A Twenty-Eleven Christmas Verse

Twenty-eleven had me fooled  -
barely begun, it suddenly Yuled
leaving me wondering, “Why, why, why
did the Year of the Rabbit so swiftly fly?
Nothing much happened to me, myself.”

In contrast, it seemed the world outside
was ripped apart. Jack Layton died
right after he captured the position
of Leader of Canada’s Opposition.
A media feast of stunning events
of which we had no time to make sense
was dinned in our ears out of Tahrir Square,
Norway, Libya and elsewhere.
Earthquakes, tusnamis - what next was coming?
The total effect added up to: numbing.

“I’m thinking of doing a Christmas letter,”
I mentioned to a passing elf.
“A poem,” he said, would be much better!”
explicitly dreading a tedious dose
of proudly pompous purple prose
all about boring family biz,
and just how amazing everyone is.
This verse has thus been commissioned for you
by the elf, a.k.a. my brother Hugh.

I find I quite like family news
from families much like mine, or Hugh’s.
The Christmas letters in my mailbox
have spared me from earth-shaking shocks.
This year I’ve noticed welcome trends
by relatives and by bardical friends,
who present their year, without undue chatter,
like simple fare on a homemade platter.

Patterns apply, but experiences vary,
from Linda and Gary to Eric and Mary.
Entrances, exits by near and dear
mark the passing of every year.
We cannot remain in the selfsame grooves
as life brings changes, and many moves.

Peter sold his house, but I didn’t sell mine.
I was glad it was there, all cleared of clutter,
its walls renewed with a sunny shine,
when I moved back in without a mutter
after a stay in Springdale Park,
with its glorious canopy after dark
when the stars reveal their far-flung lights,
and the daylit woods abound in delights -
like the deer skull Eloïse “showed and told”
and mushrooms worth their weight in gold.

While I was admiring a northern sky,
Peter and Carol found, close by,
their Toronto condo, and moved right in.
Eric survived a scary spin
into an icy Muskoka lake,
and now he’s learning how to bake
batches of cookies, as Dad-at-home,
while I concoct this rambling pome.

He lost, too early, his dear Aunt Tina,
whom everyone loved who’d ever seen her,
while Carol’s mother passed away
in Virginia, I am sad to say.

Newly arrived at Mary’s place
is Cadmon, a doguess with bouncy grace,
and a delicate way of dismantling Lego,
selectively deaf to commands of, “Let go!”

Young Kate Allen is bound to go far,
newly recruited by the Star,
while Mary in Markham immerses Grade Two
in her trademark French. At a “petting zoo”
her own kids found instruments fun to play.
Christmas will be a crazy day
of multiple music and rafts and rafts
of colourful presents, created as crafts.

Linda’s been living her Thoreau thing
on a ten-acre chunk of Adirondack.
She and Gary winter in town till spring.
When wild flowers bloom, they will be back
in their rustic rural greenery base
with squads of squirrels for Sadie to chase.

I’ve run out of fuel, and so will close
this bulletin, where snows are no-shows.
Never mind! I wish you a fabulous Fête,
and a New Year more blessed than ever yet.

Love,
Helen

First Christmas for a child born in May

Christmas Pitfalls and Pleasures

God bless the master of this house,

Likewise the mistress too,
And all the little children
That round the table go.
Love and joy come to you ...
Old English Carol

Children, elders and Christmas went together like pancakes, butter and maple syrup. No one was allowed to be lonely. What a privilege it was to live among several generations, and find ways to celebrate love despite our differing creeds.

There were a few pitfalls, easier for us kids to skim over than for some adults. Like Santa Claus. When my parents were very new at the job, thus vulnerable to expert opinions, a particularly vocal Toronto child psychologist was frightening anyone who would listen with dire theories of the dangers of letting children believe in  Santa Claus, or, more fearful still - fairies. Fairies can be brushed away like cobwebs, or left in ill-lit corners, seemingly forgotten like religions older than Christianity, where they had pride of place.

Santa Claus, on the other hand, loomed up every Christmas, entering Toronto in triumph on the final float in a big parade. From early November a jolly man in a red suit and a long white beard sat on a throne in the toy department at Eaton’s department store, asking kids what they wanted for Christmas.

