REMEMBERING LONESOME GEORGE

 GALAPAGOS STILL DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH

The mystique around Lonesome George is a wonderful thing. It is rooted in our eternal fascination with the end - whether it is our end or the end of a species or a way of life.
Think of movies and literature -  the last man on earth,  the only man on an island,  the  man floating in a space capsule out to the end of time.
Now Lonesome George is dead and is remembered more than the thousands of tortoises that were slaughtered for a century by sailors who regarded the giants as walking meat lockers who could be tossed in the hold until they were needed as a supplement to biscuits with worms.
 Lonesome hardly impressed with looks. Giant tortoises are more grunt than grace. But he was the last of his kind, the last of his subspecies. There may still be 20,000 giant tortoises around, but all the attempts to perpetuate a version of this goliath failed.
When my oldest son John Henry and I visited the Galapagos Islands a dozen years ago, its primitive volcanic side had not been softened by the 180,000 tourists that come each year and want a little civilization to come too. The authorities, to their credit, want nature to rule.
Lonesome was up at the top of our islands' bucket list, up there with the hammerhead sharks and the boobies, although neither he nor his rudimentary pen would have stood out in any zoo. It was a solitary visit, although they say the crowds certainly did come later to clamber over each other as they photographed endlessly while Lonesome stretched and yawned.
I can't really say I found our visit particularly noteworthy. After all, there were hundreds of tortoises around, and I can recall heaps of them in a mud patch in an open field that would not have been out of place on an Ontario farm. You could wander around them and probably through them and on them except that those of us who take the trouble to travel across the Pacific to the fabled islands like to survey the wonders of nature without poking at  shells and feathers.
Lonesome's story reads like a failed Harlequin Romance. It was 1972 when it was discovered that he was a little bit different from all the other tortoises. He came from La Pintas, one of the smallest islands in the Galapagos, and as we were famously told by Charles Dawin when he used the giant tortoises as one of his proofs for the theory of evolution, the tortoises and finches etc. from each island evolved differently because of their separation by the crashing seas.
Lonesome was said to be around 100, but no one really knows, because no one really knowns how long giant tortoises live. Maybe 200 years! There are those who dream that there are still tortoises alive in the Galapagos Islands that Darwin "rode" on his visit, according to his writings. I also seem to remember that the Darwin party ate a tortoise or two, that being the practical side of the environmental movement in the 1800s.
I found on my visit that sex play for Lonesome had been going on for five years while the world watched like peeping toms. Scientists kept introducing females of another subspecies to Lonesome, who wasn't interested. What isn't mentioned in the obits is what happened next. The zoologists figured that Lonesome was gay. Or maybe he just didn't remember the lecture on the birds and the bees that his parents gave him 100 years or so ago.
So they introduced a horny male and a hornier female and Lonesome watched their grunting copulations with interest but with no performance. That is rather remarkable because the heaving and moaning of giant tortoises are so remarkable that I recall the young women staring transfixed at a mating when Mary and I were visiting the famous San Diego zoo.
After trying to turn Lonesome into a sexual copycat, the experts went back to two females who they thought would be attractive to Lonesome if they left them together in Lonesome's unspectacular pen.. Whether he did or not is really not clear because the females laid eggs twice which were not fertile. Perhaps he needed some soft music and whatever tortoises like to drink when they want to forget that their life is just a mud pie.
The Islands are truly a magic place, reeling under the impact of the huge growth in the middle classes of the world who now have the money and time to travel to such distant lands. I would just like to remind them that in the Galapagos, you don't ask for turtle soup. It was taken off the menu a few decades ago.

