Author: Christopher K Wallace

PARENTING SIMPLIFIED

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

Kids need to orient towards a parent. It is how nature made us.

If that orientation is broken or weak, your children will orient elsewhere.

It’s just like a parent-less baby duck or goose bonds with a human, or a doll or a cat or a dog, imprinting and following them around as if they were its mother. You don’t want that.

Video games, drugs, risky behaviours, poor choices in friends and an over-reliance on peer groups are some of the ways a teen will make up for a lack of connection with a parent or parents or family.

What the heck do peers know? In general: not much. It’s scary how little.

Orientation is often the issue when kids go off the rails. And, after age 14, it becomes more difficult to maintain parental orientation as time goes by. Can you reclaim orientation? Yes, indeed you can. Why? Because teens want desperately to be rescued from themselves. Desperately.

So the heart of parenting is connection. It’s worth repeating. It keeps it simple. The key question to ask your self is this: Is what I’m doing going to increase connection… or weaken it?

If it increases connection, you are probably doing what nature intended. If it weakens or severs connection, that is wholly unnatural. Unnatural, I say. It goes against the natural order of things.

Ask yourself this question often; make it part of your approach.

So to me, it’s ALL about connection. Focus on connection right from the start. When parents realize it’s really this simple, many aha! moments ensue from its simplicity. Connection is surface simple but vast and deep in practice.

To connect, you need time. Not “quality time” so much as just time spent in connection. Safe, secure, predictable. The need to belong is universal. It’s largely what drives us in life.

From connection, the child will feel “valued.” Feeling like you matter to someone or a group of people is at the heart of attachment–our primary psychological need.

Connection’s opposite is loneliness. We do a lot of messed up things out of loneliness. How many of us have been in a group of people in our lives… and felt lonely? It sucks.

Imagine a child or teen feeling lonely while in your house? As part of your family? Happens all the time.

From connection and time and a sense of value, you can coach a child or teen to anything. What you want to teach them is self-discipline.

I don’t mean bootcamp discipline. Rather, the ability to delay gratification. It is the single best predictor of a successful life.

Intelligence helps a person live well but the advantage stops at just above average.

No. It’s self-discipline that counts.

Know any intelligent losers? Of course you do. We all know plenty.

Know any self-disciplined losers? Doesn’t happen. In fact, the two are opposites.

We could talk about how feminism is ruining the cultures of the western world. Dare me.

Or how the banking system uses interest to create scarcity and competition; its unrelenting need for growth forcing more parents into work to earn for their families. Double dare me.

But in the end, it misses what’s important. It’ll be the rare person who gets to 80 and says they wished they worked more or took up yet another cause.

Very few get a diagnosis of terminal cancer with months to live and wished they had a Ferrari.

No. Time and again, in the end people wish they’d spent more time with their friends and families, especially their children. Connecting with loved ones folks.

So just focus on connection. If you get that right, most of everything else takes care of itself. By putting connection first, everything seems to fall into place. It’s nature’s way.

Here’s a pithy quote:

“As long as we feel safely held in the hearts and minds of the people who love us, we will climb mountains and cross deserts and stay up all night to finish projects. Children and adults will do anything for people they trust and whose opinion they value.” Bessel Van der Kolk.

Find it early, find it late, you must find love. We must all find love, and it starts with the family of origin. Ideally, it’s where we learn how to love and be loved. This must be part of your legacy to your children.

Connection is your key.

© CKWallace, 2017

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Father’s Day, 2017

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

 

Howard Carew Wallace, my Chief

It’s Happening to Me

 

I have to admit, it’s happening to me,

It was something I could not foresee.

Decidedly, I’ll just let it be.

 

Oh, I may have dreamed it long ago,

But being so young, I did not know

Of all that was to follow.

 

Despite it all, for the life of me,

And my attempts to live contrarily

Now resigned, eerily,

 

For the truth is, I’d no longer rather

By this living eulogy you’ll gather

I’m turning into my father.

ckwallace, 2016

 

18 June, 2017

 

Today is Father’s Day. Dad has had more than sixty, each one earned.

 

Like many boys, my father is my hero. Though there came upon our relationship a darkness that lasted a decade. Even during this estrangement, there were lessons unfolding for both us, perhaps, more so for me. Though, it’s hard to tell.

 

It was my father who inadvertently gave me my animal totem when he told me at the age of fifteen there wasn’t room for two roosters under the same roof, and since it was his roof… What a great gift.

 

Regardless, eventually we got over it and I metaphorically became a cockerel (three children too!). Not so bad when you consider that the bird stands for pride, honesty, courage, vigilance, arrogance, strength, watchfulness and flamboyance, all traits I share with my father.

 

On top of that we are descendants of Celtic tribes, who considered the rooster a creature of the underworld, serving as a messenger of the hereafter, screeching out warnings of danger and calling out to the souls of those fallen on the battlefield. Perhaps my father knew I’d be an envoy from darkness, sent to share light.

 

Forgiveness is one of life’s greatest tests of virtue. It was my father who taught me this. His father was a troubled man, a WWI veteran with an impatient irascibility about him that bordered on meanness at times. War does that to people.

 

Dad was a dutiful son to his father right to the end. My father wrote a short account of his father’s passing for our family site at trueandfree.ca. Reading about how he sneaked in to hold his father’s hand at the very end of Gimpy’s life, until his father’s hand returned the faintest of signal and then, before him, was no more, serves as a beacon, a triumph of kindness over anger, of putting love first despite all else. It’s an image I continue to hold dear.

 

Of course, my father also taught me patience… using golf as his instrument. Hitting that damned little white ball all over Eastern Ontario with passion and commitment required enormous patience. He set an example, we followed.

 

My father’s invitation that we golf with him meant that along the way, I also learned behaviourism. Intermittent reinforcement being the strongest reinforcer is plain to see in the game: you hit close to a hundred shots in a typical round, most of which are going to be not so good. But there will be one that’s absolutely amazing. One shot that makes all the pain of the rest of the shots dissolve away like salt in warm water.

 

In fact, I won the family’s last golf tournament with a perfect seven iron on a par three that bounced once just before the pin and almost went in, landing a foot and a half away from the hole. The rest of that day’s game? Less memorable. I could curse him or thank him for the gift of golf, depends on the day. But I keep coming back. Patience indeed.

 

I learned to accept homosexuals from my father. While still just a single digit in age, I spied a sister cuddling her younger sibling while watching TV, and called them lesbians.

 

I was invited for a chat in the inner sanctum of my parent’s room. There my father asked if I knew what a lesbian was. Of course, I really had no idea. He explained that it was a woman who loved another woman. He added that it was just how they were made and that, in the end, they were just looking for love like anyone else. With that understood, I was dismissed. It was the 1960s.

 

Once through the homophobic peer pressure of my teen years, I returned to that wisdom. With maturity, I gained a greater sense of justice. Those words came back to serve me: “just looking for love like anyone else.” It was all the justification needed for tolerance and understanding. Simple, effective, and just.

 

Later, at some occasion the subject came up again, this time with some of my adult siblings around. In one of dad’s famous quips, he said: “Sometimes, you just have to brush your teeth, close your eyes and keep an open mind.” I’m sure that ended the conversation. I’ve never had the nerve to ask him about it either. Some things are better left unsaid.

 

My mother taught me to read but it was my father who made books available. We had bookcases all over the house. Even now, when I imagine a room, I see a bookcase there. Dad made it perfectly normal to sit and read, all day if necessary. Learning is my top strength and dad’s influence is never far.  I’m mostly a non-fiction type and I have some of his old books. The pages are yellowed and delicate like rice paper; each one a treasure. Like my father, I have a book habit. Not so bad an addiction at all.

 

When I began to scribble words of my own, it was my father who helped me along, patiently correcting my stuff with his editor’s pencil. I still look over the notes he put on texts I sent him.

 

He also taught me to be frugal about using swear words in my writing, despite dropping F-bombs most of his life. In one of his juiciest lessons, as a kid he told me swearing was “good old fashioned Anglo-Saxon expressions of emotion.” I was allowed to swear, just not at him or at ma. He wisely figured that as we grew socially we’d soon learn from the reactions of people around us and temper our language accordingly. How very true…

 

Dad taught me to be honest. As a younger man, I didn’t know anyone who was, so it mattered not as much. Over many years of conversations with my father, I’ve watched as he found just the right words to describe a subject.

 

He’d go to lengths for precision’s sake, keeping reference books nearby to look up a fact or a definition. What emerged for me from the way he did this was the need to search for truth. There was truth, there was lesser truth, and there was falsehood. Often the lines between them are blurred and hard to discern; but truth is there, every time. It just takes a little effort to find.

 

Watching my father meant learning to dig a little deeper, to broaden the scope, to see a larger or more refined view. And in this way, he taught me that intent mattered. By filling in the history of a subject, a population, or a place, we learn something of the motivations of people, even nations. We do not exist alone. Having seen more than fifty countries during his navy service, I have visited the world through my father.

 

As a young man in Ottawa growing up during the seventies and eighties, I went to practically every large rock concert and saw many smaller bands that came to town. I had an extensive collection of vinyl music from the heyday of rock and roll. Later, my tastes grew from rock to blues to funk and jazz. All of these genres form the basis of my musical identity, so can anyone explain why it is that I now listen almost exclusively to the CBC?

 

As I write this, a collection of opera is playing on a second laptop nearby, someone’s favourites uploaded to a YouTube channel. I think it started when I put a radio in my garage.

There, puttering around, doing something handy, I found opera and the classics to keep me company.

 

As a young boy, watching my father at his workbench, with old tools, each one a place to return to after use, is one of my best memories. Opera still plays Saturday afternoons at one, perhaps just like it did back in the day on my father’s little radio. The smell of wood, the sounds of sawing and hammering, and the possibility of fabricating something out of raw materials left an indelible impression on me. Perhaps the radio keeps me close to dad when I’m away. After all, the CBC teaches, just like my father does.

 

My father taught me about love by way of his example with my mother for the sixty two years they were married before she passed away. Theirs is a love for the ages, and no mention of my father’s teachings is complete without also mentioning ma. I heard his sweet reassurances to her in her final hours. It was essential attachment, a juxtaposed tragedy and triumph of human love.

 

Though, for the record I’d best explain that it was probably more my mother’s patience and virtue that lay at the foundation of their longevity as a couple. What a beautiful gift that was. It meant that you could be as faulted as my dad, even as annoying at times, and still be loved. There is hope for us all is what it says.

 

I could write much more about my father and his impact on me. It’s easy to get carried away with this kind of thing, writing words in ways he taught me, listening to music he influenced me to hear, searching for truths the way I learned them at his knee.

 

Like the time he told me it takes a hundred years for an immigrant group to acclimatize to Canada, several generations—something I still hold as my benchmark of understanding. After all, we are all immigrants here.

 

Or when I was worried about being a father for the first time: He, with nine children of his own, said to me: “Babies are like little miracles, son, they don’t take up much room, they really don’t cost much, and somehow, all of us find a way to move over a little bit to make room and welcome them into this world. You’ll do fine as a father.”

 

I’ve used those exact words countless times with new fathers and each time they have reassured as much as I was over three decades ago.

 

I believe attachment to each other is our most fundamental need. My father told me of the people from where I came. By widening my understanding of our family’s history, I got a sense of my place in time, and how I live at the crux between the many who have come before me and those after. If we exist within each other as endless loops reverberating down through the ages, knowing your ancestry means you are never alone. My father is part of me, and I continue to pass along his fine lessons to those who follow.

 

Rather than reluctance at becoming like my father, glimpses of him that show up in my life are hints of a re-discovered familiarity, and it gives me strength. My father is who he is, unapologetic, unafraid, and unique: good personal aspirations for any man. I welcome the part within me that is him, like an old friend sent to keep me company, as an elder looking in on my life with love and compassion.

 

I’m very proud to call myself his son. So happy Father’s Day my dearest Dad, may you live to a hundred.

 

 

 

© Christopher K. Wallace 2017

 

Does Pot Cause Schizophrenia?

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

 

Here is a report about smoking pot during formative teen years and schizophrenia, and another study showing pot smokers with an impaired dopamine system. The Daily Mail carries these and it seems every month there’s another study out, obscured by the cry for individual rights and the unfairness of the justice system over the relatively harmless practice of occasional use. Lots’s of truth to that and I’m generally on board.

But can pot smoking bring on schizophrenia in the susceptible? Sure it can.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2377581/Teenagers-smoke-cannabis-damage-brains-LIFE-likely-develop-schizophrenia.html

These are the kinds of articles which tend to bring out the apologists en masse. I’m not judging pot users. I simply can’t, having smoked it for 40 years. I’m not against occasional use at all. And if you’re life is so pathetically affected by pain or malaise that pot is the only solace you can find, more power to you.

But let’s not pretend it’s good for us. Or, for our children. That would be stupid.

Granted, the low numbers of cases where schizophrenia occurs in no way justifies a ban. And the last thing I want to see is people thrown in jail for smoking a plant. We also shouldn’t kid each other.

I dealt as a kid, grew great plants, made killer hashish and smoked for decades. I’ve pretty much seen it all. These kinds of studies have been around for years for good reason.

I suppose one glaring case in my experience is this one. A single case study if you like.

Mikey was a Lebanese immigrant who arrived as part of the diaspora to Canada, sent abroad without his father. I met him in his early teens when I picked him up at some town homes nearby, where he lived with half a dozen siblings. Mike had a huge nose, big booming voice, not at all handsome by western standards. We put him to work selling flowers and he did well. After a few years, I moved to BC and left the operation to one of the guys with a license.

I heard later that in his senior year, one of the crew began providing him with joints to sell at school. He went from ignored to popular almost overnight. Of course, encouraged this way, he dove in to pot culture. He was suddenly getting attention from peers after years of neglect at home and at school. His job was his only source of significance to then. Now girls actually knew his name.

In his 20s, he called me out west one day He sounded troubled and so I helped him fly out for a visit. Mikey was happy to see us and we welcomed him into our home like family. He seemed pretty normal to me. Until we were smoking a joint one end of night when he told me that sometimes when he smoked with his brother Abdul he was convinced he was out to get him. He felt like his life might be in danger. What??

This got my attention. I’ve been around crazy people my whole life. I’ve seen this turn of events before and could see now all the familiar symptoms. In the three years we hadn’t seen each other, Mikey had changed. In those three years, dope was a big part of his life.

I asked him a few questions without putting him off. He let his guard down and let me in, detailing how his thinking was progressively going off the rails. He knew it but couldn’t trust anyone he knew to confide his secrets. Mikey was cracking under the combined weight of his traumatic life and usage.

Eventually, I told him I was mildly concerned about his mental health. I reassured him that he needed some help with this and that it was most certainly something he could get a handle on. I then suggested he return home, pack his stuff and come back immediately. He agreed and seemed relieved that someone understood what was going on.

Mike returned to Hamilton to arrange a move out west. He never made it.

Apparently, while packing in the 7th floor apartment he shared with his brother, he wound up on the concrete in the parking lot below. As far as I know, it was ruled a suicide. Given his expressed paranoia, this was plausible. Though he never expressed a willingness to hurt himself, we don’t know for absolute certainty what really happened.

That Mikey was in fear I had no doubt. But there are two additional points I’d like to make. One is paradoxical fear seeking. The other is the sensory inputs confidence continuum.

And what of fear? Physiologically, the heart rate goes up, blood pressure rises, breathing shallows and thinking narrows. Classic symptoms of adrenaline and cortisol’s effects on the body.

And what happens when you smoke a joint, drag on a cigarette, or even have a couple of beers?

