Of Truth and Lies

Honesty is the best policy! That moral theme was dinned into me from the beginning of school attendance. From an even earlier age, from the time I was a babe in arms, the sinfulness of telling lies became an even more powerful reason for the primary importance of telling the truth. My parents were strong evangelical Christians and believed literally in the written words of the Bible, though now as I read the Ten Commandments I see only a prohibition against bearing false testimony against your neighbour. There is not a commandment saying, “Thou shalt not lie.”

I always believed in the importance, and yes, the practical benefits of truth telling, and I still do. My constant policy since I was very young has been full disclosure and truth telling and accepting responsibility for my own failings. In spite of that I am sure there were times as a child or even in later years, when I evaded the truth out of weakness and fear of punishment or other undesirable consequences. Telling lies did when I was a child, and in the end always does, I think, invite punishment if discovered.

It is impossible, I think, to have a properly functioning family or community if we cannot trust the word of our relatives, our neighbours, our business associates, our politicians—everyone we constantly have dealings with. Perhaps that is why our community, world-wide, in early times, in great Empires, and today, does not function properly.

So it is moral truth I am here concerned with. If any fundamental rules of ethics existed for any civilized society apart from the rules established by various religions, the first among them should be: Always tell the truth!

Surely we must begin development of such a rule by teaching children at an early age that it is in their self-interest to avoid the endless entanglements falsehoods inevitably cause. One of the better ways to motivate such behaviour is by example. Children must be able to trust the word of their care-giving adults. A sure way to undermine that trust, it seems to me, is to threaten children with consequences that never occur. I have seen such idle control mechanisms often used in families, and I have been guilty of them myself, but surely such idle threats are themselves a type of lying, and give children a bad example. I must say it is easier to criticize such behaviour by other parents than to avoid it personally.

For nearly twenty-five years I was a member of the Chilliwack Rotary Club. Rotary International is a worldwide service club of business and professional people. Rotary’s motto was Service Above Self and members were instilled with the principles of Rotary International. Club founders believed that not only was it the duty of community leaders like Rotarians, to serve their communities, locally, nationally and internationally, it was also good business. A major guide to help members achieve even greater success in both service and business was Rotary’s Four Way Test. It was required reading and periodically members unexpectedly had to recite the four questions of the test at club meetings. New members received a copy of the test printed on a small plastic desk stand, along with their nametags and other paraphernalia. Mine still graces a shelf in my library after these many years away from Rotary. One side of the stand lists the test questions: Is it the TRUTH? Is it FAIR to all concerned? Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS? Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

In debates about the possibility of strictly applying these standards questions of justice, friendship and benefit were less difficult than the question of insisting on absolute truth. Furthermore, it was not always that easy to decide whether or not it was the truth in specific situations.

For example, application of the Four-Way Test in our justice system is always a problem. Take the very simple situation of a person charged with a crime. In the common law an accused is always innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In the result, many accused persons entering a plea in our criminal courts, say they are not guilty, even if they are.

Without going into the legal niceties of that procedure, the chances are that in a large majority of cases brought before a judge, the “not guilty” plea is a lie. Accused, defence lawyer, prosecutor and judge all know the plea is most likely to be a lie, but if any one of them even suggested such a thing, the man would be deprived of what is called “due process.” Everyone knows the procedure fails that Four-Way Test yet in the interest of preserving the safeguards developed against abuses once rampant in the various systems of criminal justice, we bend over backwards in favour of a person accused of crime. Just think of the cost to our justice system of every accused person insisting that every element of the alleged crime be proven. Yet in these days of almost automatic legal aid for every accused person, the alleged criminal incurs no cost by taking advantage of every possible element of that due process. And believe me, today many an accused is more knowledgeable and experienced in exercising his right to counsel and due process than some of the junior legal aid counsel who represent him in court.