MAKING TRAFFIC JAMS WORSE

COPS NEED CRASH COURSE  ON TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT

Unfortunately, most traffic reports on most days tell us of an intersection or a road that has been closed for hours for  investigation of a major traffic accident.
Unfortunately, too often these reports say the jam is caused by a disabled tractor trailer. Why is the 400-401 interchanges such a magnet for this?
Unfortunately, most drivers most days creep by the wreckage or where the wreckage used to be and wonder why the traffic couldn't be moving quicker and why there seems to be lots of cops just standing around when they could be sorting traffic.
It is ever thus.
 I'm sure motorists have fumed at delays because of accidents since the first days of motoring. And we certainly have had a long history of traffic accidents, beginning when there were only two cars in the entire province of Saskatchewan and they collided one day at an intersection.
A few years ago at the annual meeting of the Ontario Safety League, a legendary copper named Cam Woolley complained to me about columns I had written about police not restoring a reasonable traffic flow at an accident scene as quickly as possible.
Woolley had 30 years with the OPP and became famous as a sergeant for his traffic anecdotes before he departed for CP24. In other words, Woolley knew what he was talking about. And he didn't think I did.
But then he conceded that he had arrived as the senior cop at accidents and wondered why the road was still closed. When he asked, the cops often conceded there was no reason. In fact, the road could have been cleared hours earlier. It just wasn't a priority for them.
I had plenty of time to think about this when I made my customary late trip home from the cottage. I watched the Jays game, and then Bill Maher, and figured that at 11.30 p.m. it would be an easy two-hour jaunt with the weekend rush cleared out hours before.
The trip took an hour longer. It did too for Mary and Mark who had left two hours before.
The problem was, 680 told me, that there was an accident in the left lane of west-bound 401 at Whitby. And when you managed to survive that, there was a really major accident featuring a huge tractor trailer that flopped like a dead whale in the right ditch.
In a reasonable world, the traffic in the passing lane should have been moving the slowest because the accident was on that side. Except that was the fastest lane, and the reason was that the radio report was wrong and and the accident was on the right side.
After 30 minutes or so, we rolled slowly past an accident scene of all manner of emergency vehicles with flashing lights which weren't doing much of anything. The emergency was over.
The next accident was really big, except it had been there for most of the day and it was now 2 a.m. There was too much time for me to witness that not much of anything was going on even though it looked like a scene from Hades.
I am not complaining about traffic speeding around scenes that are still dangerous,. The police, paramedics and firefighters should have all the time they need to help the wounded, and also a reasonable amount of time to clear the debris. But with modern digital technology that allows for the quick measurement and recording of an accident scene after the ambulances and fire trucks leave, are the Toronto police and the OPP really acting ASAP?
With the 400 series of highways carrying so much traffic, should the provincial government not have a major commission study how police act at major accidents? Perhaps we need the government to subsidize huge tow trucks located along the major highways which can quickly move wreckage to one side.
The TTC and GO process accidents, particularly the sad suicides, much faster than they did. For example, GO said the various police forces must stop squabbling over jurisdiction and also installed video cameras on locomotives to record the obvious suicides.
If only some of that approach filtered into the  policies of policing and road management. Yet 401, for example,  has been closed for hours because people have deliberately jumped on it from overpasses.
So what's the hurry anyway, police may ask? Just think of the cost in time, and the wear and tear on vehicles and tempers? What about the air pollution and all the missed deliveries and appointments? What about the accidents caused by frustrated motorists who speed madly away from traffic jams?
It just doesn't make much sense to build super roads which carry some of the heaviest traffic in the world only to have them crippled because of accidents which are allowed to fester like an untreated wound.