Well, your heart rate goes up, as does your blood pressure, while your breathing shallows and thinking narrows. Classic fight or flight.

Paradoxically, I contend regular users are not so much addicted to the substance, rather are wired to adrenaline and cortisol; they actively seek out fear physiologically because on some level they are comforted or attracted to  this state.

And their usage is masked by a temporary dopamine buzz that lasts only the first bit of the high. Drink all night and you’re really just chasing that first two beers buzz. It can’t be caught. It’s the same with all substances. Hell, there’s no cupcake like the first one either.

Keep ramping up that dopamine artificially and in time, you won’t feel much of anything at all. Pain is one of life’s best teachers. Kill it and shrink in the face of growth; instead of expanding, contract. And the more you disconnect the body from its intuitive self, the harder it is to form an appropriate response to people and events around you.

 

If someone is susceptible to schizophrenia, adding regular doses of fear is one way to ensure it manifests itself. You couldn’t prescribe a better method of bringing it on than to recommend pot.

Looking to become schizophrenic like some of your relatives? Want to crack under the pressure of your dysfunctional family, with your country at war, your attachments fractured, and adolescent peer issues weighing upon you while your brain is still forming?

Here: smoke this daily.

I’m not even mentioning childhood trauma from unmet emotional needs; or PTSD from various causes; or the after-effects of heavy illness.

 

Nietzche said, “All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth comes only from the senses.” So, what is filtered through the senses is the raw material you have to make decisions and in part create your emotional state. You fuck with your sensory inputs enough and the brain can’t tell what’s real anymore.

And both of these kill confidence. You cannot be both confident and fearful at the same time. They are mutually exclusive emotions. And if your brain is unsure of its inputs, that’s another blow to confidence. Can you really be in chronic doubt and expect to live your destiny?

Who needs confidence, you say? You do. It’s your juice. It’s what takes your thoughts and turns them to actions. Otherwise, smoke each day and dream of a future that never arrives.

Know anyone like this? I thought you might. It was surely me at one point. And you may know someone whose confidence is so far gone they suffer from what is referred to as learned helplessness. That’s confidence buried so deep that they don’t even entertain the notion of a better way. All growth is stifled, or even retreating.

And how do we get confidence? Mostly from confronting fear resulting in victories big and small, from which we derive an emotional state of progressive mastery. Life gets better when we get better at life.

Our discomfort often drives our motivation. We need the contrast of pain and pleasure to consider our approach. There’s the hunt and the feast. Most happiness comes from the hunt.

It’s also why I don’t smoke it regularly anymore. I solved that riddle years ago. I realized I was inhaling fear and exhaling my confidence one joint at a time. It’s unavoidable. Indeed, when you drink you are sipping on fear and pissing out your confidence.

Most people don’t get schizophrenia from smoking pot. That’s a sure thing. There’s a lovely optimism bias in young people which provides some immunity from even considering it.

But you could. You could wind up like Mikey. Bless his heart and too short life. Another man down and out. And at the very least, you will live life more afraid. Assuredly, you will exist with less confidence.

That is not what the universe intended when you won the gift of life.

Over time, you will find that ten years have gone by. And you will realize you have not really lived ten years. Rather, you have lived one year ten times…

 

© Christopher K Wallace 2017, all rights reserved

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Real Man-Cold Manifesto

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

 

Thank you, Oh Universe, for this virus.

It was brought to me upon the wheezing, coughing, and sneezing wings of friendship. As such, it is not purposely malicious; but instead, a sign of communion with my fellow man.

Far worse it be to never have a cold. For this would mean my gifts to others were never shared, neither their gifts with me. Sadly, this could mean my demise, at first in spirit, later physically, leaving me a hollowed-out shell of self.

If I never caught a cold, it would mean I was isolated and alone: Death to a human.

No. I realize you are but one of a legion of cold viruses that circulate my world, forever re-combining with bits and pieces of each other. I fear thee not… for each time we meet my body learns to defeat another foe.

Though, it takes a week or two to best you, your specific kind never possesses me again. Each time, you and your malevolent symptoms are banished from the kingdom of my being for evermore.

You are but an inconvenience.

And neither shall I feel much guilt in transmitting your existence to others. Though, I take great care to protect the weak, the old and the very young from your trials.

For myself, rather than see you as harm, I see you as opportunity. To me, you are an exercise in immunity, and I am up for that task.

The occasional lament overheard, those times when what seems like complaint makes its way past these lips, let me explain: It is because my work is being interfered with, nothing more.

For this is what men do; work in many ways defines us. Though the interruption is temporary, it is not tolerated. A cold is often cursed for daring to detract from our noble cause.

Let no one be mistaken: a cold is nothing to a man.

Nothing at all

 

Christopher K Wallace       ©2017 all rights reserved        www.ckwallace.com

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Father’s Supper

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

 

I remember my sister-in-law brought her co-worker, a Mexican national, to my house one day. While we chatted, he told me how his father came home everyday to his family back in his village. Tired, hungry, done with the day’s challenges, home was his father’s refuge.

Father would sit at the table while mother would feed the man of the house traditional Mexican food: tortilla, taco, enchilada, etc. While he ate, his children would take turns sitting on their father, so happy were they to see him. Mother would stand dutifully by and see to it he had his fill. If he wanted more, at his signal she would place extra food on his plate.

The man told me his father never objected to his children literally climbing all over him like they did. I think there were at least several of them. He just went about eating his meal, often sharing part of it with the kids. Father never refused one child his attention, acting as if this was how it was supposed to be. He wouldn’t flinch when one of them climbed over his shoulders, onto his head even, put a hand in his face, or hung off his back or neck while he ate.

When he was done, his mother would take away father’s plate and the children would stay to play and talk with their father.

This young man’s name happened to be Angel and what he told me has been my guide at meal-times since. He has no idea how easy it made things: To let go and just allow it, embracing the disorder to find connection underneath.

I’ll never forget that story. It’s now part my own…

ckwallace © 2017 all rights reserved

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GOODBYE GODFATHER

Christopher K Wallace 2 Comments

gilles-chenier-2

 

Gilles Chenier passed away this week from cancer at age eighty-eight.

He lived two doors away from my parents on Falcon Avenue in Ottawa for more than six decades. He had a pool table in his house when I was a kid. This was the height of cool in this youngster’s mind in the 60s. Imagine that? A table in the basement…

I remember coming back from my first communion where Gilles and his first wife Marie had become my godparents. I was just sort of hustled through the ritual, not really getting it. The idea of having godparents didn’t register either. I saw it as a plot to foist me on another family where I would be barely tolerated or even ostracized. I was often in trouble for one thing or another in those days and our house was a little crowded. I remember my mother and Marie talking about things that day, though I couldn’t tell if they were discussing how I was dressed and the ceremony… or when the hand-off would occur.

Someone baked a large cake shaped like a lamb—for the Lamb of God. I’m pretty sure my new godmother had either arranged it or baked it herself. I was so impressed; there was something in all this for me after all. It was covered in white icing and a lot of coconut. I thought this was inspired decorating. It was a decadent treat for a boy who came from a family of nine kids. I can’t resist coconut to this day.

Our families were connected more so because my mother and Marie were pals. Through the years, it was understood that the Chenier kids were an extension of our clan. In an era that saw sixty kids living on our small block, Gilles’ two sons and daughter from two doors over were like one of us. The house between us was occupied by Gilles’ father, whom we called Grandpa Chenier. He roughed in the basement rooms in our house for my father. He also grew a large back yard garden each summer and had a quiet and patient side to him with us kids.

Tragedy struck my godfather at the very height of his powers as a husband and father. He and his wife were backing out of a driveway after music lessons for his beloved daughter when they were struck by a drunk driver who had crossed the center lane, killing his little girl. This broke her mother’s heart, her survivor guilt drowned in a secret alcohol habit for many years. When the family finally discovered what was going on and intervened, she was days away from death from cancer. She had kept this information from everyone. They had scant time to say goodbye.

I moved on from my parent’s neighbourhood and saw my godfather only here and there over the decades. Recently, I returned to my hometown to be near my aging father. On occasion this summer, I’d see Gilles out on his porch taking in some fresh air. I took these opportunities to go and rekindle our relationship. He was accepting and grateful for the company. He had terminal lung cancer and was sent home to die. Drink and smoke whatever you like, he was told. Several times the missus and I with our two children in tow sat on his porch and steps with him and his dog and talked about life. Once my father ambled over with me to sit and visit for a while.

He’d remarried and outlived his second wife, Simone, her leaving him a little pug named Simon. My children delighted in visiting with Gilles and his little dog. They were surprisingly well behaved and Gilles was patient and kind and sweet. He was grandfatherly.

He was too old and too experienced and too short on time to mess around with polite and safe small talk. Open and forthright, he cut right to the chase on every subject we discussed. What a great lesson it was to witness and be a part of: all of us should speak and act as if we have little time left. By way of his example, this was part of his gift.

I talked to him about how people who die don’t really leave us. I explained how I thought the idea that we live in our own bodies and minds—separately from those around us—was an inadequate way to describe human reality. I said it is more likely that a part of us resides in others just as a part of them remains in you. That we exist in each other is a more appropriate description. And that people continue to echo endlessly on down through time in those who have known and loved them. Though the part of me that might reside in you becomes uncertain after you pass; the part of you that resides in me unquestionably remains.

I had taken a risk telling him this. Who did I think I was? But his answer surprised me.

At the time, the traumatic event in Nice, France had just occurred. Gilles told me that he’d been thinking of his second wife Simone and how they had walked the streets of Nice on a trip, the very streets that were shown on the news. He said he could picture himself there as if reliving those moments all over again; like she was still with him. It felt so real he said, and it happened often, he added. He said he believed me. He said, “You know, Christopher, I think that’s true.” I was relieved and happy for him at the same time.

He was an interesting man who only ever worked for one family: the Ottawa Greenbergs. He mentioned when he was a teen he took an evening course in bookkeeping at an academy on Dalhousie Street in Ottawa’s Lower town, a stone’s throw from Parliament Hill. In those days, the area was an enclave for poor Jewish, Irish and French Canadian families.

One day on his way home, the family matriarch, buxom Mrs. Greenberg, leaned out an upstairs window as he walked by and asked him to confirm what she’d heard, that he was taking a course in bookkeeping. After answering yes, he was invited by her to join the family business. He told me he didn’t know much about bookkeeping because he had just started his course but the auditors who did the company books got him set up and working.

Minto Developments went on to build much of the nation’s capital residential and commercial developments over the following decades. Gilles Chenier worked there his whole career, retiring as vice-president 40 years later.

Another interesting anecdote was the matter of a pension. Gilles recounted that once he caught Mr. Greenberg in a good mood, he could be approached about anything. Since Gilles was one of the top company numbers men, he picked his moment to bring up pensions for Minto employees. The answer was as baffling as it is amazing. Mr. Greenberg told Gilles it was a really good idea. But, any man who devoted his life to working for the Greenberg family would never have to worry about a pension. And that was the end of the discussion.

At age eighty-eight, Gilles was still receiving his weekly salary from Minto Developments though he’d been retired for over thirty years. On top of it, he still got his Christmas bonus every year too, just like any other employee still on the books. And all this was done on a handshake. It was a time of high work ethic and loyalty long gone. If Gilles hadn’t told me these things himself this summer, I might not have believed them possible.

He also lived in an era that saw the deep sacrifices of The Great Depression mold people’s attitude so that they were ready for the great post-war boom of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Besides courage, perseverance and grit, he also had character and charm; a handsome man with a booming voice. He appreciated a pretty girl.

My father and I sat with him on his porch this summer, reminiscing over the six decades they had known each other on this street. My sister saw us and came by to say hello. After warm kisses on both cheeks, Gilles got a big welcoming hug. Unbeknownst to her, and while she was still in his embrace, he stuck his tongue out at my father as if to say, “I’m having my way with your daughter.” We nearly pissed ourselves laughing.

And that was another lesson from Gilles. His body racked with tumours and growing weaker by the day, he chose to laugh. Resigned to his fate, he could have moaned and been consumed by self-pity. No. That was not his style. Instead, he looked forward to one last fishing trip with his sons, laughing every chance he got.

He was an inspiration, and for what it means, it was an honour to call myself his godson.

Goodbye sweet godfather. You are not gone at all.

 

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CKWallace,

© 2016, all rights reserved

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KITTEN CHRONICLES

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

 

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Though we had a cat in the house as I was growing up, I’ve used TG fear to ward off cats ever since. By knowing just enough about Toxoplasmosis Gondii to sound convincing, over the years I’ve talked my partners into backing off kittens… for all our sake. You look up the actual term if you need to. It’s enough to say it’s a kind of germ warfare that tricks mice into liking cats. Yes, you read that right; and it seems potently unnatural to me.

Of course, having a dog is a whole other story. I lost that battle. Well, I may have sort of lost the battle…but I sort of won it too. You can read about it here: Debating Dogs.

Anyways, back to cats… sort of. My friend and former roommate Mariko often said that I needed to have a daughter. It barely registered that these were moments when my sensitivity to a woman’s plight was perhaps lacking. I would agree, as usual, with the odds of what she was saying. I would say, “That may very well be true…,” before carrying on. Her words come back to haunt me regularly. You see, I have a little girl now. I think of Mariko often.

The point is that little girls like kittens. And there’s no way TG matters to her.

So from the time she could speak the word cat, my little girl has been angling for a kitty. Add to that, wouldn’t you know it her mother also happens to be female. Confounding things, she was also a little girl once too. And furthermore, she remembers what it’s like to be a little girl with a desire for a cat of her own.

All this to say there has been an active campaign at my house for a number of years on the kitty front. Of course, we had a dog. Unfortunately, I had to put her down before my daughter’s recall began in earnest. I suppose for most people memory’s start is somewhere around three or four  years old, when a great consolidation of neurons gives way more or less to permanent pathways of remembrances.  My girl came out of this period with kitten on her mind.

It was a bit risky to even show her old pictures, lest we’d come across one with our dog Maggie May in the background. Charlie would point and ask, “Who’s that?” I’d offer what meagre explanation I could, but all that did was set the stage for the next part of her gambit: we had a pet once; we could have a pet once again.  Iron-clad logic.

Children are like that, especially in those early years: marvels of perseverance.
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So this is how it was when we found ourselves recently relocated on 200 acres of land just south of the nation’s capital. We left our pretty little spot In Cobourg, pop. 18,504; and just off the main provincial highway between Montreal and Toronto. Our property faced the expanse of Lake Ontario; our lives having settled into a comfortable groove, surrounded by the very best people and that small town feel. Missus wanted a yard for the kids. It was an argument no morning sunrise could counter.

We arrived to this acreage without domesticated animals. Though, after an uninhibited summer in fields of grasses as tall as they are; with ample frogs and snakes to capture and examine; with dragon flies and darners buzzing all around; with spiders to wonder at by day and fireflies to marvel at by night; with birds nesting and feeding within reach; with bats out from the attic zig-zagging around at dusk; with deer and rabbits and fishers and foxes and turkeys walking about the yard, and mice and vole burrowing and scampering all over, it’s more like a certain wildness influenced my children at ages five and almost three. We had animals-a-plenty, was my thinking.

Howie teetered while standing when we arrived in May. By the time he had his third birthday at summer’s end, his once spindly legs are newly muscled from all the running through open space, climbing over everything in front of them in great adventures with his sister, played out daily in full force at the forest’s edge. He’s eating better than ever, and he’s become notably wilder, in a good way: in a way that blends.

