Shy Guy

When I was a kid I was shy.

For those of you who know me now that seems a stretch, but as a kid, up until eight or nine I was very shy. My mother (I know I’ve told this one before but maybe you’ve never heard it) put me in singing lessons. My kids laugh at this because they are sure I’m tone deaf, but her reasoning was not to make me a singer, but to make me less shy. In her later days, she always said perhaps it was a bit of overkill, and she’d wished I was a bit shyer.

The singing lessons with Ethel Evantoff were a marvelous cultural experience. She was a great teacher who continued working at singing and teaching into her nineties. We sang for groups who would put up with us, a bunch of Jewish, over privileged singing kids. Old age homes and hospitals were ripe for the picking.

I remember as I went to my new job in the department store, the first job I had where I worked with the public, the feelings I had that first day. I can remember as clear as if it were yesterday, the courage I had to summon up to go over to that first customer I saw and say, “May I help you?” Luckily, I never looked back.

I see it in my youngest daughter. She works with the public in many different capacities, is always out front in her jobs, but I see the shyness lurking in her. I hear it in her voice and I recognize it because it’s mine.

I don’t know if it goes away or if we just mask it. Often we’re told actors are very shy people. A well known Canadian interviewer,Elwy Yost, television host notable for hosting CBC's weekday Passport to Adventure series, and TVOntario's weekday Magic Shadows and Saturday Night at the Movies from 1974 to 1999 told me the story of interviewing Henry Fonda. He said he walked into the studio and saw a man sitting in a chair, still and silent. He walked over and stood waiting. A light turned on, and Henry Fonda emerged from the depths of this still figure. Princess Lee Radziwill told the story of walking in Hyannis Port with Marilyn Monroe and no one recognised Marilyn. She asked her why not, and Marilyn stood still for a minute, turned around and became Marilyn Monroe. Within a minute people came from all over to stare and ask for autographs.

It’s about very shy people overcoming their own fears, Maybe it’s forcing yourself to become what you should be.

The Grow Op

We lived in the Northwest suburbs of Calgary for six years, and for some of that time we lived in Arbour Lake, a lovely suburban community. We lived in a new house in a new neighbourhood. The last thing we expected was a grow op in the neighbourhood, but we found it in our backyard within a few weeks of moving there.


How did we know? The answer was simple if you paid attention.

*There was no real activity, except the two young men who lived there mowed the lawn every now and then. But, other than that activity, nothing.

*The window shades were down and there was never any light emitted from the house.

*There was no trash.

*A truck came by usually very late at night and parked in the garage. After an hour or so they left full of big black garbage bags.

*They stood out like a sore thumb from all the inactivity in a suburban neighbourhood.

Several neighbours had called the police, we knew, but nothing seemed to ever happen in relation to those calls. The callers were told that they would look into it but no one ever knew if anyone was paying attention.

One evening, around dusk, my wife and daughters went out to visit the neighbour behind us when they were approached by a man who was dressed as Batman they thought. He turned out to be a swat team member, all dressed up with guns and armor, and told them to go back into the house for the time being. They did not argue. This was a memorable moment!

Within a few minutes, the door was broken in and the team swarmed through the house and no one was home. Trucks appeared and pot was taken out in bags along with lots of other stuff, and then the police ordered pizza.

After a day or two the activity stopped, and all was quiet. After a few weeks the guys returned, for their stuff I guess, and the police were waiting. They were carried away; the house was sold to an employee of the original builder. He repaired the house and stayed a year and sold it to another guy.

I was told the original builder sold it to the guy (drug boss) who made the deal giving him $40,000 in cash and paying off the rest over time, which he didn’t. They never paid a penny beyond the original money but stayed for several years and the greedy builder was either too greedy or too chicken to move them out.

And so it goes….

A lime with that drink sir?

We went out to dinner on Saturday night and happily was offered a gin and tonic as I entered the house. I love gin, and in the summer have a fondness for gin and tonic. So of course I accepted and was asked if I wanted lime with it and I said no. This was an error, as I began to get the “third degree” about why I would refuse a lime wedge when they had secured it especially for me that afternoon. I just said, “No, thanks.” "Well", blustered the hosts, “Are you allergic to that too now?”