HYUNDAI ELANTRA TOURING UPDATE

A NIMBLE CITY CAR

My son John Henry was on the phone from where he lives in California wondering why what I have blogged about the 2012 Hyundai Elantra Touring isn't as enthusiastic as what I say on the phone.
Because, I said, I think it's a wonderful downtown car but the ride is too damn hard and my mileage has only improved a bit.
Maybe cars still need to be broken in, even this Elantra which is so loved by car journalists. And I suspect that tire pressure may be far more important in affecting mileage than in larger cars.
I have now done more than 12,000 kms in my Elantra Touring, much of it in the toughest kind of driving, Toronto traffic, too much of it downtown where you sit almost as much as you move.
My last trip to the cottage, much of it at 116 km/h, took 7.2 litres per 100 kms. Now that's more like it.
And my latest stop-and-go driving around the city took 9 litres per 100. Now I can (almost) live with that. But those mileage claims by the company are aggressive, if not dubious.
It certainly is a nimble car, as I have written in a couple of blogs. But until recently that consumption was so high in routine driving that both my mechanic of several decades, Kirk Stibbe, and I wondered whether there was something wrong. Yet Stibbe likes the Hyundais.
Now if only the ride would improve. There's no chance Toronto streets are going to improve, not with the current crop of councillors who make you cringe when they squabble like tired kindergarteners.
I consulted Consumer Reports before I bought the Hyundai and it did warn about a "rather stiff" ride but it seemed like the outfit hasn't really tested the model since 2009. Then again, I may be wrong.
 CR continues to be an awkward source. Their presentations can be more baffling than informative. Much like the manual that comes with the Hyundai. I asked the dealer what one section meant. No one knew. They say they would ask. Still waiting after 14 months.  I guess that's the price you pay when you buy a really popular car.
Buyers should be warned that Hyundai's boast of unrivalled economy of 4.9 litres per 100 km  (believe it or not, and I don't) apply to the sedan, the Elantra, nor the Elantra Touring, You certainly pay a price for that peppier engine!
There are two other gripes I have about the car.
Whenever I try to change from AM to FM on the radio, I have trouble hitting the tiny button that does the trick. Every time!
It's maddening, because the second you take your eyes off the road, this car starts to wander.
The car comes with a fancy eerie blue light display that gives you such interesting data as what mileage you're getting (funny, we don't say what litreage) and how far you can go with what's left. I can't read it at the best of times. In daylight, with my sunglasses on,  it is impossible. My eye doctor says changing the glasses won't help.
Too bad the engineers can't deal with such minor irritants which bug me on any trip longer than 50 kilometres.


                                                          .............................

The column above may seem dated but it really isn't because Hyundai says the policy of compensating drivers of various Hyundai models does not apply to Elantra Touring drivers.
I was told by phone and by Internet that the wrong calculation for the ads didn't happen to the Touring. But as I said in reply, why should I believe you on any mileage figure that you give because you've been caught in a significant exaggeration?
Was it a deliberate lie? An accidental goof? Or just sheer stupidity by Korean engineers who have a big rep for not making such mistakes.
What is revealing and significant about this consumer horror is that Hyundai was caught out by Americans using American standards, which are tougher, for now, than Canadian rules. Canada is moving in a year or so to broaden its testing which unfortunately seems to be necessary.
Still like the car. Still hate the ride, the radio tuning and the dashboard display.
Better, however, than my first car, a 1930 Model A sedan.
That may seem a silly thing to say but younger drivers don't realize just how much better today's cars   are. Remember as winter approaches how we used to have to use block heaters and winter thermostats and there was something called a carburetor that always needed a screw adjusted to get the right mixture.
And everyone could tell you precisely what their mileage was. Hyundai would have been caught out in the first month of a new model.

CRAP ABOUT MAYOR'S GAY "SNUB"

