A list, with pictures

THINGS MY PARENTS TAUGHT ME ABOUT FOOD

Preamble: Growing up, my family did not have much money.  But my parents are smart and resilent.  Looking back on what we ate and how we ate it, here are some of the implicit things they taught me about food.

  10.  Raw veggies are delicious.

 9. Plant a garden. It's cheaper and tastes delicious.

8. There's lots of free food to be had: maple syrup, fiddleheads, rhubarb, berries, potatoes etc.

7. Buy direct from the farmer, it's cheaper.

6. When you go to the grocery store, try to get the best nutritional bang for your buck.

5. Eat at home. Preferably with your family. At the table.

4. Treats are okay, but save them for the weekend.

 3. No junk food before noon.

2.  Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

1.  Food is fuel for your body, and your body needs good food.

Thanks Mom & Dad!

Please raise your hand

Don't you hate having a cut on your hands?  Maybe it's the piano player in me, but the worst thing about having a cut somewhere on your hand is that it is gets in the way of using your hands.  Which we humans do, all the time.  I love to work with my hands, whether it's piano or organ playing, writing, cooking, gardening, whatever.  Even when I read books it gives them something to do.

As a piano teacher, I see lots of people (young and old), whose hands are not educated.  They have trouble moving fingers independently of one another, they can't get one hand to go left while the other goes right, and they can't get one finger to hold still while the others all move. 

Our education system does not do a good job educating people's hands. Which is a toublesome because people's motor skills and manual dexterity are crucial to their well-being, both psychologically and financially.

Anybody who has ever seen a master hand-worker (potter, painter, carpenter, mason, floor installer, flower arranger, hairstylist, massage therapist, pastry decorator, musician, mechanic) has likely noticed how fluidly the hands of these people move as they work.  I never realized how much intelligence hands can have until I watched my father fix the old dryer in our basement.

He couldn't see the part he was fixing, so he felt it with this hands, figured out what was wrong, unscrewed part of it, felt around and moved the things that were in the way, and reconnected it.  I watched and then I understood that he can think with his hands.

In school we are taught to hold our hands very still so our brains can get smart.  At risk of sounding like a zombie, the most education in our society has to do with brains, brains, brains! We have largely divided humans into two classes: people who think, and people who work. Brains, and hands. 

So sad, isn't it, because brains and hands are such a great combination - they built the great dome at Saint Paul's Cathedral.

Together, brains and hands devised the most efficient form of human transportation, the bicycle.

 

                                               

                  Brains and hands create beautiful works of art.

But best of all, a person with an educated brain and educated hands can be independent.  They do not need to work too much on other people's terms, because they can be productive and make a living on their own.  They can make a contribution to the community when they choose, in they way they are best able.

So I guess, if I could sum up my educational philosophy in one sentence, it would be "I believe we need an education system that educates people's brains and their hands." To do otherwise is to deny people the opportunity to reach their full potential.

If we were smart, New Brunswick would focus their educational efforts on brains and hands - developing the best skilled, most intelligent practioners in every discipline.  Notice I didn't say the best skilled workers.  This is because I believe in a small province, we should focus on small businesses where people don't just mindlessly work.

We need more people to be productive, to create employment for themselves via their skills.  And the best way to develop the skills and bring out the hidden capacities of every child is to educate their brains and their hands.



A journey in sound and words

When I was young, I liked music but I really didn't know why.  Maybe it was the sounds: the physical density of certain waves together, or maybe it was the attention being musical afforded me, or maybe the mysterious feeling of resonance inside my body.  Looking back, I still can't quite put my finger on it.  But it stuck.

As a teenager, I become more studious and started to really listen.  Focus hard, and listen.

My musical adolescence was exciting.  I learned to play Chopin, Bach, Haydn - large and challenging pieces of sophisticated music. It sounded impressive, and it was fun. I've always loved working with my hands. Plus, my skills improved to the point where I could earn a little cash and some work experience.

