Jim Poling Sr.'s Blog, page 16
March 4, 2021
The Great Birdsong Mystery
Our first guess at the source of the bird tweets, twitters and cheeps was a robin.
We were in the living room one afternoon when the racket began. It was sharp, penetrating and seemed to come from the ceiling.
We banged the ceiling with a broom handle but the chirping did not stop. We Googled bird calls and concluded that a robin got into our rafters.
The next day I checked the eaves and facia, but there were no holes, cracks or crevices that would allow a bird into the building.
The birdsong returned the next day and more investigation revealed no place of entry or any sign of a bird. We downloaded more bird calls and decided it was not a robin. Maybe a woodland thrush or a warbler.
What such a bird was doing inside our place in mid-winter was another mystery. But after another day or so the birdsong stopped and we assumed the singer had moved on.
It returned this week, more high-pitched than before and it continued well into the evening.
Pounding on the ceiling and screaming into the woodwork did not make it stop. This was one stubborn bird, something possessed sent to drive us mad.
The next morning, we checked outside. The way the snow was banked on the roof provided a possible sheltered hiding spot. Also, a pyramidal vent stack protector might offer a place to hide, keep warm and sing.
But both possibilities were outside and the birdsong was shrill and piercing inside. We talked about shovelling the roof or perhaps calling an exterminator.
That evening, we again sat to watch some television and the bird calls began piercing the room. They were loud enough to override Bill Maher using the F-word on his Real Time television show.
We watched the 10 o’clock news then went to bed, leaving the bird chirping and cheeping. Obviously, it had no intention of sleeping, or allowing us to sleep.
I am partially deaf from competitive target shooting without earmuffs decades ago when I foolishly did not pay attention to such things. So, I unplugged my hearing aids and fell asleep.
My wife was not so fortunate. The bird kept her up most of the night. About 4 a.m. she couldn’t tolerate any more. I awoke to her pounding the ceiling and shouting for the bird to shut up.
I am not the most pleasant person when my sleep is disturbed, so an argument ensued.
“You have to turn the volume up to 100 to hear the television or radio but you can hear little tweets from a bird?” I shouted before storming back to bed.
I was awakened later by the sweet aroma of freshly-brewed coffee and traipsed down to the kitchen, where my wife was sending and receiving her daily ‘good morning’ messages on her iPad.
“It’s here in the kitchen now,” she informed me sleepily. “And, it’s even louder. At least it shut up long enough for me to do my messages.”
That evening it started up again as we watched the television news. Frustrated, my wife picked up her iPad to read and ignore the annoying racket. When she did, the birdsong stopped suddenly.
Then it dawned on us: every time the bird sang, the iPad was close by. And, whenever an iPad button was pushed, the birdsong stopped. The bird was inside the iPad!
I consulted Google and learned that others have complained of hearing noises, some bird-like, on their iPads. I didn’t try to learn more about those complaints or what those iPad owners had discovered, if anything.
I didn’t because I feared finding yet another conspiracy theory, and we already have too many of those.
With thousands believing climate change is caused by Jewish snow machines in space, or that Covid-19 is fake news, or that liberal thinkers are pedophiles who eat little children, anything is possible.
It’s not a far reach for those who believe that Bill Gates is a voodoo doll trying to depopulate the world, to believing that Apple is practising mind control with birdsongs in its iPads.
Meanwhile, we are not taking any chances. The iPad is locked away in a soundproof place and quiet has returned to our house.
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February 25, 2021
It is cold, snowing and the car headlights snap on as twi...
Dinner is not a real concern because our car is filled with the delightful aroma of freshly roasted chicken. It is coming from one of those seasoned rotisserie chickens that you buy at take-out food counters in stores like Costco, Wal-Mart and others.
When the chores are done, just pull the plump and tender roasted chicken from its plastic container, set it beside a salad, grab a slice or two of bread and voila – supper. No fuss, no mess and delicious for only $7.99 (plus tax of course) at Costco. (In a U.S. Costco it’s $4.99 American, a price that hasn’t changed in more than 10 years.)An uncooked chicken costs $10 to $12 at a grocery store, so how does Costco manage to sell ready-to-eat, seasoned rotisserie chickens for $7.99?