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And Charlotte, by early August, after careful training by her mother, having learned just when the vegetables were ripe and where to step and where not to step, took me out to the garden and showed me how to pick fresh parsley. “This is how you do it daddy; this is enough for what she wants.” All I could do was defer to her expertise with thanks.

That time, after her explanation about parsley, she stopped after first motioning towards a small clearing not a hundred yards from the house and declared, then asked a question, then declared again.

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“When I grow up… no wait… when I grow up, will you still be alive?” she questioned, looking at me uncertainly for a moment.

Charlotte is practical about these things after losing her grandmother almost two years ago. We’ve had many talks about death and life, ours and others. With as much wonder as respect, I learn a little something from her each time. Perhaps I reassure her in return. I often do this while envisioning Mariko standing silently by, perhaps in approval, unseen, reminded once again.

I thought for a moment and said, “Yes, that’s in about 20 years so I should still be here.”

To this she said, “Well then, when I grow up, you better call the workers in and build a house for me right over there,” pointing to the spot, “and I’m going to stay near you so you can visit every day. I’m going to become a farm-girl.”

I don’t want to sound melodramatic but somewhere deep inside just a little piece of my heart warmed to melting when she said that. I wondered if others get this kind of thing said to them… ever in a lifetime. I may have even shook my head and looked up, wondering how the heavens could have blessed me with this kind of devotion.

She continued, “And we’ll move all your guns and weapons into my new house so I’ll be safe.”

“But, daddy doesn’t have any guns, Charlotte,”

She says, “What about the coyotes?” Ah, I think to myself, that’s where this comes from.

“Oh you’ll scare them off when you’re bigger Charlie; they’re afraid of us mostly. It’s only when you’re small like you and Howie that we have to be careful about them; that’s why daddy doesn’t let you go into the forest alone. But when you’re bigger, they’ll run away from you. Plus, I’ll always be near.”

She considered my answer and seemed satisfied.

A little while later, she came into the garage wearing coverall jeans; showing me how she’ll dress when she’s a farm girl. She asked for my advice about boots, remarking that farmers don’t have bare feet. Soon, she was walking around with her flowered rubber boots and her mother’s gardening gloves on, ostensibly to help me pull up a patch of bull thistle but really she spent her time exploring for bugs. That day she found a beautiful black and yellow spider.

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So, you can see that’s what I was up against on the cat front. A little girl who unbeknownst to her has my heart held captive. Her reinforcement, a mother, my missus, a gal who ended up providing me with fresh vegetables all summer long while gardening in a dress and who can start her own gas-powered tiller.

Oh, and she gave me not one but two kids, neither to be ashamed of.

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I could feel my resolve weakening as each summer day in the century old house wore on. The place needs a lot of work so no chickens this year, but the whole question of adding a menagerie of critters to our lives seems natural. Or maybe it was just that I am learning to relax and let the seasons of my life evolve as they might.

You see, it’s a full complement type place. They tell me, if you’re going to garden you’ll need animals on the land to replenish the soil. A couple of cows or cattle should do it. The chickens will spread manure around nicely. And since the forest encroaches from all sides, sending out saplings like scouts to colonize open space, we could use a few goats to keep it at bay. If we’re going to have cows and goats and chickens, a few pigs might as well be in the mix, and turkeys and ducks. The idea really: what animal could you legitimately say no to?

Once fences go up, any beast could live here. Wait a minute; perhaps I’m ahead of myself.

 

It was about 10 at night when the missus shrieked, “A mouse!”

Standing in the kitchen she swore one zoomed past her. We searched and sure enough, a mouse hole was uncovered high up the baseboard under the kitchen cupboards. How was that missed by the renovators? The place was built piece-meal early in the last century, and had been left empty for a year or two before a hasty remodel. Why wouldn’t it have mice? That’s probably a better question.

Off I went the next day to fetch mousetraps. Sure enough, the following morning after that, there for all to see, a good sized mouse, crushed and dead in the trap, right along the wall between the bathroom door and the door to the basement, peanut butter smeared on its face.

It traveled along the wall, I noticed. Typical for rodents… unaffected by toxoplasmosis…

Missus pipes up, non-stop: “We’ll need to get a cat! My girlfriend keeps cats on her acreage and they never come into the house… but they keep the mice problem down! She hardly feeds them… just enough to keep them around… and no mice! They’re farm cats; they make their own way and do their job. If one dies or is eaten by a coyote, there are plenty more where that one came from! We’re in the country now!” All this said in one breath.

I was a little surprised at this. Since my missus can barely kill a spider and won’t lift a swatter to swat a fly, this sudden pioneer-woman attitude was refreshing. I may have rolled film in my mind, picturing her next year slaughtering chickens, blood splatters on her dress and entrails on the floor, going about doing what is necessary for our survival. It was all so… primal.

Charlotte pipes up: “Yes daddy, let’s get a kitten. I’ll look after it and the cat can eat the mice and we can play with it.”

“You’re suggesting an outdoor cat?” I mumbled in reply, before leaving for work.

“Yes, an outdoor cat,” was the consensus reply.

Look, I’m busy. I don’t have a lot of time to spend on this stuff. I went off and forgot about it.

In the evening, my sweet woman announced that a lady just around the corner was giving away cats. She’s like that, my missus is. She finds more free stuff online than anyone I’ve ever known. Sells a fair bit of old stuff too, or gives it away. She’s a trader at heart.

So it was that while I was out to work the following day, missus and children were at the vets spending $145 on de-worming meds and whatever. Mel had a picture of the kitten and a naming contest on Facebook which I followed between appointments in the city. Her friends joined in. Creative bunch they are.

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Of course, I opened my big mouth and offered up a name combination to include most of the best suggestions. And it’s my compromise that wins the day. She’d be called Miss Molly Fuzzy Patches; Miss Molly for short. I’m getting a nagging sense by then, not sure what, just an unsure feeling buried by my distractions at work, only later realizing it was a clear case of déjà vu.

So the outdoor cat comes home and the women in the house are pleased as punch.

The first evening, with the cat now an official member of the family, I suddenly realized that the mouse in my kitchen wasn’t outside. No. it had been scampering across my floor.

It dawned on me, what good was an outside cat if the mouse was inside? Inside the very house the cat was supposed to be protecting. I imagined inside mice lining up at the windows in the still of night and taunting the misplaced feline outside about the absurdity of the situation. Outside cat, inside mouse; what was I thinking?

So Miss Molly began her life here… inside.

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Charlie carried her all over, and the cat mostly slept with my daughter. Missus thought it was “adorable,” and the rest of it. Turns out, Molly purrs as loudly as my wife snores. I swear, it’s like a John Deere tractor idling. Where? You guessed it, at the end of my bed!

Not satisfied with my daughter’s company, the darn thing first tried to sleep up beside me at times, actually sharing my pillow. Instead of being out roaming the halls looking for vermin, pussycat’s in my bed waking me up like it had some right to the best comfort we could offer. It was like it knew who was running things… and did not consider me a threat in the least.

The first few weeks did not go well from my point of view. Add to that, Miss Molly had to practice hunting. Sitting on a window sill and killing a house fly stuck buzzing around and eating it is a small start but one I appreciated. That the fly weighed nothing and was about a ten- thousandth of Miss Molly’s size also dawned on me. Nevertheless, I saw this as progress and was prepared to cut her some slack.

But the nighttime habits of cats don’t mesh with my sleep. It was about the second week in that missus mentioned she thought they might be nocturnal; something I could see would be useful in the rodent control department. Presumably killing time before killing mice, in the dead of night Molly would knock around and chase whatever plastic toy was left on the floor, of which there is no shortage in my house.

I’m already bi-phasic—getting up in the middle of the night to spend a cycle reading or whatever. And I generally sleep well but lightly, as if one hemisphere of my brain is left on alert while the other side rests, dolphin-like if you can imagine.

Add to this, my youngest often wakes up for no reason, or gets up a 4-5 am and refuses to go back to sleep. “Go back to sleep Howie,” I’ll hear the missus hiss. A few moments of silence will pass, and then “No!” said firmly and matter-of-factly.

This cat was becoming a sleep deficit tipping point. Add to that, all it caught its first two months was a tiny little mouse, looked like a baby to me. Nevertheless, this was cause for celebration all around. After torturing it under the porch for what seemed like an inordinately long time, Miss Molly finally ate it down. OK. Good sign. And you want to sleep on my pillow right? Ah…no.

So it was that I had occasion to visit a dairy farm down the road a bit. This turned out to be a serendipitous stop. Looking for a way in, I happened upon the missus of the farm feeding calves in the nursery. Instead of asking her about my reason for being there, I exclaimed, “This place is awesome. Can I bring my kids to see it?”

Five hundred cows were busy lining up on their own for a turn on the milking machines. The whole place was organized into herd groups and running efficiently. She answered with a big friendly smile, “Sure, anytime. We milk twice a day, 4:30 am and again at 4:30 in the afternoon”. I said I’d be back with the family later in the week. After a pleasant conversation, I left her to her charges and went to search for her husband to talk business.

That Friday, I was back, her confessing she never expected me to return. There I was with Howie on my shoulders, Mel and Charlotte on foot. The place was humming by 5:00 o’clock. The larger herds were being milked by her sister in law—another gal with a great smile and an unmistakable efficiency about her. Meanwhile, Susanna oversaw the feeding of the new calves, as well as the cow equivalent of an ICU—where a half-dozen cows were on watch because their production was low. They got her full attention.

She was being assisted in the calf nursery by a coterie of kids, the ones belonging to the scattering of bikes we saw strewn about the path outside the barns as we arrived by truck. The ten and twelve year olds went about feeding and laying fresh hay down for the 30 odd new cows. Younger kids showed up, presumably siblings. It was these kids that got Charlotte’s attention, for each of them held a cat.

There were cats everywhere. We saw at least a half dozen in our immediate surroundings, maybe more, in three different sizes. As Susanna offered to let Charlotte try milking a cow, the Holstein beside it dropped at least a full bucket full of sloppy manure from its rear-end at a five foot height to splat all over the concrete floor. Charlie was splashed and froze in place as the excrement hit her face and clothes. A quick wipe and reassurance from Susanna failed to convince her that getting close to these critters from the back end was a smart thing to do. After all, they were twice her height too.

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Mel took a turn at the cow’s teat while Charlotte returned her attention to the kittens.

It was then that Susanna suggested we take one home. There are ten here she said, we can spare one easily. After quickly conferring with sister, she re-confirmed her offer, saying, “Take a cat home, please… or take two. “

The negotiations began, but not with the adult doyennes of the milking barns. No. it was with their kids. One of the young boys, maybe six or seven, suggested we find a cat elsewhere. Yeah that’s him in all his cocky countenance in the picture up above. I countered that we already had a cat—establishing a stronger frame—like we didn’t really need your cat.  He countered by asking where we got it. I told him my wife had picked it up from a lady nearby our house. He suggested we return and get another cat from her. Nice counter, I thought. I knew I was in thick; this was to be no lay-down sale.

And so on it went. His negotiation skills were considerable. It felt nothing short of weird to find myself advocating for cat ownership with this cadre of kids. He held the high ground: these were his cats and his place and he had possession. But there I was, against cats in general, shooting down this kid’s objections and re-closing as I went. I was fighting for Charlotte now, maybe a part of me making Mariko proud.

I appealed to the group, befriending each of them. I converted most of them, ending up with allies. Most of the kids were for Charlotte taking home a cat. Of the six kids there, two held out—the little boy and his cohort little sister. Try as I might, there was just no convincing them. I respect loyalty to cause.

But Decision Maker Susanna was with Charlotte. Sorry kid, I don’t need you now, I thought. She was concerned little boy’s defense was impolite. I had to let her know that I was not offended in the least by a little feistiness. In fact, I admired him I said, throwing him a bone of victory in what was really a defeat. I hadn’t convinced him. In another situation, he would have had my backing. But with my little girl involved, the balance tipped against him in sacrifice.

Some of the cats had six toes, suspected interbreeding, she said. Here’s where my missus stepped in, examining the candidates and a choosing black and white male with five toes. The kids had named him Sketch. He’s pure barn cat; milk and mice his diet.

 

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All the way home, the idea of two cats in the house dawned on me. I think I was caught up in the moment back at the barn, one of those occasions where I relented against my better judgment. Or perhaps it was just the universe speaking to me again, through the voice of women as usual. I’m not sure which, but two cats in the house was out of the question. Missus suggested I build a cathouse.

The faster I can build an outdoor cathouse, the better, I thought. So I had a version from scrap wood built in hours and placed it just so against my shop. It has a back door out which the cats could escape down an old gopher tunnel under the garage in case a predator attacks in the middle of the night. Fishers are a mean lot when hungry and we’ve seen them in the yard.

 

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Perhaps I was just being hopeful. Not about the predator, but that the cats would actually use the cat-shack and live outdoors. At this point, all I knew was to not stand in the way; to be helpful in the directions things were going, towards outdoor cats, without seeming to be cruel by insisting on it. Both the cats took to their new abode like they knew it was for them. I was relieved, knowing there’d be trouble if those cats stayed in the house. I had to walk a fine line here.
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We compromised: instead of living outside all the time, the cats overnighted at first in our mud room. We let them in for visits and the kids scurried after them for a time mornings and evenings. Then, they are gathered up and put out in their night time accommodations. The two cats didn’t get along but after a couple of cooler nights, they’re snuggling like old pals. At first renaming the new cat Fuzzy, Charlotte decided to keep the name Sketch. I’m not sure why, but perhaps she realized it was more fitting.

We’re thinking we might build something in the basement so they can come and go in winter. It was from there I figure the mice came from anyhow. It’s empty, moist and had flooded while the house sat empty and the power to the sump pump was shut off. Now tidied up but still old and dirty, it’s a perfect place for cats and mice.

As for their mouse catching prowess, it’s coming along nicely. Within a week, Sketch had caught one right next to the house that seemed as big as his head. I think he’s teaching Miss Molly too. Or it’s just that she’s taking longer to take on the larger ones. Truth is, they quickly adapted and couldn’t wait to be let outside in the morning. A couple of quick calls at dark and they’ll appear out of the shadows.  Sketch comes to my little girl; Molly comes to the missus.

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Unbelievably, the missus and daughter are now alright leaving the cats outside all night. They don’t even come into the mud room, having abandoned it completely after a week or so. And their fur has become thicker, more luxurious. These cats are looking great.

The missus has been guided in her care and control of these animals by her friend. She was brought up a farm-girl. Her father used to let her take his pick-up truck to high school, as long as she kept the horse trailer attached. She can shoot and skin and make the kind of hard decisions that need to be made living amongst critters, wild and tame.

The missus and her often send each other pictures of each other’s kids at play. The internet is great for connecting isolated rural moms. Spying a cat indoors in the background of one of these routine pictures brought the missus an immediate rebuke. “Why is your cat in your house?” her friend demanded to know.

 

You know what else is pretty cool about cats, at least outdoor cats? They’ll walk with you.

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When I gather my little troupe and romp down the trails surrounding the house, hundreds of acres to explore, those two cats follow like scouts, each taking up a side in our mutual exploration. Miss Molly and Sketch use this opportunity to go a bit further afield. We may not even realize they’re with us because they’ll disappear into the bush. Here and there they emerge, as if checking on our progress.

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And back home, entering the back yard I’m inclined to find them lounging on top of their cat-shack. They watch, sitting like sentinels, spying, stalking and pouncing on all manner of rodents who dare to show. Missus is pretty happy to find the cats working the inside caged area of her garden, keeping nibblers at bay.

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These are now working cats. Just like she said they would be. How nice is that?

