-by Frank Macdonald
I have never known my IQ. It is a secret that teachers generally failed to share with me, or perhaps were sensitive enough to spare me.
I also have no idea what my blood type is, which I suspect is a more important bit of self-knowledge. But I have been in a few ORs where masked doctors and nurses never suggested that my blood was rare enough to cause concern.
These are probably examples of disinterest in one’s self, but in this case, my case, that isn’t necessarily true. I have had a lifelong interest in myself, as I have had in my neighbours and friends. To quote a friend of mine, “Love your neighbour as you love yourself.”
That used to be, generally speaking, an easy undertaking. I grew up in a town rich with interesting characters and an equal wealth of gifted storytellers. The antics and achievements of the former became materiel for the latter.
I loved standing on John Beaton’s corner where it was common for guys to cluster on summer evenings, a gathering whose conversation usually turned to the telling of humourous tales about their fellow townsmen and women, punctuated at the end by bursts of laughter. Those of us who were younger hovered around the outer edge of this gathering, generally eavesdropping on this oral literature that had been, and still is, handed down through a lost number of generations.
If an older person stopped by to see what was going on, he would soon be part of the telling, his tales coming from the Dirty Thirties, or moments of combat that contained a moment of laughter in a nightmare we couldn’t comprehend. Only in later years, as our lives were lived in a country that was not easily given to war, did we come to understand that we had the peace and freedom to spend a large portion of our lives standing around a street corner, orally documenting our town and its lives for each other.
It was then that I learned to detect the difference between two types of storytellers. Their material came from the same people, the same characters, but there were two methods of delivery.
There were a few who told their stories well, but the telling left me dissatisfied. There were others whose stories about our fellow townspeople carried all the way into the heart of our understanding of Inverness.
The difference, I eventually recognized. The first tellers I mention told their stories as a way of emphasizing the stupidity of what their subjects said or did. The second group of storytellers, I realized, weren’t making fun of the characters who peopled their tale. It was clear in the telling that these people loved the people about whom they told stories, capturing their colour or originality or wit in a way that seemed to elevate our own appreciation of them.
I suppose these were (and a few still are) people who loved their neighbours.
In a couple of weeks, “if the Lord spares me,” to quote my dear old aunt (and several people the readers here also knew), I will be dealing with another birthday. I have noticed that there is a correlation between the number of candles on the cake and the most recent state of my COPD. It’s like trying to blow out a forest fire. Clearly, none of my birthday wishes have come true in recent years.
What had been contained in those unfulfilled wishes saddens me.
I have wished for finer things for my country, that the nation’s children are spared the madness of war, or the madmen initiating wars (and they are wars, not some other semantic to mask the truth). Also for a few more social programs that adequately help families rise out of poverty, not just enough funding to keep them still marginally impoverished. But when I blow my wishes against eighty or more flames, my limited breath manages to douse three or four, their meagre smoke signals trying to carry my wishes heavenward. I suspect they never make it.
This year, though, I would wish that time limits be imposed to prevent aging, memory-impaired, old men who value only their own lives, lives fueled by the most selfish of ambitions, be barred from seeking public office.
There are at present too many aged, old men. Even the most inspiring run the risk of losing control of their thinking while in office. One man, in particular, demonstrates this – Donald Trump. In recent reports I have read two accounts of his IQ. One said he had an IQ of 155. (Can the man even count that high?) The most recent I read says he achieves a 78 IQ. He is an amoral psychopath (pardon the unnecessary adjective) barely able to remember his name. Regardless, he possesses a madness every bit as unhinged as King George III whom the 13 colonies rebelled against to create a country that could never be ruled by a king. And now he is the man to whom the nation bends its knee.
It should be noted that both Trump and myself are among the oldest people on the planet. My ambitions to be Prime Minister of Canada have been laid away in drawer to be peeked at from time to time. In the meantime, I seek solace in this place where I live, a town still filled with characters (I may even be one of them) who have stories to be told, the poetry of their lives captured during street corner exchanges, shared among ourselves in accordance with the oral tradition, or through book pages, or most true to the tradition, in digital formats capturing for posterity the storyteller’s method and accent and other attributes that comprise a gifted storyteller. These can fill sections of our many libraries.
Meanwhile, to make my birthday wish come true, I may need to drag a leaf blower to the party, just to be sure…
**************************************
APOLOGY: I would like to apologize to Premier Tim Houston over something written in last week’s column. In trying to close out the column and meet a deadline, I hurriedly wrote the following sentence. “Bet he’d cut his mother’s health care!” These are words I regret writing. They are stupid, mindless, and unkind. I regret that they made it to print, but have no excuse for not adequately editing myself before submitting the column for print and public distribution.
This is not a coerced apology, but I believe that it is a terrible accusation on my part, and for that reason I apologize to Tim Houston.