We were different, but not so different that my parents dared to deny us the same thrill that all our neighbours and cousins took for granted. We got to watch the Santa Claus parade, and go down and see Santa himself at Eaton’s. My mother must have been very worried because she tried to explain to me on the way back from one such visit that Santa Claus wasn’t real. For years afterward she repeated with relish her story of streetcar passengers around us convulsed with laughter when I chimed out in a penetrating four-year-old voice, “But, Mommy, Santa Claus is so real. I sat on his knee and I felt him!”

By the age of nine I had sorted the wheat from the chaff of the Santa Claus mystique. I remember explaining gently to my mother that she need not worry about my little brothers believing in the Jolly Old Elf, who was just a way of teaching people the spirit of giving and of kindness. “We have it in our house all the time, and especially at Christmas,” I assured her. “That’s what Santa Claus stands for. I’ve come to understand that gradually;  it didn’t hurt at all!”

In our own household Christmas was orchestrated with precision and style. There was no severity, just the serene assumption that we would go along with the rules. After we hung up our stockings on Christmas Eve, the living room door was closed, and it stayed closed until five minutes after eight on the following morning.

No question of wildly tearing downstairs in pyjamas, long before parents were awake, the better to open all the presents around the tree, leaving wrappings strewn and ribbons festooned over the floor. Only once, when I was about ten years old, did I see such undisciplined joy when invited to celebrate Christmas Eve and morning in another household; I was not impressed. Their joy was not my idea of fun, either. Where were the gentle rituals attended by all generations? Where were the trays to display each person’s gifts? And where were the cardboard boxes? (One for recyclable wrappings and ribbons, and the other for twisted paper to kindle a fire in the fireplace or furnace.)

On Davisville Avenue, we could not help waking up before first light, all excited, but our parents were ready for that. We were not to get out of bed until called around seven, but there would be plenty to do there, all cosy while Dad shoveled another load of coal into the furnace.

In the grey light of dawn I could feel an unaccustomed weight at the foot of my bed, and glimpse a row of dim shapes that were not there when I said “Goodnight.” Turning on the light, I would find all my dolls in their best bib and tucker, organdie dresses freshly washed and ironed, velvet cloaks mended, face paint renewed. Until I outgrew my dolls and my brothers their stuffed animals, our mother somehow managed to get all this refurbishing done on Christmas Eve in addition to stuffing stockings, wrapping gifts and getting Christmas dinner all ready to cook the next day. When we were older, we would find one present - a game or a book at the end of the bed, to keep us busy until breakfast.

Christmas breakfast, timed for 7:30 sharp, was an exceptional one. No porridge. No healthy whole grain cereal. On that one morning of the year we were allowed our choice from a tiny box in a variety package of what now would be called junk breakfast food. We could revel in frosted flakes and other nutritionally hollow treats.

At five minutes to eight, we telephoned to the aunts next door, who came over wearing their Christmas corsages on their coats. At eight we were all lined up, in front of our closed living room door, in order of our ages, youngest first, with Aunt Anne at the rear, looking over most of our heads. My father opened the door, and we all filed in to find the tree lit up, in a sea of gifts, and stockings hanging from the mantle-piece above a cheerful fire.

We children emptied our stockings first, under the sentimental gaze of our elders. Then each of us, adult and child in turn, opened one present, watched by all the others, and so on around the room. The idea was to make them last all day, off and on, and the next, right up to my birthday, on the 28th.

At ten o’clock all these frivolities were suspended so that we could hear the King, or Queen, give the royal Christmas address that went out around the world. After the royal speech, my father would take us children out for a walk, not too far or too long, but just to get some fresh air and get out of my mother’s way while she finished cooking the dinner. We would want to be back in time to receive our dinner guests.

My mother’s relatives predominated at Christmas dinner. Uncle Matthew and Aunt Ethel, whose children lived away out west, were often honoured guests. Grandma and Aunt Tillie’s eyes twinkled above pursed lips, as we rationed the youngest member of the family to “only three more questions”, one of which was inevitably, “How many more questions do I have left?”

Evenings were spent with the Allen clan and the Oxford Book of Carols. The first such gathering that I remember was up on Hillhurst Boulevard, at Uncle Elliott’s. Aunt Ruby had chosen to dress her tree in blue lights and silver ornaments.

Uncle Berk Chadwick (cousin Mary’s father) had brought a whole battery of rhythm band instruments from Montreal. We children were grouped as an orchestra between the tree and the piano, where Aunt Jessie provided the tune and the harmony. The rest of us supplied the percussion. Each of us had to choose a favourite piece, and then conduct it.