In the days of my own criminal law practice I sometimes advised an accused that the weight of the case against him made it unlikely that the cost of a full defence could be justified, suggesting a guilty plea and argument to mitigate penalties could be beneficial in a properly charged offence even though judges are also unpredictable. I felt waiver of full process was not the same as waiver of due process. That process was usually closer to the truth and in the best interest of all concerned including the accused, as a fairer sentence usually ensued. It provided the justice the accused deserved, speeded up the process, saved everyone money and came closer to meeting the Four-Way Test in almost all cases.

In another area, marital infidelity or other breaches of accepted sexual morality often result in offences against the truth. Absolute truth and trustworthiness between spouses is essential to a successful family relationship, yet I am somewhat ambivalent about the wisdom of full disclosure to spouses of even the most innocent flirtation by the other. Spouses of both genders today often lead separate lives in business or profession for substantial portions of each day. In those other lives, uniquely close relationships between associates in those other worlds are easily formed. Sometimes they inadvertently result in “feelings” that could be thought of as treasonous to the spousal relationship. What is the essential truth in that situation? If the so-called guilty spouse blabs every detail of his other world to his family partner, that partner may conclude a hurtful breach of faith has happened. Consequences unintended by anyone could result. They could be terminal to an otherwise solid family relationship and ruin the lives of spouses, children, parents and friends. Does truth and trust always require full disclosure to be fair in that situation? I wonder.

I am left then, with a need to live by the truth when the avoidance of truth becomes ever more common in an increasingly secular society. In the rural and small town communities of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth Centuries, old Western religious values made it more difficult to conceal falsehoods. Major agreements could be sealed with a handshake, for a breach would easily become known and bring down the wrath of the community on the offender. Since then those earlier groupings have dispersed into an increasingly urbanized and fragmented society. Religious sanctions can no longer be taught to children in schools for fear of offending one or other of the many diverse religions to be found in our cities. The rearing and training of the next generation is left more and more to strangers, government support workers, television and the computer. Where then will we find the community to provide the essential ethical values without which a civilization cannot endure?

American and Canadian politicians and government agencies give a great deal of lip service to the question of values. Unfortunately there seems to be little consensus in our diverse cultural structure about what those values ought to be. In 1915, in the midst of the First World War, Sigmund Freud published his Thoughts On War And Death. I agree with the statement he made in that paper, when he said: “… our conscience is not the infallible judge that ethical teachers are wont to declare it, but in its origins is [dread of the community] and nothing else. When the community has no rebuke to make, there is an end of all suppression of the baser passions, and men perpetrate deeds of cruelty, fraud, treachery, and barbarity so incompatible with their civilization that one would have held them to be impossible.”

The answer to our conundrum may well lie in the development of a new supplemental secular religion of humanity. Good deeds and positive values are not restricted to the practitioners of traditional religions. Despite often-conflicting passions among our diverse religions, I have noted there is general agreement among them on core ethical values including truth and honesty. I think every major religion subscribes to some version of what Christians call the Golden Rule.

In the twenty-first century, perhaps well-intentioned urban secularists will commune with the diverse cultural traditions in North America and come up with a compendium of such core values. Once such a standard is generally taught and accepted in every social grouping, our diverse cultural community would have a new common standard; it might again have “a rebuke to make” and thereby “suppress the baser passions” of its population even without the intervention of the politicians and their legislation. The time may be here for a new set of Ten Commandments.

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Greed is Good?

Predictably The Economist’s 20 page special report on entrepreneurship in the magazine’s March 14, 2009 issue does its usual sales job in favour of the new “Global heroes”. On the first page they report on the oversubscribed conference of entrepreneurs in Bangalore, India, mentioning that many speakers “praised entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well.” Then, summing up in the last paragraph of the report, they say, “The revolution for the current generation is the entrepreneurial one. This has spread around the world, from America and Britain to other countries and from the private sector to the public one. It is bringing a great deal of disruption in its wake that is being exaggerated by the current downturn. But it is doing something remarkable: applying more brainpower, in more countries and in more creative ways, to raising productivity and solving social problems.”

