TriumphAnt

Me and commencement

(To begin with a digression, why is the graduation ceremony held to celebrate the successful conclusion of four years of high school called a “commencement”?)

Recently, I was the proud as a peacock Dad at offspring’s commencement – she exited with a superb end-of-year average and a six-pack of awards, including a first place in vocal music. What Dad wouldn’t have a ballooned head?

But what I want to ramble a bit about here is how different the passage of a just under a quartet of decades has made the transition from high school to… whatever.

It might have been the school from which I was graduated (the one where the celebration of the appearance of a 50-foot penis on the football field, and being yanked from the building in handcuffs were reported here a couple entries back), but when I graduated, I don’t recall the same enthusiasm being generated by the production of high marks as was the case in the auditorium of Ottawa’s Glebe Collegiate a few days ago.

The school had really done it up right and, as each graduand paraded solo across the stage to receive his or her diploma, a huge slide appeared on the screen summarizing high school awards, while at the same time the podium speaker read aloud his or her destination and, if applicable, any scholarships earned to that end.

Even among excellence there was excellence par excellence and the Glebe Collegiate’s Class of 2008 has produced one student who required no fewer than three full screens to list all of his awards – all of them in either physics or math. But what especially impressed me was when the podium speaker finally reached the end of the accolade, the entire graduating class of over 300 students erupted into a thunderous cheer and initiated a prolonged standing ovation for a colleague who, in my school 40 years earlier, would have been branded a “geek” and, rather than applauded, watched more in perplexed sympathy as he shuffled back to his seat.

I was also struck by the unbelievable array of university programs into which many in this class are heading – programs whose names were either the stuff of science fiction or just simply “not” when I was graduated – genetic engineering, biodiversity, management engineering, medical robotics… thankfully at least two are off to a diploma in hairdressing at our local community college. Hearing that kept me grounded at least in the approximate neighbourhood of what I call “reality”. And Glebe is also sending a great many young women into a variety of university engineering programs – offspring included – something else that was exceptional to the point of aberration in 1971.

This year, too, several of the students had defined their next year, without a shred of self-consciousness, as one of being “off”. Some were planning a combination of work and travel; others were already booked into some jaw-droppingly remote volunteer service. (One I recall is going to spend a year helping build a school in a third world country, and then heading into the university architecture program into which he has already been accepted.) Still others were unabashedly off to “find myself”; “take the time to let the reality sink in”, or even “hopefully figure out what I want to be when I grow up” and "take over the world". And good for each and every one of them!

In 1971, I have no doubt that announcing I was going to “find myself” would have been met by most responsible adults with a reply something like, “Here’s where your local recruiting office is located; get the Navy to help you look.”

This year’s valedictorian reminded his graduating colleagues that “We are the You Tube and Facebook generation” and our neighbours – with whom we can communicate as easily, if not more so, as we can with the people who live physically next door to us – are to be found across the entire face of the globe. Vaulting me back once more to my little world of science fiction, he listed the problems many of them will be called on to help solve: the AIDS pandemic; global warming; soaring energy costs and looming energy shortages; the crisis in food production; and wars in places with names like Darfur and Kandahar.

I suspect that, recalling my own dimly defined future in 1971 (hardly a surprising state of mind for a teenager), I probably shared at the time what many in the class of ’08 felt this year: a largely uncertain horizon. But I certainly don’t recall my having had anywhere near as many choices articulated for me at my high school graduation as these fine young students were offered.

And if and when one of them perfects a time machine (given the talent in our midst, that could well be in just a few years), I’m bloody well going back because if ever I had an “If I only knew then what I know now” moment, it was on this afternoon in the Glebe Collegiate auditorium where optimism radiated with so damned strong a vibe, it was surely no farther than a half wavelength away from materializing in the very air above our heads.

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Me and art

Leslie nails it

Recently, as we were pulling out of the parking lot of the McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg after a delightful few hours spent among the lions of Canadian art history – the Group of Seven and several superb First Nations artists, Leslie made an observation, which I can paraphrase as, “No matter how high the quality of an image of a work of art that appears in a book or printed portfolio, there is nothing to equal the experience of actually seeing the original.”