But even then, in many ways I was musically ignorant. I could not replicate sounds I heard, I could 'read' music, but actually I had very little rhythmic understanding of what was going on in the musical notation. And I could not for the life of me, despite hours of trying,  make the sounds I heard in my head come out of my instrument.

Although I had some technical skill, I did not have the fluency necessary for complete self-expression in musical terms. It was frustrating, but I could create music by improvising.  Occasionally a really good idea would come out the ends of my fingers and I would hang on to it.

That said, the phrase "self-expression" sometimes makes me cringe. The idea that "self-expression"  is the be-all and end-all has led to lots of bad artwork. It conjures visions of self-important psycho-babble, people "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," to quote the Bard.

But when I started listening to jazz, I realized that people really can speak through their instruments. I was too immature to be able to follow the entire conversation (let alone contribute), but I could hear musicians commenting, lamenting, or throwing in the occasional one-liner.

The more I listen, the more I realize that music is a conversation.  In several ways - between the listeners and musicians, each of whom brings their own experiences and level of musical proficiency to the table, but also between musicians themselves, who "speak the language," and who have the ability to narrate and interpret sounds. 

Music can be very rhetorical, and a heartfelt player will relate sounds in a way that can change our perspective - seems ridiculous, I know.  But narrative is such a powerful force in the human psyche: it frames details and presents events, illuminates images and casts shadows.

And somehow, a precise combination of sounds can intervene in the atmosphere and speak in an expressive way analogous to the human voice. 

We all tell stories about ourselves, and those stories shape who we are - who we really are, and who we pretend to be.  And musical storytelling can be the same - facts and fiction, details omitted, truths disguised as real life.

When we listen to someone tell a story, we hear the words, and those words impact us.  They meet us where we are and they take us somewhere else.  And they make us reflect on who is speaking,and how we relate to them. 

Narratives and conversations, whether spoken with words or musical instruments, have to potential to transform us into somebody new. When the story is over and we come back from the transient world they have created, we are not always who we used to be, or even who we expect to be. 

Maybe that's why I like music.

Woodstock Heritage Moment

Remember those lovely "Heritage Minute" commercials the government used to air?  As in, "Doctor, I smell burnt toast!" or "Johnson, sir, Molly Johnson!"  Well, I've started reading a great book about Dalton Camp, formerly a resident of Woodstock, and the "best prime minister Canada never had."  It's a fascinating book that re-tells Camp's life in the context of 20th century politics. 

Here's what he says about Woodstock during the onset of World War II:

War was coming.  You could sense the coming from beyond the earth's curve, not a distant thunder, but an eerily silent wind, a light wind that turned the leaves over, their soft white undersides showing in the sun.   People always said it was a sign of coming rain...

Walking down Lower Broadway, on a still, airless afternoon, I recall hearing Adolf Hitler's voice on radio, coming out from behind a screen door.  I heard the sounds of a crowd, and an American voice talking over it, explaining what Hitler was saying and why the crowd was cheering.  People were beginning to talk about the possibility of war now, the way people might talk about being struck by lightening - something possible, yet unlikely.

It was a summer of heightened sensation, as though the ice cream were colder, the choke cherry bushes heavier with their berries, the sun higher, the shade darker, the nights longer.  The music seemed more haunting, though we laughed longer, as if the laughter were a treasure that might soon be spent.  It was a season of small pleasures; life was anecdotal, time measured by the length of an embrace, a kiss, an early morning round of golf, by swimming naked under the railway bridge at Bull Creek, the water lit by a burning fire under a steaming kettle of fresh corn harvested from an unknown farmer's field. Seamless, sensuous, seemingly endless, one summer day folded into the next while Italy invaded Albania and the Germans marched into Danzig and Vienna.

Hard to imagine, isn't it, and yet I can imagine just what it would feel like to walk down Broadway and hear that radio.  There's a reason some things make the history books: not just because they change the world in the political sense, but because they alter the million mundane little actions that make up "life" for so many people.  We are "at war" in Afghanistan but I don't think we really feel it at home like this.