Margaret Mead, the famous Anthropologist was asked to tell us when that pivot point happened when mankind emerged from the animal world. It had resulted from antecedent discussions about Darwin, Wallace, Christian ideas, Survival of the fittest, Altruism and the like. In particular she was asked what existing archaeological artifacts she was aware aware of that reflected the departure from the animal world that mankind may have made. You may, like me, question  departure or emergence from that world. No anatomist or embryologist would see any separateness whatsoever today or in the  past. Margaret Mead's choice of artifact was the archaeological find of a healed fracture of an adult femur.  She said a fractured femur in an animal would lead to an early death. In the human with a fracture of the femur time for union takes a minimum of 12 weeks.  Someone had to feed, clean the toilet material, protect, harbor and splint the leg of the human . That might be altruism and is not likely an example of survival of the fittest. There had to be an natural impulse to leave and look after oneself. That would be normal in the animal world. To stay and nurture, is that the pivot point?
      There's lots of room to argue here with Margaret. What about my dog who is full of love and will stay by me forever, or what seems like forever and wait by my gravestone  for my reappearance. And my horse with whom I am bonded for life, or other animal oddities that demonstrate compassion that belies elevation of the fittest. Or do we have still members of mankind who still follow the precepts of survival of the fittest and are they therefore cultually certified members of the animal world?  Margaret was a Cultural Anthropologist so may not be interested in anatomy and embryological definitions but I am, and I see no pivot point here. There Is a pivot point culturally  in that mankind's departure from the animal world in music,  art, abstract thought and charity. On the other hand  there may have been the seeds of these originally according to Wallace who suggested Intelligent Design . And then no need for a pivot point. Who knows?

I was removing with difficulty a string of Christmas lights from the Quince tree that I had left too long into March. Some of the small branches were traumatized as the electrical wires clung to them and the freezing cold has still rendered them rather brittle. As i was working away on the stepladder, a small voice said,
    "You've made me look like a tart."  Then the voice said,
    "You've spent a long time yapping about Mother Nature and how organic you are and you even quoted a    poem about me once by Euripides and now you have made me into a freak."
I must say I was taken aback by this tree's assertion as I hadn't meant any disrespect. I didn't think it unseemly to string lights on living bones but now I realize for the first time it is an unnatural act and has nothing to do with Christmas either.
     " I guess you are right that I am a hypocrite, ' I said, "but it was out of ignorance rather than intent."
      " No way," The Quince said, " You have made such heavy weather of your connection to the vegetable world and apparently worshiped the dialogue between us. It gives us the suspicion that you talk a good game but have little understanding or respectfulness for living bones.  Rather than your feeble attempt to illuminate me,  try to illuminate yourself for a change."
Well you can  readily see that I felt pretty crushed particularly since she has provided faithfully every year beautiful quince for jellies and preserves, a home every year for the Western Flycatchers that grace our summers and she never develops powdery mildew. She has clearly discussed the matter in the orchard with her cousins the pears and apples.I have assured her that I will not repeat any unnatural acts in the future and will scale down my rhetoric, beating my breast about how connected I am when they all really know better!

A variety of soup we occasionally enjoyed in our house in the olden days was Bad Breath Soup. The name was coined by our saucy children who were of that age when our failings were transparent and easily exposed. Nevertheless both the name and the soup have survived hence for a further  forty years and they now speak  of it in terms of minor reverence. The soup was a derivative of the previous day's meal which was New England Boiled Dinner. This consisted of ham, onion, cabbage, carrots and potatoes boiled together. The second day the ham was finely diced, the original boiling water added, seasoning and a dollop of split peas and all the leftover vegetables into the large pot and recooked. There was always enough to freeze several  Ziiploc bags of soup.
         The nose and tongue, though aligned and working in concert are neurologically autonomous. The taste buds of the tonque are mediated by the 7th, 9th and 10th cranial nerves and the olfactory plate of the nose by the 1st cranial nerve. Therefore what an object smells like is somewhat different than how it tastes. The professional cheese and wine tasters know this, but they may not know why. Bad Breath Soup is a misnomer. It should have always been called Strong Breath Soup. That is a more apt name because it smells like cabbage and onion, both hearty and pungent vegetables that emit a superb scent. The quality of the delicate taste however is a blend of all the ingredients ; the sensations conducted by an orchestra of autonomous cranial nerves but in harmony with one another,
          Bad Breath was preferred over Strong Breath because they named it and it stuck. Children, grandchildren and great grandchildren now live apart from us but when they come back from time to time, and we eat this soup and say Grace,  it is pertinent to remind them,  that Bad Breath is better than no breath at all.
    