OK, I have a bunch of allergies, but no allergy to citrus fruit exists in me. They had carefully prepared dinner with me in mind eliminating a number of fruit and nut ingredients to which I am allergic. “Well”, demanded the hosts, "why no lime!”


“OK”, I said, “ I will embarrassingly confess, I’m doing a fecal occult blood test, if you really have to know, and I can’t have citrus fruit for three days!”

This did stop them, and pleased them with my answer, because they had experienced this before themselves. However, I didn’t want to talk about my having to chase pieces of shit around a toilet bowl with a popsicle stick!

The main use for the FOBT (fecal occult blood test) is as a screen for early colon cancer. Blood in the stool may be the only symptom of early cancer. If the cancer is detected early, the chance that it will be curable is increased. The FOBT is not diagnostic for cancer; other follow-up procedures would need to be done to find the source of the bleeding because the blood may also indicate other gastrointestinal problems.

A secondary use of FOBT is to look for a cause of anemia, such as blood loss from a bleeding ulcer. If you have symptoms and signs of anemia, such as fatigue or a low hemoglobin and hematocrit, and/or unusually dark stools, your doctor may want to order the FOBT.

Fecal occult blood tests are most often done as part of a routine examination. The tests are used primarily as a screening tool for early detection of colon cancer. They are recommended to be done annually beginning at age 50 (by the American Cancer Society and other major organizations) or as directed by your doctor based on your family medical history. Most people who have them performed are asymptomatic.

Your doctor may also order an FOBT if he suspects that you have an unexplained anemia that might be caused by GI bleeding.

The FOBT test is normally negative. A positive test result will tell your doctor that you have abnormal bleeding occurring somewhere in your gastrointestinal tract. This blood loss could be due to ulcers, diverticulosis, bleeding polyps, inflammatory bowel disease, hemorrhoids, from swallowed blood due to bleeding gums or nosebleeds, or it could be due to benign or cancerous tumors. Anything that protrudes into the lumen (the empty space in the intestine), like a polyp or tumor, and is rubbed against by the fecal waste as it passes through has the potential to eventually bleed intermittently. Often, this small amount of blood is the first, and sometimes the only, sign of early colon cancer, making the FOBT a valuable screening tool.

In Canada, this is often done in place of the very invasive colonoscopy, unless the other is called for due to symptoms or family history.

For three days during a one week period, you chase these pieces of shit around the bowl looking for two good smears to put on a special paper within a cardboard sleeve which eventually gets wrapped up in another sleeve and is mailed through the post office, and hot mailboxes, to the lab which reports back the results if negative.

My daughters did not know that this whole mess was sitting in the dining room for the last week, or they would have freaked!

The Hundred Year Old Art School Rejection Story That Changed The World

So many times we’ve heard its only art school, and so many times I’ve told the story. By now I figure everyone knows the Hitler story but it’s always worth telling again. The importance for us is that an art school and art work is important to those who do it, and providing a negative view on it is not what I prefer to do, but this is a story that continues to need to be told.


Would the world be different today? Who knows? I believe we would be a different place, and perhaps have one more dead unhappy artist blaming someone for his failure, but a lot more people alive with very different outlooks.

From Wikipedia:

From 1905 on, Hitler lived a bohemian life in Vienna on an orphan's pension and support from his mother. He was rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (1907–1908), citing "unfitness for painting", and was told his abilities lay instead in the field of architecture. His memoirs reflect a fascination with the subject:


“The purpose of my trip was to study the picture gallery in the Court Museum, but I had eyes for scarcely anything but the Museum itself. From morning until late at night, I ran from one object of interest to another, but it was always the buildings which held my primary interest.”


