Tag Archives: memories

A 30 year tradition

It was either Christmas Eve 1989 or 1990 and I was home from universtiy for the holidays. My friend Ross and I had yet to do any Christmas shopping. We drove to a huge mall with a restaurant, ordered lunch and had a few beers, then started shopping. At first we shopped together, but that wasn’t working so we split up. This was the pre-cellphone era so we made plans to meet in an hour. At that point we talked a bit about our purchases, gave each other ideas, and planned a second meeting.

I don’t remember if we split up again or just stuck together after that, but we ended up back at the restaurant, ordered coffees, and then started being brutally honest with each other about how good (and bad) we thought our purchases were for our family members. This resulted in a return or two, and some more purchases, before eating again and heading home.

By 1993 I was living in Vancouver and the commute to Toronto was a bit too far to make Christmas Eve plans with Ross. I have spent a few Christmases ‘back home’ and sure enough we still kept the tradition going, but we’ve celebrated this day many more times at a distance. So, every Christmas Eve morning I get a call from Ross. Every Christmas Eve for 30 years. And hopefully for 30 more.

Shifting Dreams

I’ve already shared that I almost never dream of people that are currently in my life, dreams for me usually include people I have not seen in a while. That has shifted a bit recently. So has the number of dreams I seem to recall. I am waking up regularly during the night with a full dream in my head.

They are ridiculous. One of them last night included me being a twin double agent that was subjected to a life-altering test administered by a rogue lizard-man. This beast was an escaped prisoner that we were not allowed to catch, and when we found him we just had to surrender to being hit with spray from a water gun that had dangerous chemicals in it.

Another dream last night turned into a covid dream… I went to visit the archery range, without my bow, and one of the volunteers talked me into shooting guns with them since archery was cancelled. He loaned me a gun, had me sign a waiver (that I didn’t have to read) then took me to a signup building that ended up being an indoor shooting range. Only after being packed into this thing with dozens of people did I realize that I was in a crowded room of anti-maskers, with a sick kid coughing next to me. Stressful. And bizarrely stupid.

When I was in university, I went through a phase of really vivid dreams and I trained myself to make them lucid. The trick was to realize I was dreaming and raise my hand in front of my face. Once I could do this, I realized in my dream that I had the power to choose what I did in the dream. The first couple times I did this, I got too excited about it and woke up.

The third and subsequent times I was able to stay dreaming and I would choose to fly. The sensation was exhilarating and absolutely amazing. I loved it. The only two times I had sensations stronger than the sense of flying in a dream were when I woke up once before my body did and I was comatose, trapped in a disconnected body, this was horrifying. The second was when I met the Messiah in a dream and felt compassion that was so intense, it brought so much love and joy to me, that I crumbled to my knees. One day I’ll share that dream, but not today.

I think I’m at a phase of dreaming where I could get back to lucid dreaming. I think I’m going to go to bed reminding myself to look at my hand and then take control of my dreams. I want to shift from dreams that are silly and stressful to ones where I can enjoy sensations that I can’t in real life. I want to fly again.

What students remember

What students forget:

  • The Krebs cycle
  • Historical facts
  • How to solve quadratic equations
  • The homework they did
  • Answers on tests
  • Worksheets
  • Teachers who will forget them

What students remember:

  • Teachers who will remember them
  • Teachers who listened
  • Teachers that made them laugh
  • Teachers who were passionate about teaching
  • Teachers who didn’t give up on them
  • Friends
  • Engaging projects
  • Sports and clubs

These lists are not extensive… but they are the inspiration for a question: What will students remember about school during the 2020-2021 pandemic?

Teachers have it tough right now. Students too. More than ever teachers need to focus on teaching students, not subjects.

Yesterday I saw an article with a title like, ‘Study shows students are months behind in reading skills due to remote learning.’ Squeezing one more book into the year won’t change that. Showing students a passion for reading will.

Focus on students… and they will remember you, and what you taught them, for all the right reasons.

Family and comfort food

Last night we made me mother’s Spanish rice. It’s a funny recipe to follow. It was given to me over the phone, more than 20 years ago. It is written on the back of a used envelope and it doesn’t have any measurements on it. It’s just a list of ingredients with a curly bracket to indicate which ingredients to cook on the stovetop first, before the rice is baked in a dish.

I’ve never made it exactly the same. This time my wife started it and I finished it, and it was only after I got it all in the baking dish that I realized that I forgot a key ingredient. Back into the stovetop it went to mix this ingredient in… it still tasted wonderful. My daughter loved it, and said it’s one of her favourite home cooked meals. I said the same to my mom at her age. It’s the quintessential comfort food for our family.

