and wealthy older brother and a devout follower of the Hindu holy books. In his twenties he tried to follow the teachings but could do so only by considering them allegory rather than history and rationally substituting non-violence to suit his belief for the right to kill the Gita taught. When he studied law at the Inner Temple and London University from the age of 18 to age 21 to become an attorney at law he tried very hard to become an English gentleman of fashion on the funding his brother provided for him in London while also looking after Gandhi’s child bride and his children financially in India. Gandhi’s father had been a state prime minister so the claim of no “social standing” in the article cannot be correct because Gandhi seems to have had an open sesame at all social levels in India, England and South Africa. That was so both before and after his voluntary assumption of personal poverty, so the force of his personality is evident, whatever his beginning. Apparently it was while on a case in South Africa at about age 24 that Gandhi had a sort of re-birth when he was thrown off a first class train coach for which he had a valid ticket and refused to move to third class, then sat up all night feeling resentful and sorry for himself. Apparently he spent the next 20 years in Africa fighting legally and politically for the rights of Indians in South Africa to be considered something other than coloured labourers. Those are just a few snippets from the 1950 biography by Louis Fischer, which includes on the back cover Gandhi’s own late in life statement, “People describe me as a saint trying to be a politician but the truth is the other way around.”

In retrospect how well did Gandhi do in his return to the simple life activism of non-violence in his fight for Indian independence? He was shot dead by an assassin on January 30, 1948, a wasted figure of 79, while fasting and conducting his daily public prayer meeting for peace among the warring factions in the divided India his efforts had wrought. He was surrounded by crowds of those who worshiped him as the father of their country. The Mahatma’s followers of the Congress Party, by virtue of his saintliness, effectively became the ruling party of the country and his successor family, cohorts and hangers-on became more political than saintly.

The sub-continent’s divisions persist, have worsened and become ever more violent. Machinery, or technology, which Gandhi decried as tools of the powerful few to ride on the backs of the millions, has become the principle reason for being of India’s millions and their diaspora. The Mahatma’s dreams of non-violence and village simplicity as a country’s way of life have been dashed to disaster in western notions of “Progress” in the so-called global village.

So it has been with nearly all our “good” examples of the Few. Even during their respective lifetimes, including beggarly rabbis like Jesus, the Buddha and Confucius, the Few suffered converts and rivals who tried to replace them or kill them, or varied their simple creeds into complex and rigid belief systems dividing into ever more sects and hierarchies. Thus the work of the Few has proceeded through the millennia to often violently pursue their separate and exclusive destiny in the Land of Infinity.

Christianity is a prime example. The original Jewish group of disciples was totally pre-empted by the Saul of Tarsus who had previously persecuted them after an allegorical conversion on the road to Damascus. As Paul the Apostle he effectively converted the simple message of Jesus, the itinerant rabbi, to a tool of Empire. There has been little peace ever since.

So the old man, with no genetic or self-taught leadership qualities, chooses to remain one of the Many, to seek his own truth in each day, to repent when in error and to defend and publish his choice when called upon in as kind and inoffensive a way as possible without being too much of a coward.

- 30 -

Another book?

As usual the old man has been struggling for an excuse to keep at least some part of his anatomy moving at a time when age and health issues have placed him and his partner both into a state of nearly total enforced physical inactivity. Current events and television being largely unrewarding, he often reverts to nostalgia.

This spring I determined to try putting together a collection of personal versifying as well as many of the greeting card verses I saved from cards sent to a few friends and relations. The latter didn’t happen till computer technology made the combination of pictures and words on cards for special occasions so easy. The result is now bound into a booklet under the cover shown at left above of which I now have a limited number of good copies professionally printed and bound.

I intend to offer copies to a number of family members and one or two others I feel might be curious and a few I will reserve for those I intend will get one whether they want it or not. To everyone else, I beg you not to try doing me a favour by requesting a copy and just ignore this issue of the Post. If you seriously would like a copy for your library, please send a request to me at 83rdplus@telus.net . If you can pay a short visit to pick up your copy please do that. If not, please include your proper snail mailing address and postal code and I will send it to you by ordinary post. My preface in the volume is printed below and explains the contents in a bit more detail.

Preface to Silhouettes,

a Collection of Verse

Five years ago I completed my last printed and bound book project in the form of the second edition of A Minority of One, my personal memoirs. I vowed to myself and others that it would definitely be the last time I would bore my few readers in that way. I lied.

Of course, I did not expect to be here five years later. Certainly not in any kind of condition to do the dog work involved in choosing and compiling a selection of the countless words that have strewn my conscious and subconscious reality during a long life.

