Gandhi’s Seven Deadly Sins
Mohandas Gandhi considered these traits to be the most spiritually perilous to humanity.
Sunday, 31 October 2010
I sometimes think I will seek a job with “People Magazine’ or ‘The National Enquirer’, or perhaps we can resurrect ‘The Sunday Herald”, so here I go again.
When we were young the President of Memorial was a man named Raymond Gushue. I have images of a dark man with a black moustache and dark horned rimmed glasses in a black and white photo. You would all be quite surprised where I found his grandson. Two weeks ago I was in the Kitchener/Waterloo area of Ontario, and my host took me to lunch at an exceptional restaurant situated on the grounds of an old estate, called Langdon Hall. Think of our own Government House turned into a series of dinning and meeting rooms, but imagine it on hundreds of acres. It is in the town of Cambridge, the resting place of hordes of Bell Islanders who fled there after the mine closure. Asking some discrete and no so discrete questions, I found out that most of the employees were children of those same Bell Islanders, who told me with great pride that their restaurant had just won world wide acclaim through some prize. [Langdon Hall is a marvellous place and it is not all that expensive.] I was also told that the Head Chef, the winner of the prize, was a Newfoundlander, and so I asked to be introduced. Well Chef Gushue is the son of James? Gushue, formerly of the Newfoundland Courts, and the grandson of the late Raymond. He is very justly acclaimed a summa cum laude in his field and a great culinary artist. He is also a very nice young man. An “ex-pat” done well!
On the same topic, perhaps one of the best known and acclaimed restaurants In my adopted City of Toronto is a place called ‘Canoe’, situated on the 55th Floor of the TD Bank Tower. Lunch is a part of business in my world, and I am there on occasion. All of you would find the menu ‘question raising’ as most of the dishes have names linked to our home province. Baie de Verde Scallops, Placentia Salmon, Trinity Lamb, Blackened Torbay Cod, even Pouch Cove Crème Brule. I never cease to ask why, and so I met the Head Chef, another Newfoundlander. I forget his name, but he ‘done good’, Head Chef at one of the best in the City.
I am off to New York City in a few weeks, and thence to DC. I will let you know if I dig up any other Newfoundlanders along the way. I am always on the look out.
Sunday, 10 June 2012
I used to be tolerably athletic. In Grade 8, Bob McKenzie promoted me to the Junior Intercollegiate hockey team. I just made it whereas Stan starred, but I was so happy at least to be there. It was my last hockey foray. In high school I played a lot of basketball. and in University I managed both JV and Varsity football. The result of all of this was endless ankle, knee and hip/back issues. Then I began to run, and from 1966 up to around 1988, I ran around four to five miles a day. Thereafter, and almost all at once, my skeletal framework crumbled. At one point I could barely walk because of hip dislocation, and the resulting arthritis. Like the Energizer Bunny, however, I just kept going anyway, even though going was painfully slow. I gained weight and it got worse. Eventually, a friend of mine, Michael Cloutier, who was at the time President and CEO of Astra Zeneca, the drug company, seeing my pain, took me in his car to see his friend Alan Gross, the Leafs orthopaedic guy, at Mt Sinai Hospital, and I then had a first and eventually a second hip replacement. The right connections still seemed to help overcome wait times. So I now had two new hips, but I also had arthritis of the spine caused by the tilt, and my fingers started to develop little bumps at the knuckle, and I feared less my finger resemble Stoyles’ appendage. On the whole, I might have been a relatively successful capitalistic, but I was a physical mess. I even had a bout of Panic Disorder, diagnosed and treated successfully at the time by Johnny Angel, a truly brilliant kid I taught in High School who is my dear friend.
Thankfully my oldest son never gave up on me. He is a 6’4” Rugby and Football fanatic who starred at both Appleby College and Trinity College, and now writes apocalyptic screen plays in Hollywood. He bought me the right workout shoes, gave me a treadmill, and made me walk. In the beginning he called every day to make sure “I had done my walk”. I now do around 30” minutes every day at around 3.5.3.7 mph, and low and behold the “old bod” is loosening up. I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to be able to move, and to move without pain. I have a spring in my step again.
More recently Gerry White’s little sister introduced me to the Paleo Diet and to a brilliant Toronto Naturopath. I am in the very early stages of the diet, but I do intend to shed 50 pounds. I cannot eat potatoes, that’s a real bummer, and diary and ice cream are verboten, but I am going to try to stick to it because I need to take the burden away from the skeleton. I like the concept of this diet, probably because I am rather Palaeolithic by nature.
