Farming fun:

About the time when old Clifford Sifton was lighting a fire under Ottawa’s politicians to settle the west before the Americans did it for them, the advertising agencies of the day hyped it up to make migration into western Canada very attractive. 

They painted western Canada as a land of milk and honey and abundant wheat crops with all kinds of space for mega-ranching and cattle herding. Ads and posters showed spectacular four-colour scenes from prairie skies to majestic Rockies, all aimed at firing up the imaginations of land-hungry immigrants.

As we westerners already know, we’re here because our grandparents were among all those who took the bait. It worked not only on East European would-be land barons and cattle kings, but also on many members of the West European gentry, some of them with the means to properly finance such dreams.

Manor houses and country clubs ready to service upscale communities were initiated in a few choice locations. This was not exactly par for the course with the average homesteaders who arrived with nothing more than big dreams and hand tools to dig, clear bush and build very basic sod shelters for the family. 

Since railway tracks were necessary to access produce everywhere the homesteads went, many looked for work laying track to earn money to buy oxen and horses.

The British gentry who thought they could carry on their upscale lifestyle with saddle horses, fox hounds, rare vintages and polo ponies in the vast expanses of the new land did not anticipate what they would encounter by way of climatic conditions. 

They failed to consider that there was no warm Gulf Stream current moderating temperatures on the bald Prairie. It took only one or two winter seasons to inspire many of them to gather up whatever belongings were portable and scurry back to the familiar neighbourhoods of the old country.

Most of them did not hang around long enough to realize the full potential of the new lands overseas. In order to do that, it was necessary for the newcomers to have a fertile imagination and enough motivation to stay put and tough it out.

Those who stayed were generally too busy to do all of the things they wanted to do. Priorities included the need to establish schools, churches, Postal service, organize municipal government and do everything necessary to build functional communities. That was what my grandpa Casimir Bielecki had to do, and he did all those things successfully. 

His sons, Carl, Steve, John and Joe had more time at their discretion to do the things Casimir had little time for, but the onset of the Great Depression brought their rapidly evolving lifestyle to an untimely recess as credit dried up and prices for farm produce hit rock bottom. 

My father, Steve, sold a cow for $5–-that’s one whole cow, not a cheap cut of meat. He shipped a train carload of barley to the Lakehead terminals, took a $100 deposit and was informed a week later that he owed for the delivery.

That's how Generations 1 and 2 fared. We are members of Generation 3, our children Generation 4, and so on. As the years drift by, memories of our friends and relations tend to become more refined as the experience of years snaps past events into clearer focus.

Memories have a way to become more enhanced and some of my favorites are those of my father’s youngest brother, my uncle Joe. That is because Joe Bielecki is the uncle I interacted with more than with the others over the years. 

Uncle Joe liked to read and he recognized my own need to read and my interest in things technological. He passed on his mechanical magazines to me after he had read his fill. These included Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Science and Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated. He picked these up at one of the stores in Tiny, SK, a nearby CN whistle stop with about three grain elevator companies doing business with the local farmers. 

Stores in Tiny at that time were operated by Gushulak and Cymbalisty. They were there to serve the farmers who hauled their grain to the elevators and picked up their groceries and dry goods on the way home. 

While all stores were general in nature, these small country shops were the convenience stores of their day. The real stores, both department and otherwise, were in Canora, the nearby rail centre.

When the railways were built, these little whistle stops with grain elevators sprang up about every ten miles, just far enough apart to accommodate farmers hauling a double or triple box wagon load of grain pulled by a pair of draft horses. The one at Tiny was within comfortable distance by bicycle for uncle Joe to do his magazine and book shopping.

This was the late ‘30s and early ‘40s when people were still coping with the results of the Great Depression which cut off credit and wiped out a significant portion of the gains the early pioneer farmers had made. It became necessary for them to give up their tractors and Model Ts to fall back into survival mode with horses and buggies. 

Being forced to abandon his Titan tractor, uncle Carl, the eldest brother in the family, took to raising beautiful Clydesdale draft horses with reddish fur, blonde manes and feathery pasterns on their oversize hooves that made them look as though they were forever wearing their heavy winter boots.

Uncle Joe took another route. He started raising Hackneys. That’s the fancy high-stepping horses the queen uses to tow her ornate, gold-trimmed carriage on state occasions. While he had no gold-trimmed carriage, Uncle Joe was nevertheless going to travel in style.

He acquired a pure-bred champion stud, Black Diamond, to sire his herd. Beautiful horse. His services were in much demand among local farmers. When Uncle Joe rented out the stud’s services, somehow the word got around and the local farmers gathered to watch the nuptials. 