I have always liked the paintings of Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris. They are deceptively simple in their lines but when you consider they often feature deceptively simple subjects – a mountain or lake shoreline – Harris’s not-quite-abstract style is perfectly suited to his subjects, many of which he has transformed into the well-known works of grandeur that hallmark his contribution to the Group of Seven’s catalogue.

And at the Kleinburg home of many of their works, at one point in my walkabout, I turned a corner to enter one gallery and found this work facing me from its far wall.


The only thing that could possibly have made me feel any more Canadian at that moment was if someone had had the presence of mind to have offered me a chilled stubby with a “Molson Canadian” label on it.

What Leslie was referring to of course is that works such as this are positively luminous in life (maybe it’s the use of titanium white) – an aspect that the printed page can never hope to capture, no matter how luxuriant or reflective the paper, or how meticulous the printing process that is employed. Every step required to capture the image – making a photo, reproducing the photo, making an image of the photo for print, printing the photo, takes a little bit away from the materials and the technique used by the artist. Viewing it reduced in size, which is almost an inevitability unless the book is a collection of miniatures, further tempers the personal experience of taking in the image by means of the infinitely more direct path of the human optic nerve to the brain.

There were several works by Mr Harris, as well as his other colleagues in the Group of Seven, on display. (In a fine example to illustrate Canada’s traditionally cavalier approximation of numbers, the Group of Seven actually consisted of eight or nine artists, depending on the source from which you draw your history: Franklin Carmichael, A.J. Casson, Lionel Fitzgerald, Arthur Lismer, Lawren Harris, Edwin Holgate, A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald, and F.H. Varley.) Tom Thomson, who combines the fame of his work with the mystery surrounding his death (a blow to the head and an apparent fall from a canoe, with no evidence of having drowned, according to one conspiracy-soaked rendition I read) is often mis-assumed (including by myself) to be a member of the Seven. However, in some descriptions of the nativity of the heptad, he is actually credited as a source of inspiration for the group’s creation, but he himself is not officially a member of the body designated as “The Group of Seven”.

The day we were there, we serendipitously found an additional exhibit had been added -- several dozen works by a single creator, a travelling show that had just begun its several-months-long McMichael visit. Joe Fafard is a most eclectic Saskatchewan artist whose media span a truly wide range from small pieces of ceramic pottery to enormous bronzes and laser-cut steel representations of horses and cattle.
(Trust me; it’s much, much more than what might at first sound like a 4-H display by a prairie farm boy who lucked into a Canada Council grant.)

For me, I was further delighted to discover the Gallery is also home to works by selected First Nations artists, including several from the Cape Dorset Inuit and another artist about whom there is rarely a middle ground – you either love or largely loathe his work – the late Ojibway artist, Norval Morrisseau. I count myself among its lovers. Many of his paintings are rendered in a style that is almost blindingly garish in his use of jarring colours and hard, graphic lines. To wit, this self-portrait.


Sending a much gentler optical signal to the brain were several works by Benjamin Chee Chee, whose art, if First Nations art were to be characterized as music, might be considered a pastoral ballet vs Morrisseau’s heavy metal rock concert.


Sadly, both Chee Chee and Morrisseau had their demons to contend with. Morrisseau’s life included two years at a residential school that banned and suppressed all connections with his heritage; a 1977 accident in a Vancouver hotel fire left him badly burned; and an arrest for public drunkenness resulted in his being incarcerated “for his own protection”. He died of complications from Parkinson’s disease in 2007, unable to paint during his final months of life.

Chee Chee, another Ojibway with what online biographies call a “troubled” early life, eventually committed suicide in an Ottawa jail in 1977, at the far too young age of 32. Much of his art reflects a delicate, soaring and almost inspirational style that belies his inner turmoil.