Why trouble all of you with any of this, after all many of you are hikers and runners etc? Well perhaps there is one forelorn fellow out there like I used to be and to an extent still am, who needs to know that it is never too late to begin again. I write this not because I am obsessed with myself, but because it is also important with friends to shed the myth of what you are, and get down to the real struggles. Now you know some of mine.
Sunday, 17 June 2012
Happy Father’s Day a tous!
i used to be called ‘Father’ and then I was lucky enough to become a biological one. I had more training for the first than I did for the second, and I often wondered how I would rank on an objective score card qua father. I have to confess that I have long felt that my own father would score higher than me. He was always there, forever proud of me, never judgemental, [unlike my mother], always supportive , endless encouraging, present at everything I did while growing up, and unconditionally accepting of all my choices, even those he could not quite understand. He was a simple man, but someone who gave me unconditional love.
My history is quite different. Admitted I provided half decently well, but looking back now I think of everything I missed, and I regret some of the choices I made. I tend to be hyper focused on what I obsess upon, and it was not unusual that I would leave at seven in the morning and not show up at home till eight or nine at night. I would often leave before they got up and come home after they had gone to bed. I was also too often absent at Spring Holidays at Disneyworld, or when Moya Greene and her daughter and Brenda and our two went on their annual sojourns to Corfu, Greece. Turkey, Spain, Italy and the like. One year they lived for a month in a villa on Corfu formerly owned by Lawrence Durrell, author of the Alexandria Trilogy, and looking back, what an idiot I was to pass that up, and indeed so much else up. I was not there with them to show them Florence, Rome. London, Vienna, or when the new century dawned in New York City; instead I watched it on TV wishing I was . I do now so regret some of my choices, for they were mine, and I do own them. My boys are now gone, one to LA and the other to his own place in Toronto. My oldest and I are extremely close, and we talk on the phone almost every day; my younger is another matter, ours is a more distant relationship. He may look like a Mooney, and indeed with his jet black hair resembles my father, but he is 100% Parker. There has been much flint between us, but finally and thankfully, we are getting a little better. I love them both.
Please understand that I do not live in regret; what’s past is prologue. But I think it important to reflect honestly, to do what I call a “consciousness examination”, not at all related to the old negative examination of conscience. I have already apologized to both my boys for my absences, and because they knew no different, they were somewhat surprised. Alas, I am aware, and there’s the rub. Perhaps when the times comes, I will be a better Grandfather
I may have shared this tale before, but this morning it seems appropriate to tell it again. Many many years ago on a planet now far far away, a cloistered young Jesuit was visited by three beautiful young women, who someone found a way to travel from Toronto to a farm in rural Guelph Ontario to visit an old friend. One was a sort of Catholic, or better put, a Catholic of her own sort , and the other two, as the people from Glasgow say, kicked with the other foot. They approached the monastic enclave carefully, braving all the stares of bewilderment that could have freighted them off, and would have to be experienced to be really understood. Their names were Linda Inkpen, Jan Eaton, and Mary Dyer, and they brought with them laughter, immense joy and rays of sunshine into that cold and damp world of asceticism. Jan is now the delightful, gracious and caring Jan O’Dea, Linda many of you know as that brilliant star she always was, and Mary is now Mary Gordon of Roots of Empathy, a well-known and acclaimed social entrepreneur. What many of you do not know is that I later attended Linda’s wedding, and joyfully went to Wesley United in St. John’s , decked out in Roman collar and all, and given the time, my presence did not go unnoticed. I was delighted to somehow return the great gift she gave to me. What you also do not know is that Mary Gordon and I have kept in fairly regular contact over the past 50 years. Part of me always has and continues to love Mary, and we have always intermittingly celebrated our special bond. I am so very proud of what she has accomplished. Imagine Mary lecturing at Harvard; she has indeed reached great heights.
This morning I awoke to a note from Mary, not in itself unusual. She sent along a picture of her beautiful daughter and granddaughter. Mary now needs all of our prayers and positive thoughts and I ask those of you who pray to remember her, and those of you who have positive energy to send it through the air to someone who many of us know and love. Mary is not fine, but she is not ill, her daughter faces some challenges. Let’s leave it at that, but please do pray for the whole family.
