An architect who designed and supervised the building of a house for the pianist and me in 1970 phoned sometime a decade or two after,  to tell me it was featured in a Legacy Show in a gallery in Victoria,  ie ,  "  "Lotus City" ! The house, although only 38 years old at the time,  was also declared a Heritage House earlier by the Municipality of Saanich. The house apparently broke new ground for design at the time in the 70's,  though in retrospect,  it wouldn't certainly have been everyone's cup of tea.
         I had friends that felt sorry for us,  others that said it looked like a bank,  but we ignored them since by then we had alresdy crossed the Rubicon. Still, the house  was interesting and evocative and after it was built the architect told me that he was most appreciative of the fact that he had a free hand thoughout the design and building process:  a situation he rarely encountered. The pianist and I were young and I , at least,  certainly felt at the time sufficiently naive that I had no right to tell someone as knowledgeable as an architect what he should build.
         We came and watched it  being built and growing every day and it became slowly our own so when we moved into it, we readily adapted and the house became our home and we knew every stick. A house is only a home when a heart beats strongly within it.  Mine did, and so did my sense that I had somehow arrived when the evocative house seductively took up my identity within itself.   We sold the house after seventeen years when our needs changed,  but I never forgot the house thoughout the intervening years as it became a statement of mine during the time we lived there. When we left and the furnishings were gone, I never returned to see it because for me a part had been excised.
         The pianist however went back to look at the empty house and as she looked in every empty room she knew:  "A house without a force vitale, is only a beautiful empty shell."
          The heart in any house, whether beautiful or homely, is what creates the home. The pianist shared my feelings about leaving it, but it became apparent to her as she toured the empty house that it was a corpse, albeit a beautiful corpse, without a heart,  awaiting a new transplant.  I wish now that I had the pianist's foresight to visit it once it was empty, so that I could write  "finis" to the sense of loss I felt at that time.
        The loss of course is never to you,  but to the house, since the force vitale is the force the house can never retain, and that,  we carry away with us. I guess we should always assess the relationships we create with our symbols. There is a danger  lurking for all of us that as times change, the visible symbol as a sign of an invisible presence can become an invisible symbol , indivisible, from oneself.  Or to put that sentence more plainly,  " You are more than any bloody house."  One needs vigilance  to maintain control of one's own orbit.

There was an abiding mythology  in the residences at the University of Manitoba I attended in the 50's that the food supplied to students was adulterated with saltpetre. That, coupled with the myth that saltpetre reduced the libido of the young, was enough to foster a seasoning of mistrust. I was so shy in my first year of university that I would have not recognized saltpetre's effect,  anyway, real or fanciful. More likely, worry, late nights, loneliness, maladaption, and culture shock of the young, were the proximate causes,  at least for me.
       Despite the suspicion,  it was never talked about much because in those days we all did what we were told and believed  "they"  were right,----or at least most of us did. Control of the student body was never an issue then. Compliance was high,  for at least those of us who were afraid that we wouldn't succeed.
        Saltpetre was , less a mythological thing and a more reality product when I was  in grade eight in the 40's when my friends  and I made gunpowder in our town of Kindersley. We mixed saltpetre, ground charcoal, and flowers of sulfur in equal proportion until the color was a dark and dirty green. I can still see in my mind"s eye vividly, the color of our recipe. Little boys blowing up things in the Kindersley town dump. As I think of it now, what was the druggist, as he was known then, thinking of,  to supply us with those ingredients? In some ways it must have been a much freer time and less supervision. How we all avoided blowing ourselves up I don't know.
          Growing up,  however, we learned to knuckle under for our own good, or at least it seemed for our own good.