Swing had just burst upon the music scene. While the rest of us crowded around the buffet, the teenaged cousins were down in the basement recreation room, listening to Benny Goodman. Over the ensuing years cousin Bill, our star conductor of the rhythm band, would join our cousin Jim and his friends as they “jammed” in that basement with clarinet, flute and guitar.

Our Christmas evenings  alternated over the years between two houses. At my next-door aunts’, Jessie’s thinly sliced molasses and porridge bread melted away, platter after platter, but before the refreshments, we usually managed to persuade her to play her “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”, or “Sheep May Safely Graze” - Bach chorales arranged by her for piano.

As our numbers grew, with friends, fiancés and fiancées joining us, we gathered at Uncle Jack and Aunt Helen’s grand and gracious Russell Hill Road home. By this time, the von Trapp Family were promoting family singing all over the Americas, and later, the world, by doing it themselves. Uncle Jack played some of their recorded music before the carol singing. The beautifully blended sound of this famous family inspired some of us to attempt more Bach Christmas chorales, and continue over the years to add more new carols to our repertoire. Somehow, Rudolph never got his red nose in.

The more popular Christmas music, dinned into shoppers’ ears in downtown department stores from early November throughout December can become wearing, especially since the standard repertoire consists of only a dozen or so pieces. Hearing “When Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night” a zillion times by loud-speaker, incited our family carol singers into inventing a new game: find a new tune.

And so the shepherds invoked at our carol evenings watched their flocks to “The Flight of the Earls”, “The Vicar of Bray” or even “Forest Green”, which is usually an alternative tune for “O Little Town of Bethlehem”. The Oxford Book of Carols was not only for Christmas.. We caroled about spring, summer, harvest, Easter and Mothering Sunday.

As the years went by, we had to stretch our time together to fit our expanding repertoire of carols. One year it took us three separate evenings to sing through our all the “must sings”,  and allow the various instrumentalists, soloists and smaller part-singing ensembles to perform.

Then, along came the babies, and often half of each couple remained home. The voices that were left grew less robust, ceasing one by one.

Yet, I wonder if they are truly stilled. Perhaps somewhere Uncle Berk is leading little angels in a rhythm band, as he did us one Christmas. Each angel will get to choose a favourite tune, as we did. Then it will have to get up and conduct the band.

Uncle Matthew may very well be guiding newcomers from inside the pearly gates to their long-awaited heavenly homes on divinely designated Golden Streets.

Among Green Pastures there could be a sunlit house with open windows that let out the inimitable sounds that Aunt Jessie could coax out of a piano when she played Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze”. I can hear her still practising for accompaniments. With those rippling fingers as backup, she could have made a gazoo-player feel like an artist, and even play like one.

In some realm of Paradise, where “hearts are brave again, and arms are strong”, I see Uncle Jack on a clear blue lake, making a canoe almost fly over the waves, double-blade paddle flashing in the sunlight.

I can imagine him organizing a flotilla of canoes, rowboats and sailboats for a sunset singsong, as his parents and their friends used to do on the St. Lawrence River. Ringing from rocky shores I can hear again that magnificent baritone voice, leading Jack’s favourite hymn: “For All the Saints” - the Vaughan Williams tune, of course.

Geneva, Switzerland, as seen by Bill Bryson, and me

The American author, Bill Bryson, spent two days in Geneva, wandering around longing to be somewhere else. That could have been easier than he guessed, had he happened on a sign pointing to a local beauty spot called Le Bout du Monde, and had he had someone with him to translate the sign into End of the World. He must have been there the wrong day. Le Bout du Monde boasts a large stadium where the Americans of Geneva go to celebrate the Fourth of July after the biggest, splashiest parade outside the US.  They bring bands all the way from California, complete with majorettes twirling batons with abandon.

He must have hit town on a Sunday when everything except the cathedral is closed tight and all you can do is window shop. Many restaurants are closed too but the one at the Bourg-du-Four isn't. (Great fondue, coffee and steaks too.) Guess he didn't like the atmosphere of Calvinism leashed. Unleashed, as in the days of the Escalade, or any other day, it can be colourful.

Obviously he wasn't there in early December, at the time of the Escalade, when kids go around shouting the first three verses of the Genevese National Anthem in 17th century Genevese, all about beating the pants off the Savoyards who tried to invade but were beaten off by getting sloshed by cauldrons of hot soup over the battlements. I love the Escalade, when people smash huge cauldrons of chocolate with marzipan veggies inside and shout, "So perish the enemies of the Republic."