Following the school rector's recommendation, he too became convinced this was his path to pursue, yet he lacked the proper academic preparation for architecture school:


“In a few days I myself knew that I should some day become an architect. To be sure, it was an incredibly hard road; for the studies I had neglected out of spite at the Realschule were sorely needed. One could not attend the Academy's architectural school without having attended the building school at the Technic, and the latter required a high-school degree. I had none of all this. The fulfillment of my artistic dream seemed physically impossible.”

On 21 December 1907, Hitler's mother died of breast cancer at age 47. Ordered by a court in Linz, Hitler gave his share of the orphans' benefits to his sister Paula. When he was 21, he inherited money from an aunt. He struggled as a painter in Vienna, copying scenes from postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists. After being rejected a second time by the Academy of Arts, Hitler ran out of money. In 1909, he lived in a shelter for the homeless. By 1910, he had settled into a house for poor working men on Meldemannstraße. Another resident of the house, Reinhold Hanisch, sold Hitler's paintings until the two men had a bitter falling-out.


Hitler often was a guest for dinner in a noble Jewish house, and he interacted well with Jewish merchants who tried to sell his paintings.

Everyone knows that Hitler’s application to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts was twice rejected. It is almost impossible to avoid the temptation to ask oneself what if Hitler had been accepted. We know that Oscar Kokoschka asked himself this tantalizing what if question. In Elias Canetti’s memoir, Party in the Blitz: the English years, Canetti relates the following about Kokoschka:

At the beginning of the War, when I saw him again — two or three years after our first meeting in Prague — I hadn’t been with him for more than half an hour when he made me his monstrous confession. He was to blame for the War, in that Hitler, who had wanted to be a painter, had been driven into politics. Oskar Kokoschka and Hitler were both applying for the same scholarship from the Viennese Academy. Kokoschka was successful, Hitler turned down. If Hitler had been accepted instead of Kokoschka, Hitler would never have wound up in politics; there would have been no National Socialist Party, and no Second World War. In this way, Kokoschka was to blame for the War. He said it almost beseechingly, with far more emphasis than he usually had, and he repeated it several times, in a conversation that had moved on to other matters, he brought it back, and I had the dismaying impression that he was putting himself in Hitler’s place … It was impossible for him to be implicated in history without having some significance, even if it were guilt, a rather dubious guilt at that.

There is another version of this story, less poignant, more in the vein of black humor, that has Kokoschka semi-humorously suggesting that he would have run the world rather differently if Hitler had been accepted at the Vienna Academy and he had gone on to something like Hitler’s political career.

Another Life Drawing Experience

In the late 60’s I was teaching a high school drawing and painting class on Saturdays and in the summer. This was in addition to my regular secondary school duties and set the path I would follow for my whole life, although it was not clear at that stage what I would eventually end up doing.

In a particular class one term, I had a young man who was an exceptional student, who at sixteen seemed very mature and on his way to an art career. Of course, at this juncture, I have no idea what his name was nor what he ever did with his life, but at the time I was very impressed and wanted to help him along.

The opportunity existed, I surmised, to attend an alumni life drawing session on Saturdays, where registered alumni would come in and draw the model without the benefit (or need) of instruction. This goes on in most art schools, as it does for us now, and the only costs associated with it are the cost of the model.

I thought that a life drawing experience would be just the thing this young man needed, but remembering my own introduction to life drawing (see My First Nude Model, July, 2009 post on this blog), I wanted to make his introduction as easy as possible.

I spoke with the authorities (the administration of the school) to see if this could be done and it was approved. I spoke with the student and asked him to discuss this with his parents and see if it was OK with them, which was fine, as we did not need releases etc. in those days. Everything was approved.

On the Saturday this was to happen, I was going to speak with the first alumna who was available, but since my class was starting, I held off, but of course went in and spoke with the model. I explained the situation and she was fine with it, and encouraged his participation.

All was set and my class started. I had them together to go over something or another for a while as I tend to “go on” a bit, and about a half an hour after the start, I took the student to the room where the model was posing for the alumni. I sent him in with a sketch pad and pencils and charcoal and instructions and a pep talk etc. Off he went and I was like a proud Papa sending his kid off to school for the first time. He opened the door and went inside.