THE WORLD ISN'T PREOCCUPIED WITH US

I realize the Toronto Star likes nothing better than to run a commentary bitch-slapping the mayor but the latest nonsense from Richard Florida just drips with the Florida/Star hatred.
The headline read: "How Ford's Pride snub hurts our city." A highlighted paragraph read: "It's time for the business community to step up and tell the mayor to stop damaging Toronto's reputation."
C'mon guys! The real world really doesn't care whether a politician supports or ignores homosexuals, just as long as he doesn't throw them in jail or target them with discriminatory laws or preaches against them. Not marching in a parade filled with flamboyant pornography isn't that big a deal.
Florida has a huge rep as a "rock star economist," author and deep thinker about urban issues, although I doubt the ordinary folk care whether he speaks or farts. He's director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.
I have nothing against that school - my sons John Henry and Mark have Rotman MBAs - but it would be nice before such profs run off at the mouth that they consider whether they could defend their comments as if they were in a doctoral thesis.
For example, Florida writes that this slap in the face to Toronto's gays "is also a direct blow to Toronto's hard-fought reputation as one of the most open, tolerant, diverse and inclusive cities on the planet."
Oh really?
I suppose it's nice that "big thinkers" come here to settle and teach and lecture us, but it would also be nice if they didn't regurgitate statement about this great city which are almost impossible to prove and spent more time on research into whether their sweeping statements are fact or fiction.
I am reminded of another transplanted American, Jane Jacobs, who was worshipped by the left and urban activists although the planning that she advocated would produce exactly the kind of street that most of us would not want to live on.
One of the strange things about Toronto is how vulnerable our leaders are to repeating myths. For example, Mel Lastman when he was mayor of North York used to boast that it was the third-largest city in the country when it wasn't.
Lastman, David Miller and others routinely talked about how Toronto is the most multi-cultural city in the world. Oh really? The world now boasts a Milky Way of cities and to pretend that any international organization has done a competent analysis of most of them is just plain silly. Organizations like the UN and WHO are so busy kowtowing to dictators and mouthy minorities that their stats must be taken with several tonnes of salt.
In the "most multi-cultural city in the world," an annual multi-cultural celebration called Caravan was started by a friend of mine, Leon Kossar, in the 1960s. At one point, 54 pavilions, each bearing the name of a foreign capital, showed off the food, culture and entertainment of their country. It was a huge success. For years I was one of the judges of the best pavilion. Caravan ran out of steam and then died a decade ago. I'm sure the Gay Pride parade years from now will be just another Santa Claus or St. Patrick's or Orange parade...if it lasts.
Florida's basic argument, when you render out the BS, is that when big cities are doing everything they can to become more competitive,  the mayor's "intolerance is damaging both the city's reputation for fairness and its business climate."
Florida considers the mayor's ignoring the Gay Pride Parade as one of those poor decisions that have a significant negative effect on city economies that can last long into the future. Yes, but it's more representative of the views of most Torontonians than Florida's. Dare I raise the ideal of democracy! One poll indicated that 29% says it's up to Ford whether he participates and 25% said he shouldn't attend. I think a poll with a larger sampling would show that most people are indifferent to this issue since at least 85% are not homosexual, and the hot issue of discrimination by City Hall cooled off years ago.
I would argue that Rob Ford's approach to taxes would be of more interest and have more impact on foreign observers than his approach to a propaganda parade. But Florida thinks a thriving gay community signals a community open to all kinds and ideas and that it will stimulate involvement from everyone from eggheads to eccentrics to entrepreneurs.
Well, it got him here. It's up to you to decide which he is. And our thriving gay community is not going to wither because of Ford.
Doesn't anyone at the Star edit this guff? Or are the editors just so grateful that someone shares their view that Ford is evil and the paper must do all things possible to stop the mayor from gaining in the polls that they will run this tortured hyperbole that the mayor's slight is as important as the tax and  unemployment rates and the cost of office space for those who dare to contemplate work in a downtown that has been warped by "experts" like Florida.