Bill couldn't have been there for the Fetes de Geneve fireworks either with all kinds of food from all over the world along the quais.

He says everyone walked hunched, not looking anybody in the eye. There he's right. I soon learned not to look anybody in the eye in downtown Geneva because if you do they know you've seen them and expect you to get out of their way. And so I soon perfected a half-focused gaze, enough to see where I was going. That way I melted through the unseeing crowds like butter, because they could see me not seeing them. This peculiar gaze allowed me to recognize people I knew, and there were quite a few of those, or to make contact with anyone I didn't know if I wanted to. And sometimes I did, as when listening to buskers or interviewing them.

Bill goes on to say money is everything in Switzerland. He confuses Geneva, which is not Switzerland, with Switzerland as a whole. Geneva happens to be a republic within the Helvetic Confederation, as well as a City, a State and a Canton and contains many ethnic communities including English, American, Portuguese, Spanish and Scottish, and is the Canton least inclined to vote against being nice to foreigners.  If he could understand French, the official language there, the odd time you hear it spoken, he would hear lots of talk about money, and be proven right.

As for the squeaky cleanliness of the sidewalks, I don't recognize the place from his description. People keep lots of dogs in all those apartments, but do not scoop ...

He probably never had to visit a doctor's office, where he would have been greeted with a polite Bonjour on entering from everybody in the waiting room, whether you know them or not.

Then he speaks of declining the advance of "Geneva's only prostitute". Rosemary is a very nice woman, who used to keep an eye on the little shop of an unworldly Indian lady I knew. ("She's not there today, and last time she forgot to lock her door" ...) I know Rosemary's not the only one, because in broad daylight I heard this dialogue in French shouted across a street over my head between a woman in an elegant pink suit and two colleagues on the other side:  "Hey, you don't look like a whore! All dressed up like a lady," and her cheeky reply with a proud toss of her head, "No, I don't, but I am one." I couldn't help chuckling, and I could see they were trying to shock prim-looking me. We shared a hearty laugh as I passed by. To me Geneva rhymes with the unexpected.

Hey, Bill, learn at least one other language, and see how the world opens up in technicolour.

And try for some less tasteless humour while you're at it. OK, sometimes you surprise me into laughing, but I find you too cynical for comfort.

Still, since Ken and Phil speak highly of  your walk in the woods, I look forward to its return from its wanderings back to our local library, where my name is down for it.

It didn't last long in my hands. Bill's and my woods bear no resemblance to each other.

Canadians March on Washington in August, 1963

Indelible Impressions Fresh After Nearly 50 Years

In the summer of 1963 I signed up for a ten-day Quaker Institute on Non-violence, organized on an island in Lake Rideau. One of the leaders told us he was heading to Washington, DC, immediately after training us, to take part in a civil rights march headed by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Two of us middle-aged ladies decided to drive down in my Austin Mini. We sent out an appeal for an additional driver and anyone else wanting to come.

Just before we left  Toronto, I cautioned the three young men who joined us not to tell anyone where this carload of white people was heading. At a gas station stop in Ohio, our destination was somehow leaked to an attendant.

“Hey,  whose side are you on anyway?” he snarled, spoiling for a confrontation. Surprisingly, he accepted the reply that came out of my mouth, “The human side.” We drove away, as he stood there with his mouth still open.

As Marches on Washington went, the one of August, 1963 was exempt from ugly incidents. Few false notes marred it, not even a couple of women preaching hatred on a street corner to non-responsive passers-by. The Kennedy administration had given most government employees a holiday, leaving the whole centre of the city at our disposal.  We later learned that the Washington police arrested fewer clients on 28 August 1963 than on a "normal" day in the full heat of the summer.

The crowd itself was so huge that even the marshals assigned to control it had to go along with its flow.  Luckily, it was a good-humoured, friendly flow.  We had started marching a little too early along a route too short to accommodate all of us.  Many of those who reached the Lincoln Memorial first had to turn back, so as not to be crushed by the sheer numbers following them.  We eddied about, finding spaces where we could, until everyone had had her or his "march". I saw a State Trooper pass on the movement of this vast multitude, as helpless as a leaf on a mighty river.

We eventually found some place to settle down, many of us on the grass quite far from the Memorial and its reflecting pool. King's address came well in mid-afternoon, after the wonderful singing of Joan Baez and Mahalia Jackson. (Marion Anderson, originally scheduled to perform, had not been able to get through the crowd to start the proceedings with the "Star-spangled Banner, and had wept bitterly.)