In about two hours I returned to the room to get the student and see what he had done. My goal was of course to ease him into a life drawing experience without the trauma of facing the nude model for the first time, in the company of experienced strangers who would pose the model, keep time and know what to do.

Of course, life doesn’t work that way!

No students (alumni) had shown up for the class! He walked in alone to the room with his art supplies, a set up easel and a nude model, and he was alone!

Thank God the model was briefed in advance by me, and was a really good model and person. She set up the poses, taught him to keep time for her, and gave him an excellent drawing experience. She went over the drawings with him at intervals, and he did a great job! I was amazed by what had happened, and thanked her profusely. She was his model and teacher, and I imagine he has never forgotten the experience and as you can see, neither have I.

My last meal at HoJo's

It was sometime in the 70’s I guess, and we were coming home from somewhere. Now we know what kind of a story this will be!

Around West Virginia, as I remember, I guess right before you enter the Pennsylvania Turnpike coming north from West Virginia, we stopped at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. It was late, there were five of us and we were tired, cranky and hungry. I remember we wanted to just sit down and eat after much driving, and the us included my wife and myself and our three young boys.

We sat and received menus and that was about it for a very long time. I can’t remember if the waitress went home before she took our order or after, but sometime in there she left!

We waited and waited and began to get upset. We tried to reason and ask for help and eventually someone figured out we never had an order processed and finally, after and hour plus, we were served!

This was Howard Johnson’s for God sakes! They were fast food before there was fast food and that’s why we went there as an alternative to what else was available at the time.

We ate, paid our bill probably the only time I didn’t leave a tip in my life, and went on our way. When I got home I wrote a scathing letter to Howard Johnson’s national office and complained bitterly. I explained in agonizing detail what had transpired and how upset we were.

After sometime, I received a reply from Headquarters. There was a big apology, and after explaining in detail how we would never darken their doorstep again, wouldn’t you know it, they sent us a coupon good for a free dinner for eight people!

No, I didn’t use it, but rather than let it go, I gave it to friends. In the light of years of experiences and reason, what could they do?

While they could have returned our money, I know that would never happen and they weren’t going to encourage us to stay away. They did what they do, they gave us food, and at least someone got it eat it.

My last ride

As a child I loved to go to Gwynn Oak Park, a local amusement park with all the rides and games and cotton candy imaginable, and as a an older kid it was available by bike.

I was able, within a half an hour, to arrive for such spectacular events as Nickel Day, where all rides were five cents and Report Card Day, where you could ride for free with a passing report card.

Gwynn Oak went down in infamy as the famous site of racial tension described in John Waters “Hairspray”. It had the Dixie Ballroom, described in an earlier posting where we were able, with my fraternity, to showcase Bill Haley and the Comets and Fats Domino.

In a kinder, gentler time, before the racial tensions of the 60’s, it was mostly an amusement park full of fun and dreams for us kids.

I had planned to go with my parents on a road trip, a trip going all the way to Detroit, a business trip for my father and an adventure to the big city for us. Everything was arranged.

This was the early 50’s, and I had taken off on my bike for Gwynn Oak. It must have been the beginning of summer (the trip being in an off school time) and I took myself down for some rides.
Among the things I did that day was to go on the plane ride, an airplane contraption with a big air foil in front with a large handle to hold on to with two hands that you steered. It went round and round on chains and you controlled it’s movement kind of up and down with this very large handle.

I went on a it number of times that day, and I was at the end of my last ride when I jumped off before the ride was over. There were no safe guards in those times to prevent one from jumping out, no big bars barring your exit. I jumped before it stopped spinning, although it was almost ended, and caught my left foot in the doorway of my plane. This dragged me around by my left ankle while I hopped on my right one, holding on with both hands.

This was not a disaster; in fact it would have been erased from my memory under normal circumstances. I got undone at the end, laughed at my clumsiness and no one even came over to see if anything was wrong. I went out to the parking lot and rode my bike all the way home.

It was forgotten until the next morning, when I tried to get out of bed and couldn’t put my foot down! It hurt!

