Canada Moms Blog

The Maple Leaf? Whatever!

You've got to admit, Canada is a country unlike many others.  After putting together a closing show for the Olympics that was so full of Canadian in-jokes and somewhat Canadian (but resident in America) stars making those jokes, a show so obscure that most Americans rated it as lame or boring, we are now exposing ourselves by arguing about the National Anthem, of all things.  I find the whole thing somewhat amusing, but in a head-hanging, squirming kind of way.

American friends, when Parliament opens a new session our Governor General reads a Speech from the Throne, written by the current political party in power. In the speech of a few days ago, the government caused the Gov. Gen. to announce that we would review our national anthem with a view to cutting out the sexist and offensive elements therein.  This only a few days after the country had gone mad singing the thing as our athletes won medals.  How lame brained was that? 

Two days later, the government backed off and said it would not do the review after all, mostly because their mail, phones and email had all become clogged with people telling them that this was a really, really stupid idea.  Meanwhile, anyone that could not get through to their MP and, I suspect, a few who did, wrote a letter to the editor.  I have just finished reading Saturday's batch, plus a few articles by various pundits, and I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

So, what is all the fuss about.  It seems to have started with a female senator who complained that the anthem as is was not inclusive of women.  The first two lines, you see, are:

Oh, Canada, our home and native land,
True patriot love in all thy sons command.

Leaves out the daughters. Tsk.  Cannot have that.  I note in passing that it also leaves out any new Canadian not actually born here, of either sex, but that did not seem to be the senator's problem.

Well, yes, both the men and the women did win hockey golds last week.  We noticed. When the women stood up to belt out the anthem, what I noticed was that several of them were singing different words.  You see, the anthem has been revised before, to smarten it up a bit, and a lot of people do not know the new words.  Not to mention that the French version has a different theme and different sentiments. 

The French version came first, back in the late 18th century, and English translations of it are just awful, without exception.  And so, around a hundred years ago, an effort was made to develop decent English words, to level the playing field a bit.  At that period, English Canadians were just as likely to be singing God Save the King or The Maple Leaf Forever, but Oh Canada got pushed forward and adopted as the official anthem because the other two were pretty annoying to French Canadians.  God Save the King for obvious reasons and The Maple Leaf Forever because the words you heard at the closing ceremony of the Olympics were not the words we used, even in the forties and fifties, when I was growing up.  The chorus runs:  The first verse, then, was:

In days of yore, from Britain's shore,

Wolfe the conquering hero came

and planted firm Britannia's flag

on Canada's fair domain. 

There may it wave, our boast our pride

and join in love forever. 

With lily, thistle, rose entwined,

the Maple Leaf forever.

At the time we all happily sang this ditty in Ontario schools, our flag was, in fact, the British red ensign.  Australia had the white one.  Or vice versa.  It was not until our centennial year, 1967, that we finally adopted, as a genuine, home grown Canadian flag, the red maple leaf you saw all of us wearing last week.  But you can see that our Francophone brothers and sisters would not be in love with those words, specifically because Wolfe was a British general who defeated a French army outside Quebec City and claimed the territory for England.

All of this is fine but the icing on the cake, for me, is the upwelling of support for the present English version of Oh Canada.  This from a nation of people whose athletes are singing different words in the English version and most of the Francophone gold medallists I saw were singing, kind of tentatively, also in English.  You can just bet they don't sing the French version much.  

I guess, as a good native daughter of Canada, I should just, with glowing heart, sing whatever words I can remember.

This is an orginal post for Canada Moms Blog.  Whenever she stops singing, Mary G can be found blogging at Them's My Sentiments.

Community Health Centres - A Good Health Care Answer

Health care reform - a huge topic on both sides of the border these days. This Canadian is not conversant enough with the proposals and present problems of the heated debate on extending health care coverage now raging in the USA. Nor am I entirely on one side or the other about 'two tier' provisions the Canadian Medical Association is presently snarling about. What I am familiar with, however, is the effect of really good quality health care on a sparsely populated and frighteningly poor part of Eastern Ontario.

I am the chair of a community board that provides governance for a type of health care delivery called a 'Community Health Centre'. We are an incorporated board with membership from all over the county where I live. We get a global budget issued to us by the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care of the Province of Ontario and spend it to provide both primary health care and supportive services and programs, our decisions being based on the advice of our staff and the needs of our clients.

Keeping House Like My Mother

Do I keep house like my mother?  Well, I do and I don't.  My mother was a young adult in the Great Depression of the 1930's and she had been raised on a farm where a lot of what was eaten was grown and processed right on the 95 acres.  And so my mother kept house sort of like her mother, but with modern conveniences. 

As young wives, both my mother and my grandmother washed on Monday, ironed on Tuesday, baked on Tuesday and Thursday, cleaned on Friday, rested on Sunday.  But where my grandmother started with washtubs and a mangle and progressed to a wringer washtub, my mother had a wringer washer, then a spin washer and finally an automatic washer.  My grandmother preserved almost all of the meat (which my great-grandfather slaughtered), and grew and preserved the vegetables and fruit that the family ate from a half acre 'kitchen garden'.  She killed her own chickens and hunted for eggs when the hens went broody. My mother, living in the city, bought her meat at the butcher, cans of vegetables and cartons of eggs at the corner store and confined the food processing to making jam and preserving fruit. If she miscalculated the amount she needed of some food item, she did without.

Grama and the Daycare Kid

For the last ten days we have had our granddaughter staying with us while her parents were overseas.  She is six, going on sixty, with a vocabulary that a grade eight student could envy and a lot of determination .  Grama is tired, even though she enjoyed every fraught moment.   Her parents are both biologists and so she is in daycare when she is not at school.  She expects structure and adult attention and when she has them she is a contented child.  It does keep the grandparents running.