Jeff Lyons, a Costco senior vice president, has said the company sells 100 million of them a year. He would not confirm reports that its chickens are a loss leader – sold at cost or less to pull in customers who buy other stuff.
Mercy for Animals, an organization dedicated to ending exploitation of animals for food, says it knows how Costco does it. Its website says the chickens are super-fast grown in “crowded, filthy barns.”
The organization did some undercover videoing at a new $450 million Costco chicken facility in Nebraska which produces two million birds a week.
It said it found thousands of chickens crowded together, living for weeks in piles of their own feces.
“Chickens struggling to walk under their own unnatural weight. Bodies burned bare from ammonia-laden litter. Dead days-old chicks. Piles of rotting birds. This is Costco Chicken.”
The chickens are force fed to produce the plump breasts favoured by consumers. Their legs often can’t support the unnatural weight gains and birds topple over and end up lying in the poop. The poop contains ammonia which Mercy says burns the birds left to lie in it.
Some weaker and smaller birds, particularly chicks, are trampled and crushed, and left to rot.
Costco says it has an animal welfare task force that audits its animal facilities and follows the Five Freedoms of animal well-being – freedom from fear, freedom from discomfort, freedom from thirst and hunger, freedom to exhibit natural behaviour and freedom from pain and suffering.
Costco and other companies do take steps to ease the suffering of animals killed for food. For instance, Costco in its Nebraska facility puts chickens to sleep with carbon dioxide before they are plunged into boiling water to loosen their feathers, thus preventing the birds from being boiled alive.
Philosophical arguments supporting killing animals for food have been around forever. Like, non-human animals don’t think, don’t have souls, and don’t act morally. They are far below us and here solely for our benefit.
There always have been people who don’t accept those arguments, but they have had little impact on the food industry. A majority of people want meat to eat and meat production provides many jobs and economic benefits.
These days more people are objecting by going vegan. They have stopped eating meat, or eat only meats from animals they know have been treated humanely.
No matter what food companies say or do, animals destined for our dinner plates are not going to live in the comfortable styles we afford our pet cats and dogs. People have been demanding meat to eat for centuries and crowding animals into tight spaces for butchering has been accepted as part of the process.
It’s a controversial, complicated subject and one for better brains than mine to figure out.
Will I buy and eat another Costco rotisserie chicken? I don’t know. Probably.
What I definitely do know is that all living things, animals, plants or insects, are equally important parts of nature that deserve and must be treated with respect.
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February 18, 2021
So here we are, one year later. Who would have thought th...
More than 109 million cases worldwide and 2.4 million deaths. Canada still experiences roughly 3,200 new cases every day and has had 21,200 reported deaths.
Beyond the actual sickness and death, COVID-19’s toll has been horrifying. Economies devastated, small businesses dying, health care systems exhausted and hundreds of thousands of personal lives shattered.
Millions of people not touched directly by the disease have had their lives changed dramatically.
There is no end in sight. Some experts say that after the pandemic is beaten back COVID-19 will be endemic – a disease that stays around requiring constant vigilance and vaccine updating. Much like polio, whooping cough and other diseases that are controlled but still erupt from time to time.
An important question now is what life will be like after the COVID-19 pandemic finally is subdued. Certainly, it will not simply return to what it was before the pandemic.
Social distancing policies designed to contain COVID-19 already have changed the world of work. Companies are finding that they operate reasonably well without large, costly offices.
However, more people working from home widen gaps in society. Humans are social animals who need to interact with others, and the gaps created by working apart will have to be addressed.
Workplace and work habit changes brought by COVID-19 come on top of changes already occurring. Automation, robotics and artificial intelligence have brought dramatic and stressful changes and will bring many more.
Similarly, the future of education as we knew it is in doubt. Almost 200 governments around the world closed schools during the pandemic. Tens of millions of learners were sent home to continue their learning remotely.
This has led to a huge number of drop outs, creating more less-educated people seeking work in shrinking work places.
It also raises the question of whether remote learning will increase in an attempt to save costs.
All this is creating uncertainty and anxiety. Our sense of safety and certainty about the future and our jobs and lives in general is being shaken badly.
My biggest worry is what COVID-19 is doing, and what it already has done, to our moral instincts.