After a hospital visit, and a cast and crutches, my parents left for Detroit and I spent a week in the care of my grandparents!

When they returned, I learned all about the fantastic Hudson’s Department Store, a huge monolith in downtown Detroit and Northland Shopping Center, the first giant covered shopping mall in America.

I guess I could never have imagined at that time that I’d spend 12 years living in Detroit and knowing all these places so well.

I think my living there brought back the memory of my chipped ankle and the trip I’d never taken.

Chocking on a Noodle

When I was still a kid, an art school student, I had a date with a wonderful girl (who may read this blog so I will not give away any secrets) and we went to a party at one of our friends houses. I think we went somewhere else first, because I remember arriving late for some reason (not a good one), and the food had already been ordered and picked up. So when we arrived it was there.

Dave Jacobs, later the creator of “Dallas” and “Knot’s Landing” was the one responsible for the food, and had ordered Chinese food. It came in those wonderful little white cardboard containers it always came in before God invented Styrofoam, and it was good. I took a big plate full, as did my date, but not as much as me of course. Since I had known her for many years and we were just friends unfortunately (there is a theme here, but not meaningfully) I was not trying to impress her with my mannerly behavior.

I assume, in hindsight, that I was just hungry and in a hurry to eat and I just put too much food too quickly in my mouth and swallowed. The result was not so bad, but I lodged a noodle, the hard kind often served with soup, in my throat sideways!

The trick here was not to die, not to mess up my sport coat or pants (we were art students but always well dressed in the early 60’s) and to be able to find a way to express my discomfort as well as express the damn thing out of my throat where it was tearing new openings in my windpipe!

I thought as I chocked and fought against total collapse of me or my wind pipe. What could I do to save me? I came up with the ingenious solution.

We were alone in the kitchen, and no one was watching. I turned on the hot water tap, grabbed a glass and began to drink hot water, knowing that eventually the noodle would melt, and it did!

After calming down, straightening myself up so that I looked good, I finished dinner.

So thanks to Dave Jacobs and the Nan Kin Restaurant (long since gone and discussed in this blog a year or so ago), I enjoyed my dinner and my date.

OK, she married several more guys since then and I married several different women, but she is still, in my mind, the date I almost died on! I will send her this story as well, because she deserves to hear it all!

The original Nan Kin article:

When I was a kid I used to go to the neighborhood Chinese Restaurant, Nan Kin. It was across the street from the bowling alley in our Forest Park neighborhood, and was always a wondrous place, full of great and exotic food.

Now, granted, this was in the days before we ever heard of Szechwan cooking or Sushi or Vietnamese cuisine.

They had dishes with pork and shrimp and lobster, these were things that little Jewish boys only heard about, because they wouldn’t have been seen in our house. It’s not like we were kosher, it’s really just that these foods were foreign to us at the time.

My father would not eat Chinese food, so this became a special place for my mother and I to eat lunch on special Saturdays or Sundays. We would get Chow Mein and Fried Rice and all those exotic Cantonese dishes.

As a teenager, I returned there with friends. My friend Ted Fisher and I would go there often very late at night and get combination platters, a great bargain. The pork chow mien and fried rice with an egg roll and soup was about $1.10 and the shrimp egg foo young and fried rice and an egg roll with soup was about $1.25. These came with dessert of course, peppermint ice cream!

I know this place closed many years ago, as well we moved on to the Lotus Inn when we were mobile, a more upscale (slightly) place a mile or so uptown. When I was older, we were turned away from the Cantonese places by the more exotic ones, but my memories of sitting there with warm china containers with chrome lids full of wonderful food and pots of tea still remains.

Much like my story about the Pimlico Hotel, I have a Nan Kin story. No, I didn’t steal from these lovely people, but an opportunity came up a few years ago on eBay to acquire four tea cups from the restaurant.

I hold the cups in my hand and it takes me back to a kinder, gentler time……

Game Day Parking

On July 10 we attended the Hamilton Tiger Cats game at Ivor Wynn Stadium in Hamilton. It was hot! The game was great until the end when they lost by a single point!