In spite of such deep disappointments and many smaller discomforts and difficulties, it was a blessed occasion. We saw and experienced much sisterly and brotherly love among the crowds that day under the burning sun of Washington. A black nurse had taken charge of me when I was about to faint from heat exhaustion.  Earlier, I had seen a Jewish gentleman look after a black girl who was also suffering from the heat and the strain. A black lad had offered to climb a small tree with my camera to get a historic shot of the crowd.

The crowd had been restless during the many speeches, and barely attentive to the singers.  Then Martin Luther King came to the microphone, and a hush fell over lawns, as the sun slanted gently from the west. King first evoked the wider issues, the promises of the U.S. Constitution. He went on to express the hope that his own "four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."  Then he said:

“I have a dream that right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and while girls as sisters and brothers.”
And finally his voice echoed out across the silent crowd:

“When we allow freedom to ring - when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty. We are free at last."

The bountiful spirit of harmony, like a giant umbrella as wide as the sky, would give us the courage of our convictions.  But there would be big trouble further down a rocky road.

"Go back," King exhorted.  "Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, so back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed."

I could sense the opening out of cracks in the apparent calm and tolerance in the north of the United States, and that when trouble did erupt it would be more violent than ever. I felt that, as the single mother of a small girl, I had too much at stake to get involved in what was bound to be a dangerous undertaking. This would be my first and last intervention in the United States of America.

Back in Canada, I concentrated on the Peace Movement, another deep concern of Quakers, until one day during a visit to Europe to see my future husband. On the top of the Salève, that long mountain overlooking Geneva, we had a fierce argument about my involvement in the Peace Movement.

That was the day I resigned from any further effort to tell anyone else how to achieve peace. If I could not have peace with the man I loved, then I was in no position to preach. Time to concentrate on peace of mind within myself and in my home.

Nearly fifty years later, I am convinced that it’s more vital than ever to feel safe inside, no matter what is going on out there. For a while it seemed like work to cultivate peace within. Now it’s getting more and more like fun. Believe it or not.

MULDREW LAKE REGATTAS AND SING SONGS

Mist curls white on  tranquil lake,

Clouds grow rosy; birds awake,

Cold dew twinkles in rainbow light,

Whip-poor-will ceases his song of the night.

The mist curtain thins on the water still,

The sun peeps over a hazy hill,

A loon laughs loudly to greet the morn,

A breeze stirs the pines - a new day is born.

HCH, 1943

We started going up to Muldrew Lake as a family in 1941, when my uncles could not always leave the city for their cottages. They were happy to have them occupied by appreciative - and responsible - family members.

There was a war on, but in the summer it all seemed very far away. Some of the young women were away in the  armed services, and many of the young men, including my cousin Fred. We all looked up to Fred, who left Canada as a sergeant and was rapidly promoted, as much for his own merit as from the death toll among Canadians overseas.

My father took a weekend off from the office, where he normally worked Saturday mornings, to help my mother set up her household in Muskoka. A street car took us from the stop at Davisville and Mt. Pleasant to St. Clair Avenue, and along to the end of the line near one of the foulest-smelling factories in Toronto. (Dad and Uncle Elliott worked there as youths.)

We and our baggage full of clothing, sheets and household supplies toiled as speedily as possible up a long flight of wooden steps to St. Clair station. The train from Union Station had plenty of cars for all of us holidayers heading for waters too numerous to count, once north of the large twin lakes Simcoe and Couchiching.

In Gravenhurst we took a taxi to Indian Landing on Muldrew Lake, where cousin Jim met us with a small motor boat to escort us in the pouring rain to his father’s second cottage on Silver Island. The following summer we spent July at Uncle Jack and Aunt Helen’s place on Pine Island, and August on Silver Island.

Less than five minutes by canoe separates the two islands. No record exists  of the time it took  twelve-year-old Peter to swim that distance on a dare. Not long, I imagine.

We had no telephones or electricity yet on Muldrew Lake. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I rowed the “Queenie”, the elderly skiff that my mother had patched, to Indian Landing to meet the truck that brought our grocery order, the mail and the newspapers from town.