Of course The Economist has been trumpeting the wisdom of “free” trade and “free” markets since it was first published in 1843 and in spite of the many changes that have destabilized the creation of wealth and the growth syndrome, its editorial belief in that wisdom continues unabated.

A little more lip service really ought to be given to limitations on the unending idea of “more”, and on the possibility of building sustainable communities on the principle that “small can be beautiful”. Although The Economist has suffered many contrarians through its history on its favourite rocking horses, most have emphasized only other or different objectives of growth. The voices raised on behalf of slower growth, greater stability and less inequality have been weak and small. The entrepreneur is too restless to dwell much on “enough”.

Just a brief perusal of western literature on the subject of wealth reveals to what extent its accumulation has preoccupied our civilization since the beginning of history. Plato, in his Laws stated it was impossible to be good in a high degree and rich in a high degree at the same time. Aristotle preached that money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest itself. Yet by the time of Adam Smith, it was held that a reasonable interest charge is a necessary rent for the use of money in making a profit. Today, most of the unseemly accumulation of excessive wealth is accomplished strictly by using other people’s money and not one’s own. Even the excessive consumerism of the very rich competing for the purchase of the largest homes in Monaco, the largest yachts and the most expensive hotels, is accomplished mostly on cheaply borrowed money while their own wealth continues to make excessive profits.

There is never enough and there never will be until all the ever scarcer bounties of the earth are exhausted. The rich will get fewer, and the poor, who will be always with the rich as biblically predicted, will increase until they too disappear along with the other used up bounties of the globe.

The hungry consumers too, created and managed by the entrepreneurs, will disappear and the rich will struggle for survival and eventually join the ranks of the poor. And that seems to me to be the eventual end of the perpetual growth syndrome indulged in by almost all forms of life on our poorly managed planet. May it then rest in peace!

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The Old Man Takes Stock

One aim of this personal publication is to comment on the ageing process itself and to see how long I can periodically record my own involvement in that process. What will shut down The Old Man’s Post? It could be an entirely external cause such as changes to Internet technology or policies. It could also be mental dementia or physical debility suffered by the old man himself.

Ten years ago, almost to the week, I wrote a lengthy essay on the subject of ageing for another self published printed effort. I did not then talk to any extent about my own confrontation with the beast, as I had not yet experienced the rapid decline now evident. That process is intractable but although I often say to myself about the vexatious physical indignities it presents, “Will no one rid me of these troublesome priests?”, I still feel very fortunate. I have enjoyed perhaps more contented independence in my long retirement than in my busy years. I consider I now have in hand a bonus of at least fifteen years beyond the years I expected when diagnosed with diabetes at about age 44.

Yet though I try to remain objective about my personal ageing process, I cannot escape reality. When I neared 80 I experienced a few household falls while doing normal chores resulting in rib and hand fractures. That brought a diagnosis of bone loss. My daily walks became ever more difficult, shorter and slower and I stopped venturing out during any slippery or wet weather. Just in the past year, and even since I published the first issue of The Old Man’s Post the deterioration has become ever more rapid and noticeable. In spite of valiant efforts with diet and massage by my wife, who is also approaching 83 and has equally serious problems, my decades of insulin dependency and diabetic neuropathy take their toll. I already carry a cane to maintain balance while walking. We can try to laugh at some of the many indignities, but at times the changes in one short year make me think of how Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s tale must have felt when the effects of the sins he had stored on his changing portrait in the attic suddenly descended on his body.

There are so many like me and ageing is now a major social problem. Not infrequently people now live to 100, still reasonably active and mentally alert. The problem lies in the bosom of our welfare state mentality. Traditionally we give up being productive in our sixties. With increasing demographic power seniors demand more and more goodies such as more political rights, housing, health care and government pensions, for rich and poor alike. The cost of all that becomes a charge against still actively employed productive taxpayers. Expanding government bureaucracies need always more from them to funnel goodies to the country’s squeakiest wheels. We seniors are among the squeakiest.