When a society malfunctions, moral instincts begin to dissolve. We see this already. Tired and stressed, people have become nastier. Crime is up. Disputes are rising in once stable relationships and friendships.
The BBC reported recently that British divorce rates are soaring with one leading law firm reporting a 122-per-cent increase in inquiries between last July and October. Similar increases are being reported in the United States and China.
Sweden reported a 15-per-cent increase in joint divorce filings last summer.
Many jurisdictions around the world report increases in domestic violence during the pandemic. Close to home, Simcoe County shelters are reporting increases of 40 to 50 per cent in crisis line calls.
Post-pandemic life will be different and will require answers to questions about how to adjust to the changes.
Interestingly, some wise thinking about life after illness has been around for almost 400 years, provided by a British cleric named John Donne. After almost dying from an unknown fever in 1623, Donne wrote Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions in which he reflected upon death and human need.
Meditation XVII of Devotions contained two famous thoughts: “No man is an island” and “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”
The first expresses his belief that no one is self-sufficient and everyone must rely on others to achieve a safe and productive life.
The second is the concept that one person’s death diminishes us all because we are a community of human life, not simply individuals removed from what is happening in other places.
Donne’s concepts never really had huge impact on the way we live, probably because they were written in Old English during the middle ages.
They are worth thinking about now in a society that too often puts individualism ahead of working together to achieve a better world.
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February 10, 2021
The paw prints in the snow make me sad.They go in a strai...
The paw prints in the snow make me sad.
They go in a straight line, heading nowhere in particular, yet seemingly heading everywhere.
They enter a hilltop copse of young maples, then descend into a small clearing at the edge of a dense spruce bog. The stride of the track shortens, indicating a pause to reconnoiter, then carries on into the dark thickness.
I have no intention of following. It is hard work walking through the snow and the farther I follow the tracks the sadder I become.
I’m saddened because the tracks are those of a red fox, probably a vixen searching for food the night before. The tracks hold no evidence that she has found any.
I’ve seen the vixen from a distance on a couple of occasions this winter and she looks gaunt from hunger. Following her tracks in the snow tells me how far she has to travel, consuming precious energy, just to find a morsel.
I feel sorry for her but suppress the urge to leave food out for her. Feeding the fox could make her dependent on handouts and diminish her desire to hunt on her own.
And looking hungry does not mean a fox is starving. It might have an empty, growling stomach but that likely will not last for long.
Foxes typically eat 0.5 to one kilogram of food a day. They are superbly equipped to find and catch it.
They have an acute sense of hearing and smell. Researchers have observed foxes detecting an egg 50 centimeters (almost two feet) away and buried under three centimeters (roughly one inch) of sand.
Also, foxes are omnivores and therefore have a wide choice of foods. They’ll eat mice, worms, insect larvae, grubs, carrion, and plant material, especially fruits.
Their hunting skills are legendary and are backed by extreme cunning and some science.
New Scientist magazine reported some years back that foxes use earth’s magnetic field to hunt. Some other creatures – birds and sharks – also have a ‘magnetic sense’ but foxes are the only critters known to use that sense for catching prey.
The magazine reported that the fox sees earth’s magnetic field as a ring of shadow. The shadow darkens as a fox’s eyes look toward magnetic north.
The fox can hear a mouse moving under a metre of snow but does not know precisely how far away it is. However, as the shadow on the fox’s eyes lines up with the sound of the mouse, they tell the fox the exact location and it pounces through the snow, pinning the mouse with its paws.
Cunning is another large part of keeping the fox from starvation. It’s an imaginative type of cunning that allows the fox to solve a problem when trying to catch prey.
There is the famous story, apparently based on truthful observation, of a fox bringing a stick to the edge of a pond where ducks are swimming. The fox plays with the stick, tossing it about in full view of the ducks who become curious about its behaviour.
The fox tires of its game, drops the stick by the shore and wanders off into some reeds. The ducks are curious and come ashore to check out the stick. Then, zap! The fox jumps up out from the reeds and grabs a duck.
There is another story of a Canadian biologist watching a fox charging a feeding squirrel which escapes by running into its tunnel entrance. Not long after, the squirrel emerges from the tunnel’s exit hole nearby, resumes feeding but is charged again by the fox. It again escapes by running back into the tunnel entrance.