ARCADIAN COURT WAS A DINING ICON

I ONLY ATE THE CHICKEN POT PIE

You really knew you had made it when you rode the elevator at Simpson's and dined under the Art Deco arches and four great chandeliers of the Arcadian Court.
And now it has been born again to live outside of our memories as an events venue.
When I journeyed as a kid with only coins in his pocket to Eaton's and Simpson's to do my shopping (the department store giants facing off across Queen St. offered the best shopping in the land) I dined on a hot dog, Honey Dew and soft ice cream cone at a nook at the start of the tunnel that went to the bargain annex of Eaton's. All for a buck or less.
The Arcadian Court, where grandmothers took their daughters and granddaughters to train them for society, and husbands were tolerated if they wore a suit and tie, was so far above me, it could have been in the stratosphere.
And it had been that way since the store thumbed its nose at the looming Depression and opened the largest retail restaurant around in 1929.
 Everything about it was grand, even the acoustics, so the TSO and even Liberace did radio broadcasts from there. It was designed for the carriage trade who still all lived in Rosedale.
I knew I had made it in journalism, sort of, not when I got my first fedora at Sammy Taft's on Spadina, like the cop reporters, but when I made it to the Court, and not just to the Court but to one of its private dining rooms.
I was a member of the Metro Citizens' Safety Council which got a deal there as part of Simpson's charity. (It was a strange setting for one of the council's most famous projects, RIDE, where I moved the motion to approve it as a trial as Reduce Impaired Driving in Etobicoke.)
I will never forget my first meal there. I was partnered with Phil Givens, who before his funeral packed a giant synagogue had been mayor, Liberal MP, MPP,  police commission head, and finally, judge. Even though Phil was one of the fastest in shooting from the lip, voters had rejected him to repeat as mayor because too many thought he had bought the Archer sculpture for Nathan Phillips Square out of $125,000 in taxes when it had been private money. Then Pierre Trudeau refused to make him a minister, distrusting his bouncy big-city roots. Phil, who had come to my wedding, used to phone me from Ottawa to complain about the PM's constant cold shoulder.
Phil announced that of course he was having the chicken pot pie. Any person in Toronto who knew anything always had the chicken pie. So I had it too. (I always did, and chicken pot pie became one of my favourite meals. (Costco has a great one, overflowing with flavour ... and calories.)
Phil dug below its crust with gusto. "I love this pie," he said, poking at a large piece. I looked carefully and said with alarm, "Phil, that's a piece of glass."
Phil snorted in disbelief. But it was, a big shard of glass.
I called the waiter. "You have given the mayor a chicken pie with glass in it." He said nothing, took it away, and reappeared with another serving. So I asked to see the maitre d'.  He dismissed it as a rare accident but never really apologized to one of the most famous Torontonians.
Phil laughed it off. I burned. The next day in my Page 4 column in the Toronto Sun, I wrote about the glass in the pie. Apparently no one from Simpson's was among my hundreds of thousands of readers because no one called Phil or me or the Sun to deny or say sorry.
Just a minor incident at a big restaurant that in some years served more than a million meals. But I can't say I was that surprised when Simpson's disappeared, along with the safety council, and then the fabled restaurant was closed by the Bay because of lack of business.  The little things can kill you as quickly as swallowing glass.

PEARLS FROM PERLMAN

"AND I HEARD A VOICE FROM HEAVEN"

The line about the heavenly voice is from Revelation, the last book of the Bible that scared the hell out of me when I was a boy.
That voice turned out to be harps. In my case, it was a priceless 300-year-old violin played by the superstar with a first name that is as unique as the rest of him.
I felt I was sitting at the foot of a musical god. My son Mark's subscription seats to the Toronto Symphony are in the front row directly below the guests when they perform. So I could almost reach out and touch the heavy boots and braces of Itzhak Perlman, crippled by polio 60 years ago when he was four, who clumped out with awkward arm canes that makes his ascent up the one step to a platform a precarious balancing act where I felt for one terrible movement he would fall.
But Peter Oundjian, the TSO conductor, knows all about the master because he studied violin under Perlman. And when he didn't reach out as Perlman seemed suspended and about to crash to the polished wood, I put aside the fear that Perlman would topple to my feet.
There is a nice bit of stage business when the conductor carried Perlman's violin and bow as Perlman dragged himself through the orchestra to his chair and then, when he makes it, Oundjian hands over his violin and bow and Perlman hands over the conductor's baton as he reaches the platform needed because he plays while seated.
Then Perlman immersed himself as the orchestra plays the first of Ludwig Van Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D Major Op. 61, the giant's only violin concerto, Beethoven played the violin as a boy and never did it well. When Perlman first wanted to play the violin, he was only three, so no one would be his teacher because they said he couldn't even hold the instrument. So he taught himself.
Now he has graduated from that toy violin to the Soil Stradivairus made in 1714, which was warmed up for him by the previous owner, Yehudi Menuhin.
This superstar mugs as well as he plays. He grimaces as if in the throes of sex, his face contorting as if it was a melting mask. I would love to see a TV program where the camera just concentrates on his face but since the concerto lasts 42 minutes, I doubt it will ever happen.
Fortunately, from my vantage point, I could see the twitch of every muscle as the music poured over me, sweet and high or then rasping as if the old instrument was clearing its throat.
Just wonderful! Ironically, as Mary and I drove home, Classical 96 played the same concerto. I hoped it would be an encore from Perlman but it was some lesser player.
There can be disadvantages when you are that close to that action.
 I recall sitting in the front row at a West End performance of Chorus Line and the dancers' sweat occasionally hit me.
 I recall covering a speech by John Diefenbaker from the front row and found that the prime minister may have been a great orator but he spit a lot.
Mary and I arrived late at a chamber music concert in Budapest staged just for the elite newspaper conference where I was a delegate and found that for some strange reason, the only seats left were in the front row. Unfortunately the superstar French flautist, Jean-Pierre Rampal, had a terrible head cold. I felt I was suspended between Rampal's snuffles and sneezes and his hanky.
But nothing like that marred Itzhak Perlman's start of a rare week's stay in Toronto of concerts and coaching of young violinists.
Truly a night. Two standing ovations (real ones instead of those offered by dumb audiences who would cheer the breaking of a wet bag) where Perlman dragged himself back to the front and centre, and then another one which he acknowledged from just outside the stage door.
 No doubt he was exhausted. But I was exhilarated.
Dr. Samuel Johnson once said: "Had I learned to fiddle, I should have done nothing else." This admiration for the violin came from a man still famous after several hundred years as one of the most renowned Renaissance men of letters ever in Britain, an author moving easily from poetry to essays to criticism to biography.
The countless listeners over the decades of the pearls of notes flowing from Perlman's "fiddle" know exactly what Dr. Johnson meant.