Gary
All of you realize by now that my ego does not require stroking. Why else would I think anyone would have an interest in my meanderings. Even the summer Tees my boys bought me carry the words “BE PATIENT, HE THINKS HE’S A BIG DEAL’.” I tolerate all of this amicably because deep down I want to believe in self-deprecating humour. But, trust me, I know what I am not. I do not have a clue about mechanical things, about repairing anything, about putting things together, or about fixing things. I’m good at giving orders, but useless at doing anything mechanical. I can turn a key or plug something in, but naught else. My boys learned very early when they were growing up that it would be better for them to read instructions and put things together, because I would assuredly bugger them up. My natural dumbness led to ever more unnatural disinclination, and now that the boys are long gone, I am left stranded with ‘machina’ as the Italians say, which I do not fathom. Their two jet skis sit on their pad at our dock, others fill up the pontoon boat and I drive, and yesterday I really buggered up their speed boat. What a day it was, Canada Day and all.
I backed it out of the boathouse without too much damage and headed to Lake Joseph, the second of the three large linked lakes [Muskoka, Rosseau and Joe] I managed to find the Lake Joe river and navigated the narrow link fairly well. I then headed down Lake Joe in the direction of Club Link and the Lake Joe Club. Again, so far so good. I thought I was having a good time. There’s always construction on the lakes, and given the sawdust in my blood, I love to look at what going up, and let me tell you, there are houses under construction around here that make Elaine Dobbin’s house at home look petit. Giant houses for merchant bankers and stock brokers with equally large egos, and the fantasies of some Hollywood starts like Goldie Hawn, Martin Short, Harry Hamlin, Lindros and a legion of hockey players. One particular new megalith caught my eye with a beautiful float plane parked in front. I was so distracted I did not notice my depth monitor, and then it was jolted to a stop. I had meandered onto a sand bar and buggered the prop and the engine. It’s an inboard outboard, so I opened it up and started blindly at the motor, not having a clue. After floating aimlessly for about an hour, I called 911 on my cell. They answered, promised to come to my rescue, never showed, and I only heard back from them much later that evening when the OPP called to see if I was alive. After two or more hours a nice young man came along in response to my frantic waving and towed me to shore. We were received warmly by a guy who happens to be a lawyer from Aurora, and he drove us home. Very late in the evening I managed to find the phone number for our Marina, called, gave them directions, and they laughed a lot. If anyone has natural mechanical ability, wants to retire and make good living, make you ways to Muskoka where all sorts of idiots like me will keep you gainfully employed forever.
There were three Parker sisters in the boat as all of this transpired and I am convinced I will get into heaven early now because of what I had in endure in comments, observations, and voluminous silence.
Welcome to your new blog. Now, instead of sending out emails, all you’re friends can read through your thoughts, life reflections, and other brain farts on this webpage.
http://www.whispersfrombabylon.com
Enjoy,
Jonathan
Did the movie The “Ten Commandments” have any factual or historical basis? Certainly not in the triumphalistic and dramatic way that Cecil B De Mille envisioned. The name “Passover” is derived from the Hebrew word ‘Pesach’ which is based on the root “pass over” and refers to the fact that God “passed over” the houses of the Jews when he was slaying the firstborn of Egypt <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/arabs/egypttoc.html> during the last of the ten plagues. Did this anthropomorphic God really do a fly over, and were there really ten plagues? Did the Red Sea part? Is there any historical or archaeological evidence for any of this? Most scholars say no. Neither is the world a mere 5000 years old, some scientists suggest circa 250 million, nor was it created in 7 days. Did King Solomon really have 600 wives and 300 concubines, and where did the idea that marriage is between one man and one woman originate or that it is indissoluble? Now that Obama has come out in favour of extending basic civil rights to the LGBT community, what will happen to all of our earlier mythologies? Answer???????????
Galileo upset what was left of Christendom in the 16th century, and Darwin scarred the hell out what remained of Christian England in the 19th century. Alas, somehow we all adjusted. After what it went through about Galileo, the Catholic Church shut up and ignored Darwin, not so the Reformed Faiths, some of whom carry on about the theory of evolution to this very day. Discovering that the earth revolved around the sun and that we did not all originate in Adam’s ribs did not convert many to an agnostic or atheistic stance. The world did not fall apart, we just moved on to a different understanding.
God, we were taught, is totally other, a mystery. Those of us who believe accept that He/She has chosen to reveal himself/herself to us in a thousand different ways, and yes also in Jesus the Christ and through the Spirit. We acknowledge the intrinsically spiritual nature of human kind along with the material, and we celebrate both. Some of us find ‘religion’ confusing; what in it is truly of God, and what of man? The answer is not at all clear. So we struggle with the comfort of what we have known and found comfort in, with the soarings of our intellect and imagination. There is no faith without doubt and wonder. But one thing must surely be apparent, a God of love will not look askance at people who love one another no matter what genitals they possess and what they do with them.
Whispers From Babylon 