In a way readers can blame my niece, Linda Ewart, to whom I have dedicated this volume. She is a lover of words. Like her artist father, Peter Ewart, did for me many years ago, Linda has a way of feeding my egoistic tendencies. Also, at this old man’s advanced years when more passive undertakings are restful for many, I find the challenges necessary to keep my grey cells exercised.

As for the collection itself, except for most of Part One and a few of the Part Two selections, Part Three and the rest are generally in random order related to greeting card photo designs. Readers will have to imagine the picture design from the imagery used in the verses.

Poetry is by its nature, an intensely personal form of expression, going back to the Homeric epics of ancient Greece. In reviewing my personal collection, especially in Part One, some of it can be considered much too self-conscious and navel-gazing in nature. Much of the work is the result of thoughts developed during a half asleep dreamlike state through the many nights without any restful deep sleep. In that state the words and rhythms seem to come together perfectly, much of it then missing when I get around to writing it down. The final product can then be worked out, often with the help of a private hour or two surrounded by nature.

Except for about four intended gifts and one to keep I propose to offer one of the limited number of properly bound volumes of these random verses as a gift to any who receive notice and may request one, especially the relations and friends to whom the personal greeting cards were sent on special occasions in the first place, as long as they last..

Bill Nickel,

Abbotsford, BC

April 2012

On Multiculturalism

The old man has had his usual distractions since last writing for the post at the beginning of April. Spring weather has finally arrived so in trying to get re-vitalized, he found an old computer file with some of the book reviews he wrote 20 years ago. His critical comments concerned mainly his pet peeve. I have ranted for years against Canadian government policies of encouraging many cultures and languages, but discordant voices like mine have never been heard. Furthermore, we have adopted and encouraged multiple national citizenships, which I find even more offensive. Archaic though the old man’s opinion on those subjects may be, I still feel that way, perhaps for the following reasons.

The book I read those 20 years ago was Up from the Rubble, by Peter & Elfrieda Dyck, published by Herald Press at Waterloo, Ontario. I liked the book and its anecdotal stories.  After the first few chapters it was a page turner for me—perhaps because my own history made me identify with the subject matter. That made it tough to do a meaningful critique for my files.  Besides, how can I argue with God?  He is endlessly invoked by the Dycks as the true author of their experiences and good works. As youngsters in their 20’s Peter Dyck and Elfrieda Klassen, both young idealists, were separately recruited for the Mennonite Central Committee’s (MCC) European relief work by Elfrieda’s much older brother, C. F. Klassen, early in W.W.2.  They met in England while helping bombing victims from 1942 to 1945 and married there in 1944.

In 1945 they were transferred to newly liberated Holland and later to Germany. The core of the book is the story of their work in finding, then re-locating mainly Russian Mennonite refugees from Europe to South America, primarily to Paraguay, from 1945 to 1948. My ingrained cynicism prevailed through the Dycks’ experiences in England and until their first meetings with groups of Russian Mennonites at the Dutch-German border. Then, at least for a moment, sentiment and nostalgia for my personal traditions prevailed and evoked tears of empathy as I recalled the many stories of my parents about their own painful wanderings through Europe with four young children from 1920 to 1922. From that point the story tellers held me hostage, in spite of their sermonizing, through their various crises in Berlin and until the whole refugee location and re-location program obviously became more organized and formalized with numerous networks in place.

At some point, though, my cynicism re-asserted itself.  The book fairly reeks with the flavour of that typical Russo-German Mennonite pride and self-righteousness against which, as a putative American-Canadian, I have rebelled from childhood. The good works of  the MCC cannot be denied and I really believe the temporal reward of its workers, as C. F. Klassen told Peter Dyck (page 365), is “more work to do.”  Considering the continuing and increasing inhumanity of man to man, the reward will be ample. The trouble I have with the Mennonite myth, so endlessly expressed in this story, is the setting apart of the Mennonites as some superior and distinct chosen people. By implication, Mennonites claim the status of the children of Israel re-incarnate.  The myth reminds me of the claims of their kin, the Boer Afrikaaners of South Africa.

Was this why God led the Dycks’ few thousand Berlin evacuees through the “Red Sea” of the Russian zone to Bremerhaven?  Many more thousands of equally despairing and deserving unfortunates continued their interminable suffering at the same time!  If so, it seems to me that from the time of their earliest migrations, God has done his work through the village and church leaders who have been notoriously successful as “persistent squeaky wheels” with rulers and governments ready to help these “good people” as witness Peter Dyck’s success with the U.S. occupying general, Lucius Clay, in Berlin (page 170).