The scenes represented in the McMichael Gallery are largely found in the real world in Canada’s wilderness, from Thomson’s instantly recognizable Algonquin Park settings to northern Ontario’s Lake Superior shores and even into the sub-Arctic.
Despite being officially located at 10,000-something or other Islington Avenue, the McMichael Gallery is actually in a wonderful woodland setting overlooking a heavily-treed ravine. The enormous main gallery building is itself constructed of a beautiful blend of log and stone that makes it feel less like a “gallery” within spitting distance of urban Toronto and more like a forest shrine.

A much recommended diversion if you’re anywhere in the area with some time to spare and you want to spend it away from the hurly-burly of the Yonge Street strip.

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Your [provincial] tax dollars at work.

I love this story. Recently, a group of 300 property owners in Goulbourn township, a rural area just outside Ottawa, were told their land had now been designated a provincially-managed “wetland”. Of immediate concern to the owners is the fact that this suddenly means they must now navigate a vast new level of provincial bureaucracy if they want to so much as dig a hole for a fencepost.

But what made me laugh (in the headshaking sort of hysterical loon-like laughter you occasionally give out when confronted with bureaucratic lunacy) is the reason why the land has suddenly been so designated. Here’s how it was told in the Ottawa Citizen (July 2, online edition):

“Mr. Hale said the problem comes down to the management of storm water, which he explained is handled differently in rural areas than it is in urban areas. Were a sewer to back up in the city, it would take 24 hours for the city to repair it, Mr. Hale said, adding the current drainage issue has taken almost five years to settle.”

In other words, the city so far has taken five years and still has not issued the approval required for the owners to hire a backhoe and operator for the hour or so’s labour it would take him to drive out on the land and scrape debris from a drainage system that, for those same five years, has been blocked up. In consequence, the rising water table thus created has now birthed ponds where none existed before, caused wetland plant growth to sprout where none had grown before, and given homes to wetland wildlife where none had lived before.

And now, even if the city wanted to issue the long-delayed work permit, they can’t – there’s this new “wetland” designation, you see, and it means the province bans heavy equipment from entering an ecosystem where the indigenous lifeforms (plant or animal) can be damaged.

And 300 landowners who bought dry, farmable land more than five years ago, are now all the extremely unhappy owners of a small piece of a large provincially-protected swamp. Which also nicely takes issuing the work permit off the city bureaucrats’ five-year-old “to do” list.

You really can’t make this stuff up.

Cyclebabble

OK, the good news (for me) and the bad news (for everyone else within two or three hundred yards of any paved surface in the province) is that the Ontario Department of Motor Vehicles has now certified that I am allowed to hit the road in the driver’s saddle of a motorcycle. Having passed my written test with a sterling 59 out of 60 correct answers (even allowing for the fact that I could have made a total of eleven more wrong answers and still passed), I was given an M1 licence and sent on my way.

I could claim laurels for this achievement but, in point of fact, most of the M1 examination questions are worded so as to test not so much your knowledge of the particulars of motorcycling rules, as they are to test your simple grasp of common sense.

As just one example, they may ask, “When you are approaching an intersection with a traffic light and the light is amber / yellow, you:

(a) accelerate as quickly as possible in an attempt to clear the intersection before the light turns red;
(b) pull over to the shoulder of the road, stop and dismount while all other traffic clears the intersection;
(c) quickly check your rearview mirrors and bring your motorcycle carefully to a controlled, full stop using front and rear brakes together, then disengage the clutch and, while continuing to apply pressure on the handlebar brake, you place both feet flat on the road surface until the light turns green;
(d) look left and right and proceed as though the light were green.”

Now admittedly, a couple of those are exaggerated, but not by very darned much. Most of the choices really did provide one sensible response and three others that ranged from “risky but technically allowed” through “stupid and unnecessary” to “illegal”.

Having just passed through what was almost entirely a test of basic common sense, what I also found to be somewhat unsettling was that while I was waiting for my own results, I watched while a couple of people who had submitted their answers before me were told they had not passed! One fellow, who really did look like the gnarled, classic movie rendition of “biker”, actually got into an argument with the young woman tasked with breaking the bad news to him when she told him his result. When she pointed to one of his wrong answers (the tests are reviewed on the spot so the testee knows where his or her errors were made), he doggedly set about to explain to her why his answer should actually be the correct one. For the record, it didn’t work, and he was invited to “re-try the test again, anytime”.