In sterner days of less government benevolence, ageing people had to keep producing enough to look after themselves. When they could no longer maintain a home, that was often the time to pass whatever assets were owned to some younger family members who had become the dominant productive people in the family. In those circumstances the elder still was often required to earn his or her keep in the new family order of things, if only by doing some menial service in the household.

This demographic reversal has been unduly kind to my generation. As social policy it was well intentioned but probably wrong-headed. All through this century a trend towards shorter work hours, earlier retirement, and earlier pension ages was evident and apparently still continues. In France government legislated a 35-hour work week, which when added to an already legislated over-long paid vacation, left economists surprised that French industrial productivity is as high as it is. The tension between the need for enough income for the cost of living and the need to keep productivity costs economical produces constant and continuing stresses in labour relations.

Born in the 1920’s, I consider myself a depression child—a generation that has, since the Great Depression, enjoyed the best of times in this country. My depression psychology and resulting frugality has improved my personal condition in those already economic good times. The post-war Boomer generation did well while productive, but its members were overly taxed to provide for the likes of me.

With changing mores and greater reliance on the welfare state, the Boomers have saved little for a rainy day. They have also produced a much lower next generation population, partly because of the feminist movement and the need for both family parents to work for wages to pay taxes and keep up an affluent life style. Our welfare governments are forced to increase immigration to provide a population to produce more tax dollars to keep providing the welfare goodies, including goodies required by refugees and other immigrants who take time to integrate into our economy and society.

While recognizing the good fortune of my own particular choice of birth date, there is no escape from the negative effects of getting older. The passage of time is relentless as it speeds through space and the rate of its speed seems to increase in direct proportion to the increasing numbers of one’s age.

Improvements of science notwithstanding, our genetic inheritance and our determination when young to ignore all advice to maintain mental and physical condition conspire to accelerate the inevitable deterioration of age. However, the “natural death” that would normally have resulted whenever the time comes, is rarely allowed to proceed without some kind of intervention from modern welfare state practitioners.

They are people who can be found in the state bureaucracies, in the science and medical establishments, and in the families of the ageing person. What is more, people I have known in terminal situations, themselves rarely admitted they would not “get better,” even if they were completely aware of their situation. Some members of the medical geriatric industry go much farther than the Hippocratic Oath ever required of them. In the event they pull out all the stops, often with artificial feeding and elimination, to delay the departure of a tortured but still hopeful spirit living for no purpose but to reach another birthday.

Individuals who live to the ripe age of 100 years, physically able and mentally alert are the pride and example of their community and family. They are still the exception. I suggest their successful longevity is due to a special genetic inheritance coupled with a lifestyle since childhood designed to improve that inheritance. The vast majority of us, without special gifts, are destined to meet our ultimate fate much sooner.

I know of no easy answers to the problems of ageing. I do think that in the condition of our society and economy right now, people of my age ought to begin a trend toward a new mindset. We ought to resign from the Me Generation and be less demanding on the resources made available to us by a generous working population. That population accepts the high taxation we have demanded through lobbying organization and voting power because the income security and institutional care for seniors that taxation provides takes a big load from the shoulders of immediate families. But the load is getting too big for the fewer numbers paying taxes as the Boomers reach retirement. We say we have earned all those goodies, though statistically many seniors today have a larger purchasing power than ever before. Some proudly display bumper stickers on their recreational vehicles bragging, “We are spending our children’s inheritance.” Many could do well without the universally provided welfare of our Canadian system.

No doubt government has poorly organized the re-distribution of wealth required by the welfare state system. Having taken away from individuals the incentive, even the ability, to be frugal, to save, to invest and thereby to provide for their own retirement, government has failed to do that effectively with the resources we ourselves provide. They have forgotten the Keynesian economics taught by the ancient Hebrew, Joseph, to the Pharaoh of Egypt, urging him to store up grain in the good years to provide food for the lean ones. The present system cannot be sustained, nor will more rapid immigration do more than delay the inevitable, for it will cause other stresses on our social fabric to demand ever more from the few who can provide that ever greater wherewithal.