It’s funny how recipes get passed down; how families share food like traditions. My grandmother on my dad’s side is the best cook I’ve ever met, and she never used a measuring cup or spoon. Following her recipes was impossible. My mom would watch her and take notes, but could not master her dishes like granny. And granny’s repertoire was incredible. A Chinese decent Guyanese who married a Jew, she could make dishes from three distinct cultures, or fuse dishes and flavours with the expertise of an alchemist.

Everything she made was a favourite. I remember staying over with her once and she asked me in the morning if I wanted an omelette. I said ‘sure’ and she went to the kitchen to cook. 20 minutes later I heard her say in her thick West Indian accent, “Ehh-Ehh!” I asked what’s wrong and she said, “Ah, don’ have any eggs!” I had the stir-fried ingredients on toast and, despite the lack of eggs, it was one of the best omelettes I ever had!

It’s wonderful how we can be comforted by food, and how certain dishes can take us back to our childhood.

When the street lights came on

How many of us Gen X kids stayed out until the street lights came on? That was the signal to head hone for bed. Until the street lights came on, all your parents knew about your location was that you were somewhere in the neighbourhood…. somewhere.

Kids today, their parents always know where they are. This isn’t that new. Even us X’ers didn’t let our kids have this freedom. We grew up in an era when news reports started telling us what a bad world we live in. Unsafe. Dangerous for kids.

Now we are locked down in a way that really limits kids freedoms even more. Where are you going? Who are you seeing? Are they all in your small bubble of friends? Coronavirus has locked us all down and limited where we go and who we see.

This is really tough for kids. They don’t have any equivalent experience of being out until the street lights turn on. They don’t have a place to be unsupervised by adults… not to raise hell and cause trouble, just to be kids.

How much of their time is organized. Even fun is organized… soccer practice, dance classes, music lessons, are all put in the calendar. Play is scheduled, like recess and lunch at school, every free moment isn’t really free at all.

I think we need to find ways to give kids some of the freedom we had as kids, when we could stay out, unsupervised, until the street lights came on.

Documenting your life

It occurred to me last night that a daily blog is an interesting way to document your life. It’s not a true journal, like a diary, because there are things I won’t share because it’s public… However it is a document of my thoughts and it opens a door into the things I think about.

I’m basically at a point now where I look back at old posts and some I remember writing and some I don’t. The blog is documenting thoughts I don’t even remember having. Have you ever looked back at a piece of writing and not remembered writing it? It’s kind of a weird feeling.

Kids today are doing this in different ways. They are sharing videos on TikTok, photos on Instagram, and even memories on Snapchat. Yes, even on Snapchat, the app where everything disappears, there is an option to save your video and Snapchat will share your ‘memories’ with you each year, like us old folk see on Facebook.

We are documenting our lives in digital, social spaces. Some of these spaces will disappear over time, and we will lose a piece of our histories. I no longer have my Ning and my Wikispaces memories archived, I can’t even remember some of the names of the apps that I stored memories on, that no longer exist.

But some will survive, some will get archived. While a paper journal can disappear, digital footprints might stick around for a very long time.

Our big ‘neighbor’

I remember driving through Indiana and meeting a couple older teenagers at a motel pool where we stopped for the night. It was the early ’90’s and these kids knew very little about Canada. They asked if I knew of Larry Bird and the NBA? They asked if we used the same currency? And they asked what the big mall was like? After a couple questions, I realized they meant West Edmonton Mall, and living in Toronto at the time I said, “You tell me, you live closer to it.”

That wasn’t a fair response, but I was growing weary of questions like this. As a Canadian on my travels through the States, I’ve been asked about hunting moose, dog sleds, igloos, and one of my favourites, if Canada was an American State?

I don’t pretend to know a lot about America, especially their history, but Canadians have an unfair advantage over Americans when it comes to knowing about each other’s countries. We see their news, they don’t see ours. We watch their television and movies. We follow their social media and business icons. We eat a lot of food produced in the US, and eat at restaurant chains that are American owned.

Canadians know we are significantly different than Americans. I’m not sure (beyond cliches) that the same can be said in reverse. It matters more to us when we rely so much on the US. And, if you look at a population map, the vast majority of Canadians live relatively close to our border, and that is not true for Americans.

Americans can live their lives not knowing anything about Canada. We don’t have the reverse option. Our election will be a ‘blip’ of news ‘down south’, theirs have and will continue to flood our media sources. Tariffs disputes affect individual companies in the US while they affect entire communities and Provinces in Canada. We will watch their blockbuster movies, and while some of them are filmed in Canada, they will be American films that Canadians might know were filmed here, but most Americans won’t.