This happens three times but when the squirrel escapes back into the entrance tunnel the fox goes instead to the exit tunnel, waits with its mouth open and grabs the squirrel as it comes out to resume feeding.
When I think about all the skills, tools and cunning a fox has for getting food I feel less sad.
Still, those paw prints trailing endlessly through the snow make me appreciate how long and hard that vixen works to keep food in her belly, and the bellies of any family she might have back in her den.
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February 4, 2021
The differences between being religious and being spirit...
The differences between being religious and being spiritual were never more evident than what’s been happening at Trinity Bible Chapel in the Kitchener-Waterloo region.
The church has held three inside Sunday services in defiance of Covid-19, Ontario law and a court order. Its leaders say that banning large inside gatherings during the pandemic is against the right to practice religion. Attending church is an essential service, they say.
So, protecting the right to attend church is more important than protecting the health of your fellow citizens. Which is fine if the Trinity Bible Chapel church-goers, most of them unmasked and not socially distanced in three recent indoors services, stayed inside for next six months instead of going out into the community, heightening the risk of spreading Covid-19.
The church asserts on its website that restrictions on religious gatherings during a pandemic are an infringement of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.Pastor Jacob Reaume has said people fear Covid-19 because they don’t know “the love of Christ” who already has defeated death,
“The worst thing that can happen to me is that I die and go to heaven,” the Kitchener-Waterloo Record reported him telling an outdoor drive-in service this past Sunday.
Supporting Trinity Chapel is maverick politician Randy Hillier, a civil disobedience advocate banished from the Ontario Progressive Conservative caucus. He attended a January 24 Trinity Bible Chapel service and proudly tweeted about it.
He posted a photo showing dozens of unmasked people in the pews and commented that it was “a wonderful service this morning in Waterloo. it was a top shelf day.”
The selfishness of the Trinity Bible Chapel folks is more sad and more alarming to me because of a special anniversary this week.
This week marks the 78th anniversary of The Four Chaplains who went down with the U.S. troop ship Dorchester, torpedoed and sank by the German navy off Newfoundland, Feb. 3. 1943.
The chaplains, a Jewish rabbi, a Catholic priest, a Methodist minister and a Dutch Reformed minister, gave their life jackets to soldiers who did not have them, then joined arms, prayed and sang hymns as the ship sank.
Their deaths were not acts of religion. They were acts of spiritualism.
Religion is belief and worship. Basic religion is about looking after yourself faithfully to gain God’s reward. Spiritualism is about looking after others.
Spiritualism is meaningful because its first priority is loving and caring about other people, all living things and the planet itself. It does not require being inside a religious building to understand and practice it.
The first people of North America understood this long before the rest of us arrived. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) creation story exemplifies the giving nature of spiritualism.
It tells of people who lived in the sky above the clouds because there was no earth below, just water. A hole appeared in the clouds and a young lady named Sky Woman fell through it, clutching a handful of seeds as she plunged downward.
Her fall was cushioned by water animals, who helped her onto the back of a giant turtle. Then a muskrat dived to the ocean floor and returned with a handful of mud, which Sky Woman spread on the turtle’s back and saw it grow into our planet.
The muskrat gave its life getting that handful of mud. Its dive to the ocean floor was so deep that when it returned to the surface, it tossed up the mud then, exhausted and out of oxygen, sank and drowned.
Sky Woman spread her seeds across the mud, then offered the fruits of her plantings to all creatures.
Both the Iroquois story of Sky Woman, and the heroism of The Four Chaplains are about giving and looking after each other. They are stories that should be told at Trinity Bible Chapel, and other churches serving extreme right wing religious groups.
How these people can defy Ontario law and pooh-pooh the health of their fellow beings is beyond my comprehension. Especially this week, the anniversary of The Four Chaplains.
And, especially because one of those chaplains – the Dutch Reformed minister – was the Rev. Clark Poling, my dad’s distant cousin, who was the last of a line of seven unbroken generations of seven Poling evangelical ministers.
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January 28, 2021
Bad information vomited across social media is so preval...
Bad information vomited across social media is so prevalent that it’s even showing up in U.S. presidential addresses.