Only a change in our attitude, a break in our Me Generation way of thinking, will gradually develop a self-sustaining welfare system. Why should it not be a change led by the people of my generation, by being willing to give up our search for an impossible security that will never be found in this world?

Ageing is a big subject. No doubt the universe will unfold as it ought, or perhaps as it ought not. In our small part of it, we could organize ourselves as a nation in a way that would permit that small part to flourish for a time more, or we could continue on some of our wrong roads to sink into the decrepitude of other ageing societies of our time.

An Immigrant Tale

Mostly Mennonite is one of those family stories written and published by so many who were of or stem from that group of immigrants often referred to as Russian Mennonites. This one was written by Ernie Harder, who arrived in the then still cohesive religious village of Yarrow in BC’s Fraser Valley in the early forties as a one year-old child. He was about the same age as I was when I arrived there with my parents twelve years earlier. I did not get to know Ernie or his family before I left that village for Vancouver in the fall of 1945 when Ernie was just starting school.

The comparison of our experiences there was fascinating. His growing up was certainly less stressful than mine. Perhaps that was because the war and post war years were much more upbeat than the Depression years. Maybe it was because his family were members of a more liberal sect of Mennonites than were mine and certainly his arrival in the midst of a growing and younger family had something to do with it. By the time we arrived in the village, my parents were nearing middle age and I was the last born after-thought of an already dispersing family. Who knows?

Ernie tells the Mennonite story well and includes a bibliography for those who wish to find out more. He is rightfully proud of his long-lived parents and the way they influenced the lives of his siblings and himself.

The Mennonite branch of the Sixteenth Century Anabaptist movement of the Reformation in northern Europe continued as a distinct communal grouping for some 500 years. Always there were those who stayed and those who went, through migrations from the North Sea Lowlands to the Polish Vistula River delta and into the Ukrainian lands of the Russian Empire in the 18th century. Though like many growing cohesive religious groups the Mennonites experienced many “awakenings” and sectarian divisions, they all stayed close to the core Mennonite communal settlements as they expanded north and east as far as Siberia to accommodate landless sons and daughters from the early Black Sea area royal land grants. And they continued to communicate, by letter and visits with relations and friends all over Europe and with their American and Canadian cousins.

It seems to me the Russian Mennonites dispersed by the two World Wars have integrated into the Canadian culture more quickly and successfully than most other identifiable groups before or since, including earlier Mennonite migrations. The result, I believe, is that Canadian Mennonites are now simply part of the social mainstream of the country. They have lost the distinct ethnicity, separateness and communal coherence developed in the old country that many tried to recreate in communities here. Now even the more conservative Mennonite Brethren sect of my own background appear to me as just another American style conservative evangelical Christian church and certainly much more Liberal than the one I knew as a child. Fortunately, in my opinion, those changes came about before our current Canadian multiculturalism and double-barrelled nationalities took hold.

This book is really worth a read. I urge you to click here for the author's website.

Political Games

According to the writer whose work persuaded me to join the Internet Blogosphere, successful Blogs require daily contributions. He would undoubtedly already consider The Old Man’s Post a dismal failure. As I am not trying to sell anything or earn an income, the motivation is not always there for the old man. For me, this is simply an outlet to explore the language, express opinions, reminisce, comment on what is becoming an ever stranger world, and also to create some kind of record of the way this old man fades away into his inevitable obscurity and anonymity. Although so far there has been no public reaction except from the few people I notified of the site who occasionally check it, it is worth the effort for me, just for the sake of the cerebral exercise entailed. So for now I shall continue as and when I can.