I do love football, even the CFL. I have gotten used to the slight differences, and enjoy the game. However, in the past, unless there were great reasons like free tickets, there was no one in my family who would attend.

Now, my younger daughter is a Hamilton Tiger Cat Junior Cheer Leader! The rules for my family have changed and maybe we’ll go every now and then.

My daughter had not realized she would be on the field the whole game, and was not properly prepared with enough sun screen and she was a bit burned. I had enough with me to stop my never ending burning, which I always try and avoid. But this story is not about the game or about the sun, it’s about parking!

The parking opportunities at Ivor Wynn are limited. There is the street, the lot which I have no idea how to get on to and the people’s driveways, the most colorful way to go. The normal citizens of the old neighborhood sell their driveway space for an increasing amount as you get closer to the stadium. They also fill up the street parking with their own cars so I always assume I’ll be in someone’s driveway and try to be early to get a space. The difference between $10 and $15 is just a block, and the lot I can’t get on to is $20 so I go for the $10 space. You are captive and couldn’t leave early as no one wants your keys to move cars, it’s just a driveway.

We came down one of the main side streets and parked at a house that had a kid outside with a $10 sign who offered us chips as we departed the car as a premium for parking there. We smiled and didn’t take any, but we smiled at the parents and said thanks, and moved on with a slight registration in my mind of the woman whose house we just left. I remembered her face and the house number, but in the excitement moved on.

At the end of the game, we decided to meet my youngest daughter at the place she entered (she had gone early but texted my wife where she could be found). My older daughter and my wife were in front of me, and when we exited the stadium they were gone from my sight in the crowd. I had no idea where they were, my cell phone was in the car and I was stuck!

I remembered where the car was and decided to go there as I had the keys and they couldn’t leave me. I had no where else to go anyway. We were the first car in, so if they were late I could not have moved it anyway. I had no problem except no family. I was very hot and thirsty, but knew I had to wait somewhere.

I was grumbling and calling them all names for losing me (as they were in front of me) when I arrived at the house. The owner came over to me and said, “Arthur?” It was a friend who I’ve worked with before, a representative of our Provincial Government and a good person, and in this case, the home owner and savior!

I was introduced to her whole family, and they were having an after game party of sorts, so I was given a plate of shrimp skewers, some sausages from the grill and a beer! I was in heaven. We talked and enjoyed ourselves when I realized I could use their phone. I called my wife, who was, of course, angry with me for losing them, and invited her to bring the kids and told her I was at a party!

They arrived, a bit surprised, and we all stayed a bit, the kids had a drink and we did go home.

The next game we’re attending, my new found friends will be out of town and we get to park in the driveway for free!

I may go early and sell $10 spaces to pay for my tickets!

Away for a while

Dear Friends,

I'm out of town for a bit and forgot to tell you about it. I will be back very soon with new stuff!

I've had experiences already that are blog worthy but can't quite write them down sitting at a borrowed computer with my right leg jammed into a table. My mother-in-law is a very good example of people who purposfully make things hard to do; puts a chair full of magazines in front of the toilet so you have to sit side saddle or removes sofa pillows from the back of the sofa so you have to sit uncomfortably if you choose to sit!

So from my most incomfortable position, I hope you're all well!

Arthur

The Incredible Shrinking Man

When I was 13 I made it to 6’1 ½”. By the time I was 16, I was 6’ 3” and I stopped growing. This was OK, because that clearly was enough. My sons never made it that far, and the tallest one was 6’ 2”, a reasonable size for anyone to be.

A few years ago I was with my oldest son and as we were talking it occurred to me he had grown. How tall he was! I asked him about growing and when it had happened. He assured me he had not grown since he was a kid. It was then that it began to sink in, I was shrinking!

I made it to the Doctors soon after that and discovered I was 6’1½”, and my world began to crumble. I remember my father getting smaller, or so he said, but I never really believed him. It does happen.

Now I never talk about weight, a touchy subject with me, but meaningful here.