Newly-sworn President Joe Biden’s inaugural speech last week contained a bad piece of social media junk. Early in the speech he referred to the “once-in-a-century virus” stalking the country. He, of course, was talking about the Covid-19 pandemic killing hundreds of thousands of people across North America, millions around the world.
There is no such thing as a “once-in-a-century” virus or pandemic. It’s nonsense perpetrated on Facebook and other platforms about pandemics occurring every 100 years – 1720 plague, 1820 cholera, 1920 Spanish Flu, 1920 Covid-19.
It’s petty of me to criticize Biden for referring to “once-in-a-century”. We all know what he meant: comparison between two horrid pandemics 100 years apart – the 1918 Spanish Flu and Covid-19 in 2020.
But there is more at issue here. The 100-year references perpetrate beliefs that these killer pandemics are rare. Many expect that once Covid-19 goes away, it will be many decades before we see another.
Pandemics no longer are rare. Thinking that way sets us up for another disaster of weak leadership and unpreparedness like the one we are suffering through.
There have been half a dozen pandemics in the last century – Spanish Flu 1918-20, Asian flu 1956-58, Hong Kong flu 1968, HIV-AIDS 2005-2012, SARS 2003, Swine Flu 2009. Plus, dozens of serious epidemics.
(Pandemics are epidemics that spread across many countries or continents. Epidemics are serious disease outbreaks that affect large numbers of people in a community or a region).
There are plenty of warnings that more pandemics are on the way. There were numerous warnings that the current pandemic was coming.
The Ontario SARS report gave warnings and recommendations roughly 15 years ago. The book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic gave the warnings in 2012.
Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates warned of it in 2015. Various research studies warned of it over the past few years.
Political leaders around the world shrugged and ignored the warnings, then responded with Milquetoast actions when they saw it had arrived.
Boris Johnson, the British prime minister who has trouble finding his hairbrush in the morning, bounced about like a ping pong ball in his responses to Covid. The result has been disaster; British cases closing in on four million, with close to 100,000 dead.
Little needs to be said about our neighbour to the south, a world-leading nation reduced to a garbage dump fire. Its former president, now known as Trumpinocchio, or Igor Trumpinov, simply ignored it, or called it fake news.
The Canadian response has consisted mainly of the prime minister daily standing in front of a microphone telling us the federal government has ordered tens of millions of Covid vaccine doses.
Canada ranks No. 1 in the world in amounts of vaccine doses ordered, but is far behind other countries in the number of doses administered.
Canada’s situation will get worse. Pfizer-BioNTech, currently the main supplier of Covid vaccine, has cut Canadian deliveries by 50 per cent for the next month or so. At the start of this week fewer than 90,000 of 38 million Canadians had been fully vaccinated and many of us will not feel the needle until summer or fall or perhaps even next year.
What has happened, and continues to happen, is a disaster caused by unprepared, unfocussed leadership. There’s little we can do about it now, except to wait for our turn to be vaccinated while following the advice of our medical experts.
We need to turn our attention to being properly prepared for the otic pandemic. We all need to become better informed about deadly viruses, what causes them and encouraging intelligent pandemic planning and stockpiling of equipment and supplies.
Most of all we need to ensure that medical experts are front and centre during the next pandemic while politicians are kept in the background, where they cannot muddle the communication so vital in serious disease outbreaks.
When this is all over don’t push it to the rear of your thoughts, because the next zoonotic outbreak is out there waiting to be spilled into the human population by some bat, monkey or other animal host.
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January 21, 2021
There is a story behind every published story, and a rea...
There is a story behind every published story, and a really interesting one behind Treasures of the Deep, a new children’s book by Minden-area author Irene Davidson Fisher.
Treasures of the Deep is the story of Ashanti, a young girl who wants to buy her grandmother a birthday present but she has only 75 cents. Grandma loves sea shells, and when Ashanti spots Grandma’s book about shells, she sets off on an adventure to find Grandma’s favourites.
The story behind the story is how Irene, who came to Canada from Scotland as a child, became a writer of children’s stories. She spent most of her adult life in business, forming her own consulting company.
Her business life included writing event scripts for conferences, speaking notes for members of boards and speeches for a number of politicians. But writing children’s stories was a dream – something for maybe off in the future.
