Canada Is Different

There are a lot of small differences between the countries that one notices when living back and forth across the border.  Most Americans know the ‘Eh?’ thing, but that is actually not very common out here on the west coast.  In language, what I notice most is the short a that Canadians use in  lots of words.  Words where an American would use a broad a.  E.g., Canadians say pasta (like the a in cat), whereas Americans say the equivalent of pahsta (like the a in fawn).  Similarly, cantata, cantahta.  It’s especially common in French or Italian words that have entered the English language more or less unchanged.  I found myself saying pasta the Canadian way a while back and felt very embarrassed, as if  I were presenting myself under false pretenses.

But what I noticed yesterday was that the Canadians still care about ‘Remembrance Day,’ whereas Americans have moved on to their many other wars since then and then pretty much past war itself.  We do it, we just don't remember doing it.  In Canada, older veterans, some of them very old (but not back from WW I) yet go out and sell the same red poppy pins that I bought (or more likely my parents bought) back in the forties, after WW II was over.  A 12-year-old Canadian of my acquantance was marching in a local 'Remembrance Day' parade yesterday, hoping for no rain. In the fourth grade, I won the city-wide contest for the best poppy poster in all of Pocatello’s elementary schools.  Okay, it was a small field, but I was pretty impressed at the time.

We made posters every year for that special day.  We all knew the words ‘in Flanders field the poppies grow, between the crosses, row on row,’ and we knew to what they referred.  All gone now south of the 48th parallel, but still alive north of the 49th  [Correction.  Ed's says 49th, not 48th, and I imagine that he is right about that.] parallel.  Don’t know why, don’t care to speculate.  Just observing.

But yesterday, November 11 (which to us is Veterans’ Day, not Remembrance Day), I went cross border to do some laundry and a bunch of other errands.  When I pulled in to the strip mall that contains the laundromat, my first thought was, ‘Wow, the economy is really hitting Tsawwassen hard!’  I’ve never actually seen the parking spaces this empty, even on Sunday.  But then, going about my errands, I realized that almost all the little stores were closed (fortunately for me, not the laundromat) and that not a one had posted an explanatory sign.  Well, I guess, in Canada, everyone would know right away what it was about; in America, we are relatively clueless.  I was surprised, as I probably am every year, to find that the U.S. Post Office and the Point Roberts Public Library were both closed for the day, as well. 

What was once a living memory embedded in real concern and historical warnings has, I fear, largely become nothing more than a government holiday for those who work for the government, and a surprise to the rest of us.  But there are yet a few veterans of WW I still alive who, if they remember anything at the age of 109 or so, probably still remember their experiences in that most terrible of all terrible wars. Remember.

Speaking of Living Things, ...

I ran into this today while looking for something else. Didn’t find the something else, but was happy to find this on this day, this week, in this world. Note the tattered condition of the ribbon. Wore this for a lot of years back in the 1960’s and 70’s. And it’s still a sound sentiment, well to be remembered.

And speaking of other living things, there is the very good news for this new year that the second parcel of Lily Point property has been obtained by the Nature Conservancy to add to our cherished Lily Point Reserve. According to the Bellingham Herald, this brings the total Lily Point Reserve acreage up to about 280 acres, all to be used for ‘conservation and public recreation.’ The Conservancy will eventually deed the land to Whatcom County and the County expects to get grants to cover the costs. This is a major achievement for Whatcom County, for Point Roberts and for the many people here who contributed time and money and spirit to get it to happen.

Awhile back, I fantasized that maybe some zillionaire could just buy all of Point Roberts and that would be the best way to keep this little gem from becoming what the area to the north of us has, understandably, become: i.e., formerly wild land now wallpapered with houses and postage stamp lawns. (And, very beautiful gardens, it must be acknowledged.) Suburbs are okay; they are what they are, but the Point is really something else and it is so worth keeping, but it is so hard to know how to keep it.

Maybe, instead of the zillionaire, we could persuade the Nature Conservancy to just buy it. E.g., each year they could purchase yet another 150 or so acres. At that rate, the whole place would be in the reserve in twenty years. I could talk to them. We have about an acre and it includes a lot of great trees, including one arbutus and one (volunteer) young Geary oak. Not only that, we have an eagle roosting tree and also, out in the back corner, quite a respectable area of wetlands. (Also, if I do say so myself, a very nice garden.) We ought to be preserved! Right now, living here is the best way to preserve it I guess. But I’m happy to think that this year’s 150 acres might lead to even more…more living things!