I had gone on a diet a few years ago and lost more than 30 pounds. When I got there, I weighed the same as I had the day I was married in 1987 (I was still way overweight!). However, my clothing from those times would never have fit. I was dumbfounded. Then I realized that as you get shorter you get wider!

Lately I have gained a lot of weight, I thought. I knew the original 30 pounds had come back but I was now scared that I’d gained more than ever. My clothing is not fitting and the sizes I need don’t come in stores made for people, I have to go to Omar the Tentmaker for pants!

I never weigh myself if I don’t have to. I have a doctor’s scale but it is off limits usually. I did, however, go to the doctors for a checkup and the assistant weighed me and measured my height. I never asked the weight, I couldn’t stand it but I have weighed myself yesterday to verify my worst fears.

The assistant said I was 6’2 3/4” tall, but she was young and Canadian, and she really only understands metric. I looked at her measurements, knowing she had to be wrong because I could not have grown despite my desires, and she thought 70” was 6 feet!

No, I was 6’ 3/4” tall! I had shrunk another ¾”!

Now the weight issue began to make more sense. I weighed myself, and while I’m not proud of my accomplishments, I don’t weight as much as I did when I went on the diet. I just grew wider by shrinkage!

This all begins to sound like a Seinfeld plot!

I am the Incredible Shrinking Man!

The Begging Suit

I was out today asking for money. Now this is not like going to Mom and Dad with a good excuse and telling them you need an extra $10. No, this is serious stuff. We call it Development.

My old friend Homer LeGassey, the great auto designer, used to tell me he would put on his “begging suit” in order to get funds for our design program, and it worked!

After more than a year of work for so many people, we were awarded a Federal Infrastructure Grant for $2.45 million, with a few challenges. We need to get another $2.45 million to match it in order to get it and we need to do all the work by March 31, 2010. As I said we have some challenges. So, I need to put on my “begging suit”!

I have been raising money most of my life. From the gentle ask to the big push, the goal is still the same, money.

The first “big gift” I ever received was in the late 70’s, and it involved a dinner. I was invited, with my wife, to meet our Board Chair and a few selected others. We spent many hours looking at art, and talking about art and futures. I played a guessing game for a while where I was asked to guess whose art work I was looking at. There were some challenges, but I was able to identify the artist on most of the pieces. There were some tough ones, like Enrico Donati and Kenzo Okada, wonderful mid-century artists whose work I did know, and a few I can’t remember now whose work was unfamiliar to me. However, it did seem a test.

There was a Reg Butler and several small Matisse sculptures. It was a wonderful adventure for me.

The next morning when I arrived at work, there was an envelope on my desk. My name was on the front, but no note. Inside, with no ask on my part, was almost $1,000,000 in stock! I checked the market and realized that we were just $60 short of a million, and called my business office and asked that if I gave them a check for $60 and included it with the envelope, could I be recognized with the benefactor as the giver of the one million. No answer was required.

Several years ago in Massachusetts, I received money from a donor who came to my office to complain bitterly about a local University that had the audacity to suggest an amount that she should be able to give them. She was alum, and had been a giver, but they had, according to her, overstepped their boundaries. Now this is a common practice, suggesting to donors an amount, but it can backfire. You can ask for too little, or ask for too much. Somehow, we never get it just right. I sympathized with the donor, and felt her pain, and was very glad I hadn’t dome the same thing to her. Her anger was such that she gave me the money she had intended for the university!

Another donor, after tea, cookies and a look at another art collection, asked me what I thought she should donate. I was caught! I had to answer but was concerned that I could ask for too much and get nothing, or ask for too little and get less than I could have. It was a tightrope. I knew the giving history of course because I was prepared, but still, what to do? I decided to go for it and mentioned a number I thought to be possible but more than double any previous gift. Her response was sure, but I can’t do this every year! That’s just what I had hoped to hear!

All of us are donors. We all have favorite charities. There’s the dollar or two I give to every poor kid with a can in front of the grocery store on the weekends, and the ongoing support we all give to a series of health related charities. And for me and my supporters, there are the arts. There are the symphonies, the dancers, the art schools, the museums and all the cultural opportunities out there to help continue and improve our world.

