My young Irish Setter was still younger than a year old. He was across the tracks at the Pool elevator since he liked the smell of rats.He was not supposed to be there.He was still young enough that he lacked savvy and had separation anxiety in new situations.I first noticed him when I was standing on the platform, the freight train was standing waiting for orders. Then I heard the freight  start to move with that characteristic squeal of axels mobilizing and as I looked under the boxcar, as it was moving with a very low pace, I could see Rusty trying to crawl over the tracks under the boxcar. He made several tentative passes. I yelled at him to no avail. As he tried to slip under the moving boxcar to the platform where I was standing a rear wheel caught him in the midsection. I watched in horror as long freight train wheels passed over his body. I ran into the kitchen where my mother comforted me. Bill, the Pool elevator operator and my dad stayed outside after the freight  pulled away. Then my dad came into the station and said, " You have to pick up your dog and bury him." My mother and Bill said, "He can't do that." My dad said I had to do that: it was the only way. So I picked up the two parts of my dog and put him in the wheelbarrow and went about 500 yards down the right-of-way and buried him near the tracks.
    I'm not sure what my dad was thinking, or why, but then I'm not sure he was wrong. I guess  no matter what, we have to face our grief head on. We cannot sanitize the events of our lives. Sorrow and joy are always present in life and  serve to make us whole.Doing what I did probably allowed me to participate in the life and death of something I loved. At fifteen I suddenly took a further step into becoming a big boy. Living on the tracks of the CNR mainline with ten to fifteen trains a day is really no place for a dog. He died trying to get to me for safety. I buried him in the right-of-way where he belonged. It was my turn for him.

Over a hundred high school students on weekdays make a journey of an hour or so each way to and from the high school back to their island homes by water. We are island people and water is our highway.We live in a Southern Gulf Island area with four outer islands and a larger Lotus island with the high school  serving the entire area. These gulf islands lie, or more properly bask, in what is now called the Salish Sea. Every weekday the pianist and I watch the two large water buses, The Scholar and The Graduate, transporting their precious cargo to and fro, passing our harbour side window leaving for the outer islands at 6:45 am, returning at 8:15 am and transporting the students home later in the afternoon. The commitment of society on these islands to education and scholarship is enormous. The commitment of the youth is exemplified by the sacrifice of time due to the travel required. The winter in northern waters, while largely inshore water. is periodically rough and cold and dark at the times of coming and going! If you are prepared to put that much time and effort into getting an education, it follows that you take yourself seriously. You have the right to be taken seriously by everyone else as well.
    The curious thing about it all  is this trip through the islands is one of the country's, nay, one of the world's major beauty spots, even from time to time in the winter, but the students, so take it for granted, that it's old hat. As they get older and depart the islands they will come to realize I am sure, the incredible nature of their school journeys. In the meantime, as they travel, they have fun, talk a lot, text a lot, do their homework, and never bother much looking out of the window.

!Wallace Stegner was a professor of literature at Stanford and lived his early life in the dry land of the Palliser Triangle of Saskatchewan. His book Wolf Willow is a Canadian Classic. He describes going to the ice house to provide meat for the family, chopping it off the side of beef. My mother often sent me to the ice house to saw off a chunk of beef from our rock hard carcass. By then I was stronger than her and could return with a chunk but had no idea if it was steak or roast or whatever. She was okay with that. I guess I thought if it was okay for Stegner, a guy from California, it was okay for us. I thought they must know stuff !  However I avoided discussing my butchery when I started to go out with the pianist. Her father was "a dollar a year" man for the rationing board of the Federal government and responsible for implementing rationing by way of the meat charts and strict adherence to the requisite cutting and selling  by meat cutters. It was his volunteer role during the war and for him meat rationing was the holy grail.I imagined the scorn he would have applied to me had he known of my butchery when I was applying for his daughter's hand. It wouldn't have helped if I told him a Californian professor of literature did it too. He may have concluded Orthopedic Surgery would be equally too demanding for me, as identifying meat cuts apparently were!

