Month: August 2022

A Day at the Cottage. Idle Thoughts.

August 28, 2022

The lake was smooth, and I was sipping my first cup of coffee on the deck early in the morning. The grumble of a starting boat engine woke me from my meditation, which is usually to think of nothing. How inconsiderate, waking everybody up at 7 am. The large inboard/outboard ambled out of the bay and slowly coasted down close to the shore in front of me. I was having my second cup when I saw the boat coming back and then turning direction again, with a young male standing at the wheel but not fishing. That was surprising. What was he doing? Then an aluminum boat appeared and circled the other one and the two boaters talked with each other. I thought that was strange, a meeting early morning on the lake. It appeared to me the first boater was waiting for the other and just coasted on the lake until the other one arrived. The Ozark episodes on Netflix came to my mind where drugs were distributed to boats on a lake while a preacher gave a sermon to the anchored boaters. Oh, shut up. Your imagination is running wild. Probably just two friends from Toronto discovered that both have a place on the same lake and arranged to meet.

We came up to the cottage on Birch Island the night before, to relax after family visits and to eat up the leftovers. We did not have anything to carry over to the cottage and did not use the carts at the marina for moving stuff to the boat. But we saw the weekenders had begun to arrive and fill the parking lot. Disturbing was a couple of young people bringing, what looked like a huge sound system. Sound travels far on the lake and we do not cherish late-night parties. A worse scenario is when we see cases of beer carried onto the boats.

But it was a quiet night, and the morning was relaxing on the deck, punctuated by the two motorboats trolling now along the lake in front of me, with the two young people fishing. I decided to go for a walk on the island.

Walking, I came upon one nice cottage and was confronted by its owner standing on the path and bemoaning the loss of shade trees, providing privacy to her cottage.  She told me: “Ontario Hydro cut down my cedars that I planted fifty years ago”. I looked at the cuts that showed tree trunks of over a foot in diameter. Ontario Hydro maintains the right-of-way of the power line paralleling the path by cutting down vegetation along it. I empathized with her but remarked that at least we have electricity here.

With the heat rising by now, the lake beckoned me, and I returned to ponder a swim. My son-in-law brought me a swimming buddy, a red balloon that you tie onto your waist, so the boats can see you in the water. I blew up the swimming buddy, attached it to my waist, and jumped into the water, avoiding the wannabe water skiers.

Life on the water is, to me, the essence of cottage life on a lake. Kathy grew up in Wales on the waterfront close to Porthmadog in Caernarfonshire and I grew up in Hungary, where we spent our summers on the Danube. We both enjoy water-related activities and getting the cottage was a joint venture.

Another favorite activity is dinners with the family on the deck after a day of playing on and in the water. With long daylight and no mosquitoes until sundown, the deck provides the ideal space for freewheeling discussions on career choices for our grandchildren or how much our healthcare system sucks: wait a minute, we discuss both sides of the healthcare challenges we face today.

Tonight, the grandchildren prepared the meal and the third choice was tacos and burritos. It is interesting to me that although I do not cook much, all my children and grandchildren can and some even enjoy cooking. Quite a change from the old days. After the meal, the grandchildren washed the dishes, and under the threat of missing dessert, it is not democratic at the cottage. Sundown and the arrival of mosquitoes pushed us into the cottage. And we heard the loons on our lake providing the background music before the crickets took over.

One needs money and time for a cottage: cottagers are people, in my experience, with an established career and a family. Limited by the seasons and vacation time, people have cottages on our island that stay vacant most of the time. When I survey all this vacant real estate, I think that this is extravagant or perhaps indecent from a societal point of view. I really enjoy it though.

Mixing of the Races?

August 17, 2022

Viktor Orban, the far-right Hungarian Prime Minister, said “We, Hungarians, are not a mixed race…and we do not want to become a mixed race”, in a speech in Romania, in July 2022. I thought his idea was pathetic nonsense. But wait. Let’s examine what his consequential statement means.

The Huns occupied Hungary over a thousand years ago. Since that time, and also because Hungary is the crossroads between Asia and the west, hordes from the east have invaded and trampled on its land many times. As well, the Germans and Russians occupied it recently. No question that intermarriage has happened, witnessed by the names in Hungary and words borrowed from the Turkish, French, German people, and others. Hungarian people today have a rich ancestry of people from many countries. There are Polish, German, and Hun names in my ancestry, among others, but we called ourselves Hungarian. So what does Orban talk about when he says that Hungarians are not a mixed race?

In the same speech, Orban also said “countries where European and non-Europeans mingle were no longer nations”. Aha! Now you say that Orban is OK with the mixing of European people but not others. Who could these others be? He meant African migrants who came to Europe over the past ten years. And, of course, Africans are Arabs and Blacks and many are Moslems. They have different skin colors and religions. He is against these people coming into Europe: there can be no other interpretation of his comments.

The reaction to his comments was swift both in Hungary and in Europe: he was called racist and his statement was out of the Nazi playbook on racial purity.

We can identify race as humans with similar and distinctive physical characteristics, such as skin color or hair texture. But race has no specific identifiers in the human genome. There is only one race: “homo sapiens”. Altho race is a social construct, it has developed connotations for social exclusion, discrimination, and violence towards certain social groups. We often express it in a social hierarchy with white-skinned people with privilege over darker-skinned people.