'Sometime in the early 80's Joan and I were atop of Mount Tabor, which tradition identifies as the Mount of the Transfiguration. We had been in Israel and Palestine for close to two weeks by then. We looked south from the mountain top down the steep slope to the valley of Jezreel and beyond to the cotton fields of the plains of the Gallilee. On the valley floor was the ancient road that took the Babylonian army to Egypt and the Egyptian arms to Babylon, Later it was the road for  Alexander and the Greek and then Roman armies, and eventually the Arab and Turkish armies, later the British and German armies. It is a famous road and in the way of these destructive forces though history was Israel and the city-state of Megiddo sitting dab-smack in the middle of the valley. It was destroyed , sacked, rebuilt  and destroyed many times and now, as we observed is a deep and testamentary excavation of the horror of war. The name of the city has given rise to the word for destruction, Armageddon.
       I often think of our visit to Mount Tabor and at this time of the year because Jesus was here atop the mountain with his friends shortly before he went to Jerusalem. As he descended the gentle North slope with them after his Transfiguration he must have had an inkling that it would be his last journey and he was facing his own armageddon. He wasn't stupid you know.
        It's hard to stand on that kind of mountain, look at that kind of valley, think of that sort of city, that man knowing the doom he faced and moving steadily towards it, knowing he faced abandonment in the end, and not feel  myself be touched by the history and conflictedness of death.

There is an old joke. It may have come from Socrates though it is not I believe recorded as his. As you know Socrates discourses'  were recorded by Plato rather than Socrates himself and the joke is "about", rather than "from", but is supremely illustrative of what might have been and always "is". I guess you could say it is Socratic.
    Student:  "Socrates,  Why do you always answer a question with a question? "
    Teacher:  " What's wrong with a question? "
Indeed!  Answer that student because it is hellishly complex.
     Socrates, as Plato records him, asked questions of students in response to their questions as a means of eliciting thought from them, rather than providing didactic statements. It may have been slow and painful and often seemed silly but it allowed thinking out answers for oneself. The students answer may well have lead to a further question in which Socrates feigned ignorance that allowed the student the revelation of coming up with a further answer. The discourses were extractive and often seemed like pulling teeth.
      Have we worshiped the accumulation of fact that  trumps question and thought,  and, will question and thought sometimes expose the nakedness of  "known" fact ?
       I had two teachers in my lifetime that took the time to employ Socratic methods. They were confusing, exasperating, exposed our ignorance, but were never arbitrary, in thrall of unquestioned facts or spent all our time thinking inside the box. It took me fifty years to realize it was no joke to question everything. There is nothing wrong with a question and it is still easy to be wrong!
     Rule  1   Fear of being wrong will destroy the willingness to think outside the box.
     Rule 2    Fear of being wrong will destroy the initiative to risk taking a voyage of discovery.
     Rule 3    Fear of being wrong will inevitably lead to a pedestrian lifestyle, safe but wounded.
     