We have a very large and powerful neighbour to our south, and we can’t ignore the influence they have on us. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next 5-10 years. The closed border, the discrepancy between our two countries in Covid-19 cases, their leadership, and the impression the US has on the world stage, has all changed the way the US is viewed in Canada.

The little brother or sister eventually stops looking at his bigger brother or sister with admiration and awe. I think we are seeing a similar relationship transition between Canada and the US. I just hope these two siblings remember that we are all part of a North American family and keep trying to play nicely together.

Covid dreams

I woke up this morning from a dream in which the entire focus was on getting the proper face protection to do the task I wanted to do. I can’t remember the task, only the concern for not being safe.

I often have dreams where the preparation for the task takes over the dream. This goes all the way back to being a pizza delivery driver in university. I’d dream of getting in my car to go to work and my car would only go in reverse. The whole dream would be about trying to get to work driving backwards.

Obviously these are stressful dreams. I can control stress in my waking life, can’t do it in my sleep. It’s not surprising that months into this pandemic, I’d have dreams related to the challenges we face. Going back to work last week has added to this.

Dealing with Covid-19 isn’t something normal. It’s a unique challenge that adds stress to our daily experience. Being around other people used to be easier. Understanding how to give others their personal space used to be easier. Supporting one another used to be easier.

Stress responses are not designed to be triggered again and again over long periods of time. While I was bent on the idea that this isn’t the ‘new normal’ and we need to remember that things will get better… the timeline for change is too long to not call this normal. We need to normalize mask wearing, social distancing, covering up coughs and sneezes, and staying home when we don’t feel well. We need to make this normal enough that it isn’t a stress, but just what we do.

I look forward to dreams where I’m wearing a mask, but the concern of it isn’t the focus of the dream.

Bajan Sun

I grew up in Barbados and loved spending time in the sun. Summers would be spent at the beach, arriving on the sand after breakfast, and often staying until late afternoon. The beach was only a 5 minute walk from our apartment on the second level of a two-story quadplex, and sometimes we’d walk home for lunch, but usually we’d bring a lunch or buy something on the beach.

I’d get so dark that my bathing suit tan line looked like it divided two completely different people. The amazing thing is, I never used sun tan lotion. That was stuff the tourists used. And we saw a lot of burned tourists.

My grandparents lived in a big house on our street and they owned a motel at the end of the street, about 25 meters from our apartment. I can remember my granny’s institutions to newcomers, in her Bajan accent.

“Listen ta me. I got two important things ta tell you. First, don’ go in the sun between 10 and 2 for your first few days… and watch out for the Bajan rum!”

Like clockwork there would be a couple that ignored her warning about every 2-3 weeks. It usually went like this: The first night I’d be woken up late by a taxi dropping a couple off. The husband would be slurring and generally being an ass, drunk on our strong rum. And his apologetic wife would be unsuccessfully trying to corral him into their room while trying to keep him quiet and not wake anyone up. Or they’d both be drunk and making a ruckus.

Next, I’d see them visiting my grandparents the following evening, either just the husband or both of them, red as lobsters, arms outstretched, and asking what to do about the sunburn pain? Basically, being hung over, they would decide to just go to the beach, ignore my granny’s advice and sleep in the sun during that blazing hot time between 10am and 2pm. My granny’s advice was always the same: vinegar. Keep it in the fridge, put it on a soft cloth and dab the burn. She used to give the vinegar out for free, or at least with the cost of an ‘I told you so’ lecture.

I can no longer sit in the sun for endless hours without sun tan lotion. I don’t know if it’s a difference in the sun or my soft Canadian skin, but I can’t handle the sun like I did as a kid. I hate suntan location though, to me it feels like a film of dirt being added to my skin. So I still don’t use it much. Instead of using it, when I go to the beach, I sit in the morning sun, enjoy the feel of soaking in some natural vitamin D, then seek shade after that. I listen to my body and it tells me when I’ve had enough. Sometimes the sun is unavoidable beyond that and yes, on those days I still use sun tan lotion, but mostly I am just cautious about how much sun I get. I still tan well, but it has been decades since I’ve had that stark tan line just above my bathing suit.

Growing up on an island I saw many raw, burned tourists. I saw t-shirt lines so dark, I thought their white bodies were shirts with chest hair. I saw skin peeling off their arms and backs. I saw Santa coloured cheeks, and Rudolph coloured noses during every month of the year. And I heard my granny’s warning over and over again to newcomers, to watch out for the Bajan sun and rum!