Grandma's China

I read an article in the paper this weekend about inherited china.  The gist of it was that women to-day are not wanting their parents' patterned china but instead opting for plain white in pleasing shapes.  The article gave me a good laugh because after a lifetime of buying white china in pleasing shapes (the first, purchased in 1963 with wedding gift money, was white Mikasa in a rounded square shape), I am now the custodian of a hand painted Limoges service, pink rosebuds and green leaves painted on cream china with a gold border.  There are twelve place settings and every size and sort of service dish that you could imagine, dainty cups and saucers, even a pickle dish.  One daughter has my Mikasa.  The other got my mother's ornate service.

What is really funny is that I love Grandma's china.  Not the serving pieces, no.  They are ugly blobby shapes - as you can see from the photo - but they are right handy when serving a crowd because they have ugly blobby lids that keep the food warm.

Mountain Roads

I've just come back from a driving tour of Colorado and New Mexico, staying with our daughter in Colorado Springs and taking either day tours or three to four day excursions.  One excursion took us to the Taos district of New Mexico; on another one we went north to Steamboat Springs, Colorado via Highway 40, a road marked scenic on which you cross the continental divide three times and pass 11000'.

All of the country we passed through is beautiful, whether it is sere grassland inhabited by scruffy buffaloes, tiny lilac strewn communities in river valleys or stark mountain majesties viewed from the plains.  This has been our fourth trip through parts of the southwest and I would go back again tomorrow. 

I would go back even though my husband can't see a mountain pass on the map without wanting to drive through it.  We are both flatlanders, but JG seems to be able to surmount the vertigo and enjoy crawling up the side of a mountain.  I don't. 

Who knows that you blog?

I read an article in the paper the other day about women who hide their purchases from their husbands or fudge the price they have paid, even when the purchase is made with money they have earned themselves.  My problem is something similar.  When my husband wanders by my office, a space with no door, and asks me what I am up to, I have to switch screens fast. He does not know that I blog.  I do not want him ever to find out that I blog.

Decorating Daze

My elder Daughter buys me a subscription to a magazine called Canadian House and Home as a Christmas gift each year.  Not that I follow any of the advice, especially that which would lead to a lot of dusting and fussing.  (Size labels safety pinned to folded sheets? Not me!) Nor do I wish to buy extremely expensive paint in colours with names that bear little relation to the hue advertised, chandeliers that would take a day a month to keep cobweb free and kitchen cabinets with glass doors to show off my lack of organization. As fiction, however, it provides me with hours of fun.

When JG and I were married we set up housekeeping with a double bed box spring and mattress, a small chest of drawers, a kitchen table, and a whole lot of books. We had a broom, too, because I vividly recall it blowing off the roof of our station wagon, loaded with all our worldly goods, as we drove along the 401, moving from our student apartment to our first Real Home. This was a four room apartment in a walk-up building in Ville la Salle in Montréal, but it was a palace to me. It had a bedroom with a closet, a linen closet (with silverfish), a semi-enclosed kitchen and a living room, plus minuscule bathroom.  We needed a big furniture expansion to fit all this space. Because we had been married rather unconventionally, a lot of our wedding presents had been cash and so we were able to purchase a (cheap) new couch and chair, coffee table and end table. The couch and chair were upholstered in brown and beige vinyl and the futon style couch folded down to a single bed. We got six little legs to hold up the double bed mattress.

I was pretty impressed with this adult collection of worldly goods.

Left in the Lee of the Baby Boomers

When my husband retired, we joined an organization called the Canadian Association of Retired People.  Acronym, CARP.  Like the AARP it is an advocacy and group discount organization for seniors that does a lot of lobbying of various governments about Seniors' issues.  It did a lot of carping, in fact, demonstrating gray power.  There was a monthly news magazine featuring discounts and bargains and descriptions of what the group was carping about that month.  Sort of dull and polite.  Then the organization got taken over by a man called Moses Znaimer and suddenly everything changed.  Notably, the magazine was rebranded for the baby boom generation and renamed Zoomer.

Zoomer?  Oh, come on. For the last while since the change, the magazine has featured famous people over forty five (the Zoomer generation!), people such as Wayne Gretzky and Helen Mirrim and Margaret Atwood. The feature articles on them have been interesting and certainly the glossy new format of the magazine, except for all the advertisements for face cream and makeup, is interesting. But this month, the featured famous person was the Queen.  Labelled as a Zoomer.

There she is on the cover with her trademark pearls and prim posture, uncharacteristically grinning at the camera. 

An Old Wife's Tale about Breastfeeding

In September of 1967 we decided to visit the Centennial Expo in Montreal; our younger daughter was two months old, a sturdy, easy, breastfed baby.  In all of that huge site there was one (1!) 'changing station' for babies.  The YD was a happy little lump in her knapsack, packed in with diapers, until she got hungry.  Once she decided she needed feeding, she became very noisy.  So she got nursed in some peculiar places. 

One day at noon our best option seemed to be a huge cafeteria beside the Russian Pavilion; it was almost empty and we could all eat while she did.  So I established myself at a table, unbuttoned my jacket and blouse and fed her.  My husband and his parents went through the cafeteria line and brought the food over, giving me a carton of milk, with a straw. Just then The YD, who was very hungry indeed, gulped some air, air-locked and shrieked.  As I hoisted her up onto my shoulder to try and get the bubble out, a waiter came over to see what was up and, looking at the milk in the carton, cleared his throat and asked if he could warm up the baby's milk.  My FIL, a wonderful guy with a big sense of humour, grinned widely.  'No thanks, that's taken care of,' he said.  And about then the poor waiter must have realized what was going on because he turned a fine shade of scarlet and slunk away.