 In 1943 I was nine years old, at home in Kindersley Saskatchewan. The war was on and food was scarce and choices limited. My mother was a quick cook with no frills but it was always good. With one exception!  She made tomato soup with milk and canned tomatoes and never bothered to remove the tomato cores. I hated that soup. I hated the soft, sloppy, slimy, tomato gobs attached to the cores that floated in the soup. I would sit and gag for hours over it but got no relief. My parents would not bail me out no matter how long I sat. I said to my dad after a particularly long session, just to give him an idea about the seriousness of my situation, "I'd sooner eat shit." I remember this as vividly as if it was yesterday. It was in the dead of winter then. He went out to the roadway and picked up three frozen road apples. He brought them in the house, arranged them on a plate, put ketchup on them and said, "Take your choice." I ate the soup.
   Frozen road apples  were usually piled up to act as goal posts for road shinny and also to be a puck. I never in the past considered them useful to encourage eating in childhood. In the meantime, in Saskatchewan, when a contrived and non deft argument is made to a parent, the apt metaphor is , "Don't eat that Elmer, that's horse shit." I now have two great grandchildren and have learned to never give  food advice.

As I was coiling up my hoses I heard the little green tree frog with his mighty voice summoning all or any females to his side. Telus uses them in their ads along with lambs and lizards gamboling about. My friend, a greenhouse man, keeps a little green tree frog in his greenhouse ostensibly to eat insects. Certainly this and other species are not interested in food when  in a state of unrequited love. When I tried my friend's tactic I found my prisoner quiet and withered away on the vine. I think there was pining and wasting away because of unfulfillment. To employ a frog to do your dirty work eating your insects in the guise of being organic is no excuse. Think of his feelings. He is a brief enough candle a it is, working for Telus, living in the great big world, singing, seeking, procreating, and just surviving the environmental degradation to which he is so vulnerable. A you know he is the canary in the coal mine. He won't live beyond his allotted life span outside the greenhouse but toiling in the workhouse is probably worse. Slavery! Too little to fight back. There isn't anything wrong with a short but happy life of freedom.  We need to stop harnessing every single  living thing in nature for our own use. Listen to the little green frog sing!  Sing, ---"-Let it be----Let it be----Let it be----Let it be, Whisper words of wisdom, let it be."

  My blog is occasioned by a photo yesterday of my four year old great granddaughter eating what appear to be Blue Point oysters, with great relish. The picture on Facebook gave me great pleasure but took me back to family contention over oysters, from Atlantic, Salt Spring Island, cooking or raw or eating alive. My brother-in-law, a medical colleague who lived in New York and taught at Columbia-Presbyterian insisted on Blue Point oysters as the piece de reistance of all oysters. I guessed he was right but tried to assert myself in an effort to bolster our cluster of Japanese oysters that grew in our Price Road beach on the shale outcroppings that we harvested from time to time. The Japanese oysters have displaced the indigenous oysters in our area now and are large, and meaty and I felt I owed it to Salt Spring, despite my misgivings about our oysters when he visited us for a few days aside, on a teaching role on the west coast. Misgivings aside,if you know your argument is weak , at least it could be memorable. I told him we ate the oysters alive since they tasted better than just fresh, We then rowed out to the shale outcrops and chucked the oysters, leaving them on the rocks in the attached shell and ate them from the rock. I believe that is an innovation called oystermania. He was unimpressed. I also told him we and the other beach friends cooked oysters, clams and fish in a pit  in the beach between tides on hot coals covered with seaweed and a 4ft by 8ft plywood. Timing is important to finish before the tide comes in and floods your pit. I resolve I won't bullshit my great granddaughter if I live that long and am so proud of her for trying new things. My brother-in-law Jack was my long time colleague and friend and was never fooled by either my misgivings or attempts to be memorable. And what's more? I didn't mind!