Gasoline was rationed, but few cottagers ran outboard motors anyway. One enterprising youth delivered groceries with his motorboat “for a slight fee”. The rest of us paddled or rowed to the landing just for the sociability of meeting each other three times a week. Families used this occasion to invite each other to sing songs, picnics and wholesome parties designed for cottagers of all ages.

On Sundays there was always a clergyman or professor or lay person on holiday to lead the church service at Memorial Pines on Middle Lake. Granite cliffs embraced the clearing in the grove on two sides, making a natural amphitheatre. Behind the birchbark lectern, past the pine-needles and the rocky shore, sparkled the waters of the bay.

When the wind died down and the moon came up, groves of slender white birches would gleam out on the  island slopes, like the sylphides in my favourite ballet.  From  the  thickets, a whip-poor-will would call, as if saying, "All is well.  Time to put out the oil lamp and go to sleep."

Yet the war was not so far away after all. The old hospital on Lake Muskoka had been turned into a prison camp for German officers. We could see the barbed-wire fencing  around the beach of this “gilded cage”. Once in a while we met parties of prisoners at roadwork under guard. As far as I recall the solders were unarmed. 

The Norwegian Air Force set up a camp nearby at Little Norway, apparently feeling at home among our pines, birches and granite. A few of these Germans and Norwegians returned to Muskoka after the war as immigrants.

-----

Our train for Toronto at the end of the summer of 1942 was made up in Gravenhurst, so that there was plenty of room when we boarded. Our family of five were able to turn two seats facing each other, while a uniformed man did the same for his smartly tailored wife and bright-eyed little son. From his shoulder flashes, this native Canadian was one of those guarding the German officers at the prisoner-of-war camp.

In Orillia a contingent of nuns wearing the habit of the order of St. Joseph came in, and the Indian family man gave up three of his four places to make room for Sisters. 

At Barrie, near Camp Borden,  a boisterous crowd of young men and women - probably military personnel on leave - cheerfully filled the aisles. They stood up all the way to Toronto, singing and urging the rest of us to join in. One of their favourite numbers was the saga of a man who went into a restaurant to see “What fifteen cents would do”, since that was all he had:

“The waiter’s call rang down the hall: ‘This here gent wants one fish ball!’” they belted out, and they continued to entertain us all the way to St. Clair Station, where our small family group detrained. All very jolly. I counted more than a dozen passenger cars continuing their merry way down to Toronto Union Station. 

Summer, 1944

We still had plenty of teen-agers under military age at Muldrew Lake for the annual regatta that remains freshest in my memory. We had mainly canoe races, no sailing events, and only one rowboat race.

I liked best the gunwale race. Balancing with one foot on each side of the canoe takes a certain skill, and practice, whether you paddle or simply bend your knees to send the canoe forward in rabbity leaps. I practiced, when I thought nobody was looking, for a whole week before the regatta, which was held on a Saturday afternoon in Middle Muldrew Lake.

On the Friday before the regatta, all the young people from Middle Lake crossed the Middle Portage to the north side of the Peninsula to help ferry all available craft from North Lake around the end of the Peninsula and back east again to the site of the regatta on Middle Lake.

We made the rounding of the peninsula into a day-long expedition with a picnic halfway along. People from North Lake crossed the portage homeward well after dark.

On Saturday, Uncle Jack and Mr. Dickson ran the regatta, and awarded inscribed paddles to the junior and senior boy and girl who had racked up the most points in all the races. After the evening picnic at Memorial Pines, no one felt like going right home.

The young people, still full of energy, crossed the portage to North Lake and poured ourselves into the few craft left there - the emergency rowboats and the leakiest canoes. At Indian Landing we piled into a couple of cars and drove the three and a half miles into town to see what was on at the movies in Gravenhurst.

Nothing was on! The manager had closed his theatre, exceptionally, because of a close family bereavement. The streets were thronged with tourists, cottagers and Norwegian airmen at loose ends. Men in blue-grey were draped here and there on the lawn in front of the Opera House, which also served as City Hall in those days. Music coming from open windows on the second floor prompted some of our more enterprising crowd to crash the local dance. 

No such shenanigans for me at my young age, or for older cousins Jean and Jane, who felt responsible for me. After kindly Jane wiped our table at the Chinese restaurant for the wilting elderly waiter, we ordered milk shakes to fortify us for the walk back to the lake under the stars. The rest of our crowd merely sampled the dance, then returned to the lake for a midnight marshmallow roast on the top of the Peak.