Some weeks ago I turned on the tube and surfed between Canadian and American news channels primarily because of the fuss that had been made about President Obama’s speech to American school children on the first day of school this fall. I wanted to hear the speech for myself. There is also a Canadian federal election in the offing, a phenomenon that seems almost an annual affair in the most recent four or five years. The political gamesmanship evident on both sides of the border becomes distressing to behold especially when I consider how very little real difference there is in what any of the participants in the game can accomplish. One can think of almost any of the issues politicians raise in one election after another and there is an almost equal division in the population about the direction we need to go to achieve a civil and peaceful society

In Canada that “federal election in the offing” has stayed in the offing ever since this fall’s session of the current parliament. Liberal leader Ignatieff announced before the sitting that he was ready to bring the Stephen Harper minority government down. That was immediately countered by the other two parties represented in the house announcing that Canadians did not want an election in the recession plagued country. That left Ignatieff’s first vote of no confidence effort falling far short of success. In the meantime the opposition leader’s popularity has continued to plummet and Harper continues to rule, with an unofficial election campaign, dirty tricks and all, continues to flourishing on all sides. Prime Minister Harper may yet end up with a majority government if he continues to be the wily politician, and turn out to be the Mackenzie King of our era. The country slides ever deeper into deficit and debt, and the population keeps on spending all the borrowed dollars that our sons and heirs will have to repay generations later.

All parties here and in the United States pay lip service to the serious matters of managing our physical environment by lessening the impact of our species on the pace of melting ice caps and deepening oceans. Yet all parties seem intent instead on exploiting the availability of scarce resources uncovered by the warming climate. It really does not matter whether Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats or Republicans are running things in our neighbouring countries, the consequences vary but little. On climate change, the Kyoto Accord of long years ago made participants who signed up feel righteous for such good intentions but not one country has really accomplished anything in reducing the impact of increasing industrial pollution on the rate of nature’s changing seasons. I predict no serious agreement will be reached at the approaching international meeting designed to come up with a successor to Kyoto.

In the States President Obama too is becoming a toothless tiger as ruler of the White House. No matter what his good intentions as a candidate, he is still a prisoner of the system. On domestic and economic matters he must rely on advisors he chose, all establishment figures in finance, public relations and politics, and pushed one way and another, he must opt for a decision, usually a compromise, which he must then try to sell to the body politic. As he nears the end of his first year in office, it is unlikely that anything approaching a successful health plan will take effect. Many of his economic and finance advisors are products of the banks and organizations who caused the near Depression in the first place, and as yet there is no indication that his government will come up with any way of bringing Wall Street under any reasonable control. He gets no help whatever from the loyal opposition and the way things are going, if Republicans come up with a believable leader in the mid-term elections next year, Democrats may well lose the Congress again in 2010.

In foreign affairs, Obama has made Afghanistan his war and after eight years fighting a war that seems to have no end, Obama also appears to be ruled by the advice of his military establishment, which by its very nature and existence has a vested interest in keeping all its pots boiling. Tell me, why should the United States have its armed forces stationed in some 150 countries around the world, all watching the World Series of baseball from afar as the announcers tell us during the games?

And so the game of government and politics goes on as nature moves inexorably on its way and we still know not what we do. I have copied pictures below of three of our current players in the game, being Prime Minister Harper and President Barack Obama.

The Old Man

November 1, 2009

The Way We Were

In late summer, almost anytime, the old man’s fancy turns to thoughts of nostalgia. This time it was triggered by a slide show presentation attached to an email from one of my nieces, apparently collected and created by J.A.C. and titled Foto antigas, containing a series of early to mid-twentieth century pictures. One of them I identified with especially and I have “borrowed” it to insert with this issue of the Post. It is what ended up as the second photo down of the series of four snapshots inserted along the left margin.