About five years before she retired, Irene was flipping through an old magazine when she noticed one of those postcard advertising inserts. It was for the Institute of Children’s Literature, which offers correspondence courses on writing for children and teenagers. She set it aside, but didn’t do anything with it.
Some years later, after she retired from her business career, a good friend handed her an envelope. It contained the Institute of Children’s Literature postcard and a note saying: “Promise me you will fill this out and follow your dreams.”
She sent in the application and a sample story and was accepted into the Institute’s basic program, later graduating from the advanced program.
The story behind the story became even more interesting in 2011 when she and her husband lost everything in a house fire. Her computer, containing Institute assignments and stories, was burned but the Institute still had some of her work on file, and some of her saved ideas and work later became children’s books.
Her first children’s book, Robbie Raccoon and the Big Black Blog, was followed by the Best Present Ever and now Treasures from the Deep.
Each story has a message for children. Robbie the Raccoon is about listening to your mom; The Best Present tells how the best part of Christmas is about giving. Treasures is a lesson about money not being necessary for a special gift and never giving up when faced with a problem.
Irene donates $1 from each book sale to Autism Canada, which she describes as a charity “near and dear to my heart.”
She also recently published online a flipbook poem titled Achoo, which gives positive messages to children about Covid-19. It is illustrated by her granddaughter.
She is working on a new book titled Percival Penguin, based on an idea she has had tucked away for some time.
Talking to Irene about her journey into writing and her books reminded me of a valuable lesson: the importance of getting children into the habit of reading.
Albert Einstein, a brilliant mind and a man considered by many to be greatest scientist of all time, is reported to have told someone:
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
Reading storybooks is a critical part of the growth and development of children. Children’s books are the homes of characters that young readers get to know and become like friends.
Books are doors to discovery, magic portals through which children walk into other worlds and meet other characters with different lives and different ideas. In practical terms, reading helps children exercise their brains, sharpen their imaginations, develop critical thinking, and of course improve language skills.
Just as important, reading helps to improve concentration, something much needed in a world of digital games and other distractions.
Most importantly, reading helps children develop empathy, which is the ability to experience and understand the feelings of others and to learn how to be helpful.
Empathy is something humans are not born with. It is developed. And, if you want to see what happens when it is not developed, watch the Jan. 6 insurrection videos of all the boneheads pulling apart the once United States of America.
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January 14, 2021
So many people are dying in California. Almost 30,00 peo...
So many people are dying in California.
Almost 30,00 people in the state have died from Covid-19. Three dozen or more perished last year in the state’s 9,000-plus wildfires. Then there’s the roughly 3,000 deaths a year from gun violence.
Tens of thousands of tragic deaths that are of no remarkable interest to people living in distant places.
However, three recent California deaths grabbed my interest, reminding me dramatically just how fickle life is, and how our lives are connected.
A family of four was walking the Pacific Ocean shoreline when a rogue wave slammed into the beach. The dad and his two young children were carried off and drowned. The mom survived.
My daughter and her family live in the San Francisco area and took some interest in reports of the tragedy because they go to the beaches. They probably had walked the scene of the tragedy, a beach at Goat Rock State Park in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco.
My daughter says rogue waves seem to be increasing and this is backed by a variety of scientific studies. But the Goat Park drownings were just another beach tragedy and a warning to be cautious about ocean beach visits.
Just another, until I saw an unusual obituary notice in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
The obituary was about Michael Wyman and his children, Anna, 7, and John, 4, who were caught by a rogue wave and drowned at Goat State Park on January 3rd. Why would the Globe and Mail publish the obituary for three Sonoma County people drowned while walking a California beach?
Then it struck me. Michael Wyman was a Canadian I knew when he was a child.
The Wymans lived in Ottawa not far from us when my family lived there many years ago. In fact, my daughter Marcella babysat Michael and his older sister Katrina.
More importantly, a neighbour and very close friend of ours was Michael’s caregiver while his parents worked. Over the years he became like a member of her family, a third son and little brother. They remained close over the years.
Time moved on and people went their separate ways. Michael was a bright young man, nurtured by a well-educated mom and dad and what had become his second family, our friends up the street.
He got a terrific education, including degrees from Upper Canada College, the University of Toronto and Oxford. He earned a law degree, plus a Chartered Financial Analyst designation.