Though I do believe many Canadian Mennonite congregations no longer claim the exclusive apostolic mission of a “Mennonite people”, and MCC may in fact have become an inter-denominational tool, the authors tend to promote such minority exclusivity.  I found this particularly so when Peter Dyck effectively ends the book (the last two chapters are really a sermonette based on his MCC work as text) with this at page 381:    “ Through tragedy, disaster, and the suffering of sisters and brothers in the faith, thousands of miles away, people in North America were drawn closer to each other and united for greater kingdom work.”  [The italics are mine.]

            Such efforts to maintain and promote belief in a “distinct” and inherently “superior” culture are symptomatic of the work of many strong minority lobbies which continue to capture the power centres of our liberal democracies. The “separateness” required for such cultural pursuits offended me as a teenager when the Yarrow village Mennonites with whom I grew up, especially the elders, considered themselves distinctly “better” than their “English” or otherwise denoted Canadian neighbours in the community. It offends me still as the power of the special interests in our country has led to the officially subsidized multicultural policies that are keeping the development of a truly Canadian or even an American cultural community at bay. With increasing migratory pressures from Asia and Latin America, so long as immigrants seek to extend their original homelands and its ways to the new land rather than give up the past to think of this as their country, this country will not survive as a cohesive community.  Added to the already explosive French-English and Native “Nations” mix, the resulting cultural and multi-lingual separateness can lead only to a multiplicity of mutually antagonistic racial and cultural ghettos continuously competing for power and preference. In the end North America may become even more fractured than the constantly warring peoples of the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent and the Balkans, to give just a few examples. The old man has not updated the comments, and in spite of how well we are adapting to such multiplicity in our community, the loss of cohesion is more and more evident.

Wherefor Tomorrow?

An occasional reader of The Post responded to one its efforts from a nom de plume email address that included a combination Latin phrase “carpediem”. Curious, the old man found that the phrase used came from a poem by pre-Christian Roman poet, Horace (65 BC to 8BC), often considered the most accomplished lyric poet of that era. Apparently the verse in question extolled the virtues of living for today without worrying about the future, thus “seize the day” for Carpe Diem.

The phrase reminded the old man of an essay he published some twelve years ago on Time and Ageing. Those were years when I had already realized, much too late, how sadly I had sinned in letting time pass me by. My thoughts of that time are perhaps even more valid today when I hardly dare contemplate the future at all, while many of my succeeding generations often appear to do little else but “seize the day” and spend but little time thinking of tomorrow. I noted in 1999 that the Boomer generation saved little for a rainy day, produced a lower next generation population with both parents working to pay taxes and keep up an affluent lifestyle. Governments increased immigration to make up the difference. Ever more welfare goodies, ever more rapid “growth” was necessary to sustain the system.

Philosophers and poets have long thought of the nature of time and its passage. Augustine in the early days of the Roman Church suggested that past and future do not exist at all and the present has no “extent of duration”. Pascal, in the 17^th Century thought we were so dissatisfied with the present that “we anticipate the future as too slow in coming … or we recall the past to stop its too rapid flight. … For the present is generally painful to us. … Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the present and the future. … The past and present are our means; the future alone is our end. … So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.”

Since my early retirement now nearly 30 years ago I spent much time examining my thoughts as Pascal suggested. I have been dismayed at the rapid disappearance of my more youthful “present”. As a boy I could not wait to be bigger, more powerful, better off, more successful, more this, more that and preferably someplace else. As a teenager I doubt if I ever knew what I wanted, either in the present or the future but I could not wait until I finished school, became “independent” and found a mate of my own. That stage finally came about through some effort and a lot of help but without taking any real advantage of the great scope of resources that “present” freely offered. I could not wait to be “successful” so I could provide for mate and offspring. So I kept looking, thinking of the future, of security for me and mine, of retirement, of everything but what was there for me to enjoy in the here and now. Before I knew it, the children were gone, the years consumed with nothing but efforts to get them into their “future”.

Time since the old man’s retirement seems to have gone in a flash. My “present” has lasted much longer than anticipated and though my physical assets have deteriorated more rapidly in recent years, I still have the ability to “contemplate” the present sufficiently to be able to prepare an occasional issue of this journal. Often the result turns out a contemplation of the past, largely because the scope of my social present gets more limited all the time. All my speculations have done nothing to solve the mysteries of time and ageing. Perhaps after all, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in this fragment from the famous soliloquy, said it as thoughtfully as anyone:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. There’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than fly to others that we know not of?

