dual personalities

Now that I’ve finally adjusted to daylight savings, I’ve noticed that spring is stirring: the birds are singing and the air has a new, fresh quality. We’re nowhere near buds and little green shoots, but the signs are there: wind, rain, mud, floods, and tons of road grit. We’re in what is affectionately known around here as mud season:

Picture retrieved from Google Image

Nevertheless, the onset of spring quickens the blood. I begin planning household projects (how quickly the kitchen trauma recedes!) and if I don’t exactly long to get dirty in the garden, at least I imagine re-potting my indoor plants.

It’s a good time to fit in a little recreational reading. I recommend something light and refreshing. My DH gave me Ian Rankin’s newest, In a House of Lies, for Valentine’s Day.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed it, I felt that the author’s depiction of his main character, John Rebus, was a little off. All the other regulars were exactly as they should be, but Rebus just didn’t feel like Rebus to me. I wonder if anyone else felt that way?

Now I’m reading Louise Penny’s newest that son #3 gave me for Christmas:

Again, I’m enjoying the book, but whereas Penny has her characters down pat, her style is driving me crazy. She seems to have shifted to that awful journalistic every-sentence-is-its-own-paragraph style. Ugh. Still her main character, Armand Gamache, is as wise as ever:  “Learn to make peace with whatever happens. You can’t erase the past. It’s trapped in there with you. But you can make peace with it. If you don’t,” he said, “you’ll be at perpetual war…and the enemy you’ll be fighting is yourself” (p. 81).

In other literary news, I just discovered that Amor Towles is doing a writer’s tour and will be in Syracuse, NY in late October! Huzzah! Son #1 and I are already planning our evening out. I can’t wait!

Today I’ll be involved with another type of book — the church record books. Yes, it’s the annual reckoning and I’m off to have my books checked by other session clerks. Wish me luck. I spent all day yesterday getting them in order and it was no mean feat.

Have a great weekend!

*Rainer Maria Rilke

“Gung Ho” is an expression that I have known and used my whole life, but I never knew (or thought about) its derivation until I watched a movie the other night entitled Gung Ho: The Story of Carlson’s Makin Island Raiders (1943).

It is, indeed, a Chinese expression that means “To Work in Harmony”–“Gung” translates as “to work” and “Ho” as “harmony”. The phrase became the motto of the 2nd Marine Battalion and eventually worked its way into the American vernacular. Over time, it has come to mean “unthinkingly enthusiastic and eager, especially about taking part in fighting or warfare.” This is how I use it.

I guess there are a lot of expressions that I use every day which I don’t really know the meaning. Does anyone else say, “gung ho”?

Well, I am gung ho for the weekend! But I will be taking it easy. I fell again (pushing the neighbor’s large recycling bin out of the middle of the street) and bruised both knees this time and strained my shoulder/arm which is now in a sling. Pathetic.

Oh, Mamu, no!

By the way, the movie was not very good, even as made-during-the-war propaganda. I fell asleep.

I woke up this morning from a vivid dream in which I had composed a brilliantly insightful blog post. Unfortunately, waking drove my stellar plan away, and all I remember now is something vague about historical novels. On the upside, that experience got me thinking about how time eventually reduces our lives to a series of random snippets, like a dream that other people — not the dreamer — must somehow remember. Inevitably, those who study the past make a coherent story out of incomplete evidence. It’s important to remember that, try as we might to be objective and find “the truth,” those who tell the story, shape it.

Consider our great grandfather, Daniel Cameron, about whom we know so little. Day in and day out, from 1857 to 1929, Daniel lived and worked; he traveled from London to South Africa, back to Scotland, and thence to Canada and the United States. He married and had four children. He worked for the same company from the moment he landed a job in Canada, until a month before his death in 1929. But what do we really know about him? Bits and pieces –some tantalizing (what happened to those medals?),

some of them rather humorous,

and some more mundane.

By the way, the medals article appeared in the Montpelier Morning Post of January, 1910, while the other two stories ran in the Burlington Free Press. The car-fire occurred in January, 1928 and the election in March, 1918. When Daniel died in May, 1929, his obituary appeared in the Burlington Free Press.

Alas, newspapers often contain errors: DHC was not born in Edinburgh, though he might have thought it was his birthplace, and he lived in Rockland (not Rodsland), Ontario. His father did die in South Africa, but the likelihood of his earning a commission in the regiment (he had transferred to the 10th Lincolnshire by that time ) is effectively nil. All this goes to show that it is vital to verify information!

Since I get to “frame the story”, I’d say that our great grandfather was a Christian gentleman, who managed to maintain his good character even in the darkest of times: in a Scottish orphanage; during WWI when his son served and his nephew was killed; when his daughter died soon after, and when he lost his job. He was a dependable, intelligent, honest, and honorable man, strict with his sons and a pushover with his daughters, and devoted to his wife — a man who would not have approved this public attention to his private life, but whose example we are in need of these days.

Meanwhile, in my small corner of the North Country, the ground is still frozen but the amaryllis is blooming!

I can’t tell you what a morale boost beautiful flowers are, especially at this time of year, when the snow and ice still lie thick on the ground and the wind bites. Thank you CDC and JRP for such a lovely gift!

* The Tragically Hip, “A Beautiful Thing”