He practised corporate law in New York City and was involved in promoting solar power projects. It was in New York that he met and married Sarah Brennan, a scientist who studies cancer biology. They moved from New York in 2017 to fulfill a dream of living in California.
Michael drowned while holding onto his son and trying to reach his daughter. It was a scene described later as a horrid tragedy, but one marked with love and heroism.
His wife and bystanders pulled him from the surf but paramedics were unable to revive him. The bodies of the two children were swept out to sea.
Three days later, on the other side of the United States, there was another tragic scene – an American version of Kristallnacht, the 1938 violent attacks against Jewish people in Nazi Germany. Insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol, in a mindless smashing and looting spree that ended with five people dead.
On one side of the country terrible misfortune marked with courage, intelligence and love. On the other side, tragedy marked by stupidity and hatred.
When I think about those two deadly incidents I want to stand up and scream: Why? Why do decent, intelligent people get taken away? People with brains, training and positive attitudes that help make our flawed world a better place.
Why do the stupid ones, whose only contributions to society are negative thoughts, negative actions and hatred, get to hang around trying to pull the rest of us down to their level?
They are no use in building a better society. They are like the twisted timbers and broken bricks that carpenters and masons toss aside when building the best of homes.
Why? There doesn’t seem to be an answer.
December 24, 2020
O holy night!From Shaman’s RockBy Jim Poling Sr. My most...
O holy night!
From Shaman’s Rock
By Jim Poling Sr.
My most cherished Christmas moment comes when I sit quietly and recall the Christmas Eve when I heard an angel sing.
Fresh-fallen snow protested beneath my gumboots breaking trail down the unploughed lane as I walked home that Christmas Eve. Dry, sharp squeaks, not unlike the cries of cheap chalk scrapped against too clean a blackboard.
Skuur-eek, skuur-eek.
The boots ignored the sounds. They moved on, ribbed rubber bottoms and laced high leather tops creating a meandering wake in the ankle-deep snow.
From each side of the lane, drifted snow leaned tiredly against the backsides of the bungalows, dropped there by an impatient blizzard just passed through. Their crests were indistinguishable against the white stucco walls but nearly reached tufted piles of fluffy snow clinging nervously to windowsills and eavestrough lips.
The squeaks flew through the still night air, dodging fat snowflakes that fell heavily onto my cap bill, occasionally splashing into my face, flushed warm from the walk.
Faint strains of music joined the squeaking as I approached our back fence. I stopped to hear the music more clearly, now identifiable as singing voices escaping through an open window.
I shuffled forward and listened to the notes float out crisply and clearly, then mingle with smoke rising from the chimneys. Notes and smoke rose together into an icy sky illuminated by frost crystals set shimmering by thousands of stars and a frosted moon.
The music was the Christmas carol ‘O Holy Night,’ and the notes came from the window in my grandmother’s room. It was open to the cold because most people smoked cigarettes back then and cracked a window at gatherings to thin the smoke. They sang the first verse, and, when they reached the seventh line, the other voices ceased and a single voice carried on alone:
“Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices! O Niiii ... iiight Diii...vine! ...”
That’s the part where the voice rises higher and higher until the singer reaches a stratospheric note.
The solo voice belonged to Louise LaFrance, my grandmother, and I knew she was hitting that high note while sitting on the edge of the bed that had been her prison for sixteen years. She was crippled with limb-twisting rheumatoid arthritis and suffered searing pain and the humiliation of being bedridden, a humiliation that included needing a bedpan to relieve herself and having her son-in-law lift her naked body in and out of the bathtub.
She had taken up smoking to help ease the pain but had trouble holding a cigarette between her gnarled fingers.
She never complained or questioned why she had to bear the pain, and despite her frailty, she was a leader in our house. We brought our problems to her. When we hurt, we ran to her and she draped her twisted arms around us and absorbed our pain because she believed it was better that she have it than us.
The others had stopped singing to listen to her. A shiver danced on my spine the second time she hit the high notes at the words “O Night Divine,”.
When she finished singing “O Holy Night,” the other voices started up again, this time with “Silent Night” and other favourite carols.