Feet, Pythons, and Nuclear Things

The Vancouver Province today offers Canadians four or five front page (website) stories about the multiple severed feet that have turned up about the province over the past several months. On the Eastern side of Canada, a Globe and Mail’s lead story details a Montreal woman’s discovery of a 40-inch python under her bed in a basement apartment. Not something she put there.

Summer’s slow news days, maybe. But not so slow as all that. After all, last Friday, the New York Times published an op-ed by Benny Morris on the need for much more war in the Middle East. Reading this op-ed, early this morning, pretty much ruined my day, my week, and perhaps my entire life. Morris is a highly respected Israeli historian, and one of the things he is respected for is that he produced the first scholarly work demonstrating that the Israelis had forcibly expelled the Palestinians from their homes in 1948. The reigning ‘truthiness’ in Israel for many years had been that the Palestinians had fled because (a) the Arab countries told them to, and (b) the Palestinians were cowards. Which was why they had no 'right of return.' Turns out Morris was right. The Israeli army had forced the Palestinians from their homes, and in that act lies much of the Palestinians’ claim to ‘a right of return.’

So, when Benny Morris writes, I read attentively. He’s demonstrated his ability to think past and through the information that clogs our minds. Unfortunately, what he’s writing in the New York Times scares me much more than loose feet or loose pythons. His pitch is as follows: If Iran ever gets a nuclear weapon, Iran will destroy Israel with it; thus, Iran must never get a nuclear weapon. Israel, he says, will ‘almost surely’ bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities 'in the next four months,' but this attack might not be entirely successful. As a result, Israel would ‘subsequently’ have to use its nuclear weapons to destroy Iran. Such a nuclear attack is not in the United States’ or Iran’s interests, he allows. Better to have the U.S. bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in the next four months because they have much more military power at their disposal and will be more successful [and Iran can't retaliate by destroying the U.S.]. But the U.S. probably won’t do it, so Israel will have to. Whether the Israelis are successful or not, the Iranians will strike back at Israel, and then there comes the nuclear war we’ve all been trying to avoid. But, what is Israel to do?

This is, I think, a pretty straight reading of Morris’s essay, which gives few to no reasons for any of his assumptions. There are a couple of responses on the Huffington Post here and here. None of this made me feel like being smart or funny or silly today. Or maybe ever, or for the next four months, whichever comes first.

Connecting Threads

The picture is of 1600 yards of hand-dyed Tencel embroidery thread, work that has occupied me for the past couple of days. Absolutely shimmery! Now, to other work.

The radio is filled today with talk of war and peace, of dead soldiers and remembrance, it being Memorial Day and all that. Memorial Day belongs first of all to the Civil War, a war in which the state of Washington definitely did not participate as a state. It was organized as a territory in the 1850’s, but was not admitted to the United States until 1889. I think, because that is typical of most of the western states, the Civil War has very little purchase here. I know that in the South, for many people, it’s not forgotten because it’s not over. But for many of us out here, it never exactly even started, at least once they and we got here.

My maternal great-grandfather left his Illinois home as a 14-year-old in 1862 and joined the Union Army. He ended up with little glory, I suspect, in Andersonville Prison which, obviously, he managed to survive, a testament to the strength of youth. After the war, he moved west, to Utah, where he found a happier career as a copper miner and, eventually as the mayor of Park City, Utah. My great- grandmother’s Virginia-born father fought for the South and at the end of the war, he and his family moved to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, where he worked as a freighter. One of the grandchildren of this Southern soldier and this Northern soldier was my mother, and I guess the Civil War ended for them there, if it hadn’t actually ended a lot sooner by their decision to move West.

The West is where you went to get away from the problems of the East and the problems of farming in the Mid-West. The West is where you went to get away, period. So here we all are, out here, away, but with no further West to go to now, and back in the middle of some new Civil War, although we might perhaps better think of it as the Uncivil War. The Internet permits and even encourages a lot of incivility. It’s better than guns, though. Nevertheless, it’s hard to be generous in a period in which the coin of the realm seems to be who is patriotic enough, who stands in the right position for the national anthem, whose hands are where for the Pledge of Allegiance with its deist demand, whose lapel sports which pin. In a time when we cannot seem to find little discussion of or even a modicum of agreement about what constitutes the national interest, it’s hard to think well of the country, or at least of the country’s people. Nobody argues that earmarks, or farm subsidies for wealthy farmers who aren’t farming anymore are in the national interest, at least.

Oh, well, better to think today of all the war dead in all those endless wars, and of the thousands (some 300+ thousand already) of injured military men and women in our current wars. Sorry for their (and our) troubles, as my Irish-born great-grandfather’s family (the parents of the Andersonville survivor) would have said, and sorry for a lot else besides.