Why, is anybody’s guess, but a good theory is that the horses’ reproductive equipment, both male and female, resembles closely the human equivalent, only larger, and the farmers at that time had no high-definition big screen TV nor portable telephones to inject a little diversion into their spare moments.

Uncle Joe took his status as a gentleman farmer seriously. Besides raising Hackneys, he also had a wide variety of pigeons, including rollers, tumblers, homers, fantails, and probably spinners, or whirlers, etc. His only problem with these was the Peregrine falcons, whose favorite prey is doves, close relatives of the pigeons. 

In time, the pigeons learned that a good way to avoid the falcons’ attacks was to dive for the earth and start walking. The falcons evolved to attack in the air and didn’t know what to do with a bird that chose to walk, so they landed and walked along behind, in the hope that their intended dinner would decide to take off.

On more than one occasion on the way to or from school, we kids amused ourselves watching pigeons walking across the black summer fallow fields with a hungry peregrine marching along behind in lockstep.

On winter weekends, when the snow in nearby fields was just right, Uncle Joe would come and pick me up driving a fast team of Hackneys hitched to an articulated sleigh with a two-level box. Concealed within the box, crouched on a layer of straw, were three dogs: Smokey, a tall greyhound, and two smaller, not so swift, but much more deadly pit bulls.

If the snow layer was no deeper than a foot or so, and temperature not too low, we would head out across the fields until we spotted a coyote. That seldom took longer than a few minutes and at that point, Uncle Joe would prompt Smokey to have a peek. 

The huge hound would raise his head over the level of the box and scan the indicated scene. When he spotted the coyote–-usually a black dot on the snowy horizon–-he would bound out of the sleigh box and take off in a straight line for the coyote.

With Smokey well on his way, uncle Joe turned the two killers loose and they scrambled out of the box and immediately fanned out, one to either side of the hound’s trajectory. This worked well when the coyote decided to turn either one way or the other, in which case one of the pit bulls would be upon him in short order.

Hiyaah! The Hackneys would accelerate into a galloping mode and take off in the same general direction. We’d grab onto some solid part of the sleigh box and hang on. The chase was on!

Smokey’s bounds were a measured 22 ft between touchdowns, so he covered a lot of distance and closed on the unfortunate coyote in short order. The big hound was not a killer. He would simply overtake the coyote and knock him off his stride. As the coyote turned to defend himself, the killers would be upon him. The end was quick and merciless. One less coyote for the farmers to worry about.

This is not exactly the type of fox hunting the Brits expected to be engaged in, with a couple of dozen baying Beagles harassing a fox, but it was damned efficient and useful to the farmers who tried to raise livestock and poultry without having to share with the local predators.

And it was fun. Bloody, but fun. Something to do which I appreciated during my high school years. I spent parts of the occasional weekend with Uncle Joe and the memories that were generated survive to this day.

Smokey provided plenty of action. Uncle Joe told me about one occasion when the hound took off on his own and tackled a wolf and came back needing some patching up. Another time, the adventurous hound took off all by himself to tackle a coyote which turned out to be an amorous female and wound up coming home much later with a smile on his face, but looking quite apologetic for his impulsive behavior.

We speculated that it is entirely possible that somewhere in that part of the prairies is a sub species of extremely tall coyotes that can outrun a dirt bike.

It ought to be quite obvious that Joe Bielecki was a man with a lively imagination who did what he could to realize the full potential of what life had to offer in Canada’s early west. He was a fun guy and I was lucky enough to share some of his activities with him.

His mechanical magazines had a hand in shaping my future, as well. When, years later, I joined the business press division at MacLean Hunter in Toronto, I found immediate success as editor of Canadian Automotive Trade Magazine, Automotive Service Data Book and the Car Life section in Maclean’s Magazine.

I wound up my writing career doing technology articles, some international award winners among them.

 

Global Warming:

The first cold snap of the season followed by double-digit warm front is as good a time as any to talk about global warming.

Is our planet undergoing a warming trend? Didn't feel like it a couple of days ago, with the wind chill reaching minus 17 here in the middle of November in normally balmy southern Ontario.

But that’s just the ups and downs of local weather and has nothing to do with climatic shifts. Geologists tell us that at one time there was a sheet of ice a couple of miles thick where Toronto now sits. One theory says that its sheer weight crunched the earth’s crust down to the depth of Niagara Falls to create the Niagara Escarpment. 

Then it began to thaw. The gradual melt, according to the geological sleuths, has been happening over a variously-estimated 10,000 years. Over at least 9,900 of those years, the thaw happened without automobiles, coal-fired hydro generating plants and all the poisonous industrial emissions modern society is accused of generating. The people making these accusations are the global warming cheerleaders.