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At her girlfriend’s suggestion, missus got a few bales of hay from one of the local farms and stacked them all around the cat-shack for insulation. When Auntie Sharon visited a couple of weeks ago, she knitted some cat mattresses now carefully placed inside. Those cats love it in there, and don’t even try to come in the house much anymore.

This is turning out way better than I could ever have imagined. Way better. Before winter’s cold, I’ll build a cat-door to the basement they can access. It’s there the most likely ingress of rodents will occur. This way, we’ll keep the cats on their meat diet, and alive, and accessible.

I’ll also look like I care; because I really do. In the end, that’s all that really matters. In deference to all the women who continue to teach me so much, I’m paying attention. I’m also humbled to be someone’s hero.

In which case, what’s a little toxoplasmosis?
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©CKWallace, October, 2016, all rights reserved

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FOOD ADDICTION and CONFIDENCE

Christopher K Wallace 2 Comments

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I don’t know much about food addiction, but know a bit about addiction.

In my view, most substance abuse is seeking fear–or a fight or flight response. It’s paradoxical fear-seeking behaviour.

If you are afraid, generally, you’re breathing shallows, your thinking narrows, blood pressure rises and heart beat increases. These are your classic fight/flight responses.

About two beers in, a few hauls on a joint, 6o seconds after lighting up a smoke, etc. the same thing happens: narrowed thinking (which shuts out the bigger picture and its accompanying thoughts), breathing shallows, blood pressure and heart rate goes up.

For some reason, no one talks about this. I contend that a lot of substance abuse is an attempt to put oneself into a fight or flight state, and that the real addiction is to cortisol and adrenaline.

I also think most people learn this very young—even pre-memory, especially in the case of trauma or illness—though it can be learned at any time in the life-cycle. PTSD is an example of stress learning. Other’s are particularly sensitive to their environments. At some point, fight or flight carried the day and that response becomes entrenched as a way of dealing with the world. It’s what keeps them alive at an unconscious level.

I’m not sure what the parallels would be for food addiction. There are actually four Fs in the fear model. Fight, flight, freeze and faint. I’m guessing here, but maybe freeze and faint play a role in food addiction.

Here’s the kicker. Can you be fearful and confident at the same time?

I’d contend that answer is no. The two are mutually exclusive states.

And what is confidence good for? Well, confidence is what is needed to take your thoughts and turn them into actions. Pretty vital stuff in my view.

So if we repeatedly put ourselves into a fear state, over time, we are decreasing our confidence. Over a longer time frame, that decrease in confidence can become something called “learned helplessness.”

That’s where you see no way out, that excellence or mastery in life is something for “other people.” You just hang on. Compromised.

What are the similarities for food addiction? I’m not sure. I’d be grateful if you could help me understand.

I suppose, feeding the pig in all of us puts a person into a state of comfort, while at the same time exerting control, while at the same time feeling guilt and even shame, and somehow also blocking these things in a great narrowing of thinking. Maybe all of those are a form of faint and freeze. We put ourselves on hold using food.

Or does that excess of sugar, or other long-chained sugar molecules from carbohydrates, provide an excitation reaction at the cellular level akin to what happens when I give my five year old too many sweets? Does my greater bulk simply allow me to absorb the reaction better when compared to a child’s? I think so.

Though, without the obvious physiological responses that smoking, cannabis or drinking has. Or, is this true? Is there a definite physical reaction to eating food that is describable, and measurable at the level of blood pressure, heart rate, breathing and thinking? I think you could easily make the case that there is.

There is little doubt in my mind that eating a row or two of cookies changes my state. Is it the “freeze” and “faint” equivalent of the four Fs? I think there might be something to this.

Many former addicts become addicted to sugar. My father quit drinking when I was a boy and used to have bulk boxes of chocolate bars delivered to the house from wholesalers he knew. We kids thought it was great. About a third of people who quit smoking put on weight–trust me, that’s not happening from a diet of vegetables and meat; carbs rule their cravings.

There’s another consequence that is rarely talked about. When we compromise our sensory inputs, the ones our brain relies on to make sense of our environment, we also experience a decrease in confidence.

If the brain can’t discern properly what is going on around us because we are a little drunk, high from smoking dope, agitated on speed or cocaine, or our breathing has slowed and all pain is absent while on opioids, it cannot also be confident. Oh sure, there’s a dopamine rebound effect that can propel us into action. People get high and clean their whole house, or get drunk and start fights. In my opinion, this is the body trying to stay alive–it’s being pushed and it pushes back. In the end, real confidence gets lost in the confusion.

And don’t we compromise sensory inputs while overeating? Doesn’t the overwhelming sensory experience remove us temporarily from having to deal effectively with our environment? Too full to move? I doubt many disagree that escapism is involved.

Escapism being entrenched by conditioning. Rewarded, are we really doomed to repeat the behaviour? Do we become slaves to this conditioning? And what about confidence then? If your control is relinquished, where is your confidence?

I suggest that overeating has a huge effect on confidence. It’s a dirty little secret—like the closet drinker nipping at a hidden stash.

The problem is overeating carbs wrecks your body and leptin/insulin regulation. This further kills confidence as you go from a bit of healthy weight and a pear shaped body, to “big boned” to “chubby” to “a little fat” to “fat” to “morbidly obese.” For many of us, control over our physical destiny gives way to a certain resignation about our fate. We rationalize it until we can no longer.

The questions about confidence then become:

How much confidence am I willing to give up for a fear, or flight, or freeze or faint state?

And,  “How much confidence do I have to lose before I make myself helpless?”

Or, “How much confidence do I have to give up just to give in to a bad habit?”

I don’t know about you, but for me, this won’t do.

I have found value in this simple sentence learned from Glen Livingston’s book, Never Binge Again:

“I’m not the type of person who eats a row of cookies. It’s just not me.”

It works more and more as I use it regularly. I say this to myself as I contemplate a binge of carbs.

I am choosing confidence, I tell myself.

I am choosing self-concept by design, not one created from happenstance as I react to my environment.

Having solved the riddle of addiction when it comes to heroin, cocaine, alcohol and tobacco, food addiction is next.

I’m learning just like anyone. I’m interested to know what people think.

 

© CKWallace, October, 2016. All rights reserved

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DEBATING DOGS

Christopher K Wallace 2 Comments

 

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Pets: I’m not for them at all. In fact, I’m completely against dog and cat ownership. I want nothing to do with either. I’ll tell you why.

The thing about pets that we forget is that they die. Oh, I know. You’re not supposed to talk about that bit. But, it’s true. The little critters worm their way into our hearts and lives and then we outlast them. Of course, along the way, all manner of itsy bitsy life lessons can be learned from cats and dogs, and other little creatures, but saying goodbye is always hard.

My father is 87 years old. We never had a dog during the time I lived there as part of a family of eleven, but we had a cat called Brindle Shit Brown. Of course, my father named that one. It was born high up in an apartment building and the mother cat had dropped the baby cats off the balcony one by one, presumably inviting them to live elsewhere other than in those over-crowded conditions. My father continued to have a cat in the house long after I Ieft home.

Dad says that it so crushed him to see his cat pass away a few years ago that he’s not interested in ever getting another. Too hard, he says. His last little pet used to come out mostly when no one else was around and sit on his lap while he read in his big chair. If ma was in the room, then it would sit between my mother and father, keeping an exact space within an inch of the halfway mark of each of them. It was as if it was intentionally reassuring them, showing no favouritism, both having earned its love, or whatever it is that cats offer us.

I’ve had a few pets myself over the years. I used to keep a couple of Afghan Hounds around when I was in my late teens or so. Of course, this was back before municipal laws made it mandatory to pick up your dog shit. Those fenced in school yards in the evenings made for a perfect place to let the hounds out.

Later I learned a pretty neat trick for avoiding responsibility for the care and maintenance of a dog. I’ve had three major relationships in my life. And each of these women wanted to get a “puppy” to fulfill some kind of maternal need. Of course, to a young man, a dog is better than a baby. It’s hands down a better option.

Truth is, it was my experience with the hounds early in my twenties that made me realize a few things about pets in general. They become part of your little “family” and can no more be abandoned than a sibling or child. You have to look after the suckers. That means if you want to go somewhere, they either have to come too, or you are not going. Not everyone appreciates you bringing your oversized semi-guard dog to their homes.

I suppose it’s kind of like a farmer with horses or a milking cow. That horse has to be walked or ridden daily. Twice a day, that darn cow has to be milked come hell or high water. Dogs are a bit like that with the whole walking bit, aren’t they? Only now you have to pick up the dog shit too.

There’s something about being trained by a dog to wait behind it with a little bag until it is done its business, then feeling its soft poop through the thin walls of the plastic as you gather its offering. It stinks too. Fresh excrement is like that. And while you do it, the dog either looks at you puzzled or just goes off to the next bush or clean patch of lawn to repeat itself. I remember feeling taken for granted on the odd occasion where I’ve had to do this. Conformity costs.

Afterwards, you follow the dog home while carrying a bag of shit. Even today, driving down the road, sometimes I spot a big dog with their owner following. The misnamed master carries the required bag and it reminds me of the bull balls ornament you see some guys tie to their trailer hitch on the back of their pick-up trucks. There’s no nice image that justifies this or makes it any better. You’re still carrying a bag of shit while your dog frolics along. The owners never look happy to me. If you look at them too long, they stare back defiantly.

Over the years I learned to give in to the various gals I was with when the puppy call came. I’d first act reluctant, making it was known that I was not interested in pets. They were all the pet I needed, I’d tease. Been there, done that, I might say.
Once my position was clear, predictably we’d move to the next phase.

This is where persuasion comes in. Of course, I’m no match for a determined woman in that circumstance so it was to my advantage to realize that I was arguing a foregone conclusion. If I was losing the battle anyway, getting the best possible terms while the getting was good was my drop back position. It was a pattern oft-repeated during my years with dogs.

Oh, we’d get the dog alright. But not until it was understood and agreed to that I was not its owner, would not walk it, would not feed it, would not bathe it and certainly would not be picking up shit after it like some feminized male walking a poodle for his dame.

Now you might have a poodle, or you might be happy to walk your gal’s poodle and pick up after it on her behalf. I wasn’t. It’s just me, no reflection on you. And it was under this clear understanding that in all three of my major cohabitating relationships, we got dogs. But not big dogs, mind you, small dogs.

I once knew a fella who was a notorious gangster in what’s known as the Irish Mob here in Canada. He had a small dog too. Despite this apparent incongruence in his otherwise outward appearance and reputation as a tough and masculine male, I think it was a Shih Tzu or similar sized dog he preferred. I once asked him, “George, why the small dog?” To which he answered, “Little dogs need protection too.” Of course, in that moment the answer struck me as obvious: a dog wasn’t going to protect George; he was going to protect the dog.

After my experiences with the Afghan Hounds, I realized that large dogs as actual guards have limited value. Once I gave my second dog to a friend who didn’t have one. His place was broken into and the thieves simply piped the dog over the head and proceeded to empty him out. It left him with a large vet bill and a dog with one prominent canine tooth cracked in half and missing. Champion Kanishka of Douglas didn’t look much like a champion after that.

No. A dog around the house as protection is not a sure thing. But a dog’s hearing is so good that if you’re looking for an early warning system to give you advanced notice burglars are stalking your place, a dog is the thing. They’re also good about warning you to people innocently walking by minding their own business. And squirrels, they tell you about squirrels on your property, or scampering across hydro lines in sight of the windows. Dogs watch over their domain, like a sentry standing guard against all interlopers at the top of the castle’s walls.

maggie two

So it was that most of my adult life a dog has lived in my home. One other rule I observed: each new relationship, a new breed of dog. Seems only fair, right? What kind of sick guy would manipulate three gals in succession to all get the same darn dogs? It’s deceitful. It’s the kind of thing that happens when someone has three marriages going in three different cities. Eventually, three different widows show up to the funeral. Sooner or later, you’re found out.

No. It would be a picture in an old album that would give me away; or, more likely social media currently. I knew this so it was important for me to keep things on the straight and narrow by ensuring each one of my great loves get a different breed. Luckily, fate never challenged me to the point where one had a preference another had already. It wasn’t like I could suddenly blurt out, “No. That one’s taken!” and not look like a complete idiot. After all, I wanted nothing to do with the whole thing, right? I have to say, I got lucky.

We went from Pekingese to Lhasa Apso to Havanese. All three breeds are similar and reflected their owners to a great extent. I suppose this also reflected my taste in women. The first two gals were blondes and so were their dogs—blond hair, black mask to be more precise. The last one, the Havanese, was all black. Change was due. I suppose. Read into it whatever you like but they were three small dogs bought from certified breeders at full price.

Well, except for the last one, the Havanese. Maggie May. Mel was so grateful we were getting a dog she let me name it. Somewhere, vaguely inside me, I was troubled by this: had I reached the pinnacle of my manipulation? Or was I just fooling myself? Anyway, Maggie was bought from an alternative breeder (read not Canadian Kennel Club) and I talked the lady down from $1500 to $800. Maybe not full price but not chump-change either. It was the exception.

All of them were superb pets and provided my gals with endless enjoyment, grooming, feeding, walking and cuddling them to great satisfaction. Each of them allowed me to rise to the odd occasion and walk a dog on her behalf. Say on a cold wintry night, minus temperatures and snow swirling about. That’s when I’d step up and do the right thing: joint and lighter tucked into my jacket pocket, and walk her dog for her.

The Pekes, as they are known to their owners, snort and snuffle as their pug faces take in air. They walk around with heavy chest pushed out like a diminutive bulldog. It’s pretty hard to not find them endearing. And just as our Pekes were characters, so was their owner. It takes a special person to find the beauty in the ugly. Pekes have it both. All that breeding to achieve their distinctive look takes a toll on the cardiovascular system. Their hearts give out. They die young. I went through two Pekes in that relationship

The Lhasa Apso is a good breed: Smart and loyal little pooches and not at all demanding. They are highly versatile and when their coats are allowed to grow out, a fantastic looking animal. It takes an owner who can dedicate time and effort to grooming to do the dog justice. Luckily, this breed was suited to my wife at the time because she always looked good. I’m pretty sure we had at least two, maybe even three of these dogs during our long relationship.

The Havanese is a Cuban version of a Bichon Frise. The Bichon Frise is normally white and found in the Mediterranean area of France. But in Cuba, it comes in all colours—much like the Cubans themselves. The Havanese is good for herding chickens I’m told. Of the three breeds, this was easily the smartest. It could roll over and play dead. It fetched a toy and laid it at my feet in seconds the very first time I tossed it. You could pretend to shoot it and it would die… for food.

Here’s a question: What’s with the idea that a dog has to sleep at the end of the bed? Can’t you just say no? I have to be honest here, that’s one drawback to my system. If you sleep with someone and they want their dog at the end of the bed, they will simply say, “It will sleep on MY side.” Of course, I have answers to that. Things like: “The dog wakes me up,” or “It hogs my blankets worse than you do.” In the case of the Peke, “The damn thing snores and I’m a light sleeper.”

In my experience, these are good reasons for not having a dog sleep at the end of the bed. Each of them was accepted with sensitivity by my partner, leaving me feeling validated and heard. But even so, the dogs all slept at the end of the bed, interfering with my sleep for decades. The reason for that was the dog just waited until we were asleep, left its own bed, jumped up onto ours and settled in. I know because it woke me up each time. My gal would offer me sympathy when I complained. But no remedy. It was their conspiracy.