MY CRISIS IN GRADE 5

WHEN PROBLEMS WERE HUGE BUT SIMPLER

My face burned. I worried about tears.
Miss Thompson, the Grade 5 teacher, had asked me to stay after my class clattered off to lunch. I must have done something wrong. After all, she didn't call me Johnny.
 Miss Thompson cleared her throat and shuffled stuff around on her big battered desk. She looked funny. "John", she said, "the crotch is gone out of your breeches. It's not decent. Tell your Grandmother that if they're not fixed, you can't come back."
 She seemed as upset as I became. I walked the four blocks to our little home by the CN tracks where the passenger trains came twice a day. You could tell time from their whistles. It almost seemed they were coming into the house.
 I was sicker with each step. What would I say? After all, I was only 9 and never really talked to Grandma.
 Grandma and Grandpa had taken in us orphans after their daughter died of leukemia. They hadn't approved of the wedding. Their favourite girl had married a man more than twice her age, and not a Christian as far as they could tell.
 I was told by my sisters that my father had been a doctor everyone liked in Toronto . They said he drank and smoked. And that was a big problem because Grandma and Grandpa hated that. Grandpa had left Holland after working in a distillery. He had become a born-again Christian who thought gin was the devil's work. So he had to come to Canada and a small town because Bols was the only employer in the suburb of Rotterdam and he couldn't find Christian work there.
 He was trained as a stationary engineer but he couldn't understand enough English to get his papers here. So he worked in the big furniture factory, a tiny man hoisting up big desks to put on the final finish, and became a deacon, shouting out his amens from the fifth pew in the plain Baptist Church on the hill. We read a chapter from the Bible after every meal, except for the Songs of Solomon,  and knelt beside the kitchen chairs in prayer. Church was the only thing he did beside his vegetables.
And now his girl, who had gone to Toronto Bible College, had married a man who never went to church. When Aunt Jean came in from the farm at Williamsford, I heard them talking about what they said was a May-December wedding that would not have worked if they had lived.
 Dad had nicked himself during an operation and refused to have his arm cut off when it got infected. He said his night nurse saved his life. So he married her. Then he died, exhausted by house calls during a flu epidemic. Then Mom died of blood cancer, although when Grandma was really mad, she said Mom had got ill when I was born.
Grandma was old and tired and cranky. Her body hurt. Her legs had varicose veins which bled every few months while we searched for Dr. Morgan to come. Since Grandpa never had much to pay him, Dr. Morgan took his time. Grandma probably dreamed of being back on the neat streets and canals of Holland but she never talked to us about anything except the Scriptures and behaving.
 Grandpa never said much because he was worn out from the heavy lifting at the factory but we were too poor for him to stop even when he was 72. But then no one in the town ever stopped working. On a few rare evenings, when Grandma had been agreeable, he would talk sadly about the old country. He never said but he missed his family. Once he confessed, and looked guilty, he and his brothers when they were young had fed the goat slops from the distillery and Billy had kept ramming a wall until he knocked himself out.
 My grandparents never talked about the big city where we were born. They never talked about the relatives who lived there. Leaving our town of 1,800 to go to what the neighbour called the Big Smoke was not something they wanted to do even when my aunt living there said they would drive the four hours up and bring us back for a visit. Grandpa said all those people bothered him.
My sisters and I memorized all the wonderful things in the catalogues that we used to use in the outhouse before a toilet was put inside. Joyce even said how nice it would be to go to Eatons and Simpsons but Grandma said Heinmillers down on the main street was just fine for us.
 I was careful going into the house for fear that Grandma would notice my torn breeks too. (Boys never called them breeches. ) At the least that would bring slaps or maybe Grandma would tell my reluctant Grandpa to give me the strap.  I certainly wouldn’t be able to go out on Saturday afternoon to play (actually I snuck into the Roxy theatre for movies that were yelled about from the pulpit the next day.)