Though the picture is not dated or identified in any way, I think of it as a Depression Era scene in rural California. It is just the sort of scene I was part of about this time of year in the mid-1930’s right here in the Fraser Valley. Most of the families in our then recently developed settlement were recent refugee immigrants from Central Europe who made much of their cash income by working in the hop farms nearby. During the harvesting season, young and old alike were hired on as pickers. We would get up well before dawn, do the home chores, then trudge to the central pick up area to climb into a truck just like the one shown there to be driven to the hop field some ten miles from the settlement for a long day of picking the fluffy yellow fruit from the hop vines in the row assigned to us, rain or shine. It was often dismal, uncomfortable, boring work but for all that my hop field memories of that annual harvest from at least 1932 to 1939 are among my most evocative. There was the competition for the “best” row when starting a new field, to get near the front of the weigh-up line, the buzz of dozens of conversations to listen to, the calls for straying children (“W-i-l-l-i-e-e-e-e!”), the sudden and surprising beauty of a Swiss melody yodelled by a picker at the far side of the field, the haunting summons for “Wire Down!” They were all part of the annual hop harvest in the thirties, with a penny a pound to boot! The top photo of this issue is from my own collection of family snapshots taken at that same hop yard in our valley, likely in September 1930, showing a group of young pickers from that settlement including one of my late sisters, at the picking end of a row of hops where the vines trained up a string to the high trellis have been lowered for picking.

Another memory from those early days involved a sudden move to Vancouver for my first experience of living in a rented house equipped with indoor plumbing. My older sister worked in the city as a housemaid for a wealthy family and three other children were to attend school while my father and 20 year-old brother began development of a swampy four acres in the settlement as a small holding with a cabin to be built with occasional financial help from available work at the hop yard. I continued grade one there in the fall of 1933 after having started in my rural school setting that September. The last photo at left is a picture of that grade one class in the spring of 1934. The third one down was taken back in that settlement in the spring of 1937 as I was completing my grade four there.

Just a few of the memories evoked by these pictures that have stayed with me include:

• Strange hermit-like bachelors who seemed to be living out the Depression years by squatting on Crown land in cabins built by surveyors years earlier high in the woods above our promontory at the settlement who were only seen in the settlement for occasional shopping forays;
• Hobos who rode the rails of the electric interurban from Chilliwack to Vancouver, often coming to the settlement looking for food in return for chores;
• One transient of Asian origin who was attracted to our small holding one summer day by a lush growth of poppy plants which were regularly included there for the poppy seeds used by the family in baking or cooking. He asked us to show him the plants and I remember him picking a green pod and eating it raw, pod and seed and all. Mother told us she thought he was on the lookout for opium poppies;
• Another hobo came to the shack asking for a meal and when mother offered him a drink with bread and a dish of home-made plum jam he ate the whole dish full with the serving spoon;
• Many long spring days harvesting our raspberry crop and attending to chores assigned to me throughout the year and when I was 12 finding another job with my nearest sister and many other locals to harvest the nearby tobacco fields after the berries were done and before the hop harvest. The job involved a five mile bike ride on gravel roads to the tobacco fields and often a twelve hour day at twenty cents per hour in 1939;
• The frightening talk of war, the preparations for war and the outbreak of war during the 1939 hop picking season before beginning grade seven.

Of such memories is the old man’s nostalgia made. Thank you for letting me offer them to you. ☻

The Old Man's Heat Wave

A week of humid plus 30 Celsius heat was really too much for this over 80. Much too hot to be composing anything for this Post. The air stood still, the flowers wilted, my blood pressure rose, my blood sugar misbehaved, I couldn't sleep, and all I really did since my last posting here was try to stay awake, read mysteries from the library. I was anything but productive. I was just thankful the poor overworked old through-the-wall A/C survived the numerous breaker pops when the power circuit it is on succumbed to the strain.

In any case, I am offering this post just to let readers, if any, know that I am still in the land of the living and intend to continue with something a little more succinct and hopefully more interesting in future issues of the Post.

In the meantime, I will offer you as some relief from my weather woes, a look at one of my snapshots of a cooler day along the Chilliwack River from the seventies.

Bill
August 3, 2009 at 9:45 PM