I have a couple examples. Many months ago, after Mom died, I found a beautifully carved lightweight wooden cane in her trove of flea market / yard / garage sale acquisitions accumulated over the years.
Mom had a few simple rules that governed her buying at such sales: Did she like it? Was it low-priced? (Actually, come to think of it, that’s about it. She never bought for “cachet”, and rarely even considered “collectability”. For her, a trip to the Stittsville Flea Market or Bernie’s Sale Barn was a day well spent even if she didn’t add a single thing to the china cabinets.)
She did have a fondness for antique bottles. Her McLaren’s Perth Malt Whiskey bottle (photo) from the long-gone Perth Distillery is a much-welcomed addition to my own shelf of meaningful miscellany.
She also collected Depression Glass – tableware (plates, bowls, pitchers, cups and saucers, etc) with a faint tint of colour worked into the patterned glass. But that was about the only genre of collectible that she ever even considered whenever she would hit a flea market or sale barn.
But back to the cane. In addition to being beautifully carved with a leaf garland running from the curved crook to its bottom end, it included a name and the notation, “France 1916”.
Over a period of several weeks after Mom died, I decided I’d try to see if I could find something more specific that might enable me perhaps to find a more relevant home for it. The “France 1916” proved to be gold when it came to a starting point. Thinking that it might actually indicate the work of a soldier, I sent a note with a description of the cane, including the name carved on it, to a contact I have at the Queen’s Own Rifles (QOR) Museum in Toronto. (It’s a fascinating place if you’re interested in one highly significant unit’s military history from the present day all the way back to Canada’s historical roots. It’s located on the top floor of Casa Loma.)
How I came to know my QOR contact is a long story in itself, but let’s just say briefly that part of it involved my successfully shipping to the Museum – through Canada Post – a pair of military products I donated to them after they indicated they would be delighted to accept my offer: two WWII-era Mills Bombs, which is what the British and Canadian forces called the pineapple-shaped explosive the Americans know as a “hand grenade”. They were in pristine condition, and each was engraved with a deeply-cut “FW”, indicating they were made in the Frost and Woods factory in Smiths Falls, where one of my family tree dwellers had worked for a time during the War. It’s important to emphasize that they were completely disassembled and contained no explosive whatsoever – “inert” as my Museum contact labelled them when I described them to him before shipping them off.
So yes, Canada Post, I sent two bombs (photo) through the mail – carefully wrapped, totally disassembled, and wholly free of any explosive – but guaranteed to have triggered the scanner equivalent of a fire alarm had those classic pineapple shapes turned up on a random X-ray.
How my late relative came to be in the possession of two inert hand grenades that were subsequently passed on to my Dad is a family mystery that I suspect will forever remain a cold case.
Um... the preceding would be what one could call a “digression”. I can’t recall when I’ve ever digressed in this blog before...
Where was I? Oh yes. After e-mailing a description of the cane to my QOR Museum contact, I received – within 48 hours – an e-mailed copy of a document called a Certificate of Attestation. It is a document that every army recruit in WWI had to sign when he enlisted. Simply by signing it, the recruit attests, “Yes I am old enough to enlist”, and provides a few bits of personal information. Two things leapt out at me: 1. the name was identical to that on my cane; and 2. the clincher was what had been written in the box labelled “Occupation”: woodcutter. If anyone could be expected to have a job-related skill like woodcarving... The document also included the information that his home was in a small town in New Brunswick.
At this point, things got a little unbelievable. When I Googled the family name, plus the New Brunswick town name, I got one hit with the same surname that not only gave an address, but also a phone number. So having gotten this far, I dialled it and, after spending a few minutes explaining to the woman who answered the phone about the reason for my call, I listened as she shouted to someone at her end, “Grandpa was in the war, wasn’t he?... No, the First one.” Then she came back on the line. “It’s my husband’s father.”
Just like that. So I bundled the now-homebound package up so as to survive either Canada Post’s handling or being run over by a herd of stampeding wildebeest, added a copy of the Certificate of Attestation and a note summarizing how I had collected the background information – with the help of the QOR Museum curator – that led me to make that (to me) amazing phone call. Then I sent it off with a mail tracking code.
My last encounter with it was an online verification via the Canada Post tracking number that it had been delivered. That was almost a year ago. Since then, nothing.
Example 2. While Dad was in his last months, my brother and I regularly – every three weeks – arranged for him to be transferred via a private ambulance service from his nursing home in Perth to the Ottawa Cancer Centre (OCC) at the Ottawa Hospital campus on Smyth Road and back again after a five-hour chemo session.
Each of those trips also involved a personal meeting with a young, friendly and highly professional hematologist at the OCC. And after each visit, Dad regularly let both my brother and me know how completely comfortable both experiences had made him feel.
The ambulance crews in particular, without exception, were scrupulous about watching his portable oxygen level, even once replacing an expired bottle with one of their own when the nursing home inadvertently sent Dad off with only a partially filled one. Also, they never left Dad and me at the hospital (I met him on every trip at the Ottawa end; my brother sent him off and welcomed him back at the Perth end) until they made sure he was hooked up to the hospital’s oxygen supply, preserving the balance of his portable supply for the return trip to Perth.