Researchers in the terrestrial sciences tell us that the Ice Age we are now emerging from is only the most recent of several they could trace back through millions of years. There were no reckless human industrial conspiracies then. There was no American economy with its seething industrial might and power generation, no China introducing new coal-fired hydro plants almost on a monthly basis, nor India with its rapidly accelerating industrial growth. If Canada’s notorious Tar Sands were exposed at all, they were an important destination for aborigines seeking pitch to patch the seams of their birch bark canoes.

But none of this seems to deter the hyperventilating zealots who have turned global warming into a religious cult almost as virulent as lunatic-fringe Islam. The planet is warming up and it’s all due to the generation of thousands of tons of greenhouse gases is their mantra. 

The greenhouse gas they are referring to is carbon dioxide, which happens to be the vital ingredient plants use to convert sunlight energy into sugars: i.e. food. Without carbon dioxide, life could not have evolved at all on this planet. 

If this gang's negative view of carbon dioxide makes no sense to you, don’t worry. Logic is not a vital part of their head space. These youngsters from the chaotic end of our social spectrum will not be deterred from belief in their own negative sloganeering.

I can even recall when this global warming propaganda was launched. It was initiated by Soviet planetary probe Venera back in ‘83. After many tries, Venera finally succeeded in descending all the way down to the surface of Venus and sending back colour photos and pressure and temperature data of the hell-like surface conditions in the brief time before it melted.

The event disappointed all the science fiction fans who were used to reading fanciful stories about Venusian adventures with fictional heroes like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. These tales were almost always enhanced by comic art showing beautiful, scantily-clad humanoid female inhabitants. 

Before Venera, cloud-shrouded Venus, second brightest object after the moon in the night sky, was regarded, somewhat hopefully, as a habitable terrestrial twin, inhabited by friendly humanoids. All this made sense at a time before we learned Venus was orbiting short of our star’s Goldilocks zone.

Naturally, this new information was a huge disappointment to scientists and science fiction fans. Totally ignoring the fact that planet Venus was about one-third the distance closer to the Sun than Terra, various scientific types began to speculate that the heat that fried Venera must have been generated by the Greenhouse Effect.

They speculated that this was caused by a set of conditions where the thick cloud cover blocks the radiation of surface temperatures back out into space, thus making the planet hotter and hotter......and it could happen right here on Terra, they said. The Greenhouse Effect theory was born.

Right away, the media jumped on it and speculated that indeed, it might be happening even as we speak. They ran in every direction with this speculative analysis, hyping it up to sell shampoos, sanitary napkins, toilet paper and hair club products for men. Mesmerized viewers bought the media hype wholesale. 

CBC’s The Nature of Things added Global Warming to its growing list of dire events we should lose sleep over. As usual, David Suzuki upgraded the stress level by adding stern warnings that it may already be too late to do anything about it. CBC set out to beat Nova, Nature and similar documentaries trying to out-hype each other for the viewers’ undivided attention and an increased share of the advertising revenue.

Al Gore wrote a compelling book about it which is about as factual as you’d expect from a US politician with an agenda and waited for the profits to roll in while flying all over to preach the message personally to the converted. All this was eagerly covered in breathless detail by the sensation-mongering media. They just couldn't get enough of it.

Many of these documentaries include extensive quotes by various scientific types claiming that there might indeed be some merit to the argument. This includes the group from Australia who were going to celebrate last Christmas among suitably snowy scenery by hiring a charter to take them to Antarctica. 

They set out to confirm global warming by measuring the loss of ice over the last 100 years. The measurements had initially been taken and recorded by an Antarctic explorer a hundred years earlier, so, given that time span, the task to confirm global warming should have been a slam dunk, right? A lot of ice ought to have melted in 100 years if the planet was indeed warming.

Well, it didn't quite work out like that. To begin with, their ship got stuck in the ice about 70 km farther out than the explorer was able to achieve 100 years earlier. Ice-breakers they called up to break them loose got stuck a significant distance even further out. Finally, in desperation, they were lifted out by helicopters from China. Exactly how long their charter boat and ice breakers stayed stuck went unreported.

What did they blame this fiasco on? Well, Global warming, of course. Believe it or not, they attempt to save face and justify this string of blunders by blaming it all on global warming.

Nobody appears to be asking when the alleged warming trend is expected to stop and turn around, heading back up to another terrestrial snowball, or if it has already made that U-turn. That would be too logical a question.

As a matter of fact, the question of whether our planet was headed back toward another ice age was posed by one of Toronto's newspapers during a mid-'70s ice-pellet blizzard. But that was before the media feeding frenzy that turned the Greenhouse Effect theory into a doomsday cult.

