"If I could save time in a bottle..."

“Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.”

George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

And what, you ask, was in the big bag behind my breakfast?  It contained a part of my birthday gift from Karli - and you'd have to know me extremely well to understand why she would give me this odd selection of common items.

For a long time when I was growing up, summers were an idyllic break from school and schedule. My father ran a semi-successful little construction business, and it was a given that we would act as his semi-paid* employees, but as the youngest of five (and quite admittedly the least interested) there was a period of time where I wasn't really expected to help shovel gravel or dig trenches. As such, the sunny Muskoka summers were very much my own time in the years before I started high school.

Because my siblings were off working for my father, I was pretty much on my own with my mother - we'd go for walks, or I'd play on my own. But once every couple of weeks or so I'd put on my worn canvas knapsack, climb onto my rusty fixed-gear bicycle, and head off to the Bent River General Store, located a few miles away on the highway.

The first part of the trip was always a little exciting - there was a long long hill that went from our house down to Lake Rosseau, and it was easy to build up a lot of speed on that hill. (It was a lot less fun coming back - one of the measures of summer for me was making the trip enough times that I built up the stamina to ride all the way up the hill on my return trip without having to walk my bike.)

Once at the store, I had a set shopping list.  I'd buy a Coke, a bag of hickory sticks, and some comic books.  We didn't have allowances or anything like that, but my mother would sometimes give me some money, or we'd collect empty bottles from the side of the road for the deposit.

The comic books that I purchased would probably be worth a reasonable amount of money right now if that youthful version of myself had somehow been able to put them in storage. In the 60s, both Marvel and DC had adopted the practise of selling three or four** comics in a bag for a few cents less than cover price in an effort to both increase sales of less popular comics and to reduce the number of returns from retailers.

The Bent River General Store sold Marvel Comics, and this was at the height of the Silver Age of comics, as the Bronze Age was just beginning. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were busily building on the foundations of the Marvel Universe that they had created in the early 60s, along with disciples like Steve Ditko, Jack Sinnott, John Romita Sr., John Severin, Roy Thomas, Archie Goodwin, and a host of other classic Marvel artists and writers.  As such, even a one-off comic guilty of poor sales at the time could easily have become a valuable collectable 45 years later.

After I'd made my purchase, I'd get back onto my bike, and start the trip home. There was a little isolated hill about half a mile along the road on the way back, where I'd run my bike down into the ditch and  lay it down in the tall grass on the other side.  I'd lie there in the sun, read my comics, drink my pop, and eat my hickory sticks. It's a treasured memory for me, one which has never lost its lustre as the years have gone by.

Tomorrow we're flying to Toronto, and after spending a few days there, we'll head up to Muskoka so that Karli can see where I grew up.  As part of that side trip, we'll be driving along the road that I would have ridden on those long lost summer days.  I've packed everything, and even if it's raining and we have to sit in the car at the side of the road, I have every intention of being a ten year old boy again for just a few minutes, with my comic book, my Coke and my snack.

What a brilliant and thoughtful gift to give to someone who has just turned 55.  Thank you, my love.

- Sid

 * This was a ongoing bone of contention.  My father maintained that after all, he was paying for food and a roof over our heads, whereas we always felt that we were saving him from having to hire workers who would have been considerably more demanding in terms of regular paycheques. Practice fell someplace between the two - we'd get paid now and then, but not really as much as if we weren't members of the family, and my father didn't end up charging us rent.

** I would have sworn that you could get two comics for 19 cents, but I cannot find one bit of documentary evidence that supports this belief.

Breakfast of Champions.

My birthday morning breakfast:  bacon, eggs, toast, and, once again with thanks to my good friend Colin, two Doctor Who bobbleheads* and tea in a Fallout mug.

Colin also sent two unique additions to my Doctor Who t-shirt collection: 

In order to safeguard the Fallout mug in its cross country journey, Colin did some innovative repacking, presumably using the resources that he had at hand. However, he was kind enough to annotate the box that he chose in order to avoid inappropriate expectations.

Thanks again, Colin!

- Sid

 * For the uninitiated, David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor, and Matt Smith as the Eleventh.

Or it could say "timey wimey".

Thanks to my good friend Colin for the perfect birthday greeting* for a science fiction fan...

- Sid

* For any non-Doctor Who fans reading this, trust me, this is brilliantly funny.

Is Birthday Eve a thing now?

Unlike the shrewd fisherman of Gont, this old man, for fear and wonder of his wizardry, would have given the boat to Ged. But Ged paid him for it in sorcerers’ kind, healing his eyes of the cataracts that were in the way of blinding him. Then the old man, rejoicing, said to him, “We called the boat Sanderling, but do you call her Lookfar, and paint eyes aside her prow, and my thanks will look out of that blind wood for you and keep you from rock and reef. For I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.”