At 2.00 a.m. they had to put out their bonfire and hurry down to take John, bleeding copiously from a scalp wound, to the doctor’s cottage on the western end of Pine Island. An over-enthusiastic hewer of wood had dropped a sizeable dead tree trunk on my cousin’s head. He appeared the following day neatly stitched and bandaged, ate a good lunch and crossed Middle Portage in time for church.

After the service and a swim from the high cliffs nearby, we ferried back the North Lake boats, stopping to picnic just before sunset. More jumping from even higher cliffs on the wilder south side near the western end of the Peninsula.

Roosting on sloping rock, we sang a few current hits like “Sentimental Journey” and “Chattanooga Choo-choo”, both about trains, come to think of it. Someone pointed out a gull on the calm sunset water, calling out, “Look at the sun shining on its stern!” The gull remained placid, unaware that it had set off a burst of laughter. 

We set out on our journey east along North Lake as the sky took on that special green glow above the horizon. In the Swiss mountains it is known as Le Rayon Vert (the Green Ray). I call it “a Muskoka sky” and look for it in summer.

TREASURES AND PLEASURES OF RHYTHM AND RHYME

Shakespeare’s Winter Song

When icicles hang by the wall,

  And Dick the shepherd blows his nail

And Tom bears logs into the hall

  And milk comes frozen home in pail,

When blood is nipt, and ways be foul,

And nightly sings the staring owl,

To-who,

To-whit, to-whoo, a merry note

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,

  And birds sit brooding in the snow,

And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,

  And Marion’s nose is red and raw,

And roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

Then nightly sings the staring owl,

To-who,

To-whit, to-whoo, a merry note

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

Dad was really good at reading poetry to us at bedtime out of a little book that he found for 25 cents on a bargain table in Eaton’s basement. He had a quiet style that didn’t get in the way of a poem, just laid it out so that we could make up our own minds, as if he were discovering it himself for the first time.  Sometimes he threw in for free a nonsense verse by Lewis Carrol or our American contemporary, Ogden Nash. Dad was especially fond of mock cautionary verses like Hilaire Belloc’s in his Bad Child’s Book of Beasts.

We three children absorbed poetry and verse from the sublime to the ridiculous,  relishing in awed silence the sounds of Blake’s Tyger, tyger, burning bright, and stifling giggles when Hilaire Belloc recommended a yak from Thibet as a nursery pet. Richard Orme Allen (aka Dad or ROA) got his money’s worth by adding a twenty-five-cent impulse investment to an already extensive library of nonsense rhymes.
 

Growing up steeped in poetry and verse, we knew the difference between them first hand. None of us aspired to pen immortal sonnets, when we could indulge in a whimsical family tradition dating from the days of Queen Victoria. Those happened to be the days of cautionary verses written to scare children into being good. A wealth of stories of goodness rewarded and wickedness punished offered scope for parody by those very children subjected to their black-and-white morality. Defiant scribbles began in secret as teenaged Victorians like my father and his brothers shook off the constraints of their strict upbringing. My Uncle Elliott let off steam by writing scary verses himself, and frightening his young brothers into the bargain.

Nor was Elliott the only author of homegrown verses. Dad, his older sisters and his nieces were prolific in their production on any occasion. Ten minutes’ rapid reflection by ROA produced a memorable ditty to celebrate Aunt Mildred Fairbrother’s foray at age 52 into teaching in the wilds of Ontario. As a beginning teacher in Rhode Island she had been reprimanded for smoking between classes. Three decades later, the darling woman still smoked, like a chimney. An elegant silent butler was her send-off present, along with this cautionary verse:

When at school you need a drag

upon a coffin nail or fag,

its evil signs you need not strew,

but carry them about with you.

After her marriage, my mother caught the doggerel bug, and reeled off the occasional jingle, like this limerick composed at a party about our family doctor, who was also a school mate of Dad’s and a family friend:

There was a swell doc named Norm

Who said, “Please fill out this form.

Take this pill at dawn

And just carry on,

And I trust it will do you no harm.”

That inspires me to press the verse button in my brain, and take a break from prose.

Doggerel is doggerel, a distant relation

to poetry’s art. You feel the elation

of finding a rhyme for a pesky word -

for example like “doggerel”.

“I’ll fight through this fog or I’ll ...”

invent something outrageous, as yet unheard.

Forsaking poetry’s heights of splendour

and being a frugal and choosy spender

my father delighted in do-it-yourself.

He drew the line at a Hallmark card,

and had no intention of mocking the Bard,

roosting well-thumbed on a handy shelf.