These new cultists are willing to completely ignore the effects of barely understood sun cycles and the planet's estimated 500 active volcanoes pumping countless cubic miles of emissions into the planetary biosphere, while blaming automotive exhausts and hydro smokestacks. As we already know, logic is not their strong suit.  

Meanwhile, the clever Chinese must be chuckling up their sleeves after having signed an agreement with the Americans to cut down on their emissions by the year 2030--guaranteed.

It is easy to speculate at this point that the Chinese see our global warming enthusiasts and our social consciousness that accepts such wild theorizing as a not particularly bright bunch that might be kidded along, but should be approached only with great caution.

Note: Another figure on the number of active volcanoes on this planet offered lately is 1,500. No doubt there will be other stats from time to time. Take your pick.

Cowboys and Indians:

Canada’s aboriginal problems aren’t new. I was personally made aware of them one moonless night away back in the middle of the last century while stuck in the mud on the old #5 highway in Saskatchewan.

Following a rainy weekend, I was trying to get back to my rural school site on a Sunday night in May. The spring of ‘53 was particularly wet in our area, the gravel roads soggy and only marginally passable to wheeled traffic. 

The old highway, following the 90-degree survey lines of 1905, was yet to be grasped at both ends and snapped straight, parallel to the CN Railway running cross-country in a straight line from Winnipeg to Saskatoon and points west. It was still waiting to be paved in the years that followed.

At one particularly sloppy stretch between Canora and Mikado, the Pontiac slid into a set of deep ruts and bottomed out. About 100 yds ahead was another vehicle stuck on the other shoulder at the edge of the watery ditch.

My only choice was to walk to a nearby farm yard belonging to an acquaintance and ask for a tow out of the muddy patch, but it was past 10 pm and the lights in the farm house were out, a sure sign that the family was asleep. That would have to wait until morning.

A farm truck hummed into view, veered over to a different set of ruts and roared on by without easing up on the gas pedal. The driver was not about to reduce momentum to help anyone, which was probably a smart, if not exactly friendly, move on his part. 

The driver of the stuck vehicle up ahead got out and walked back. It was Ray, a family acquaintance from my childhood in the Elbow of the Assiniboine. 

Ray was an Indian from the Key reserve. He was a graduate of the Mission school at the northern edge of Kamsack and, contrary to popular mythology, was not known to voice any complaints about it. 

He joined the Canadian army at the onset of the war and participated in the liberation of Holland, helping to wipe the stubborn Nazis off the muddy Scheldt Estuary. In the process, he earned himself a chest full of citations for bravery above and beyond the call of duty. 

He was fortunate enough to return alive with all of his body parts intact and with the dream of investing his military credits in a modern dairy farm on the reserve. That much I knew of the man. 

After a short pow-wow we both agreed it would not be good ethics to awaken a sleeping farm family. It would be best to wait until morning and I offered him the use of the back seat in my car because he said he had five other men from the reserve in his car with him. They got as far as this mud hole on a return trip to Yorkton.

He walked back to the car and yanked a couple of fur robes out from under his passengers. He offered me one, climbed into the back seat and made himself comfortable in the other. 

We got to talking before sleep overtook us and he told me the sad tale of what happened to his dairy farm dream. 

“I got some pure bred Holstein breeding stock and set up the proper pasture and shelters for the cattle,” he said. “But it wasn’t long before those *&^%$# Indians began cutting the barbed wire and pulling up the fence posts. They turned the cattle loose to wander out all over the reserve. In less than a couple of years it got to the point where it became unprofitable for me to carry on.”

It was a sad tale and I asked Ray why any sane person would do such malicious damage.

“Sane person? Hey, we’re talking about those @*&^%$# Indians here,” he said. “They didn’t want to see me succeed in the white man’s world.”

Being unfamiliar with aboriginal politics, I could not understand how such an attitude might develop on a reserve and said so.

“I guess these guys were happy with their Indian status and were not about to risk making any changes to their way of life,” Ray continued. 

“So they did what they could to keep me from spoiling things for them. These guys are happy with their regular pogey which they get for doing nothing at all and that suits them fine. As they see it, last thing they need is an Indian neighbour showing some signs of initiative.”

It was about midnight when, warm in those comfortable fur robes, we were lulled to dreamland to the soothing chorus of frogs in nearby ponds and puddles. Secure in the knowledge that only a madman, a country school teacher or a carful of Indians would be crazy enough to use that muddy highway at night, we drifted off to sleep there in the middle of the road.

When we awakened in bright sunlight, farmer Phil was up and about and we got him to start up the old McCormick-Deering farm tractor and haul us out onto firmer gravel. The mud had chilled and stiffened enough during the night to provide reasonable traction. I paid for the tow and we were soon on our way. 

I got to my farm school cottage on time and was able to start the day in presentable shape after firing up the wood stove and heating a kettle of warm water to wash and shave. 