In September 1951 my mother and I left on the train for Winnipeg to register me for the second year of the Arts and Science Programme at the University of Manitoba. We stayed with my grandparents who lived on Jubilee Avenue and took the bus out the Pembina highway to the campus where I registered for French which was mandatory, Botany, Zoology, Chemistry and English, which was also a requirement. I also was registered for occupancy in the university residence. My mother bought me a maroon corduroy jacket, tan colored trousers, three white shirts and a tie. There were probably other bits and pieces but that's all I remember. To be honest, I was so far removed from my mileau that week that the cocky assurance I always carried with me in my little hometown of Lestock had melted away. Whatever hope that I had for blending in had totally disappeared and I was simply swept away with the torrent of people, rules, feelings, confusions and decisions.
     I had turned 17 in June of that year and my dad had suggested a good job for me would be a brakeman for the CNR railroad. The pay was good and because my dad was a railroader, a station agent, our life was seen as a good way to make a living. I had gone to Melville, the terminal in our area, earlier that summer and was "examined" by the railroad doctor to determine if I was healthy enough for the railroad to hire me on as a brakeman. He said, "Drop your pants and bend over ", and he stuck his finger up my backside. I was confused but assumed I guess that this was part of being a brakeman and it was okay. In retrospect now, I wish I could ask him why he didn't give a 17 year old a little forewarning or counsel, but since I'm in my 86th year, he would probably be 141 tears old  and not answer.
      I was not to be a brakeman. My mother wrote to her father, my grandfather and her twin sister, a doctor in practice in Connectticut and told them my marks in Grade 12 were good and asked them for financial help to allow me to go to university. It was not easy for her to do that, but she was looking at her own life, living in railway stations, making do, keeping her family of boys  together and often on the move.  It wasn't that she didn't know any better as she had been in the same university residence where I was scheduled to live when she became a teacher in 1926 and knew that knowledge and the ability to impart it is a wonderful thing. My grandfather sent me two thousand dollars and my aunt a thousand dollars which was my turning point. I had lived with my mother at my grandparents for my first three years of my life during the great depression in the early thirties while my father traveled to earn a living, so we were close and I was named Darcy, after grandfather's nickname, acquired after Mr. Darcy, Jane Austin's prototype  of a dandy of yesteryear. That wasn't me at that time.
       Lestock, my little town in Saskatchewan was everything I needed at that time. School, friends,baseball, hockey, family, supremely happy, wrenched from this to culture shock, anonymity, incompetence, loneliness, and loss of identity. Small town boys, perhaps more so me, took a long time to become acculturated and then it may not have been all that useful. It took me a year to get grounded. I lived in four different places, scholastically struggled, barely passed everything and longed for home. I made friends with the equally troubled whose maladaptation was equivalent to mine but I recognized that distancing was useful. I learned one thing however, I wouldn't repeat the screw-up the following year. If I was to get into medicine the following year my pre-med year had to be good. I  had to jettison my maladaptive friends, accept that to study is lonely, but to learn is joyful. I studied six nights a week and celebrated on the seventh. My marks were good. I was awarded an Isbister  Scholarship and got accepted into Medicine.
       The summer before grade twelve and before my mother took me to Winnipeg, I worked in the Pool elevator across the tracks from the railway station cleaning out the bottoms of the elevator shafts in preparation for the new harvest to come. The chaff of wheat, barley and oats with rat droppings was three to five feet deep in the bottom of every shaft. Dirty , dusty jobs like that taught you two things.  Three things really. he third thing was that you needed to bath every night to get rid of the dust balls in your hair, eyes  and ears and had to carry the water from the town pump in order to heat it on the wood stove for the bathtub in the kitchen. Then what was one?---- That you didn't want to do it forever and two----that you weren't good enough to do anything else. Learning to be a brakeman might have seemed to be a good enough idea at that time but all things are relative.
     

Me ,myself and I are contained in a bag of skin called Jim. We talk to one another regularly about the direction the bag is going, and generally what it is all about, and what is best for it. We know the bag hears us because it often mouths our dialogue and we hear ourselves repeated, though not always accurately. Those of our trio never try to dominate or take over and we simply laugh off the little foibles we see from time to time  that drive the bag to go off in somewhat hapless directions.
     Jim, who is easily mystified, says,  "Who are these entities that claim to be me, or that try to direct me in my life?  Are they Angels or Demons, or just Gods or Muses?  Do they arise from an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato?' ----As Scrooge purportedly said to the ghost of Jacob Marley.
      We reflected that the three of us were becoming more obvious to Jim as he is ageing and a bag has to listen more intently to his inner life. In addition, Me, Myself and I are probably stirring up the bag a little more often.
        Jim finally asked,  "Who are you guys anyway?"  We, as a trio, answered in unison.  We have rehearsed this answer many times as we have always been here in the bag of skin called Jim and have waited for the question which has finally come.----- "Jim, we are much older than you and have been here many years before you. You, for your information, are a new bag and always will be since the elements of your cellular replacements for every one of your current cells arrives from earth's supplies every few weeks or months as you reconstruct the skin of your bag and renew the cellular contents within with fresh materials. For that reason, though your template remains old and is getting older, you become a new cellular entity each week or two as earth recycles its materials to and fro. Even your wet bones will rise again and be renewed, though much more slowly. You are and will be the paradox of new cells from earth in the template of an old bag.
       "To answer your question, We just are! You however are of earth. You are no more mad than anyone else. Not more;  not less. You are just listening to us more carefully and somewhat more urgently now!"