But for all its challenges, having a small dog in the house is a joy compared to what happens when we lose one. It’s heartbreaking. Not so much for me, but I feel for my gal each time. In some dark recess of my selfishness, a dog’s death signals release. A good night’s sleep, accidents, barking and vet bills are all welcome benefits of a pet’s demise. A partner’s sadness is not. So I understand a bit about what my father was speaking about. It’s tough stuff.

Our last dog, the smartest one by far and the one I got to name, cost me ten grand in vet bills. I say that as an aside because the real challenge was when I was tasked with putting her down myself. It was something my wife asked me to do while she was at Ronald McDonald House attending to my boy’s life as he spent his first few months at Sick Kids. There she was up every two hours all day and night feeding or pumping breast milk to give our son enough of his mother’s nourishment to survive. It was the least I could do for her.

It is a funny thing how our dogs are so much like their owners. In turn, in my case, it’s a funny thing is about how our wives are often so much like our mothers.

All during the past three years as Mel has dealt with my boy’s health issues, she’s never complained. All the emergency visits to hospital; being awakened almost nightly to attend to him for one reason or another; his eating difficulties so bad that he vomited up almost everything she tried to give him for two years straight, the odd time all over her; and the uncertainty of not knowing if he’d live or die. She was stalwart. She was like my mother.

My mother had ten pregnancies in twelve years, raised nine children, cooking thirty-three meals a day for decades while keeping a house and every one on task following her marching orders. And as soon as she could she went back to her work full-time, putting her nursing background to use first as a medical secretary and later in government for the hydrographic section of Environment Canada. When cancer claimed her finally at age 86, she died on a Friday afternoon surrounded by her nine adult children and husband of sixty-two years by her side holding her hand. My father told me she apologized to him for dying.

Maggie was bleeding out of her ass and could barely walk ten feet.

A lot like her mistress, my missus, and my mother, Mel’s mother in law, the little dog who could do so many tricks never complained. She just tried to carry on, right to the end. She would look at me through her curly black hair and those dark eyes and wait for my signal, at the ready like a good little soldier. She was so accepting of my authority as her pack mate, her alpha and protector.

I can’t say this delicately: the vets offices I called for help in putting her down were assholes. They were condescending, patronizing, contemptuous of my wife’s decision (which I was tasked with carrying out), and disrespectfully obstructionists. I ended up doing it and burying that little dog myself. I fed her steak before she went.

For the last few dogs, I’ve written eulogies. Each has been moving to me and others, cathartic expressions of a cherished being’s impact on all of us. Dogs really are a man’s best friend. I’m a bigger believer now.

This might seem inconsistent of me given I accept little responsibility for the pet’s existence in the first place. Call it maturity perhaps. Or, call it an abatement of testosterone. Maybe it’s just a greater connection to my environment and allowing the bigger picture to speak to me more directly, or through me.

It’s remarkable how often messages from the universe arrive to me in the form of a woman’s voice. I’m not sure I want to understand how that works, though I do. But watching how pained my loved ones are at the demise of a beloved pet provokes in me whatever semblance of poetic licence I can muster to try my best to do some kind of justice to their cause.

My women all loved their pets and I seek to honour their loyalty—especially as the person responsible for providing the animal in the first place. Pets are like family, and no restricted involvement rules set at the outset protects one from this eventuality. If I was a reluctant owner, the dogs made me their alpha because they recognize a deeper natural order that exists far beyond my self-interest.

Recently I moved to a 200 acre spread a few miles outside town, 20 minutes from my father’s place. Not everyone gets to be near their parents as they fade so I feel very grateful to be here. It’s also a great place to grow kids.

It’s mostly bush, very little land is cleared for agricultural use. That means the forest is steps from our back door. There are plenty of coyotes around, and we’ve seen fishers and foxes. Add to that my wife wants chickens. This is what happens you see: you give a gal a couple of kids and they want chickens. Can you imagine poultry in such circumstances without a dog to stand guard over the flock? Seems to me that is almost obligatory conditions for dog-ownership.

I imagine any day now I’ll be writing to announce how my wife and two kids have a new dog. It could happen.

Meanwhile, next time I’ll tell you how we now have not one, but two cats.

Yeah, you read that right. Not winning here. Not winning at all.

 

charlie and sketch

 

miss molly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

©ckwallace September, 2016. all rights reserved.

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ATOMIC LOVE

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

wally's engagement poem to Mel

 
It was exactly 3 years ago today that I laid the atomic love on Melissa while she was nine months pregnant. We’ve been connected in atomic love for ten years, but that’s when I wrote her those words.
 
It was in front of 100 family members and friends during a post-double-nuptial reception clan BBQ for two of my brothers at one of Ottawa’s most scenic and historically significant sites.
 
This morning, I asked Mel about it and suggested we plan a wedding.
 
She answered saying it’s no longer the style to get married as people once did. Her sister has no plans to marry despite having a son with her man. Her other sister remains unmarried despite my advertising her virtues to promising suitors over Facebook and elsewhere (don’t worry, she won’t last. The good ones never do)..
 
I noticed while she said what she said this morning, she had also shared my poetic proposal on her wall earlier in the day. Thank goodness for social media. I may be a romantic… but I’m also just a man.
 
Of course, she accepted my proposal at the time because, well, really, who can refuse atomic love?
 
It’s the only kind I know after finally getting this whole love thing in middle age. As I like to say, find it early, find it late, but you must find love.
 
So why not atomic love? The kind that leaves you entwined with one another… as if it’s an impossibility of physics to be apart. This is my kind of love. This is the love I know with my Melissa.
 
Any of you who know me well also realize there is plenty of lust. In fact, I focus mostly on lust, while atomic love just happens.
 
So…what to do? Ha! Knowing what I do about women after all these years, I’ve got this.
 
As her knight in shining armour, as the man who chose her, who made her my woman those ten years ago, I must take her.
 
Even if it means I must double this buxom wench over my shoulder and carry her to an altar to stand before a priest, then it’s what I’ll do.
 
There I’ll declare my intention to continue to lust after her forever, and with physical fervor of and intensity of spirit, provide her with all I’ve got, with atomic love.
 
Little Howie is now eating solid food for the first time in his short life and putting on weight. He’s sleeping soundly after Mel insisted on a sleep study that revealed apnea so severe he was bumped to the top of the list for adenoids and tonsil removal. His Eustachian tubes must have been affected because within a week or so he picked up another fifty words. He can hear now. He’s a boy, a charmer, smart; his father’s son.
 
Charlotte is my delightful daughter, now five. She’s magic and I am hopelessly smitten… just as they warned me would happen. She teaches me something new every day.
 
They will be flower girl and ring bearer.
 
We sold our Cobourg house overlooking Lake Ontario in the early part of the year. Despite the spectacular view and wonderful neighbours, it no longer suited us. Missus said, sell, she wanted a big yard for her children, and for chickens. Seemed like a natural progression to me so we moved.
 
While she was in Toronto with the children attending to medical needs for our boy, I got her two hundred acres just south of Ottawa. It is twenty minutes from my aging father’s place. Not all of us get to be there for our parents in their later years. I’m feeling very grateful.
 
I am among clan and many friends, some of whom go back 40 years. Business is rebuilding nicely. Life is very good and getting better. I think the time is approaching when the missus can relax and make this official.
 
So, stay tuned, there’ll be a wedding in 2017.
 
True and Free!
lowrescoa

© ckwallace, 2016, all rights reserved

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Should men understand women?

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

 

wildwoman

Come on, this is a fantastic graphic. It’s worth the whole post.

 

As men, should we understand women?

Some trip over themselves to answer yes. It’s plain that women can do pretty much anything a man can do outside biology, why wouldn’t we strive to understand them?

Others will tell you to forget trying the impossible. Perhaps you’ll see that as a challenge. Some will say we are not supposed to understand women.

My dearest father once told me the same thing. He is now 87 years of age, patriarch to a large clan, with nine adult children still around after his wife of 62 years passed in late 2014. He has four daughters, and he was brought up mostly by his mother and three older sisters. Dad might know about women, I thought.

So, it was probably at least three decades or more ago now when I asked my father about this whole understanding women thing. It was a time when I clearly didn’t, my inadequacy tormenting my days with distraction. He answered matter of fact like, as if he was pointing out something obvious: how I had it “all wrong, all along.”

He said: “We’re not supposed to.”

That was it. Nothing more. End of discussion. Subject changed.

Really? Gees, I felt so dumb for a minute.

Then it dawned on me: what a relief that was!

I didn’t have to keep checking myself as if I was learning advanced mathematics with a brain for languages. No. It meant that in those few words I was done with the task. It wasn’t my job. It was something for the heavens, or the universe; it was for Mother Nature in her infinite wisdom.

Since that very moment, I began to notice NOT how my gal and I were the same, rather, how different we were, especially when at odds over something. In those cases, I’d examine my motivations, and guess at hers. I realized I had pretty good intentions most of the time. If I gave her the same latitude, so did she.

Over many years I examined the gender studies for divergences at a time when this was frowned upon by some. Like my own social sciences lab, I also observed the teams I ran–mostly young teenagers and young adults selling for me in various ventures door to door and at kiosks. About half were male, half female. There were clear gender variations that emerged consistently.

And in time, I began to understand women a little more. There were wide variations in individuals of course, but nevertheless, consistent distinctions. It was as if the very notion of letting go of the “should understand” rule allowed room for something else: appreciation.

Now, I think I get it. I admit it might have taken decades and an abatement of testosterone. It is what it is. As much as I can: I now get women… to a point. Not more because it will never be my default way of seeing the world.

It takes a double take, a little effort, some reflection and even more acceptance; indeed, I can bridge the gap if one presents. Starting with the notion way back that I’m not supposed to understand now makes understanding in any amount a bit of a gift.

There’s the challenge.

Want to know the secret to fishing? It’s simple: fish where the fish are.

If they’re hungry, they’ll eventually bite something you throw at them.

When I first began to walk the rivers of British Columbia, rod in hand, I cast a lot of gear into unproductive waters. But when I began to recognize tail outs, structure, currents and pools and the seasons of a species’ life-cycle, I couldn’t keep them off my hook. After all, the fish live beneath the surface, where we can’t see. We must surmise our approach based on their needs. It took a fair bit of fishing to get to that point.

Like looking for clues to game, there are sign. Walk a trail with an experienced hunter and notice the difference between what you see and what they see. Similarly, it is knowledge that enhances a trapper’s success, and that comes with experience.

So it is with women. Subtleties I missed many years ago now present as clear signals. It’s not so much that I reject my father’s advice; it’s just that I’m challenged by it. It’s what sparked my quest, albeit abdicating perfection in the process.

The prize is peace; it is more love perhaps, lust certainly.

There is more. Recognizing that I’m not supposed to understand someone else frees me to reach new levels of tolerance. After all, can we really truly understand anyone completely?  By bridging discrepancy between us with acknowledgement for our differences, it’s my life that is enhanced by friendship and connection. This is generally true for both of us, regardless of gender.

I think that’s what my father was trying to teach me, both by way of his example and his brief counsel.

Acceptance and Appreciation.

Fritz Perls may have been on to something when he wrote his prayer:
I do my thing and you do your thing

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations

And you are not in this world to live up to mine

You are you, and I am I

And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful

If not, it can’t be helped.

 

I believe my father was trying to tell me that by letting go, I would gain.

He was a naval commander at the time and I suppose for him it was no retreat; it was more of a way to regroup. Soldiers learn quickly how to pick their battles. It’s certainly been true since. Using the guiding principles of acceptance and appreciation, his wisdom has been a gift.

It also frees me to say that I’m a man and I won’t apologize for it.

Bet your bottom dollar on that one. 😉

 

©CKWallace, 2016, all rights reserved.

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Emboldened woman!

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

 

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Mel’s in the grocery store, Howie wakes up in his car seat sweating and pissed off.

I do what any good father does: I unbuckle him, put him on my lap and proceed to give him basic steering lessons in my truck.

It’s dusk, foggy, and nary a soul around in this sleepy town. We looped around and around, watching for his ma to come out.

Suddenly, a large woman, shaped like a battle ax my father would say, steps in front of my truck, motioning me to stop. As I lower my window to inquire as to what she wants, she holds her hand up signaling incredulity. With exasperation in her voice she demands: “what do you think you’re doing?”

“Well, I’m teaching my boy to drive,” I answer.

Howie, having done ten or fifteen laps of the parking lot by now, getting better at it each time, looks on with pride. I can’t say for sure, but he might have been expecting a compliment.

“Teaching him to drive? It’s unsafe!” she admonishes.”And that’s illegal!!”

“Oh come on lady. He’s with his father. It’s the safest place in the world for him.”

“You can’t do that!!” was her answer. And, with increasing frustration, she became angry: “It’s against the law!” she shrieked.

I wanted to say something clever. I really wanted to push her over the edge and tell her off. I wished I had the presence of mind to tell her to know her place around a boy and his father. Instead, all I could do was say: “Lady, frig off.”

I guess I’d had a long day too.

Then Howie drove away. Funny how the kid–at two and half–knew how to do that at just the right moment. All we could hear was her loudly repeating my plate number over and over as we pulled away…

So…the cops just left my place.

I responded to a knock on the door and insisted the constable come in. He asked me if I’d had someone accost me in the Metro parking lot. “Indeed I did,” I told him.

“Was your boy on your lap, driving around in your truck? I don’t have to tell you about how potentially unsafe that is, do I?”

“Of course not, you don’t have to tell me that at all, officer,” was my reply. “But here’s what you do: Ask Howie yourself if he was driving”, I said, straight-faced, as I pointed to my little boy watching Bo on the Go nearby.

He asked: “So were you driving?” Howie said nothing. Solid kid.

I said to the cop, “I’m not saying anything like that happened but if a guy happened to be waiting for his missus in the grocery store and one of his kids was crying in the truck because it was past bedtime, wouldn’t it be smart of that father to let his kid practice steering in a practically empty parking lot to keep them distracted? After all, it’s on private property and traffic laws don’t apply right?”

“Just saying,” I added.

“You’re right,” he answered. “Private property, regular road rules don’t apply.” He turns to leave.

“Sorry she got you here, wasting your time,” I said.

“No problem,” he replied with a wave as he walked away, “always nice to see you again Mr Wallace.”

“Goodnight officer.”

©ckwallace, 2016, all rights reserved

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Cobourg-20110902-00187

That’s my Charlotte slapping the cuffs on officer Cindy’s heart a few years the day we moved in…

 

Clan Chief’s Birthday: a living eulogy

Christopher K Wallace 6 Comments
IMG_20160320_183833
I have to admit, it’s happening to me,
It was something I could not foresee.

Decidedly, I’ll just let it be.

Oh, I may have dreamed it long ago,
But being so young, I did not I know

Of all that was to follow.

Despite it all, for the life of me,
And my attempts to live contrarily

Now resigned, eerily,

For the truth is, I no longer rather
By this living eulogy you’ll gather

I’m turning into my father.

Today is dad’s birthday. He’s 87 years old. Each one of those years was earned.

Like most boys, my father is my hero. Though there came upon our relationship a darkness that lasted a decade. Even during this estrangement, there were lessons unfolding for both us, perhaps, more so for me. Though, it’s hard to tell.

It was my father who inadvertently gave me my animal totem when he told me at the age of fifteen that there wasn’t room for two roosters under the same roof, and since it was his roof… Regardless, eventually we got over it and I metaphorically became a cockerel (three children too!). Not so bad when you consider that the bird stands for pride, honesty, courage, vigilance, arrogance, strength, watchfulness and flamboyance, all traits I share with my father.