My lesson plans with 42 students in 10 grades would keep me busy until 4:00 pm. After that, I was free to think about what Ray had said and try to find some logic in it.

It was obvious that Ray’s attempt to establish a nutritional food source for the families in the Key reserve away back in the 1940s was killed by mindless home-grown activists of the day. It’s a 70-year-old story and, if you follow the news, paying particular attention to present day Indian activism, nothing has changed much. 

Today, in the white man’s world, that kind of behaviour is described as being pro active. Years of mindless sloganeering is selectively referred to by the hooded activists and amateur anarchists as affirmative action. 

Back in my youth, we had few delusions regarding such activity. We knew them as simple-minded s--t disturbers. 

Intelligent Universe:

None of the documentaries or articles I have viewed or read so far have mentioned that the universe might be considered sentient or intelligent. 

An argument can be made. Think of it as follows:

–-A variously estimated four and a half billion years ago, an immense hydrogen cloud in an outlying arm of the Milky Way galaxy condensed into a stellar mass large enough to spontaneously ignite. The nuclear furnace of the Sun was lit. 

--The Sun’s gravitational mass drew into its accretion disc elements of interstellar debris generated within short-lived giant stars that preceded it, went nova, blasting into surrounding space all the chemical elements that were fused from hydrogen within their nuclear furnaces. 

--Our solar system of planets and satellites condensed from leftover debris generated by such events, and those elements became the building blocks of the eight planets, more than a hundred satellites and swarms of asteroids in our star system. 

--Conditions friendly to life were created on at least one planet-–Terra. 

--It follows then that the elements generated within giant stars eventually evolved into intelligent life on this planet. We, as intelligent beings, evolved from that matrix of star dust. 

--A universe that evolves intelligent creatures is, by definition, intelligent, that intelligence arising from the ultimate manifestation of the underlying principle of all life–-natural selection--the binary code of evolution.

--As part of that creation, we have to conclude that the universe, in all of its awe-inspiring beauty, is also intelligent and aware of itself, because we, as constituents of it, are having this discussion. 

--When we focus telescopes such as the Hubble on endless star fields, nebulae and galaxies in all of their majestic glory, we are looking at Creation itself, the basic processes that gave life to our species, and that creation is intelligent. If you’re looking for God, you might be inspired at this point to stop and think about it.

--Darwin has explained creation to us and Hubble has shown us pictures of it that surpass anything one might view in the Sistine Chapel or the Dome on the Rock, wonders that drew our eyes toward the heavens before we evolved the technology to actually view them in detail.

Paulo Yaztrzembski:

Nobody in my recollection ever went out of his way to wax poetic about what a nice guy my maternal grandfather, Paulo Yaztrzembski, was. 

I just heard a lot of stories from my uncles and aunts about his strict and demanding ways. It was mostly bellyaches about chores and curfews, the usual stuff that concerns rebellious kids.

Yaztrzembski. That might not be exactly the way his family name translated from the Cyrillic script, but close enough. It was hard to pronounce even for Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles, and many of his neighbours who arrived from eastern Europe roughly about the same time, took the liberty to simply abbreviate it to Yastrob, which translates to Hawk in some of the east European dialects. It was darkly hinted that for some, Yastrob could have been not so much a name as an allusion to his character.

Not that he cared. He came to Canada around the turn of the 20th Century, bringing with him my grandma Anastasia, and a generous measure of the will to succeed. Here was a brand new country with lots of farmland up for grabs and opportunities unavailable to him back in Europe. He was not about to squander the chance to make his private dreams and ambitions into reality here in the new world.

This was the time when MP Clifford Sifton from Manitoba brought to the Canadian parliament’s attention the fact that if we don’t settle the west, the Yanks will soon do it for us on their own terms. Parliament's answer was to get the survey teams going all over the west and offer 160-acre homesteads at $10 to anyone willing to settle and work the soil. 

$10 sounds like not much today, but in the year 1900, it was worth about $150 in today's dollars, so it wasn't small change.

They advertised it in Europe. That brought a wave of would-be land barons from the European countries, Paulo Yaztrzembski among them, steaming across the Atlantic.

He had what it takes. A high-energy personality, he worked hard and thought smart, expecting the same of the people around him. My mother, the eldest of his seven children, was born in a wheat field where her mother was helping with the harvest. Grandma simply wrapped the new baby in her apron and walked home across the stubble field. 

No, he wasn't a cruel SOB or a wife beater. This was the year 1905 in the Eastern reaches of the Saskatchewan prairie and that’s the way time was prioritized if the gardens and crops, representing a full year's work, were to be gathered and stowed safely before the early snowfall.

