Barris Beat

Just follow the instructions

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The assembly directions always say "it's simpler than it looks."
The assembly directions always say "it's simpler than it looks."

Generally, I’ve never had any phobias associated with the last holiday weekend of the summer. Oh, years of commuting to Toronto have made me dread that first Tuesday back on the Don Valley Parkway when it turns into a parking lot again. But nothing ever really bothered me about returning to the fall schedule the day after Labour Day, except (at school) that first-day-back exercise ritual most teachers imposed on us. You know the one – writing or telling the class:

“How I Spent My Summer Holiday.”

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Barris Beat

Paving over peach paradise

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We met her along a suburban crescent of retirement-like houses in Vineland, Ontario. The homes were built in 1990 on local farmland, but looked brand new. Anyway, for semi-retired Patricia Pierce, the setting was perfect – almost opposite her old elementary school and close to the farm where her parents had raised her and thousands of Niagara Peninsula fruit trees.

“I would never have thought in a million years I’d be here in this retirement village,” she said. “But somehow it seems very appropriate.”

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Barris Beat

From small town ideas

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Lancaster in front of Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton, Alberta.
Lancaster in front of Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton, Alberta.

I had hardly oriented myself to the place. Wood smoke from the recent B.C. fires had left Nanton, Alberta – a small prairie town south of Calgary – in a palpable haze. Nevertheless, aviation enthusiast Karl Kjarsgaard, who lives and volunteers there, had something he wanted to show me. Inside the newly renamed Bomber Command Museum of Canada, he led me to a storage area above the workshop. He opened a cardboard box and pulled out a metal bar about 18 inches long.

“This aluminum ingot has Canadian blood in it,” he said. “There’s 1,400 pounds of melted down aluminum in this box… and some of it is about to become famous.”

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Barris Beat

Getting life from a stone

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The restored Frauenkirche church in Dresden in August 2010.
The restored Frauenkirche church in Dresden in August 2010.

I remember the day some business friends and I needed a room in which to meet. A financial advisor friend offered his offices. As I sat down in his boardroom, I spotted a large picture frame on the wall. It contained several images of the former post office in my town. It was typical of that turn-of-the-century, Edwardian construction – tall central tower, large windows, red bricks. When I asked what had happened to it, someone said they’d torn it down.

“Any chance they’d ever rebuild something like that?” I asked naively.

“No will. No way,” fellow board members told me.

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Barris Beat

Making census of the data

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On a hypothetical day, responding to downtown apathy, the township votes against redeveloping the main street. Or, guessing about a population shift, the public school board makes plans to dismantle one of the town’s elementary schools. And then, wildly projecting buyer trends, several of the big-box stores in town decide to forgo sales for gardeners, truck enthusiasts or on Boxing Day.

Canadian long-form written census.
Canadian long-form written census.

In these make-believe scenarios, the municipality, the board and retailers are quite happy to ignore information readily and often freely provided by Statistics Canada in its regular written census. They would agree with the current Industry Minister’s perception that Canadians can do without the long-form census.

“The state has no right to demand intrusive information,” Tony Clement told reporters, and further that “up to 24 per cent of Canadians believe [they] should not be forced to answer it.”

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Barris Beat

Cost of lighting the way

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Courtesy Fisgard Lighthouse National Historic Site.
Courtesy Fisgard Lighthouse National Historic Site.

On Nov. 16, 1860, George Davies made history. The lighthouse keeper climbed the newly constructed, 15-metre-high, conical tower of Fisgard Lighthouse at the entrance to Esquimalt naval harbour on Vancouver Island. His appointment not only helped the British claim sovereignty of the Pacific Coast, it also made a statement about public investment in literacy. In addition to his salary for the nightly lamp lighting atop Fisgard, keeper Davies received a $150 stipend to purchase magazines and books.

“It is of the utmost importance to the interests of the Lighthouse Service,” the Governor of Vancouver Island stated at the time, “that the minds and intellects of the lighthouse keepers should not be allowed to stagnate in their isolated and … desolate stations.”

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Barris Beat

Retreat, but write

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At Sage Hill Writing Experience, writers (l-r) Shar Mitchell, Gayle Sacuta and Linda Killick, pose with Ted Barris in the Saskatchewan sunshine.
At Sage Hill Writing Experience, writers (l-r) Shar Mitchell, Gayle Sacuta and Linda Killick, pose with Ted Barris in the Saskatchewan sunshine.

Shar Mitchell and I greeted each other like old friends. We are. But we haven’t seen each other in years. We exchanged smiles and a hug. We got caught up on spouses and kids. We reminisced about the 1970s when she – then Shar Lenz – felt disillusioned with nursing and expressed an interest in the media. I offered some leads and she landed a job in television. She never looked back. From TV producer to feature writer to actor to concert tour assistant for the ’70s band Seals and Crofts, Shar’s professional life has brimmed with travel and experience. But with pleasantries over, she asked for my help with her next challenge.

“For 10 years I’ve been carrying this story like a yoke,” she said to me this week.

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Barris Beat

The spirit of writing

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It was a reverent moment. Our host entered. We had all enjoyed our first meal in the dining hall together, while on the wall over our shoulders a painting depicted Christ and the apostles at The Last Supper. Our host – a middle-aged monk – apologized that not all seven Franciscans normally resident there could be present; two of them – men in their late 80s – had recently been moved to hospital for elder care, he said. Nevertheless a younger 70-ish Brother Dominic bid us welcome.

Brother Dominic
Brother Dominic

“We are brothers of prayer,” he said. “But we welcome you here to St. Michael’s, your home away from home.”

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Barris Beat

Food for thought

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Post card of The Double T Diner in Baltimore, Maryland, c. 1960.
Post card of The Double T Diner in Baltimore, Maryland, c. 1960.

It’s kind of like breezing by Baked at Frankie’s on a summer morning. Frank and Donna Van Veghel are sitting on a bench out front taking a break, sharing a coffee and the day’s news. Or, it’s like arriving at The Tin Mill when Don Andrews is there at the door greeting his guests. My wife, my sister and I were travelling back from the U.S. through Pennsylvania last weekend. North of Harrisburg we stopped for breakfast at a roadside restaurant called Angie’s Diner.

“Is there really an Angie?” I asked the waitress.

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Barris Beat

When walls come tumbling down

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GARAGE_FROMBACKYARD1I’d been planning the demolition of my garage for a long time. Built sometime in the middle of the last century, my fast disintegrating, single-car enclosure – I had come to realize – had outlived its usefulness and had to go. So, over the weekend, I hired a friend and his future son-in-law to help me bring the old building down. But what the destruction of my old garage revealed as it came down was a great deal more than I expected. For example, as we three demolition types took a break last Saturday afternoon, I asked my longtime next-door neighbour, Ronnie Egan, when she thought the garage had been built.

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