 I knew saying that they had just worn out and that I hadn’t wrecked them wouldn’t work. And there was no way that my good breeks that I could wear only for visiting and church were used enough for school. The breeks were never comfortable. They scratched and pricked and had knee laces which were supposed to hold your socks up but didn't. There was now a cold draft, well you know, down there, and if you slid, snow came up, and it was really cold.
 And now I had this problem that looked like the end of my world.
 My sisters and I sat there eating the boiled potatoes and cabbage that we grew on the land squeezed between us and the tracks. We bought little at the store. There were thick slices of the brown bread which Grandma baked in the wood stove that also heated the house, sort of, and the water. The bread was good for a week but then it became so hard, you could use a slice as a tack hammer. We hated the bread when it got stale and the cabbage with the dead insects between the leaves.
We looked forward to the rare Sunday visitor when we would eat a chicken from the pen out back. Grandpa would choose the chicken at the bottom of the pecking order that was really thin and had started bleeding at the neck. He would grumble that Leghorns were great for eggs but there sure wasn’t much meat on them.
 We seldom talked much at the table because Grandma would frown. But Joanne and Joyce figured something was wrong with me and asked why in whispers. They decided they had to save me because Grandma would be mad at everyone if she found out. They snuck out into the back kitchen and poked through a rag box for any scrap that was grey. Then we went up to my tiny bedroom which was away from the stove and was so cold in winter that frost etched lace on the inside of the window. They tried to sew in patches but the needle kept getting lost in the coarse corduroy.
 "We need a darning needle, " Joyce, the big sister,  said. Only Grandma had them. Grandma demanded what Joyce had done with the one she was given last week. Joyce had to listen to a talking to on waste but got a big needle. They stitched in some strips that almost matched. The ends hung down, however, along with a cobweb of threads.
We tried pulling and breaking but the cocoon of patches threatened to come apart. We needed scissors, and in our house real big scissors were not for children. So Joanne screwed up her courage and asked Grandma, fibbing that she had a picture of Princess Margaret that she wanted to cut out of an old newspaper for her scrapbook. Grandma handed them over with a frown. At least she didn't want to see the page.
My sisters tugged and trimmed. I said the best stuff would have to be at the front and top so when Miss Thompson looked down, she wouldn't see the tangle. Finally they were done. I tugged on the pants and did up the fly. That was hard because now the buttons and the button holes didn’t match without a fight. Then I walked carefully down the stairs, afraid that any jerk would snap a thread.
 Out into the cold. The steaming draft horses plodded by on their hourly routine of dragging a sleigh full of sawdust from the sawmill to the furnace that heated the Krug Bros. factory. Normally I would sneak in behind and ride a runner, the fastest way to school if the driver didn't spot you. I couldn't risk that today.
 Down the hill I went, sort of knock-kneed. Past the driving shed where the farmers stabled their teams and sleighs in winter when they came to town. The horses stood patiently in the dark, searching for hay, stamping their hoofs, rippling their skin in the cold. I always went in to pat one, but there was no time because I was moving as slowly and stiffly as a turtle. I couldn’t be late today.
 No snowball fights in the schoolyard. I didn't dare. Through the heavy scuffed doors of the Boys’ Entrance into Chesley's old school. Along the dark cloakroom ripe with wet scarves and chewed mittens and soaked rubber boots. It was like running one of those things we were taught about Indians, a gauntlet. Our cloakroom was a gauntlet of bad smells. When it was filled with kids, everyone was pushing and shoving because scarves and boots got mixed together in a tangle and there was always one kid missing one glove or stinky rubber boot.