It did not take grandpa long to acquire as much land as he could cultivate and the farm machinery he needed to cultivate it. As the years went by, he was one of the first among his group of arrivals to own a brand new McLaughlin Buick convertible. His home was wired for electricity and there was a powerful Windcharger out on the hill and large glass batteries in the basement. A steel wind turbine pumped water for the livestock. Everything was high tech for its day.

Contrary to what our young environmentalists think, wind turbines were not invented by Al Gore and David Suzuki. They've been around for a couple of thousand years in one form or another.

All of that happened before the US stock market crash which precipitated the Great Depression back in ‘29. That event put the brakes on the headlong rush to prosperity as credit became scarce or non-existent, but it was not in grandpa’s character to give up. With energy undiminished, he picked up the pieces and set about to rebuild his little empire.

His farming community was centered on a meeting hall they called Pretty View, an aptly named location overlooking the scenic Assiniboine watershed to the south. In time, it became a nest of Communist sympathizers, people who were moved to blame the free market economy in the new world for the stock market crash. 

Having had their plans for a successful life derailed, it did not take much effort for an aspiring Communist party politician to convince the local farmers of the merits of Karl Marx’s Utopian visions as relief from the world of shattered dreams they now lived in.

You’d think an industrious dude like my grandpa would have seen through such propaganda as an economic vision that failed to take human nature into account and, as a result, was destined to fail right from the start. Apparently, he did not. It was one of the straws people clutched at when all they had worked for slipped away from their grasp with US stock market manipulations that had nothing at all to do with farming.

But the political climate had little bearing on how Grandpa’s friends and family regarded him. Mostly, hand-me-down information has it that they saw him as a tough guy who demanded maximum effort from people around him and tolerated no nonsense. While there is no actual evidence that he went around looking for a fight, neither was he especially known to back down from physical violence when he thought the occasion warranted it. 

My own memories of him are those of a serious, not particularly warm, thoughtful personality with a neat handlebar moustache. Clearly, he was a man on a mission, and not the easiest guy to get to know, but he did give me books to read. It was mostly political literature based on communist theory, matters of less than zero concern to my grade school mind. 

My father, whose views on communism differed somewhat from my grandpa’s, kindly offered to file that literature for me, did so, and promptly forgot where. It mattered little, since I never asked.

What inspired grandpa to pick me from among a couple dozen of his grandchildren as the beneficiary for his books still provides me food for thought in my most private moments. Usually, I catch myself wondering if I should feel proud or guilty.

Grandpa died young, before I was in my teens, and before I could actually get to know him on more than a superficial level. The high physical demands he put upon himself were the most probable contributing factor to his early demise. He was laid to rest in the Tolstoy cemetery north of Verigin, SK. Anastasia joined him there about 35 years later. Their joint tombstone is red granite.

Family photos of grandpa show him looking very much like some pictures of Wyatt Earp, the US marshal made famous by the gunfight at the OK Corral. That image was enhanced somewhat by whispered rumours of a six gun in grandpa’s possession. I do not recall any talk of him ever threatening anyone or actually using it, but my childish imagination led me to wonder if by any chance it was a Colt 45 Peacemaker and if he ever wore it in an open leather holster slung low on his right hip.

Tough guy? Sure, why not? Those were tough times. 

But there was another side to this man. My mother liked to recall an incident when she was a little girl playing with her second in line, her younger brother, my uncle John. While playing in the farmyard’s wooded perimeter, Josie and John discovered a red squirrel’s storehouse. It was late fall and they found this hollow tree trunk filled with hazel nuts. 

Bonanza! The annual fall chore of gathering a winter’s supply of hazel nuts to munch on before a warm fire in January took a couple of weeks for an individual to fill a burlap bushel bag. Hazel nuts grew everywhere in the forest underbrush and you had to know where to look. Here was a batch all ready picked. John’s straw hat was not big enough to contain all the nuts and they also filled their pockets, according to my mother. 

They brought their find back to the farmhouse and showed it off proudly to their parents.

“Where did you get those?” asked grandpa.

“We found them in a hollow tree out behind those grain bins,” said my mother.

“You take those nuts and put them right back where you found them,” he scolded. "Those poor squirrels worked hard to put in a supply for the winter. What are they going to eat if you steal their food?”

Thus having received their marching orders, Josie and John went and scooped the nuts right back into the hole in the tree trunk.

Tough guy? Wild West-type character? Maybe. But also, beneath that tough and unyielding exterior, there was a genuine streak of compassion few individuals other than Anastasia, Josie, John and the red squirrels were able to access. 

Grandpa wasn't about to see a hard-working little red rodent suffer the fate he himself was destined to endure about ten years later with the Great American stock market crash. 

(Note: The red squirrel is about half the size of the black and grey squirrels in Toronto.)