And the young hematologist was never less than completely positive about how unexpectedly well the chemo appeared to be working. (The OCC chemo treatments were indeed astonishingly beneficial in pushing back the effects of his multiple brain tumours and, in fact, it was his emphysema that eventually was to kill him in a swift final attack.)
After Dad died, I wrote long and emotional letters to both the patient transfer service and the hematologist expressing my appreciation for making Dad’s last months as comfortable for him as they could possibly have been.
And you can guess where I’m going with this. I wasn’t looking for a “Thank you for your thank you” reply, but a short note telling me they got my letters... anything at all... would have been nice. That was five months ago.
So I don’t know... maybe the New Brunswick family once more in possession of what I imagine is a pretty special part of their family history is afraid I’m going to send them a bill for the shipping (I’m not); and maybe the patient transfer service and the medical specialist have been warned by their legal advisors never to enter into any personal written exchanges with clients / patients; or maybe it’s just a symptom of the times. But what I do know is that it’s kind of sad.
So say thank you, folks. And acknowledge it when someone says thank you to you. (In speaking, that would be, “You’re welcome,” or something equally simple.) Most of the time it costs not a damned thing but what it’s worth at the receiving end can mean everything.
= = =
Worlds and Estates (After listening to a Fifth Estate news report on yet another UN criticism of Canada’s Third World conditions on its native reserves)
It’s generally common terminology – some would argue too common – for the media typically to refer to desperately poor countries, or localized poverty conditions in countries not so desperately poor, as “Third World”. And on a related numbers topic, if from no other source than the name of a popular television investigative news show, we can pretty much guess that the term “Fifth Estate” has something to do with the media.
But hands up, everyone who – without having looked it up – knows what the First and Second Worlds are – and whether there’s a Fourth; and who knows what the first four “Estates” are. (I can tell you for sure that my hand was definitely not up.)
Describing what is First, Second or Third World can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. But what all the definitions have in common is that they are not driven by a country’s location or age or literacy or extent of over-population, but rather by economics.
At its simplest (emphasis on simplicity; some of my related reading on this could easily fill a book), the difference is essentially this: the countries of the First World are the developed nations, in which you will find a combination of a strong industrial or service-driven economic base, and no persistent state of epidemic or major pockets of life-threatening disease. Canada, Japan, the US, the UK and France are all considered to be in this classification.
Countries in the Second World have some degree of moderate economic development, perhaps an unlinked economy of several individual businesses or agricultural-based trade and export. (Occasionally, a Second World country in fact might also be small enough that it is driven only by a single national industry or commodity.) Healthwise, such countries will occasionally see disease outbreaks, but the really major epidemics have pretty much been relegated to the dustbins of their history. Mexico is considered to be a Second World country. So is Thailand.
A Third World country is pretty much what the First and Second are not. The vast majority of the country lacks urbanization or significant industrial development. Killing outbreaks of diseases that are readily beaten in other parts of the world, such as measles, malaria, leprosy or river blindness, are occasional if not regular occurrences. A great many of Africa’s nations are Third World, as are several on this side of the Atlantic in Latin America.
And several sources do indeed also define a Fourth World, whose inhabitants are even harder to nail down for the simple reason that they consist of highly mobilized, nomadic or even subset groups within a larger national context. The Fourth World does not know borders, but defines a people bound by, for example, religion or a powerful ethnic tradition that is independent of national boundaries. The world’s Roma, colloquially called Gypsies in the past, the Iberian Peninsula’s Basques, the Middle East’s Kurds, the Pashtun of Afghanistan / Pakistan, countless First Nations throughout the Americas and the indigenous peoples of the North like the Inuit or the Lapps, are all Fourth World.
With Estates, it’s a little more complicated. In British tradition, the terms originally referred to agencies that had influence over legislation. The First Estate was the Church; the Second the House of Lords and the Third the House of Commons.
The Fourth Estate has been less firmly fixed and the label was used for any other agency with the authority (whether granted or seized) to influence Parliament from time to time. Occasionally it has referred to the army, trade unions, even the poor, and occasionally it has referred to the press – in the most literal sense of the word: the Fleet Street newspapers. Later, when electronic media reporting became commonplace, the Fifth Estate was coined to include TV and radio reporting.
At least that’s what some sources say. Oxford, however, while starting with the same general distinctions, lumps the electronic media together with the press as the Fourth Estate, and calls the far more recent Internet-driven media such as websites, blogs, Tweets and the like the Fifth Estate. “It has characteristics similar to the Fourth Estate,” says Oxford, “but is sufficiently distinctive to warrant its recognition as a new estate.” (“Oxford Today”, online).
Now get out there and win a few pub trivia challenges, people!
Every day’s a school day on "Baby Duck!"
Next time: As this entry was going to press, CBC radio's "Cross-Country Checkup" with Rex Murphy was taking on the subject of bullying. I have a festering sore that I want to tear a 44-year old band-aid off. And you get to hear about it!
Until la prochaine.
No comments:
Post a Comment