On top of that we are descendants of Celtic tribes, who considered the rooster a creature of the underworld, serving as a messenger of the hereafter, screeching out warnings of danger and calling out to the souls of those fallen on the battlefield. Perhaps my father knew I’d be an envoy from darkness, sent to share light.

Forgiveness is one of life’s greatest tests of virtue. It was my father who taught me this. His father was a troubled man, a WWI veteran with an impatient irascibility about him that bordered on meanness at times. War does that to people. Dad was a dutiful son to his father right to the end. (You can find his short account of Grandpa Gimpy’s death in Dad’s book about our family at trueandfree.ca). Reading about how he sneaked in to hold his father’s hand at the very end of Gimpy’s life serves as a beacon, a triumph of kindness over anger, of putting love first despite all else. It’s an image I continue to hold dear.

Of course, my father also taught me patience… using golf as his instrument. Hitting that damn little white ball all over Eastern Ontario with passion and commitment required enormous patience. He set an example, we followed. My father’s invitation that we golf with him meant that along the way, I also learned behaviourism. Intermittent reinforcement being the strongest reinforcer is plain to see in the game: you hit close to a hundred shots in a typical round, most of which are going to be not so good. But there will be one that’s absolutely amazing. One shot that makes all the pain of the rest of the shots dissolve away like salt in warm water.

In fact, I won the family’s golf tournament last summer with a perfect seven iron on a par three that bounced once just before the pin and almost went in, landing a foot and a half away from the hole. The rest of that day’s game? Ah… not so good. I could curse him or thank him for the gift of golf, depends on the day. But I keep coming back. Patience.

I learned to accept homosexuals from my father. While still just a single digit in age, I spied a sister cuddling her younger sibling while watching TV, and called them lesbians. I was invited for a chat in the inner sanctum of my parent’s room. There my father asked if I knew what a lesbian was. Of course, I really had no idea. He explained that it was a woman who loved another woman. He added that it was just how they were made and that, in the end, they were just looking for love, like anyone else. With that understood, I was dismissed. It was the 1960s.

Once through the homophobic peer pressure of my teen years, it was that wisdom I returned to. With maturity, I gained a greater sense of justice. Those words came back to serve me: “just looking for love, like anyone else.” It was all the justification needed for tolerance and understanding. Simple, effective, and just.

Later, at some occasion the subject came up again, this time with some of my adult siblings around. In one of dad’s famous quips, he said: “Sometimes, you just have to brush your teeth, close your eyes and keep an open mind.” I’m sure that ended the conversation. I’ve never had the balls to ask him about it either. Some things are better left unsaid.

My mother taught me to read but it was my father who made books available. We had bookcases all over the house. Even now, when I imagine a room, I see a bookcase there. Dad made it perfectly normal to sit and read, all day if necessary. Learning is my top strength and dad’s influence is never far.  I’m mostly a non-fiction type and I have some of his old books. The pages are yellowed and delicate like rice paper; each one a treasure. Like my father, I have a book habit. Not so bad at all.

When I began to scribble words of my own, it was my father who helped me along, patiently correcting my stuff with his editor’s pencil. I still look over the notes he put on texts I sent him. He also taught me to be frugal about using swear words in my writing, despite being an f-bomb dropping mofo most of his life. In one of his juiciest lessons, as a kid he told me swearing was “good old fashioned expression of emotion.” I was allowed to swear, just not at him or at ma. He wisely figured that as we grew socially we’d soon learn from the reactions of people around us and temper our language accordingly. How very true…

Dad taught me to be honest. As a younger man, I didn’t know anyone who was, so it mattered not as much. Over many years of conversations with my father, I’ve watched as he found just the right words to describe a subject. He’d go to lengths for precision’s sake, keeping reference books nearby to look up a fact or a definition. What emerged for me from the way he did this was the need to search for truth. There was truth, there was lesser truth, and there was falsehood. Often the lines between them are blurred and hard to discern; but truth is there, every time. It just takes a little effort.

Watching my father meant learning to dig a little deeper, to broaden the scope, to see a larger or more refined view. And in this way, he taught me that intent mattered. By filling in the history of a subject, a population, or a place, we learn something of the motivations of people, even nations. We do not exist alone. Having seen more than fifty countries during his navy service, I have visited the world through my father.

As a young man in Ottawa growing up during the seventies and eighties, I went to practically every large rock concert and saw many smaller bands that came to town. I had an extensive collection of vinyl music from the heyday of rock and roll. Later, my tastes grew from rock to blues to funk and jazz. All of these genres form the basis of my musical identity, so can anyone explain why it is that I now listen almost exclusively to the CBC?

As I write this, a collection of opera is playing on a second laptop nearby, someone’s favourites uploaded to a YouTube channel. I think it started when I put a radio in my garage. There, puttering around, doing something handy, I found opera and the classics to keep me company. As a young boy, watching my father at his workbench, with those old tools, each one with its place to return to after use, is one of my best memories. Opera still plays Saturday afternoons at one, perhaps just like it did back in the day on my father’s little radio. The smell of wood, the sounds of sawing and hammering, and the possibility of fabricating something out of raw materials left an indelible impression on me. Perhaps the radio keeps me close to dad when I’m away. After all, the CBC teaches, just like my father does.

My father taught me about love by way of his example with my mother for the sixty two years they were married before she passed away. Theirs is a love for the ages, and no mention of my father’s teachings is complete without also mentioning ma. I heard his sweet reassurances to her in her final hours. Though, for the record I’d best explain that it was probably more my mother’s patience and virtue that lay at the foundation of their longevity as a couple. What a beautiful gift that was. It meant that you could be as faulted as my dad, even as annoying, and still be loved. There is hope for us all.

I could write much more about my father and his impact on me. It’s easy to get carried away with this kind of thing, writing words in ways he taught me, listening to music he influenced me to hear, searching for truths the way I learned them at his knee. Like the time he told me it takes a hundred years for an immigrant group to acclimatize to Canada, several generations—something I still hold as my benchmark of understanding. After all, we are all immigrants here.

Or when I was worried about being a father for the first time. He, with nine children of his own, said to me: “Babies are like little miracles, son, they don’t take up much room, they really don’t cost much, and somehow, all of us find a way to move over a little bit to make room and welcome them into this world. You’ll do fine as a father.” I’ve used those exact words countless times with others and each time they have reassured as I was well over three decades ago.

I believe attachment to each other is our most fundamental need. My father told me of the people from where I came. By widening my understanding of our family’s history, I got a sense of my place in time, and how I live at the crux between the many who have come before me and those after. If we exist within each other as endless loops reverberating down through the ages, knowing from where you came means you are never alone. My father is part of me, and I continue to pass along his fine lessons to those who follow.

Rather than reluctance at becoming like my father, each glimpse of him that shows up in my life are hints of a re-discovered familiarity, and it gives me strength. My father is who he is, unapologetic, unafraid, and unique; good personal aspirations for any man. I welcome the part within me that is him, like an old friend sent to keep me company, as an Elder looking in on my life with love and compassion.

I’m very proud to call myself his son.

So happy birthday my dearest Dad, may you live to a hundred.

cofident dad close up
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© Christopher K. Wallace 2016 @ ckwallace.com, all rights reserved

Connection Forever

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment
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It’s hard to say who suffers more during the adolescent years: parent or child. It’s a time of great change, often for both.

When considering those times, I operate on the understanding that the drive for attachment is our greatest need. Long ago, our very existence as part of an identifiable group was a life or death question, so it’s important to not take personally someone else’s striving for connection. And we know the teen brain is an incomplete entity; heck, many adult brains never seem to get past this stage. But our need to belong and the uncertainty of the teen years carries with it heightened vulnerability, an understatement most people can relate to.

The transition from family to peers during adolescence also has allies, characteristics like uniformity and magical thinking. Uniformity is striving to be like other kids to fit in. Magical thinking is the notion, “It won’t happen to me.” Teens are susceptible to these forces, especially during the whole incomplete brain thing. Knowing they have a tendency to take risks without necessarily having the intuition to apply filters to their thinking and brakes on their behaviour is something that scares the heck out of most parents.

It’s not enough to expect our kids to behave as we think we might, no more than we’d expect a four year old to make dinner. During the teen years, connection and education are your default approaches to retain waning influence. So that’s connection and education on one side; uniformity and magical thinking on the other.

Education without connection is weak. In that case, your imparted wisdom can go unheard, or be dismissed outright. Connection is an imperfect measure of parental effectiveness but represents your best shot at influence. Human beings are made to attach to each other. You either make it easy to attach to you, or people will find others to connect with.

That’s true at any age.

In his book, Hold On To Your Kids, Dr. Gordon Neufeld talks about how children can orient towards their parents or towards their peers, but not both at the same time. It’s one or the other. Neufeld and co-author Gabor Mate talk about how easy it is to lose connection with a child and see them orient towards peers, TV, video games and all manner of other influences. Using a compass metaphor, they advise imagining attachment direction in the same way you would see the needle on a compass orienting towards magnetic north.

Kids can only have one north.

But the truth is, by the time our kids are teens, we want them to make good and safe connections outside the home while maintaining their primary attachments with us as parents. We hope we’ve taught them enough to do that. The alternatives are painful, even dangerous.

As that conflict of loyalties plays out, backtalk, condescension, avoidance and outright contempt can develop in a teen’s attitude towards adults. Looking back at those years with my now adult son, I remember the fear and dread I felt at the notion of losing him. I saw the dangers; I knew the pitfalls. I was out of the house early, the result of a breakdown between me and my dad. Noticing these forces at play in my beloved little boy now grown to adult size, I was damned if history was going to repeat itself.

I used an approach that reassured him, and modestly addressed uniformity and magical thinking.

Every kid likes to hear about themselves as a child, so I sat him down and told him some favourite anecdotes. I made sure he knew he was loved and appreciated, that we felt blessed to have him in our life, but I did this by way of examples, not just by using well-meaning words that were empty of realism. I gave him things he could hang on to. If a memory was triggered and his view differed significantly from mine, I strove to understand why that was. I sought to see things from the viewpoint of his recall, taking the opportunity to find common ground between us, even apologizing for being a shitty parent at times.

“Remember when I came to the end of the school year thing where parents got to play ball with the kids. Maybe it was grade two or three?”

“I remember that,” he answered.

“We used a kind of big volleyball instead of a regular ball. I remember I was playing third base and you were at bat, you hit the ball my way. Do you remember trying to steal an extra base and me firing a laser shot from third and beaning you right in the head on the line between first and second, knocking you on your ass? You were pretty shook up for a minute. Remember the teachers consoling you while I told you to tough it out? Do you remember the looks they gave me?? Hahaha, great times son…hey, sorry about that.”

He laughed quietly at the memory. He knew stealing that base was risky.

I told him that kids who don’t get along with their parents happen in “other” families, not ours. I showed him that we’ve always been good to each other, that we took the time to understand things, and that when we had a conflict, we sat down and resolved it. I gave him examples. I reminded him of the closeness of our relationship, and the many times I backed him up. That he was part of a larger Wallace Clan with many aunts and uncles who ask about him regularly. His grandparents send gifts and cards at Christmas and on his birthday. “People in this family care about you. We are not like other families,” I said.

I also used anecdotes like this one:

“Remember your grade four teacher, tough guy martial artist Mr. Black? Remember when he blamed you for leaving the tap on in the portable and it overflowed? But you told me it wasn’t you; it was that other kid in your class. Remember how you complained that he threatened to throw you through the window? Do you remember how I told your principal that your uncle Duncan (fifth Dan black belt) and I were happy to have a word with Mr. Black about him threatening my boy? That if he wanted to throw someone through a window, he could try me first. And do you remember the principal getting rid of Mr. Black and replacing him with Madame Rose, and how well that worked out for you?”

We spoke about how he happily did all the rest of his grade school at that school. How he stayed in the French Immersion program at Norwood Park in Hamilton, just as I had attended French school as a boy. Because of this, I could speak French fluently and he could understand me. And did he remember going to the big sports day at the end of his last year before we moved to BC, where he met that young girl? “I’m pretty sure she was the first girl you kissed.” He smiled.

“Son, one of my best memories is when I got to watch you bat the winning run in and your team won your Little League Championship. Remember that?” Oh, how he remembered…

I ran a door to door sales team in the evenings at the time but I’d driven back from territory to watch his game. I caught a lot of them that way. We did some batting practice that season, especially on Tuesday evenings, the day he got to come to work with me every week. I was an outfielder and decent hitter in little league; he was even better.

“Remember in high school when you were getting harassed because you owed someone at school ten bucks? Remember how I handled that for you? Yeah, turned it right around. You see son, in this family, we have each other’s backs.” He was listening.

“I need you to know the difference between your family and your friends. I know you feel a strong pull towards your buddies right now, and that’s perfectly natural, but you need to remember where your base comes from. It’s your parents who brought you into the world and who will always be there for you. I’ll tell you why: shit happens.

What do I mean by that? Well we always think stuff won’t happen to us, but it’s just that the universe has randomness to it and we just never know when shit is going to hit the fan.” (I may have given him local or news examples of randomness–tornadoes, floods, robberies, etc.).

I told him, “No one can predict where lightening will strike next, son. God forbid, but what would happen to you if you were ever in an accident? You’re going to learn to drive soon. Think it doesn’t happen? Happens all the time. People get seriously hurt. And all those people thought the same thing: how could this happen to me?”

“Worse: what if you wound up in a wheelchair?” I said, reaching over and symbolically touching wood. “Let me tell you what would happen. If you lived long enough, you might make it home. Oh, and your buddies from school would definitely come around once you were in your chair, maybe they’d even take you for a spin through the mall, so they could look good being kind to the paraplegic. But soon enough, despite their best intentions, visits would come less and less. After a while, they might not visit at all anymore. They’d get on with their lives.”

“I mean, could you blame them, son?”

“No, I guess not,” he answered solemnly.

“But do you know who would be there? Me and your mom,” I said, answering my own question.

“It would be your mom who would care for you, change you out of your soiled clothes and empty your piss-bag a few times a day. I’d lift you in and out of the tub so your mom could wash you, and I’d build ramps and stuff so you could get around. I’d move if we needed to, buy a different car with hand controls, and get you what you needed to survive. Do you understand me here, son?”

He was quiet. Then, I went for it:

“Or what would happen if you were ever falsely accused of something in your life? Where you were totally innocent but were being used as a scapegoat. Think it doesn’t happen? It happens to both men and women. Look at that nurse in Toronto who was accused of killing babies during the time we lived in Hamilton. Killing babies, son! They went after Susan Nelles for years until she was cleared. Turns out it was all bullshit—the drugs found in the babies were a natural consequence of the autopsy process. You can look it up.”

I continued, quieter, more seriously, “And what about people who get accused of crimes they never did? Just like when Mr Black accused you as a kid. This shit happens for real. You are never immune. None of us are.”

He stared at me silently…dumbfounded. I had his complete attention.

I continued: “Look at cases even here in Canada. What about David Milgard? He was accused of raping a nurse in Saskatchewan and spent twenty-three years in prison! Rape son! And, twenty-three fucking years he did! Completely innocent! Can you imagine? And where were all his buddies? In fact, if I remember, at least one of them testified against him, saying he’d gone out that morning and came back looking suspicious. Turned on him! He was pressured by detectives looking to nail someone for the crime.”

I continued: “Everyone abandoned this guy, and he proclaimed his innocence the whole time. He wouldn’t admit it so they wouldn’t let him out. No one would listen. NO ONE!”

“Can you imagine everyone abandoning him, son?” I don’t remember if he answered.

“Except for one person: his mother, Gail”.