Coffee after class

It was second semester of my first year at the University of Guelph. I had a night class on Wednesday’s from 6-9pm. Now, decades later, I have no idea what the class was about, yet taking that class had a profound impact on my thinking.

Another student taking the class with me was Brian, an older, round-faced, bearded gentleman in his mid 30’s whom I knew from a class the previous semester. We sat near each other in the first class and afterwards he asked me, and one other student that I didn’t know, James, if we wanted to go for a coffee. James, was a moustache-less but goateed, hip-looking young man who was probably no more than a year older than me, but he made me look young next to him. He said he was meeting his girlfriend, and could she join us?

Upon leaving the the class, James’ girlfriend, Lara, approached us and he introduced us. Lara was just as hip looking as James. She had short-cropped hair with coloured highlights, and a nose ring. Or maybe it was James that had the nose ring, my memory is a little hazy, this was 32 years ago. (I’m not even 100% sure I have the names right, but these will do,)

And so it began, 10 weeks of the four of us meeting for coffee, creating some unforgettable memories after sitting through a class that was completely forgettable. While we talked about life, the universe, and everything, the conversation always seemed to gravitate to religion.

To give a little personal background, I grew up in a Jewish family, but we were not religious and my dad’s views were both secular and esoteric. What little faith I had was rocked by Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments. I saw this movie shortly after moving to Canada, not yet a teenager.

The part of the movie that most impacted me was the scene that sets the stage for Passover, the only Jewish celebration we did with our grandparents.

To borrow from Wikipedia on Passover:

In the Book of Exodus, God helped the Israelites escape from slavery in ancient Egypt by inflicting ten plagues upon the Egyptians before the Pharaoh would release the Israelite slaves. The last of the plagues was the death of the Egyptian first-born. The Israelites were instructed to mark the doorposts of their homes with the blood of a slaughtered spring lamb. Upon seeing this, the spirit of the Lord knew to pass over the first-born in these homes, hence the English name of the holiday.

In the movie, a fog passes through the city bringing the plague that would kill the first born of the Egyptians and non-believers. You could hear the screams of Egyptian parents as their oldest children died.

Even at this young age, I remember thinking of this from the perspective of an Egyptian parent; A parent that did not wrong anyone, a parent who led a good life, in a loving family. I remember thinking, “What kind of cruel God would do this?” I could understand a God punishing the slave owners, but this was too much. It was vindictive, it was indiscriminate, and it was cruel. I thought, “I can not believe in such a vengeful God”.

The other three that met for coffee after class came from completely different religious standpoints. James was atheist. He had a Christian background, but his stance on religion was as indiscriminately hatefully as the Passover plague was to the Egyptians. Lara was Catholic, and while not fully devout, she held Christian values and principles. Her resolve in believing in God was as strong as her boyfriend’s atheism. Brian was… different.

Like the other three of us, this was Brian’s first year at university, despite being close to double our age. He joined the conversation not just with almost a lifetime’s more of life experience, but with life experiences that were rather unique. He was well travelled, articulate, and wise, but it was his unique religious background that made him quite an anomaly. Brian has been a “Hare Krishna devotee for 14 and a half years”. Looking back, it seems odd that he described his time with them that way. Why mention the 1/2 year?

Early on he was defensive about his time with this group. “People say that the Hare Krishnas drug their devotees… well I was head chef of our group for 9 years and I can tell you that not only are there no drugs, but they ate extremely healthy meals all the time.” As the weeks passed, he began to realize that we were just curious and not being judgemental when asking about his experiences in this faith. He shared a lot about them, but would never divulge what it was that made him leave.

Our conversations would routinely last until the coffee shop closed at 11. Sometimes we would stand outside for another 15-20 minutes conversing before we found a good place to stop. I remember a night where ‘James the Atheist’ became ‘James the Agnostic’. A week later, he was atheist again. I remember a ‘ladder and pyramid’ analogy for religions that Brian shared, that still influences my thoughts on religion today.

I remember having my thoughts and perspectives completely flipped, and also watching as my words would do the same to others. We used the Socratic method of asking questions to stimulate both argument and agreement. We got loud, but never angry. We learned from each other and honed our abilities to argue for the sake of good discourse.

I don’t remember seeing James or Lara after that. Brian didn’t come back to Guelph the next year. He went to India and was doing some charity work. I know this because he wrote a letter to update me. I have that letter in a box somewhere in my garage. I don’t remember any of the contents of the letter now, but I kept it because it was insightful, just like our conversations were.

If it was an era of smartphones and Facebook, I’m sure I would have kept in touch with Brian. He brought the four of us together. We taught each other. We challenged each other. We had one of the best ‘classes’ that I had at university. Four friends in a coffee shop.