The 105-Year-Old Blogger

Salle de la Reformation. The official opening of the League of Nations.  Photo obtained on Wikimedia Commons: “ This file is a digital replica of a document or a part of a document available at the National Library of Norway under the URN  no-nb_nansen_2488 . ” The new League of Nations held its first General Assembly in Geneva on November 15, 1920.   My great uncle Loring Christie was there as part of the Canadian delegation , and wrote about it in letters to his parents.   Below are some excerpts, written in December, 1920. "I am writing this in the Assembly Hall & I hope you will forgive the pencil.   The speeches are not very inspiring this morning and I seize the moment to send love & Christmas greetings … The Assembly has now been going since Nov. 15; people are getting fed up & tired of each other; there is a general determination to bring the thing to an end, and I think it certain that we shall be through by the end of next wee...

Image by  Gordon Johnson  from  Pixabay My great uncle Loring Christie   was a Canadian delegate to the ParisPeace Conference of 1919 .   In those days, Canada’s presence was as part of the entity of the British Empire, rather than as its own country.   When Loring says “our people”, he’s really talking about that entity.   The Peace Conference was the beginning of a change in that status .   This is an excerpt from a February 1919 letter that Loring wrote to his parents:   “The Preliminary Peace Conference -- that is the proper name of what is going on now -- is getting some things done, but very slowly -- too slowly to suit my feelings about the matter. The world outside is in too precarious a condition to trifle with. Of course the task is almost staggering.   And if the time seems long, one has to remember the great difficulties of reaching agreement among so many Governments, so many peoples, with differences of language, cust...

“Big Canadian Stuff” could refer to the large fun things that we like to build in our towns; like turtles , lobsters and potatoes . But there’s no need for me to do this since Canadian author Will Ferguson has done a perfect job already in the article “Wawa to Black Diamond: A Cross-Canada Tour of Big-Assed Objects by the Side of the Road”, in his book Canadian Pie.   I’m content to have forced my son to accomplish that Canadian rite of passage: getting your picture taken with the Wawa goose.    My “Big Canadian Stuff” has to do with industry; the kind of thing I notice only thanks to friends and family.   My childhood would have been one endless daydream—paddling contentedly in the Seaway pool in St. Lambert near Montreal, watching giant ships go by without ever wondering where they came from—were it not for my parents’ expeditions to the St. Lambert Locks.   These were the first on the Seaway , and we went there for no better reason than to watch a bi...

On a brutally hot Montreal summer morning in 1975, my Dad, siblings, and I rode our bicycles by bridges and backways into downtown Montreal, and left them at the railway station.   They, along with us (and Mom), were to board the train that night and head west.   A trip diary written by a 13-year-old reliably reports the important things; my diary chronicles the fact that, after checking our bikes onto the train, “Dad treated us to an orange drink or milkshake.”   It also declares the weather for the next three days “air-conditioned.” Overnighting in coach seats is a great adventure when travelling the short distance to Nova Scotia.   Four nights of it would have been onerous.   Roomettes or berths for everyone were too expensive, so my parents booked two coach seats, two roomettes, and two berths, and we all took turns using them.   That, at least, had been the theory.   “Took turns” quickly settled into sharing.   My sisters and I easily f...

Whenever my parents took the family to our relatives’ exquisite cottage in Tidnish, near Amherst , Nova Scotia, we travelled by overnight train.   Boarding right at our Montreal suburb in the evening, we arrived in Amherst the following afternoon.   It was always a fun train ride, and we could count on three things happening sometime during the trip: a crying baby, a loud talker, and a drunk.   In the summer of 1973, a rail strike forced us to travel home a different way.   We discovered that what the Greyhound lacked in drunks and babies, it made up for in pot-smokers. Strikes are a common feature of our western culture, so there’s nothing unique about that aspect of my Montreal childhood.   Teachers’ strikes were frequent and welcome.   When I could stay home and read my books, instead of sitting in a classroom surrounded by a bewildering array of subjects and socializing, I was just as happy.   My education wasn’t affected by the strikes, and...

Image by  Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay   Every spring, Canadians go through the same ritual: it starts in February on the West Coast, and ends sometime in June in the far North. We remove clothing layers and breathe easier.   We remove boots and step lighter. We enjoy the nimbleness of unlocking the car without mittens.   And in the midst of all this, Tim Hortons provides us our annual flirtation with gambling . There are even interesting innovations to go with it.  Some don’t call it gambling. They rightly point out that Canadians will buy their double-doubles whether there’s a rim to roll or not. But speaking for myself, spring is the only time that I experience all the agony of a gambler. Stittsville is the Ottawa suburb that is as far west of Ottawa as the suburb of Orleans is east. Orleans is where I was living the year my son had a weekly three-hour science-and-history class in Stittsville. While my son was in class, I got to kno...

I grew up in the pretty little suburb St. Lambert, across the Seaway Canal from the Island of Montreal. At the end of my street, I had a clear view of the canal and its ships, the Expo Islands, and then the city. Mount Royal loomed behind them all. I could clearly see the cross on its peak — one of my favourite views. At night, the cross was lit up in white lights. Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay  During the summer of 1978, Pope Paul VI died. While this world event unfolded, I was at my relatives’ cottage, perched above the Northumberland Strait near the tiny community of Tidnish, Nova Scotia.  Whenever I was there, engaging with the ocean and the tantalizing tidal mud flats, there was nothing to make me want to go back to the city.  But that summer I would have loved to have seen what happened to the Mount Royal cross: to mark the death of the Pope, the lights on the cross were changed to purple. Image by Aimee Valentine from Pixabay  By the time I got ...

The September 20, 1977 Montreal blackout has been forgotten. Even the internet can’t remember it. But that event and date are stuck in my head because it was my 16 th birthday. I’m not sure what exactly caused all of Montreal to go dark that day, but it must have had something to do with the wonderful raging windstorm. I remember the wind because I was out in it under black, brooding, rainless clouds—reveling in the dark dramatic weather. I also revelled in the fact that I wasn’t in school; cancelled because of the power failure. Best Birthday Ever. I stood in the wind at the end of a street near my house, enjoying our view of Montreal.   It was dark in the middle of the day, and the downtown cluster of buildings were uncharacteristically unlit; mere rectangles (like the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey ) against a dark Mount Royal. Meanwhile, my mom was shopping in the dark for my birthday present at the local department store; using the subdued daylight coming through the wind...

Growing up in Canada, I took a lot of things for granted: peace, education, health, plenty, hope. Included in these Canadian benefits is easily-accessible natural beauty. There is plenty of it to be seen just by travelling in Canada, but my most memorable engagements with extreme beauty were in two of the extremes of the country: Vancouver Island and Newfoundland. In August 1975, my parents, siblings, and I travelled by train to see relatives on the West Coast. There, of course, natural beauty is everywhere. 1975 Lake Garibaldi 1975 The Sunshine Coast Two of the weeks were spent on my grandmother's piece of land in Mud Bay, beside the Strait of Georgia near Courtenay, on Vancouver Island.  1975 Mud Bay at low tide One day, we all went even further west by crossing the island  to  Long Beach , a  place of extreme beauty with its  wild, cold gigantic waves and gigantic rocks to clamber on.  An aunt and uncle and four cousins lived on the same property as G...