“She never, ever gave up on him. She worked tirelessly behind the scenes to free her son. She would protest on parliament hill, accost justice ministers. She linked up with US organizations that helped the falsely accused. This was back when there was no Internet to gather information. There was no regular DNA testing to exonerate people. Gail Milgard worked year after year, never, giving up and finally… was able to bring his case into the public spotlight. She never wavered, she knew her boy. I remember seeing her on the news at the time, and she was relentless. FEARLESS! No one cared about David Milgard or that he might be innocent. He had no one… but his mother. And what a force! After 23 years… she got him out! You can look it up.”

He sat there, spellbound.

“That’s the kind of thing that parents do for their kids. It’s how Mother Nature made them. You mean everything to me. You will feel the same way about your own kids one day.”

Then, I reminded him that he was representing himself out there in the world, but also his family of origin. That he ought to feel a lot of pride, and even an extra dose of confidence to have parents like us in his corner. That we were not perfect but did what we thought was best. We were behind him.

Also, that no matter where he went, or who he had as friends, or how many wives and kids he had, or jobs he went to, or where he lived, that here, we would always have a home for him. Here, he would always be known and accepted. Here, he could count on being loved in a way not possible anywhere else.

My boy is in his thirties now. During his life, all I did was focus on connection. After that talk, the issue was never in doubt again. And I never worried about spending quality time with him; I just spent time, any kind of time. I kept the contact between us at all cost.

He now lives 3000 miles away. He is even contemplating moving across the Atlantic Ocean to Ireland for love later this year. No matter where he is, each time I step off a curb, every time I walk across a busy parking lot, I can still feel his little hand in mine.

Connection forever.

©CKWallace 2016, all rights reserved
 P.S. Know someone who could use this? Please share.
If you need a little help with this sort of thing, contact me.

Teen Drinking Tragedy

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment

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A few days ago, I shared on Facebook a CBC story about the death of a young man I didn’t personally know. Though he’d graduated high school and was learning to be a welder, Brad Grattan was still a teenager when he succumbed to the effects of playing a game of “beer pong” with hard alcohol. I offer my condolences to his friends and family.

You can read the full article here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/brady-grattan-drinking-game-death-1.3458093

To be honest, the idea of teenagers chugging hard liquor scares the heck out of me. I’ve lived too long and too faulted a life to not realize that that could have been me, or that it could have been friends of mine. Sadly, at times, it has been.

I can’t say I have the best answers to this. Brad had good parents and people in his life that cared and loved him. None of them could have predicted his fate. It can only serve to remind us all to be vigilant, to be parents to our children to the best of our ability. The dangers of drinking hard alcohol at that age are great, and most kids don’t know how lethal it can be. That’s the message his parents, Cody and Tracey Grattan, want people to know.

 

As a teen fresh out of the house in the 1970s, drinking and drugging parties were the norm in my world. Working with teenagers over the decades confirms things have not changed much since. Absent parents or other positive influences, things can get out of control pretty fast. Many of the kids I hung around with back in those days had brushes with death of their own. Two of my first three girlfriends had been hospitalized to have their stomach pumped because of alcohol. That’s how they did it back in those days. But even if the relationship between parents and teen is good, hard liquor represents one of the ways things can go awry really quickly. We never see it coming, do we?

 

When I was just sixteen and living on my own at a rooming house in downtown Ottawa, I used to hang out with my best friend at his father’s apartment on weekends. His dad was a medically retired lawyer who had contracted malaria during the 1950s Korean conflict which eventually left him in a wheelchair after developing multiple sclerosis. He managed to wrangle a full military pension but his marriage fell apart as he deteriorated into drinking more and more. The daughters had stayed with their mother while his only son moved into this tiny apartment with his father. There, it was party central most of the time, with every disillusioned young teen from our school area dropping by. Old man Nash would often send us to the liquor store across the street at Billing’s Bridge Plaza, where producing a note from him to the store clerk would get us his gin. Of course, we added our own purchases to the list of provisions too.

I was out of school by then, a high-school dropout. Dad and I had fallen out and I was on my own… something about two roosters living under the same roof and one of us had to go. Leaving a large family of siblings behind, the only world I’d known, meant I’d lost my rudder in life. I worked during the week at menial jobs and spent weekends at my friend’s drinking and getting high with the crowd there. It was where I felt welcomed. I used to sleep on the floor of my buddy’s room in a sleeping back after getting shit-faced.

One time, I drank a whole bottle of rye over the course of the night and blacked out completely. I woke up in my sleeping bag fully clothed and realized I had puked all over myself. To my horror, I then noticed that I’d actually shit and pissed my pants in my sleep, and then slept, unconscious more like it, in puke, shit and piss for the rest of the night. In the morning, all of this was partially dried and caked to my body, great scabs of human detritus of my own making, stuck to me like dried blood from battle. It was all we could do but carefully remove my wallet from my pocket with two fingers, and undress in the bag. I carefully emerged, first a head, then a naked torso, then the rest of me, dried puke on my arms and neck, shit caked against my ass. I headed to the shower and the soiled clothing stayed in the bag. My friend closed off the top of it, pinching it shut with one hand as he pinched his own nose from the stench with the other, and carried the lot of it straight down the hallway to the garbage chute. There it was tossed to everyone’s relief. He lent me fresh clothes so that I could go home. It was my first blackout, and first hangover. Not my last.

 

Many years later, my own son Corrie approached the age where drinking experimentation would be inevitable. Going off to meet his friends on a Friday night at someone’s house posed the same risk. There’s always a more tolerant parent somewhere who grants access to their basement or garage for mild partying, often as a way of keeping an eye on their own teen as they make their way into adulthood. Better here than out there, they figure. Sometimes, they have substance use issues of their own, but just as often not. It’s someone who wants to keep the fading connection of influence with their child at any cost.

So how did I handle this critical time with my son? Well, I knew that if I lost influence with my boy his peers would take my position pretty quickly. In fact, after around the age of fourteen, I noticed that his peer group had become such a big factor in his life that it was unlikely I’d ever regain what we once had. This was my sweet little boy, the kid who up until age ten automatically put his hand in mine as we prepared to cross a road or walk through a parking lot. I had given up so much to be his father; it was a role that had defined me for many years. How would I protect him from himself?

More importantly, how could I prevent him from becoming me?

 

Communication was the key, of course. That’s what I did my best to preserve no matter what. It meant suspending judgment and listening, and moving from parent to acting as an adviser most of the time. Easier said than done, that’s for sure, and I was far from perfect at it. But I realized that if I could position myself as his backup adviser, where he could come and rely on safe counsel without me jumping ahead to impose my views on him, I might stand a chance at keeping the connection. However awkward, it worked. People ask me about what my goal was with my boy during those years. My answer was always the same: to make sure he lives past the statistical danger years of fifteen to twenty-five. That’s still my best advice.

I had a big talk with Corrie about the insanity of drinking straight booze.  We talked all about blackouts, hangovers, and about me pissing, puking and shitting all over myself. I told him about some of the teens who worked for me, kids he knew growing up by name, and some of their mishaps with alcohol. Sadly, Brad Grattan isn’t the first kid to die this way. When newspaper articles from that era reported how another kid lost his life to this folly, I’d seize upon it and we’d talk about it. We can honour the Grattan family by doing the same here.

Back in the days when I talked to my boy about drinking hard liquor, inadvertently, spontaneously, I ended up blurting out more than I had planned. Desperate, I took a gamble.

I told him I was so serious about this, that if he’d agree to never drink straight alcohol—to be wary of it, to be the guy who says no—I would instruct his mother to buy him his own beer to take to his friends. I remember thinking at the time, did I just say that? At this, his eyes lit up. “Really?” he asked. “Really,” I said. “If you drink a couple of beers in your friend’s basement that’s one thing, but the straight booze thing can’t be part of what you risk. I want to you to promise me and really mean it. Swear on it with me as a man.” He answered, “That’s awesome, dad, sure I’ll take you up on that promise, no problem. I will not drink straight alcohol.” I was crossing my fingers.

 

So, there it was that his mother and I dropped him off at his friend’s place a few blocks away on a Friday night. In he went, barely concealing the grin on his face as he stepped up to the curb to face his buddies, several of whom where outside, probably waiting to see if he’d actually appear with beer his parents bought him. Holding his little twelve pack of Coors light cans, he showed up like he was a rock star, his status assured at a critical time in his life. And all he had to do was not drink the hard stuff. He’s in his thirties now. He still drinks but has never been a big drinker. Though, I’ll worry a bit when he moves to Ireland later this year. Of all the places…

 

I suppose I just got lucky. It was the connection between us I worked hard to preserve that seems to have carried the day. I’m probably the least able to judge other’s behaviour given my own past. I don’t condone using my particular method, but that’s part of what worked for me. The important thing is to have the conversation with your teen, and to do whatever you can to keep the connection good between you. People need their attachments and our children naturally want to attach to their parents first. As that connection wanes, they will have no choice but to attach to their peer group. Nature makes it so.

And what do peers know? Not much if you ask me.

 

CKWallace, 2016, all rights reserved.

Contact me here if you need help getting through to your teen about alcohol.

Photo credit: CKWallace. Son and father with their Dodge pickups 2012.

 

Hi, it’s Caroline calling from Revenue Canada

Christopher K Wallace 3 Comments

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Hi, it’s Caroline calling from Revenue Canada.

 Great! I’m so glad you called Caroline. It’s really wonderful.
 
Well. Thank you Mr. Wallace, that’s not our usual reaction. 
 
I don’t know why Caroline, I love it when Revenue Canada calls.
 
Well I’m calling about your latest HST returns. 
 
Yes you are! Isn’t it great! I’m all up to date!! 
 
I see you just filed recently; I’m calling about your last quarter 2015. 
 
Yes. Of course you are. I suppose you wouldn’t know this, but my mother’s name was Caroline. I’m in the middle of eleven, four sisters and four brothers. Of her four daughters, my mother’s closest was my younger sister, also named Caroline. She took care of our mother in her last years. Yes. Ma passed a year ago in December. She was surrounded by her nine adult children. Her husband of sixty two years, my father Howard, whispered sweet reassurances to her until her last breath. Lived until age 86 and loved dearly right to the end. By the way, I assume you’re calling because I filed so many returns and put in for a large amount of input tax credits on that last one, right? 
 
Yes, Mr. Wallace, it’s been flagged by our system. 
 
Makes sense, that’s because I sent in several years’ worth of input tax credits on that one return. You’ll notice that the previous ones had none. I’m ready for your audit. I have it all laid out for you. When would you like to stop by? 
 
No. No. Mr. Wallace, we haven’t decided if an audit is necessary yet. 
 
But, Caroline. I insist. And call me Christopher. I love it when you guys come by. It’s always a learning experience for both of us: good conversation and we take care of business. I usually find some things I forgot to claim too. I’ll set aside a whole day. How about next week? Would that do for you? Will you come personally? You sound nice and I’d love to meet another Caroline. 
 
No. No Mr. Wallace, like I said, an audit hasn’t been ordered. 
 
Please, call me Christopher. You know, I almost named my daughter Caroline. I lost that battle I’m afraid. She insisted on Charlotte; that’s a pretty nice name too. It was our first child together. It was the least I could do. Missus was heroic during the pregnancy and 18 hours of labour. There was blood everywhere and she’s so tiny. She deserved to name her. I call my little girl Charlie.
 
Laughing: Yes, that is a nice name, Christopher.
 
Thanks. You never know though, we could have another. Well, actually, we did, only it was a boy. If you come by, she’ll tell you it was a mistake, but, I only believe that so far. In any case, my father had five sons Caroline, and none of us named a boy after him. So when I got this little guy in my life, I named him after my father. Little Howie, we call him. He’s a real delight, now two and a half.
 
That’s great Christopher. 
 
Although, there’s still a chance we could have a Caroline. Don’t give up! You just never know. The missus says no, flat out, no way. In fact, she wants me to go under the knife–if you know what I mean. But I just can’t bring myself to do it. I mean, seems pretty drastic. What do you think? Another Caroline would be great eh? 
 
Laughing: Well yes, I suppose that would be good too, Mr. Wallace. 
 
Then again, we could have a boy, Caroline. Then I’d really be in trouble. I have no plans for another boy’s name. It seems so vain to name him after myself, you know what I mean? 
 
Ha! I’m sure you’ll come up with something if that happens Mr. Wallace. 
 
Yes, I don’t even want to think of the wife’s reaction if I knock her up again. I’m not getting any younger you know. Well, that’s too bad you’re not stopping by, Caroline. I really made sure to have things perfectly in order to make it as easy as possible for you. Are you sure you couldn’t? I have a big conference table and chairs where you can go over three or so years of receipts. I’ll serve coffee too! 
 
No. No. Mr. Wallace. Could you just send us a sample of the expenses, like maybe the five largest ones? 
 
Well, I suppose. I mean, most of my receipts are for pretty small stuff. I have one vehicle that’s dedicated to business. Unfortunately, I was in newspapers sales and creative destruction has killed off my niche so I’m moving on as of this week. 
 
Oh, that’s too bad Mr. Wallace. I know. Newspapers are all on-line now. Print is less in demand. 
 
Yes, that’s right Caroline. It’s the end of an era. To tell you the truth, I have mixed feelings about it. I spent 14 years flogging newspapers across Canada. At one time, I had more than a 150 reps working for us, ten managers, a dozen newspaper clients and seven regular account offices. I’m bittersweet about leaving. 
 
It must be terrible Christopher. I hope you find something else that works for you. 
 
I will Caroline. And when I do, I’ll make sure to keep proper records in case you want to come by. When I think of it, there was a couple of transmissions put into that vehicle, those are pretty big bills. Will those do? I mean, what can do to make your job easier today? If you won’t come by for an audit, how can I help you? 
 
Mr. Wallace, how about I send you a letter asking for the five largest expenses and a sample of one of your month’s expenses. Send me that and we should be good. 
 
Caroline, that doesn’t seem like much. Are you sure I can’t do more? 
 
Laughing: No Mr. Wallace, that should be fine. I’ll send out a letter today. 
 
OK. Gees, I was sitting here pen and paper in hand ready to write whatever you said but if you’ll send me a letter I won’t take notes. Darn efficient of you then Caroline. I’ll look for your letter and I’ll make sure to send off whatever you need by the end of the week. And if you need anything else, you just let me know. Is your contact information going to be in the letter? 
 
No. No. Thank you very much Christopher. You don’t need to do anything. Yes, my contact information will be there too. I’ll put it all in the letter and if you can just do that and we should be good. It was nice speaking with you today. 
 
It was super speaking with you too. Please call anytime. I’m more than happy if you do. Goodbye now.
 
Good bye then. If I need anything, I’ll let you know.  

 

 

©CKWallace, 2016, all rights reserved.

P.S. If you’d like to learn how to build immediate rapport with anyone you meet, let’s talk.

My Newspaper Finale

Christopher K Wallace Leave a comment
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I’m not sure why it is that the papers in Canada haven’t done more to survive. Clearly, they have things on their minds other than paid circulation—which is where I have worked for the last fourteen years. From a societal viewpoint, it’s already tragic that newspaper ownership has been allowed to concentrate in Canada the way it has, let alone what that means for those who operate as their vendors.

 Very few people will read this, even fewer will care. So many started their working careers selling or delivering newspapers that it’s worth a mention. It’s the passing of an era.

I’ve heard there are partially publicly funded newspapers in some Scandinavian countries. I’m told these seem to be working well enough, with sufficient legislation keeping the government’s nose out of editorial to allow the fundamental role newspapers play in their societies to continue. Unfortunately, Canada is so close to the US in ideology—with its reliance on letting the marketplace decide the viability of a product no matter its importance—which means it’s doubtful that we’d ever consider moving to that kind of model.