 If the teacher was mad at you, you had to stand there in the dark and listen to your friends dimly recite on the other side of the wall plastered with coats. And if she was really mad, it was the principal's office. Mr. Sanderson looked like he could be God. No one dared much if Mr. Sanderson was watching. Because he believed in the strap. He would hit you so hard, his shirt buttons would pop off.
 Then the classroom, with its picture of the king looking stern, and some drawings by the girls who always got gold stars on their scribblers when the inspector came and the teacher got really nervous and repeated an old lesson. I sort of tiptoed to my desk. I was in the first row because Miss Thompson always put the boys who she said acted up where she could watch them.
 So far, so good. The lessons began. My crotch started to sweat and itch under all the ragged ends. The classroom was always warm in winter because the big furnace somewhere in the basement where we weren't allowed to go either made the school too hot or too cold. And all the women teachers preferred too hot. An hour passed. I started to relax. I might make it to 4. And then something might save me in the evening. After all, they talked in Sunday School about miracles. And I had been good. Lately!
 Then came Current Events, my favourite. Each morning at 8 I listened to Jim Hunter far away in Toronto and memorized all the fires and floods and sinkings. And if Mr. Hunter didn't have good stuff, I made it up. Miss Thompson didn't know because she didn't listen to CFRB but to CFOS in Owen Sound.
I kept my hand down because I was afraid what would happen if I stood only a few feet from her. This puzzled her. ''Why Johnny," Miss Thompson said, "you have no news. You always do." "No," I said, sinking lower behind my desk.
 "John", she said, "you know in this school we always stand when we talk to the teacher," My chums smirked in anticipation. I had told Rod Matheson and he had blabbed to all the boys. They knew of the fragile state of my breeks. I slowly rose. Flowers growing in a greenhouse would have beaten me. I squeezed my legs together so tightly I could feel the lumpy darning on my long socks. I tried staying behind the desk but it would be suspicious if I didn't stand straight.
 "Miss Thompson," I lied, "the radio didn't work this morning. I have no news." No one rescued me by raising a hand. By now my chums were choking back laughs, but even a loud giggle would have meant the cloakroom.
 Suddenly I could see that Miss Thompson remembered. She surveyed me slowly. From the bottom of the breeks to my crotch and then up, no back, then up and over the sweater that I wore for the entire year to my sweaty face and the bristle of my brush cut. And I waited. And all the boys waited. Then she turned to the blackboard, thank God, and said she expected more participation in Current Events tomorrow. My crisis had passed, for now.
 That night my sisters tackled my breeks again. But we were all afraid to tinker too much with a cloth concoction that had survived its first test. For a few days I moved carefully, scuttling across the playground like a crayfish in the Saugeen River beside the school. Then I was tackled in a snowball fight and as I rolled in the snow with my shrieking attacker, I heard a tear.
 ‘Damn it,” I said, and then some worse words while my friends shrank at the profanity, looking around for a teacher.. But it was only my knee. No problem. It wasn’t in the delicate place that the girls giggled about when my chum Rod boldly told on me to a clutch of them one noon. My sisters and I could deal easily with a patch like that.
Finally after months of careful manoeuvring,  it was spring and I was released from the scratchy prison of the breeks to the short pants where I seemed almost naked by comparison. By fall, I was too big for my britches and almost too big for the Sunday pants. And then came the glories of long pants and a belt, and farewell to suspenders and those stiff descendants of pantaloons and those stockings that always drooped. Hated by all boys and loved, apparently, by all moms, and one grandmother.
So I found salvation that Grade 5 only through the miracle of time. And my faithful sisters, ready to risk the wrath of Hades just to help out a smelly kid. Saved by time, and the insistence then that all girls had to take Home Ec.