If knowing as we must by now, that anatomically we consist of an aggregate of organic and inorganic molecules of building blocks for our substance, how is it that we came to the emotion of love or to mourn the absence of justice?  My friend Joe with whom I discussed this and whose interest is particle physics corrected me in that we are really composed entirely of a breakdown of these molecules to particles. Does this mean that we have truly arrived from A) a pinch of dust and B) the breath of God, so that the particles could love and mourn?  And does it mean that when the dust returns to the carboniferous earth we are finally at home in carboniferous union? And am I just a molecular aggregate skating along on the molecular aggregate contents of Mother Nature who is really my true mother with whom I will rejoin? She possibly has allowed me  the freedom to love and mourn in the period between the dust of creation and the dust of reunion.  And in that period I can self replicate praise God. How was it I thought in the past I was just a liver and a couple of  kidneys and a bag of skin and could love and mourn without the breath I received? How was it I thought I was self replicating without giving much credit to receiving my supplies freely and daily from the carboniferous earth that I gobbled up carelessly? The truth of the matter is the time between the dusts is limited and the replication starts to slow down before reunion. When the dust is finally united with the earth, the breath remains. Somewhere!

Every decade we have dragged our stuff and lived on and under it, hither and yon. I love our stuff which carries meaning.My writing from here on stuff explores meaning deeper than touch or sight. In the mid-seventies, when she was still alive our friend Carolyn stayed with us and sketched a collection of drawings of our house we had built in Victoria. The house was later designated a Heritage house in Saanich and 3 months in an Architecture Gallery Show some time later. My friends, when we built it, felt sorry for us and thought it looked like a bank. I wrote about our house in my book "A Braided Cord" and the "Force Vitale" that will accompany what you love, but a house is an empty shell, when you carry away the force vitale. Still, the drawings are in my room on the wall and  Carolyn and the house are both etched in my memory. We all have symbols whether we acknowledge them or not. And as I say in the book, "--a visible symbol is a sign of an invisible presence". There can be no apology for stuff in our life imparting a Force Vitale. It would be much like an apology for meaning.. As I also said , "It just requires vigilance to maintain control of one's own orbit."

 Above a toilet in our bathroom is a little 4 inch by 9 inch pen and ink tinted watercolor of our backyard in Plymouth, Devon where Robert and Anne played in the sand pile, collected snails for John to cook and eat at a penny a snail, and got humped by Winston, the adolescent bulldog, from time to time which we discouraged. As I stand and piddle and look at it at eye level over the years I remark to myself what memories that little painting produced 58 years ago returns to me, whereas they could spring from a paragraph now, to a book if I had the energy. John Polochi,  a general surgeon, now dead after a career in Kingston Ontario. Susan, pursuing her art in England at the time and coping with his gastronomical needs including garden snails, small birds which he trapped and  boiled sheep's heads for face meat. He helped me rake up all the broken glass from our back yard and clean and drain the bomb shelter, those residual remains from the heavy blitz in Plymouth in 1941, to make it safe for our children.  They loved them too. Canadian and Italian, we were all strangers in an other's land.

When I was a high school student in our little town of Lestock Saskatchewan in 1950 our town doctor made house calls in the winter with his bombardier. He had a driver, Joe Lucas, and his service area was about 25 miles in diameter, frequently bad or no available roads were passable other than as you can see with the bombardier. His role was crucial because despite our town's small size we had the only hospital in the area and the vehicle could also transport patients if need be. Our doctor, Chuck McCullough was a good friend of our family and for a young boy the imagined romance connected with the saving grace of rescuing the sick, bounding over drifts of snow, over fences trapping snow, in blizzard conditions was inspiring. It may have been the single most important matter that captured my desire to go into medicine. It tells us once again that the ability of a solo practitioner managing such a large area by himself, treating a large farm population in a hospital and at home with his own hands and own brain was crucial. This was the state of affairs in the country practice in the winter of 1950 in rural Saskatchewan. Who wouldn't be swept up with this kind of life and this kind of  effort.Talk about value. Priceless.