Despite all the stories of demands and uncompromising effort, that one incident alone inspires in me feelings on the warm side of ambivalent for my grandpa with the unpronounceable name, Paulo Yaztrzembski.

Gay Pride:

Gay pride?

What’s that all about?

Our sexuality is not an achievement. It’s a condition. It’s something we’re born with, and should include either male or female physical parts. What's there to be proud of?

Apart from the fact that our religious background considers pride a sin, if our sexuality is all we have to be proud of, it’s really not much, is it? 

Upon puberty, most of us become aware that we share our sexual equipment with roughly 50 percent of the people we know, so we are not unique. That being the case, it would be to our own personal benefit and the comfort of everyone within earshot if we resisted the urge to bore everyone around us with the prurient details. 

People tempted to exhibit pride in their sexuality should be reminded that it’s a function they share with all living things, including rodents, house flies, fleas, fruit flies, aphids and head lice. To their credit, they do not make a public production of it.

The pride parade? In Toronto, it’s been an annual freak show hardly fit for family viewing. Incredibly, some people bring their children. Here's our future crop of neurotics. 

The pride parade is an event eagerly promoted by our sensation-mongering media because it enhances their advertising. The breathless publicity and highly inflated crowd counts attest to that.

The rainbow flag? We should hesitate before tarnishing the image of the rainbow by hanging a limp parody of it on a flagpole at city hall. One of Mother Nature’s most spectacular displays deserves more respect than that. 

We all belong to the human spectrum. Comparing the sexually indeterminate end of it to a rainbow is an easily verifiable case of human-generated environmental degradation. 

Al Gore and David Suzuki should have no trouble making their case on this one.

The Abortion Issue

The latest political incursion into what ought to be a private matter comes from Lib leader Justin Trudeau. Young Trudeau is reported to have said he will not accept any candidates who will vote against the right for any woman to abort a pregnancy. As usual, young Trudeau ventures into territory more experienced politicians tend to avoid.

I'm not a politician and am not looking for anyone's approval, so let's discuss abortion.

To put things in perspective, the debate over when life begins in the process of gestation is ridiculous. Life does not begin. It is simply passed on from parents to children via sperm and egg cell as has been the procedure right from its initiation. 

If life began on this planet, then it was initiated hundreds of millions of years ago. If it arrived here on a meteor or a comet, that time span could go into a billion years or more. But none of this stops the pro and con-abortion pressure groups from wringing their hands over it endlessly.

Someone once described pressure groups as a 20th-Century phenomenon that probably reflects too much spare time available for the first time in history to people unequipped to handle it productively. It is now the 21st Century and nothing much has changed. That description is still accurate.

The anti-abortion lobby in particular, has gone so far as to gun down doctors and other activists who describe their stance as “pro-choice”. That’s as in pro-choice for the mother, no choice for the fetus.

Whether or not this wrangling serves the development of our social consciousness in a positive way is difficult to say. However, forcing a woman to go through with a pregnancy who would otherwise terminate it for no better reason than that it would be inconvenient for her to carry it to term probably does the process of evolution a disfavor. 

It is likely that the human gene pool would benefit from the removal of such genetics from it. Why add to the gene pool still another unwanted child with the chance that it will be genetically predisposed to be morally deficient? There are far too many of those around already, including the activists on both sides of that argument.

The people who argue that terminating a pregnancy is murder as well as those who argue that it is not are both only about half right. A fetus is not entirely a human being. It has the potential to become a human being, but even a newborn is nothing more than a freshly-assembled organism possessing only a set of physical attributes and genetic predispositions plus an autonomous system for programming. As yet, there is no specific program (personality) other than that which doting family members project upon it in their overly-stimulated imaginations.

“Oh, he looks like Grandpa Al”; or “Doesn't she have the chubby behind of her Great Aunt May?” Apart from such hopeful comparisons, in actual fact, there is only potential, nothing more. It is a brand new microprocessor that has yet to be programmed. There is little evidence that there is anybody there until a program initiates.

Of course, a fetus at any stage of development is already special, but no more so than that of a rodent or a bird. It represents the success of a solitary sperm, one out of a variously-estimated four to forty million, that made the journey from the male gonads to the female egg cell to achieve, against almost insurmountable odds, the process of fertilization.

This is no mean achievement. It represents an incredible journey with more hazards in it than were faced by any fictional hero in an operatic saga written by Wagner.

When a sperm finds the egg in a couple who want the child, that is good news. When this happens by misadventure through rape or random promiscuity, that is bad news. The probability that the resulting fetus may be carrying the genetics of a mother who does not want it and a father who has had the bad judgement to impregnate a woman who does not want to be pregnant is even worse news.