A Perfect Royal Occasion

Perhaps some half dozen or so Christmases ago, the old man and his spouse were again invited to celebrate the occasion with his one remaining elder sibling and her family. His niece, Linda the Activist, mentioned previously in this journal, was among the other invitees to the family occasion. As Linda is again undergoing emergency hospital treatment of a serious nature, the old man offers this bit of story the old man offered to his sister after that dinner. She may have seen it at the time, but hopefully it will lighten her time a little when she returns home for what we trust will be a comfortable recovery. It went as follows:

A Yuletide Night’s Tale

(As Told by an Idiot)

Once upon a time in the Kingdom of Portishead the youngest son of the Royal Household was sent to the heavily forested but distant Colony of George, where he was granted the title, William Abraham, Duke of George and Lord of the Royal Hunt.

There he met and promptly married the Princess Katherine of the neighbouring Kingdom of Nonsuch as her royal parents deemed the match politically advantageous. As Duchess of George, she immediately took charge of the ordering of the various ducal palaces and hunting retreats and loyally served the Duke for many years, bearing two children and coming to be known far and wide as the Dignified Duchess of the entire Kingdom of Portishead. In the progress of her achievements she also cemented alliances with the neighbouring kingdom of her origin.

As the ducal pair approached the venerable age when title succession should be considered, the Dignified Duchess persuaded the reluctant Duke (who, though the royal succession was already into the third generation since his appointment was determined to continue as Lord of the Royal Hunt for further generations) to order celebration of the annual Yuletide Festival of the Birth of the Lord of Hope in Hunt Castle’s great festival hall.

Anointed as Chief Lady in Waiting and Maker of the Feast (more vulgarly known by the commons as Chief Cook and Bottle Washer) was the Duke’s elder daughter, the voluptuous Countess Esther. The Honourable Esther, known throughout the great kingdom for her wit, knowledge, experience in travel and commerce and sense of adventure also bore the title of Royal Ambassador at Large for the current generation of the Royal House.

The Countess was ably assisted in her festival duties on the principal feast day by the beauteous Lady Sarah, daughter of the Countess and dear to the hearts of the ducal pair. The great Festival Hall had been gladsomely adorned for the celebration throughout with garlands of ribbon and streamers and baubles and lights and mistletoe and greenery and plenteous gifts under the traditional giant of the forest in its central place.

The other guests invited for the main feast were members of the Nonsuch Royal Family related to the Duchess who occupied quite different outposts of that far-reaching kingdom lying adjacent to the Duchy of George.

First in importance and close to the heart of the Duchess was her niece, the cultured and intellectual Princess Linda, who presided over the outpost port City of the Great White Rock from her Castle Aerie overlooking the sea and its trade and commerce between the Kingdom of Nonsuch and other lands across the wide ocean. Undeterred by the fierceness of the wild winter storm, the Princess of letters, song, painting,  and arbiter of manners and means, with firmness and resolve, joyously mounted her four wheeled carriage, took the reins of the many harnessed horses and shouted at the wind with glee through the long journey to heed the summons of her aunt, the Duchess.

From nearby, only one gatepost beyond the forested duchy border, last in importance but closest in age to the Duchess in the Nonsuch royal house, came Prince William, Earl of Nowhere with his beloved Countess Shirley. Somewhat non-conformist since his youth, with a strangely mottled visage and the huge proboscis of his ancient forbears causing him generally to be known among the people of his fiefdom as Prince Longnose, this youngest son was not his father’s favourite, so he was granted the appanage of the Fiefdom of Nowhere with all its vassals, peasants, rents and incomes on the understanding that he remain in that far off outpost, far away from the kingdom’s capital for the rest of his days. Still, before taking up his appanage, he insisted on taking one journey abroad to seek a wife and unlikely though it appeared, he passionately wooed and won the Lady Shirley, heiress of the Celtic House of Banks in the course of his travels through the Scottish moors.

Prince William and his Countess took possession of Nowhere Manor in its protective palisades and continued there for lo these many years devoted to each other and the needs of their forested fiefdom. They were only too happy to partake of what they knew would be an incomparable feast and youthful companionship to celebrate the Birth of the Lord of Hope at Hunt Castle in deep midwinter. As befit their octogenarian status they left the gathering early to slither across the intervening border and just managed to stable the troika and settle in their cozy well-lit apartments when all again went dark and they were locked quietly within the palisades of Nowhere Manor to gaze contentedly across the snow driven palisades by lamplight while at Hunt Castle the wassailing went on for many hours.

The End