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Wizard of Earthsea

It's my birthday tomorrow, but Karli surprised me this evening with a pre-birthday card on my pillow. It was actually a thank-you card, which isn't very surprising if you know anything about our relationship, about the gratitude that we feel for finding each other, and Karli also managed to find a card with a quote from one of my favourite authors, science fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. LeGuin.

The quote in question is from the 1968 novel A Wizard of Earthsea, the first in her five-book* Earthsea Cycle.  I strongly recommend the Earthsea Cycle - the books are ostensibly young adult fiction, but they deal with classical themes of darkness and light, the shadows that represent our darker sides, vanity, egotism, selflessness, sacrifice, good, evil, love, sexuality, aging, and the final journey which is death. The books are quite short by the current standards of epic fantasy, but not a word is wasted - LeGuin's writing is simple, elegant, and eloquent.

Thank you for the card, my love - and you're welcome.

- Sid

* There are also a few short stories.

The 50th anniversary of Star Trek - more or less.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the broadcast of the very first episode of Star Trek – the famous NBC showing of The Man Trap on September 8th, 1966, a date etched in the annals of science fiction geekery.

Or not.

The ACTUAL first broadcast was Canadian: September 6th on CTV.  Take that, 'Murica.*

- Sid

* And if we’re going to do a bit of flag waving here, let’s not forget William Shatner, a nice boy from Montreal who got his start doing Shakespeare at the Stratford Festival in Ontario.

Revelation 6:8.

It's Labour Day, and with Labour Day comes the start of the school year.*  Every now and then I look around for courses dealing with my area of interest - I've often thought it might be interesting to study science fiction or fantasy on a scholarly basis.  Over the years I've looked at a wide variety of courses, but it just never seems to work out for me in terms of time and scheduling.

One of the more intriguing options available in the current year comes from the Langara College English Department:  Apocalypse Now: Literary Narratives of Pandemic.  It's an interesting choice for a topic: unlike the more speculative disasters such as global warfare or the destruction of fossil fuels, humanity has actually experienced at least one pandemic event. In the middle of the 14th century, the Black Death swept across Europe like a dark curtain, killing uncounted millions of people - some estimates place the death toll as high as 60% of the population, if not higher.

I'm quite curious as to how this course approaches pandemics in a literary framework, but sadly, the Langara web site provide no more specific information other than the following:

Students in this course will study prose fiction in a variety of forms with the goal of improving their strategies for reading and writing about 20th and 21st century prose. Course themes and content, as determined by the English Department, may vary each semester. Check the Registration Guide for details.

As a result, we have to extrapolate - how does one approach pandemic writing from a literary perspective?

Depending on how you define your terms, there would certainly be plenty of grist for the mill. The earliest fictional (as opposed to Biblical) take on a global apocalypse is Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, which tells the tale of an end to the world very much like the near miss of the Black Death. The late 20th Century is thick with novels where a disease of some sort wipes out 99% of the population**: The Stand, Oryx and Crake, I Am Legend, Earth Abides, The Last Canadian, and so on. If you broaden your definition of pandemic to include the walking dead (caused by a contagious medical condition transmitted by biting, rather like rabies) the list grows exponentially.

Most of this fiction deals with the immediate aftermath of disaster: finding food and shelter, seeking allies or companions, defending against cannibals and raiders, etc.  It almost goes without saying that this is a pessimistic literature, a literature of life lived in the present. It's rare that these stories look very much further down the road than the immediate crisis.***

A rare longer term view of the challenges - and consequences - of attempting to rebuild a broken world can be found in Some Will Not Die, a 1961 novel by Algis Budrys, which paints a brief multi-generational picture of the years following the fall of civilization in terms of ends and its justification of the means used to achieve them.

The White Plague, by Dune author Frank Herbert, presents a very different view of justification. This 1982 novel is the story of a microbiologist deprived of his family by a bombing in Northern Ireland, and his decision to punish all of the participants in the conflict with a similar loss, now and forever: the eponymous White Plague is fatal only to women. The book concludes with a brilliant description of a journey through the tortured remnants of Ireland by the biologist and the bomber as the plague escapes the bounds of the United Kingdom and begins to infect the entire world.

As it turns out, this display of erudition in the area of apocalypse is fruitless - I don't have the prerequisites which would allow me to take the Langara course.  Although, to be honest, I might find it more interesting to take a shot at teaching a class or two than attending them...

- Sid

* Those of you involved in multi-semester education, just work with me here.

** I'd love to add The Andromeda Strain to this list - I grant you that it's more of a failed pandemic, a pandemic manqué if you will, but the scenes set in the Arizona town which finds the crashed probe so clearly show the horror of an alien disease set loose on Earth.

*** It would be interesting to see an episode of The Walking Dead set in a future time when Carl is his father's age or older.