He’d toss off a couplet with easy authority

to honour the birthday of his niece Dorothy

or any other occasion for jollity,

celebration, graduation or other frivolity.

It is now well over seventy years

since my father first read us a song of Shakespeare’s,

and gave us a feeling of rhythm and rhyme

that clearly has stood the test of time.

The measures that pictured winter’s woes

trickled down from my head to my toes

etching into my very being

Elizabethan winters that I was seeing.

So now, grandchildren, it’s time to mess

with Shakespeare’s winter, and take a guess

at how to depict a Muskoka scene

under the reign of a different queen,

the second to bear Elizabeth’s name.

Some things are different, and others the same.

His brilliant pen portrait still shines as ever.

I borrow his words but I could never

aspire to tarnish their timeless glow,

so this is a tribute, written in snow

and destined to melt away like frost,

unlike these lines from “Love’s Labour’s Lost":

When icicles hang by the wall ...

A few centuries later in a winter traffic jam north of Toronto:

WINTERIZING

A Muskoka Tribute to Shakespeare

When icicles hang by the wall,

they’re Bob the Builder’s blatant proof -

no matter how we warm the hall -

heat is escaping through the roof -

and that is where the heating bill

will go before the next snowfall.

The roads are foul and tempest-tossed.

Just follow the snowplow; you won’t get lost.

Don’t stamp on your brake, you reckless kid,

or your four-wheel drive will go into a skid.

You’d better avoid the 401

and a twenty-car pile-up that’s not much fun.

Black ice is a dreaded invisible danger.

In white-outs known landmarks turn suddenly stranger.

A sign by the roadside makes travellers think 

of a coffee shop and a hot, warming drink.

But it’s shut for the season, to their disgust,

so they stay on the road because they must.

Where’s Greasy Joan, to stir the pot,

and serve up meals that hit the spot?

Joan hath clothed, I mean, has closed

her Greasy Spoon and flown away

to Florida until next May,

leaving her baffled creditors,

to utter bleak, frustrated howls

strangely like the staring owl’s.

HELEN'S FEBRUARY POEM 2011

        

All of a  sudden, my daughter Mary

wants me to write about February.

That was the month that used to be

the target of the year for me.

Although the shortest month of all

by count of days, it was no friend

because it never seemed to end,

proceeding at a maddening crawl.

It proved a challenge to my muse

that I could simply not refuse:

find out how many rhyming ways

could celebrate those dullard days.

That was before all Canada

began to shout and yell, “Hurrah!”

for Chinese New Year’s timely feasts,

rotating twelve symbolic beasts.

This Rabbit Year will be terrific -

Prosperous, healthy and prolific.

I wish us all a very Merry

Forty-seven and Nine this February.

Helen Heubi

Visit: http://www.theholidayspot.com/chinese_new_year

FROM JAPAN WITH LOVE

Chiyo is now 72, and still looks like an eight-year girl. It is no coincidence that I was also eight in 1938 when my missionary aunt Annie Allen brought her over on furlough from Tokyo. By the way, Chiyo means "Long Life", but if she ever completely falls apart, and cannot be repaired, she will be buried, in the Japanese tradition. 

Meanwhile her sweet face inexplicably gives some people - and once a confused, frantically barking dog - the creeps. She looks so human - maybe it's her human hair wig. Maybe it's also an aura of love that she always had - beginning with the women in Tokyo who stitched her an extra outfit in silk and brocade when they learned she was for a niece of "Aren-sensei".

                                      Chiyo and Akira

With Chiyo came two boy dolls - one looking about four years old, the other a baby - all three for me and my two younger brothers.

In the early 1980s my brothers discovered the littlest boy doll in my father's basement, and handed him over to me complete with kimono. Ten years later I gave him to a Japanese American girl whose family had lost most of their valuables when sent to detention camp; they managed to bury their Samurai armour, though. Keiko and I named the little guy Akira, a sunshiny name.

Peter  brought his doll to me a few years ago, because he thought I might take good care of it. First my husband mended it, then we set about finding a name.

First I checked "Taro" or First Born Son on line, and found it is no longer used on its own much these days, but rather is tacked on to another name, as it had become so ubiquitous as to be impractical.

Then I found two equivalents to "Peter":  Isamu meaning Rock and Ishi: Stone.

Both Mary and I agree that Ishitaro has a nice ring to it. And so Ishitaro he is.