The fact this happens in a majority of the cases between people whose lives have yet to emerge from the chaotic conditions of social instability and/or who have developed irresponsible attitudes toward the use of drugs and/or alcohol, bodes trouble ahead for the newly-initiated fetus. 

Seeing this fetus to full term practically guarantees a minefield of dubious genetics and damaged tissues and is unlikely to serve either society or the process of human evolution in a positive direction.

Dare we remind the activists who call themselves pro-lifers that for every successful impregnation, in excess of 3,999,999 innocent little happy-face spermatozoa with little propellers flailing away behind perish in the acid secretions and gelatinous sperm traps along the route to the egg? Who represents their cause?

And of an estimated 400 eggs that a woman is destined to produce in the course of her reproductive years, only two or three get to be fertilized on the average. The remainder are unceremoniously flushed out of the system along with the inside layer of the uterus to die one or two at a time at the end of a lunar month period.

These, too, are real, live, human components. Like the sperm, which carries the male genome, the egg carries the spark and the female half of the blueprint of human life. It is the sperm and the egg that are the bearers of life from generation to generation. Who speaks for them? 

It is clear that when you really get down to it, these highly-politicized arguments about when life begins and whether to abort or not to abort can get pretty stupid.

The perennial argument between the liberal media and the Catholic Church about the use of condoms pits a side that wants to do the act without taking the risk against the edicts of a Church that tends to view human life as sacred. Can any religion afford to not view human life as sacred? Every abortion represents one more empty space in the pews come Sunday morning.

The church obviously opts for the way Nature reduces populations--through microbial attack, violence and natural selection, where the weak get eaten and only the most fit survive. It would appear that the church feels everybody should be given the chance to fight it out on their own in the arena of real life instead of ending it before it begins. It is a point worth thinking about, but not for too long.

Of course, that is what religion is for. Its purpose is to set out rules for civilized behavior. What all of these other people lining up pro and con abortion are about is still another mysterious facet of our current state of social consciousness.

Let us blame that on the robots. The household robots do the work while their owners sit around agonizing about things that should really be none of their concern.

Late abortionist Dr. Henry Morgentaler was not a leading-edge social phenomenon. That is what witches were for all along. This was their main stock-in-trade. 

Of course, the nature of their work made them not only essential to every community, but also high-profile targets when they possessed secrets regarding the wives and daughters of local officialdom that would best be left undisclosed. It requires no great stretch of the imagination to perceive what all those witch burnings were about.

Be all that as it may, the decision of whether or not to abort should be made by the woman in consultation with the man who impregnated her. If she’s not too sure of just who did it, or if he has disappeared or declines to take responsibility, then the decision, rightly or wrongly, is hers and hers alone, unless she wants to consult with her parents, priest or counselor. There is no room in such a decision for the involvement of activists, politicians, sidewalk superintendents or third-party busybodies with too much time on their hands.

The couple who decide to pair up and become responsible parents are probably fit to parent the child with a real chance of bringing a significant new life into this world. Those who decide to abort have to live with the guilt for the remainder of their now-tainted lives.

What about Morgentaler? Anyone who stoops to accept the Order of Canada following Dr. Henry Morgentaler’s highly controversial award would gladly accept a medal regardless who offered it and for whatever flimsy reason. People who do not wish to be linked in any way with this event have returned their awards and no doubt there will be many others who decline the offer in the future.

It would not be in the least surprising if some entrepreneurial spirit has already negotiated the striking of a medal even more ostentatious than the Order of Canada with the inscription, “I returned my tainted Order of Canada Medal” and offered it as a trade-up for that now sorry award. They would still have a golden gong to show off, but would be announcing clearly to all concerned that they do not want to be associated with some of the other recipients.

NOTE: Further to how a fetus relates to a finished product: Every wheat seed that is milled into flour for baking is an aborted wheat plant. Every slice of bread represents a couple of thousand aborted baby wheat plants. The same is true of every seed of every plant. Each is a complete fetus that needs only to be exposed to warmth and moisture to germinate. Plant babies such as cherry stones, which are encased in hard shells, are packaged in delicious tissues for birds and animals to eat and soften before they are excreted along with nitrogen-rich nutrients to take root in a location far from the parent plants.

Beer drinkers should be aware that beer is brewed from sprouted barley seeds, well on their way to developing into barley plants. How many thousand barley plant fetuses were aborted to brew a glass of beer?

Eggs are bird fetuses. Anyone who wants to feel guilty about eating plant or animal fetuses should go ahead, but regardless of how we choose to moralize and agonize over it, that is the way the dance of life and death works on this planet. Get used to it.

As for young Trudeau's declaration, he should consider himself lucky his parents decided not to take the option when he was conceived.