I bought a print an other year of the Camino, the road from France to the Spanish town of Santiago de Compostela. It was in an exhibition series of pictures in our library exploring the nature of roads. Standing on the road;  a trail really;  was a solitary lengthened shadow of a pilgrim holding a stick:  the low sun, the sense of impending twilight, and the antiqued paper giving the print of the road  a quality of roughness and endless distance. A road always suggests a journey : leaving somewhere, or something, or someone and going to something or somewhere.  But the gist of the journey is the process, not the beginning,  nor the end,  but where we will spend ourselves. The shadow is fully in contact with the road and accompanies the traveler forward and backward during the day, leading and following and foreshortened side by side.
     The road, hard and rough, the traveler footsore:  he is confined by the direction of the roadway if he is to progress to his intended target. If it's the road to Zanzibar Dorothy Lamour takes with her friends, or the ´Yellow Brick Road, or the Camino road, the road is where you will spend yourself. This is where we walk a step at a time. In my print the solitary figure expressed by the shadow and the stick gives a feeling to the viewer of the loneliness of the roadway. There is no Bing Crosby or Bob Hope to accompany Dorothy! There is no Toto to accompany the other Dorothy. But of course some of these are only fantasies. Road may signify action not meaning  in a world without metaphor.
      In my print there is no bicycle, no automobile, just a trail where each step is the only present and the only reality. My print could have been from anywhere because my road is a metaphor for life. I have never taken the road  to Santiago de Compostela, marking the way to the Cathedral of St. James, and I am too old to do it now, but a road, is a road, is a road and we are all on a roadway to somewhere and leaving somewhere. It is the process that we live with from the road we decided to take, rather than a goal that will be arrived at somewhere else.  Think about it for a minute.  How many times did you start with a goal and find during the journey, from your roadway, that the real purpose was somewhere else? And how slow and painful it had to be to get there.

March 17th:  I was buzzed by the bumble bee today.  And we counted 14 Harbour seals clustered together, four of them circling about, and ten treading , or what goes for treading, vertically in the water, sharp little snouts looking skyward; all waiting for the spawning herring to appear. The Indian Plum is in full flower and the Alder catkins are a cloud of red-brown. The Bufflehead ducks are weaving in and out of the cluster of waiting seals and taking their share of the small minnows the seals ignore. The raspberries and the loganberries have just started to leaf and the rhubarb is poking up through the leaf mold. The gooseberries and black currents are leafing ahead of the red currents.The apple trees don't show any green buds yet but the pear trees flower buds are swelling with life but not yet bursting with colour.
    The late storm surges over the last few days have thrown up an abundance of seaweed and have sucked out a lot of loose winter vegetation dropped from the shore shrubs. This detritus has mixed together and harbours all the tiny denizens of the shore that feed the gulls and crows. The ground of the seaside is like a wet sponge with all the rain and the moss is especially thick this spring giving a yellow-green luminosity to the canvas of Mother Nature lying supine before us in the sunlight. The little red squirrel scampered about today and he (or she) allowed me to approach to three or four feet which is pretty bold. They are quick but not quick enough and I always worry about the eagles which are starting to hunt in earnest, feeding bigger fledglings.
     There is green,green,green every where on Lotus Island today and since St. Patrick was of the green it seems right. We haven't been diverted yet from the green by the vibrant colours that will come in abundance in another month. Even the daffodil blooms are still in the anteroom. However the greens are restful and as holy as Saint Patrick. A serene sort of vibrant. I think I'll toast the green with a glass of Black Bush right about now!

 My dad was a farm boy and the phrase "Kee Heep"  was used to call the cows. It was a singular throat sound. The shrieking and shrill "e" phonetic of kee heep carries a distance and was clearly pleasing to the recipient cows since it meant an event and they came ambling  back together.
    If one of us was at a distance and  dad wanted to get our attention he also hollered " kee heep". My dad was not a soft spoken man. If dad wanted to make himself available he always said, " Holler if you need me." It was not as if he was hard of hearing.  Holler, for him was both a figure of speech and a literal remedy. It was particularly useful in ball and hockey games, then generally ornamented with colorful phasing when disgusted with  the play.
     My dad always whistled while he worked as a younger man  and particularly as he rode his bicycle back and forth from his job. As he became older he stopped whistling while he worked but could still whistle a little if he sat and caught his breath a while. He stopped hollering and stopped calling at us, kee heep. You need breathe to holler . "kee heep" and to whistle. The cigarettes had finally caught up with him and he became progressively more disabled with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease or COPD. He remained cheerful but much quieter when confined eventually to his chair for much of the day anchored to the oxygen tank. The day before he fell and cracked his hip and two days before he died the oxygen man had visited him and wrote a progress note, "Mr W is doing well , and is cheerful in his slippers and doing the breakfast dishes.".
     Wellness is relative and finite.  He has been dead almost 40 years but I still think back to the hollering kee heep and the whistling merrily with the same monotonous tune as he rode back and forth to his job. My brothers remember  his regular tune  "Let me call you sweetheart, I'm in love with you". He rode the bicycle because he never had a car in those days. You could always tell where he was coming from or going from a long way off. His sounds were still part of us for a very long time.