I went into the house and found Christmas Eve celebrants — my mom, dad, and some neighbours — crowded into the ten-by-ten bedroom that was my grandmother’s world. They sang long into the night, mostly in French because the neighbours were the Gauthiers who seldom spoke English to my grandmother and my mother.
After the singing ended my mother served tourtière, which I slathered with mustard and devoured as only a teenager can. Then we gathered at the tree and opened our gifts.
I have long forgotten what I got, and it doesn’t matter, because my real gift was the understanding that those high notes were not solely the products of my grandmother’s lungs. They came from a strength far beyond anything that mere human flesh can produce. They were high notes driven by something far stronger — an unbreakable spirit.
It was my grandmother’s last Christmas. But the memory of her high notes and unbreakable spirit brings her back every Christmas Eve.
Read From Shaman’s Rock: www.mindentimes.ca/columnsDecember 16, 2020
It’s time to hike out to the shed and fetch the artifici...
It’s time to hike out to the shed and fetch the artificial Christmas tree.
It is not a huge task. Wrestle the box off the top shelf, pull out the three tree sections, snap them together, straighten the stand legs and stick the tree in a corner. The lights are built into the tree so you just plug the cord into a wall socket, add some Christmassy decorations, toss on some tinsel, and voila! All done.
But I’ve been thinking that maybe that’s not such a good idea this year. Memories of Christmases past keep whispering in my head.
They remind me of joyous Christmas moments from the past. Those years when we went into the bush with Dad to select and cut the world’s best Christmas tree. The fun of dragging it home, setting it up, then placing every coloured ball, and each piece of tinsel, carefully and affectionately.
And, in later years, following many of the same family traditions with our own children.
More people are leaving their artificial trees in storage this year. They are opting for real trees, in many cases because they are seeking some normalcy in a year that has been completely abnormal.
The Canadian Christmas Tree Growers Association says it expects this year to set a record for sales. Many Canadian Christmas tree lots have sold out and exports of real trees to the U.S. are soaring.
I decided some years back not to cut any more live Christmas trees because of environmental concerns. I’m wondering now if those concerns are well-founded.
Like most artificial trees, ours is mainly plastic. The needles are plastic, as are many of the connecting parts. The electrical wires are plastic as is the star that tops the tree.
I’ve concluded that by deciding on an artificial tree I traded one set of environmental concerns for another.
There is too much plastic in our world. It is everywhere, including places it should not be – roadside ditches, city streets, lake shorelines and oceans. Plastics take centuries to deteriorate. Some never do.
Real Christmas trees disappear soon after Christmas. Many municipalities have Christmas tree recycling programs in which the trees are ground into mulch that is added to gardens to lock in moisture, suppress weeds and feed the soil.
Live trees suck up carbon dioxide belched into the atmosphere by human use of fossil fuels. They are pollution filters that researchers say can remove up to 13 tons of airborne pollutants per acre per year.
And, they release oxygen year round - especially the young hungry and fast-growing evergreens - because they do not shed their needles, which are food-producing factories.
Growing Christmas trees for sale also is a boost for the agriculture industry. Statistics Canada reports that the value of farm cash receipts for Christmas trees in 2017 was $91.2 million.
Also, when you get a tree from a Christmas tree lot you expect that tree is going to be replaced. Tree farmers must replace trees that are cut and sold if they expect to stay in business in future years.
A tree farm sapling takes eight to 10 years before it is ready for market, so it’s a business in which the operator must think ahead.
Perhaps all of us should adopt such forward thinking. What if those of us who follow the Christmas tree tradition planted one replacement tree every year as a sign of renewed life?
All trees, but evergreens in particular, are a sign of continuing life. Ancient civilizations hung evergreen boughs over their doors and windows during bleak winter times. The ancient Egyptians brought green palm branches into their homes in late December as a sign of life.
Some Christmas tree traditions and customs have been borrowed from different people from different lands. The first Christmas tree in Canada is believed have been introduced by Baron Friederick von Riedesel, a German immigrant to Quebec in the late 1700s.
Originally the Christmas tree was the traditional centrepiece of the season celebrating the birth of Christ. It has expanded to become a symbol of freshness, renewed life, hope and faith.
That’s a much-needed, much-appreciated gift in 2020, a year of loss and sadness.
Read From Shaman’s Rock: www.mindentimes.ca/columns