Meanwhile, I have since augmented my modest biker wardrobe with a magnificent pair of official Triumph gauntlets
(“gauntlets”, rather than “gloves”, because the gauntlet design includes an extension that envelops the cuff of the jacket and so won’t cause its sleeves to billow up when you’re on the road), and a pair of exceedingly heavy-duty pants, with a cuff that drops at least four inches below the heel of my boot. “Just cut ‘em off”, I was cheerily told when I asked if there was a shorter leg length. Welcome to the wonderful world of biking: drop three digits’ – before the decimal – worth of price on a pair of trousers and “tailor” them by hacking off the excess with a box cutter.

Recently, I revisited the sales centre, offspring in tow this time, to pick up their own lengthy list of motorcycle insurance providers (as well as any conditions of which their customers might have made them aware. One, for example, came with the note, “Will only insure if rider has held M2 licence for at least 2 years”.) As a bonus, offspring got to saddle up on the one remaining Triumph America in their inventory. She heartily approved of the choice and she even tried on a couple helmets, managing to find one with which she was quite pleased. That, of course, is a priority for me since once I’m approved (not to mention sufficiently competent) to carry a passenger, a helmet is mandatory for the backseat rider as well.

So I’m ready. Mid-August (my safety course) sure feels a long way off. Standing in the living room with my helmet on and going “Vroom vroom!” only goes so far. (That’s something else recommended for a novice – not the “Vroom vroom!” part I mean, but wearing the helmet from time to time before taking the course, so its exceedingly confining presence around your ears won’t feel completely alien and therefore distracting when it comes time to learn to manage the bike itself.)

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And finally, filed under “There is a God!”

On our return trip from Toronto and the McMichael, as we got close to Ottawa early on a Sunday evening, we were passed by a little fart of a car with way too much motor under the hood. It just roared past – nipping in and out again on a solid double (no passing) centre line and even starting another pass on a long curving turn where not only double lines, but plain good sense should have kept him in his place in the line. We were moving at a pretty good clip – about 95km/h in an 80km/h zone, but even that wasn’t fast enough for this clown.

For a few minutes after he blew by us, we watched as he darted in and out of the constant-speed travellers in our long line – driving like someone who believes that niggling little law codes such as the Ontario Highway Traffic Act are written for other drivers.

But more than just the fact of his risky, if not dangerous, driving behaviour, he also had four fabric-wrapped tires slung across the back of his car like a sideways stack of fat pancakes. Although his brakelights were visible – barely – his licence plate was not and I said to Leslie, “If he’s not careful, he’s going to be ticketed for driving with his plate obscured.”

I speak from experience here. In one of my previous instances of car ownership, the brackets holding my rear plate on had actually rusted clear through and, rather than have the plate fall off and be lost, I tugged it off one day (the ease with which it separated from the car confirming the wisdom of this decision) and tossed it into the car’s hatchback window well. Intending to get a replacement mount the next time I passed by a Canadian Tire, I left it inside the car.

The very next day, I was pulled over. After listening to my story, the constable let me go with a warning, and that warning included the admonition that some form of rear plate has to be clearly visible at all times – either a permanent licence plate, a temporary dealer plate of the type your salesman will hang out of the trunk when you test drive a new or used car at an auto dealership, or even the large, temporary paper window sticker that indicates a change of ownership is in process and a new plate has been applied for. The constable’s emphatic point was that some form of vehicle identification plate has to be fully visible when the car is on the road.

So as you might expect, given the title of this concluding entry, a few miles closer to Ottawa we passed the flashing lights of not one, but two Ontario Provincial Police vehicles off to the side of the road. Two uniformed OPP were at the driver’s window of the vehicle nicely sandwiched between the two police cars and – sure enough – it was the aforementioned risk taker with the blocked licence plate view.

As we drove by, I have to confess, I laughed out loud.

And so did Leslie.

Until la prochaine.