Unfortunately for Orban, the trend does not support his thesis: the trend is toward increasing interracial marriages. Partially, it is because of migration patterns, people move from Africa to northern locations. It is also because of increased educational levels; with higher education, there is less prejudice. Sometimes it results from the lack of available partners. For example, many men perish in wars, and the incarceration rate among blacks in the US is high.

In Canada, five percent of marriages were interracial, according to the 2011 census. The rate was ten percent in the city of Vancouver. In the US, over eight percent of marriages are interracial, while ten percent of marriages were interracial in 2015. In Honolulu, forty-two percent of marriages are interracial, while in Las Vegas it is thirty percent and in Santa Barbara, CA, it is thirty percent.

There are many people with mixed-race parentage. Just think of President Obama or our own Governor General Mary Simon. My older brother married a Chinese woman from Hong Kong. Peter and Angela had lived in Hong Kong and Toronto. The family accepted and got along well with Peter’s wife. I enjoyed the diversity Peter brought into the family. You may know some people, in your family or outside, who married someone of another race. So what the hell is Orban talking about? The future is already here; interracial marriage is now.

How College Students Spend Summers – Then and Now

August 3, 2022

This is not a scientific poll by any stretch of the imagination. But I reflected on how three of my college-age grandchildren spent their summers this year and compared it to what I and my friends did for summers while attending college over sixty years ago.

We had one goal: to get a job to pay for tuition, room, and board for next year at the university. My grandchildren had loftier goals: do something interesting, educational, and even exciting, while making money. Big difference in aspirations! Is this true? You be the judge.

OK. So what did I and my friends do when we were at college? To pay for the cost of attending university the next year, we took the first job we could get. The emphasis was on getting a job, any job. We did not think about fun activities.

Looking for a job in my first year at university, I had a couple of false starts. One was strawberry picking on the lower mainland of British Columbia, where the stench of the accommodation and backbreaking work all day finished my enthusiasm in one week. The other false start was my unsuccessful career selling Collier’s encyclopedia in small towns along the Fraser Valley to poor people. After these attempts, I was successful in getting a sustaining job: I settled into a summer of dish-washing at the Essondale Mental Hospital. Boring as dickens but steady and paid well. The mental patients ribbed me about seeing me doing “women’s jobs”. But I lived at home and could save all my earnings.

Other jobs followed in subsequent years. I was happy to be hired by a survey crew where I did machete work in the wilderness of Vancouver Island’s interior, memorable for the cloud of deer flies and mosquitoes. When I complained, they assigned me to work inside, where I experienced the most boring job of my life: drawing cross-sections for a highway from survey data. Each drawing took a few minutes; plot seven dots on graph paper and connect the dots. I decided never to be a draftsman for a survey crew.

One highlight of this job was that I learned to like and drink beer (in retrospect, this may not have been a positive highlight). We drank beer in the hotel pub at night, having nothing else to do. I learned to gulp down a glass of beer by holding the glass with my teeth and knocking my head backward while opening my throat. Most nights ended with the natives joining us and getting into a rumble that I avoided at all costs.

I left the survey crew in a haste on my last day, after hearing the crew members talking about teaching the “college boy” about real life by stripping me and inserting my private parts into an anthill.

So what do college kids do today? My grandson Cedric showed up at the cottage in Elgin, ON, after a 3000-mile bicycle ride from Portland OR. He is an engineering student at Oregon State University (in Corvallis) and decided to cycle coast to coast before taking on a summer job. What a great physical and educational adventure! And potentially dangerous, too.

Among his many observations he related, he found the prairie people more friendly and curious than west coast people and discovered coffee at Tim Hortons in Canada much hotter than McDonald’s in the US. He avoided places where people looked at him with suspicion, but also met many friendly folks who let him camp overnight in their yard.

He used the “warm showers community” website in his travels, where people offer a welcoming hot shower and a place to bunk down, to cyclists. What first-hand experience learning about your country!

My thoughts circled back to Cedric and his financial situation and how he could afford to spend six weeks cycling and not working. I recalled that last summer he did fire-fighting in Idaho and saved money: accommodation and food were provided in tents in the wilds of Idaho. They were paid for sixteen-hour days and there was no place or time to spend money. They worked in fourteen-day stints, then were off for two days before another fourteen-day session started. For Cedric, it was another amazing educational and well-paying experience as well.

Here is another example of what students do for a summer job today. Not satisfied with repeating a job as a cashier in a grocery store, my granddaughter, MaryKate, created her summer job. With friends from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where she is a student, they secured accommodation from the friend’s family to stay at their cottage in upstate New York. Then they took training in whitewater rafting and obtained a job with ARO, an adventure class white water outfit in Watertown NY. Another great experience! When MaryKate did not work at the white water center, she worked at the local grocery store. She created her job!

One final example is how another grandson, Alec, parlayed three seasons of fun-filled sailing camp experience in Ottawa, Canada, into teaching sailing to disadvantaged children on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. All I heard from Alec during the summer sailing camps was the fun they had turtling (turning the sailing boat upside down), but obviously, they also learned to sail!

Alec negotiated his accommodation in New Orleans by sleeping on a boat belonging to a friend. It had never entered my mind that summer camps can provide skills making you able to get into the workforce.

Yes, three examples do not form a valid sample. Despite that, my cohort, over sixty years ago, had much more pedestrian jobs. Why? I can only speculate that the children today live more in the present and try to maximize their opportunities. As well, they have more confidence. What are your thoughts on this subject?