A malevolent stew of ingredients has been slow-cooking this part of the information sector for some time. These include the aforementioned ownership issue, in Canada an almost laughable consequence of precedence.

Detractors like to mention hubris, citing things like decisions made in the 90s to sell yesterday’s news. Though I wasn’t yet working as a full time vendor, having read at least one daily most days of my life, I remember at the time this was pivotal. It signaled something almost ungrateful, something that disconnected people emotionally from newspapers. As far as many were concerned, it was seen as breaking a pact with the public; we no longer shared the same-day news value.

It also was part of what left newspapers open to being beat in the marketplace by faster and more efficient assemblers of information. First Craigslist and later Kijiji obliterated their once great stranglehold on the classified ad, and then a plethora of online news products offering free content watered down the once mighty status of newspapers of all stripes.

The tradition of newspaper ownership insisting on using their platform to sway public opinion by backing favoured candidates during elections has also undermined credibility with a public that expects at least a modicum of neutrality on issues. That’s what customers tell me. I know this because my reps have been knocking on doors across Canada for more than a decade, and people tell us what they want or don’t want, but especially what they don’t.

I know. Editorial stance has a long tradition. I’m saying it was a bad one.

The list of gripes goes on. We weren’t swayed. Trust me when I say as vendors we developed a keen answer to every objection over the years. Despite all this, newspapers are still valued by a segment of the population. However, what I read is that when the market is allowed to determine the true value for newspaper products, the natural price falls to zero. That leaves us in a difficult position. At least in Canada, we have an economically worthless product that commands only a tiny fraction of the loyalty required from the general public to survive.

Speaking of which, I’ve been asking about loyalty programs since before 2009. I’ve talked with every circulation manager from Alberta to Ontario, and got a polite audience each time from well-intentioned folks hamstrung by decisions being made under an increasingly centralized chain of command. Any financial inducement to new subscribers by our sales teams has to be built into the price, making it far more than what your average consumer will pay. I’ve asked about using premiums from local advertisers to provide additional value to the print reader. We saw a short-lived sprinkling of green/organic trial coupons tried in Calgary and it worked very well, boosting sales; Edmonton did even less, and the other markets even less than that.

As soon as the Ipad came out, many predicted the newspaper’s days were numbered. Sure enough, half a dozen years later almost half of Canadian households have at least one. The drop in advertising post-2008-9 recession, the severity of of which had not been seen in more than half a century, ensured the print news at least, if not the whole sector, was in deep trouble.

 

The one day per week print paper might still have appeal, or a bundled print/digital product that came at a very low subscription rate. We’d need to get paid a good rate as vendors for both a weekend order and/or digital edition to survive. The Canadian newspapers responded by cutting our deal for one day orders even more. It seemed at the time as if they were petulantly insisting we give them what they want, or nothing, regardless of what the market demanded. I prefer to think it was just that they didn’t believe they had the money.

That first Christmas when tablets appeared, I picked up two of the first generation Ipads–one for the missus and one for my top account manager. I felt a little guilty about reading newspapers this way after being a loyal print reader for four decades. It took a couple more years before I picked up a Blackberry Playbook and began to read the free online edition of the National Post. I kept my daily print paper coming to the house until two years ago. Now I read the odd print paper out of nostalgia, if at all.

Because of the natural transition from print to digital occurring everywhere, newspapers didn’t see the benefit of paying much for digital customers at the door or kiosk. There was already a migrating wave of e-edition subscription enrolment as readers got rid of print. Perhaps that was sufficient to convince our newspaper clients they were doing well enough in that area, since they weren’t making much money from that type of subscriber anyway. These were readers they could deliver to practically for free online.

However, it also meant we were showing up at customer’s doors selling a format the reader had already divorced themselves from mentally. Many were grateful not to have to recycle all those newspapers, and the comments above represent just a sampling of the public’s negativity. We found that our reps had to be trained to such a high level that we’d soon lose them to competing jobs. Sales anywhere are trendy—we realize that. There aren’t many bible salesman around anymore either.

Regardless, if our newspaper client’s brand isn’t in front of the consumer in as many ways possible, both in print and digital, then I suppose the risk is we lose them to Google forever. That seems to be the case.

What was a fairly easy impulse buy at five or ten bucks a month for three months just ten years ago, rose to almost thirty per month for a six month deal and is now a commitment of twenty dollars per month, six months minimum. To ask a Canadian to fork over more than a hundred bucks for news they can get for free doesn’t fly, no matter how you dress it up.

For the past few years, we’ve been pushing our Canadian newspaper clients to adopt some of the practices of the US markets in which we still have decent sales, where there was enough competition to encourage different approaches. Bright spots emerged as a result of that collaboration. Cities where we sell a one day order bundled with digital for a very low monthly rate retain at 50% or better a year or more out. That’s pretty good for our business. Whether it’s good enough for everyone isn’t for me to decide. I note other markets are asking for our services south of the border. People seem to be willing to tolerate a one day paper with digital bundled in, if it’s priced inexpensively at five or ten dollars per month.

Unfortunately, Canada doesn’t seem willing or able to go that route, at least not yet. Of course, we can’t keep sales teams in the field while they decide. Just a few years ago, I had more than 150 reps working for up to ten managers in seven cities for up to a dozen newspaper clients. We were good at it because we looked after our people. The papers supported our efforts, and we felt more or less valued. We did our best to represent our newspaper clients with integrity and honour, proud to be part of its great history. However, over time, we’ve lost every manager and a steadily dwindling turnover of reps to the forces of creative destruction and an apathetic client who seems to be in the game for the ride downhill. I’m the last crew man standing in Canada from our company.

I, for one, would have been happy to spend the rest of my days flogging a product I believe in deeply. My grandfather had been a reporter in his youth, and my father got his writing start in Halifax as a cub reporter. Our family had the Le Droit, the Ottawa Citizen and, when it was still around, the Ottawa Journal, delivered to the house as I was growing up. I was a carrier for all three, and even did a stint for the Globe and Mail, rising at 5 am and delivering papers by bike all over the south end of Ottawa. I got my start doing doors selling subscriptions on Saturdays after finishing my route.

Every Canadian city where we once held flourishing accounts have now closed: Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Hamilton and Toronto, all gone. Smaller communities we’d often go into once or twice a year to boost circulation haven’t had crews or kiosk visits for years. Though there was some grumbling in the last few years about our service, and about me personally not being able to deliver, I hold no hard feelings towards anyone who was in the business, or the few of them who remain. I’m not a miracle worker and I did my best. My experience working with dedicated newspaper folks all over Canada has been positive, and I still hold many of them in high regard.

Some have left the business like rats swimming away from a sinking ship; some have nobly disembarked with heads held high… and some have been forced to walk the plank. My best to each one of them.

It is the wonderful reps and managers I worked with over the years that were by far the best part of the job. I know I’ve had an impact on many of them, just as each of them in their own way was able to teach me something. I was also proud to represent our company, rising through the ranks to the top Canadian job. I learned so much from my experiences and a lot of us will stay in touch. Recently, one of my old Vancouver managers told me about his girlfriend’s sister’s husband who worked for me over a decade ago. I don’t really remember him but the name is familiar. He says he remembers many of my motivational speeches, with one thing in particular that has stuck: happiness is a decision. A fitting thought to end on.

So it’s with some regret and misgiving that I won’t be in the business any longer. I wish the whole industry the best of luck as it finds its new low, or morphs into whatever it needs to become to survive. I’ll be pulling for this important guarantor of democracy and free speech from the sidelines.

Last person to leave turns out the lights.

 P.S. Need help with something? Check me out at ckwallace.com or fill out this form and we’ll talk.

 

Christopher K. Wallace

 Senior Vice President, Canada
Circulation Marketing Inc.
© CKWallace 2016, all rights reserved

Anxiety’s riddle

Christopher K Wallace 4 Comments

 

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Anxiety and stress are good things. It means your body and mind is working as it should.

I like to tell people who are anxious that they should be thankful for their anxiety because in days of old, they’d be less likely to be eaten by a bear.

It’s also a signal that you care about something. After all, if you didn’t give a hoot, there’d be no reason to feel anxious. You have no vested interest in feeling fearful about something that you have no feelings for.

Anxiety and stress: caring emotion.

There you have it: both can be a good thing, and it means you care. Something has meaning for you. We are meaning-makers: we search for meaning our whole lives. You’ve found some of it.

I wonder if Olympic athletes are fearful before they compete, or if actors feel anxious on opening night? What about those who have to give a speech in public, folks like politicians, academics, even Tony Robbins?

All of them feel it before they go on.

Top performers in every field you can imagine feel nerves and anxiety when they are challenged. I did my best exams in college when I felt my most anxious. Executives in companies and people in everyday life feel it. We all do. There are people right now all over the world feeling anxiety and stress. You are not alone. It happens to everyone.

When you ask people who have excelled at something, you rarely hear “it was nothing, no big deal,” unless they’re bullshitting, or trying to calm themselves.  No. Usually, you hear how they wondered if they’d pull it off. We hear about their fears, their trepidation. They might downplay something, probably so they don’t get a big head, or just to put things into perspective. But almost always, they use determination and perseverance to stick at something despite how awful it might have felt at times.

Determination and perseverance.

It’s like the sapling growing in the forest: when the wind blows it bends deeply, opening tiny cracks in its bark that quickly fill in with new growth. In this way, it thickens until it becomes as solid as the giant oak it was destined to be.

Anxiety and stress can be our wind, there to make us grow.

Here’s where it gets interesting. When we are pushed, we often find a deeper level of creativity or resourcefulness that we can call upon, and we often do things we never thought possible when under stress.

Everyone has heard the story of someone lifting a car off someone trapped underneath after an accident, or braving flames to rescue someone in the nick of time, acting without thinking out of fear. Being scared shitless can make us push back. As a kid, I ran my fastest getting away from that bully that was going to kick my ass; it made me go like the wind. We all have times we can remember where we rose to challenges in an unforeseen way. While such heroics sometimes make the news, all of us have a hero inside us coming up with new ways to overcome obstacles and burdens–often energized by fear.

You can use that stress and anxiety to search and find answers that you perhaps didn’t have before. The discomfort is there to propel you forward into action, often new action. Not to fear it, but, instead, to use it.

Here’s a suggestion: use three Ds to handle anxious thoughts. First detect a fear producing thought. Then detach from it–making no particular judgment about it–just that it’s there. Then detour around it by leaving it to hang and disappear on its own, realizing that you are not your thoughts. You know how as wee kids we blew bubbles?  Thoughts are like bubbles that hang in the air for a moment and then burst. They just come and go; some are useful, some are useless, some are freaky shit. Detect, detach and detour.

I do something similar with my feelings. Allow yourself to feel them as temporary physical sensations, without allowing them to define you. You are not your feelings either. Instead, look to how you can put your body to good use in that moment, in a way that allows you to live truer. How can you take your emotional energy and use it to live what you value, to pursue a goal, to meet your desires?

What if you find yourself with big anxiety? I’ve had that. It’s a bitch. I’d get a big pain right in my chest, in the sternum. First time it happened, I thought I was having a heart attack. Friends took me in to hospital where I got hooked up to all the machines and had blood work done. Old doc, about seventy, came out and told me my gullet was flipping. To me that meant there was something seriously wrong as I imagined some part of my chest tied in a life-threatening knot. I wondered how the heck I did that, and would I need surgery?

Seeing the dumb look on my face, doc tells me, “You’re having an anxiety attack. You can go home now.”

What the…? Anxiety attack? Me? Isn’t that for girls?

I had a bunch of them until I learned how to get control of my body. Another old guy, this time a psychologist-priest I knew, told me to go for a run next time it happens. He said you can’t feel anxious and run at the same time, you’ll fall down if you do. There’s something about putting one foot in front of the other at any speed that alleviates the tension. The deeper breathing helps too. Sure enough, within a few blocks, the tightness in my solar plexus would dissipate.

It worked like a charm. After a few months, I never got them again. That was thirty years ago.

What’s interesting is looking back at those episodes the same principals apply. I used my high anxiety to get moving, first by running off the tension and then to make huge adjustments in my life. I had just given up a ten year heroin and cocaine habit. I had a three year old son we just brought out of hiding after stashing him with relatives for a few months. A bunch of my friends and “co-workers” had been killed or died recently, and even I’d been shot, stabbed and had an arm broken with a bat over the course of a few months. Now I was in school full time studying behavioural sciences and working as a doorman/bartender at night. So my anxiety meant I cared. My stress was there to push me forward.  So is yours.

Anxiety and stress is just part of your energy, a deep wellspring of power you can harness for good. It’s a signal to find a way to live according to your own version of value-based happiness.

And here’s perhaps its greatest gift: It can put you into the zone. That state of flow that represents your best level of confidence.

Confidence isn’t a feeling,  at least not at first. No. Confidence is an action. Its Latin root is con fidere: with trust. Confidence is an act of trust. It’s acting with the highest degree of trust in you. More often than not, it is fear that puts you there.

Here are three ingredients to getting into your zone. But first, here’s what I mean.

I used to play a lot of pool. Snooker, nine ball, you name it. When I was in the zone, there could have been five hundred people watching, twenty-five people watching, or no one watching, it didn’t matter. I’d prowl around the green baize cloth, my eyes focused so intently that I wouldn’t even notice my surroundings, only what was under the lights. Commanding concentration shrank my world down to the size of the 6 x 12 or 4.5 x 9 foot table. The key to pool is controlling the white ball and I’d feel as if I could put it within a quarter inch of anywhere on the table, as if I had it on a string. If my opponent spoke, I wouldn’t acknowledge or hear them beyond what information they could convey that I needed to control the table. Time would seemingly stand still; I’d feel no hunger. And it was fear that would put me there because before every big money game or tournament match, I’d feel anxious to the point of shaking throughout my body.

The first zone ingredient is to master the fundamentals of whatever it is you are involved with. I’d practice twenty hours per week at my pool game, taking on players all over southern Ontario back in the day. I even got coaching from Canada Fats, Tony Lemay.

Second is to focus one hundred percent on the task at hand. At every college or university I attended, I sat in the front of the class and took the best notes possible, completely absorbed in the lessons of the day. That allowed me to excel.

And third, try the impossible. When you allow fear to put you into the deep trance of your zone, calling upon everything you know and have practiced, creative solutions emerge that you never knew existed. I’ve made impossible shots at the table while in my zone. When pro ball players learned to block Michael Jordan’s jump shot, he came up with the fade-away jumper during a game to compensate, sending the ball over defenders to the net. Somehow, acts of confidence are summoned from within flow, often surprising even yourself.

If you can see fear and stress and anxiety as your body’s way of signaling you have extra energy to devote to living according to what you value, suddenly a force that once held you back is replaced by a power that brings out your best efforts.

Before you know it, fear, stress and anxiety is replaced by action and confidence.

What a gift this thing we call fear.

P.S. Have a fear you need help with? See me at ckwallace.com, or  contact me here and we’ll talk

 

cue

 

© CKWallace 2016, all rights reserved

ckwallace.com

photo credit: ckwallace.com

Top: The Acorn Tree. A large white oak that has been growing near my parents home in Heron Park, Ottawa, since long before me.

Bottom:  combination snooker and pool cue. Four shafts, three extensions fit in the custom case. I traveled to Montreal to meet and be measured by Marcel Jacques himself somewhere around 1990. In his day, Marcel was one of the best custom cue makers in the world.