We all need your support for all kinds of important reasons. It’s not just health and poverty that are important to us; it’s the arts as well.

If you are in position to give, give it to me! (not me actually, but in this case it’s the Dundas Valley School of Art) Every dollar given will be matched by our Federal Government, and will be used to renovate and rehabilitate out 175 year old structure. (I have to go put on my begging suit, and I’ll give you a call!)

Living and Loving

This one starts out, I think, about living near work While this seems like a good idea from a carbon footprint concept, it has it’s drawbacks.

Years ago a school principal I worked for told me that his problem in a small community, was that he was unable to purchase alcoholic beverages in his town. This was years ago and in a rural community in Maryland, but still he had to travel miles away to buy a beer. And in those days, he said, he had to wear good clothes all the time. There were no ratty old jeans for the principal, because the community expected a sense of decorum from him, in the same way they expected it from their minister.

Many years later in Massachusetts, a friend told me he worked part-time in a porn shop, in the days before access to internet porn. This was in another far away town, where he would see school officials from other towns (he knew who they were for some reason) driving miles out of their way to rent porn videos.

My experiences have been limited with this as I haven’t been in that position often, but when I was, it was irritating. I remember a Board member asking me at a meeting why I was home at 2:30 in the afternoon! First, it wasn’t his business; secondly, a Board meeting is not the place to ask that kind of question, unless you want to try to humiliate me in public. I answered that I didn’t get free until 1:45 and wanted lunch, and because I lived so close, I went home to get some. It was the truth, and he was, of course, apologetic, and didn’t mean anything by it (why was he there looking?) and we moved forward.

This all brings me to the other part of this thing and that’s the old adage, don’t dip your pen in the company ink, or, don’t sh*t where you eat, or, don’t f*ck where you eat. These two thoughts, living and loving came together for me when one of my staff lived near a lovely widowed woman. She would see another one of my staff member’s car at the widow’s house way too often for her comfortability. She informed me they were clearly having an affair because he was there often day and night. I have no idea what their relationship was, nor did I care much, but he did maintenance for us and to no surprise, he worked for her as well.

So many of my stories, many of which I’ve told in earlier posts deal with at work relationships. I mean, after all, where do you meet people? Other than church, bars and on line, it’s a pretty limited world and people who meet at work, and spend time together, do get close and share mutual experiences. Sometimes, this leads to mayhem.

Right now the only current gossipy story I know has to deal with parents who have kids on sports teams and hook up by mutual interests. I guess this is a new area of relationship development, kid’s activities. People travel all around with each other to support competitive sports and dance. Things happen.

At my age, the story is better than the reality. I once had a fantasy about a woman on the school PTA, but nothing happened. I spent an afternoon with her preparing for some kind of event and never saw her again, but clearly never forgot about it.
An old friend of mine came home early one day to find his wife, a teacher, loving another teacher on their living room couch. We go from there to his second marriage, where his wife, a salesperson, was discovered to be doing another salesperson. His next wife didn’t work.

In the movie “Same Time Next Year”*, there’s this wonderful (my thoughts) fantasy about a couple who meet annually at some sort of meeting (it’s been a long time since I’ve seen this one) and we see them grow old apart from each other, but continue to hook up once a year. This is a wonderful fantasy, where no one gets caught, no one gets a disease and no one leaves their spouse to go get the other one and screw up everyone’s lives. It ain’t happening!

I will not put my real experiences down for posterity, because I need to save something for my biographers. Having had way too many questionable relationships, I advise everyone to get married for life, to your high school sweetheart and never stray! This was, in fact, my philosophy until my high school sweetheart asked me to go away!

*From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
New Jersey accountant George and Oakland, California housewife Doris meet at a Northern California inn in February 1951. They have an affair, then agree to meet once a year, despite the fact both are married to others and have six children between them. Over the course of the next 24 years, they develop an emotional intimacy deeper than what one would expect to find between two people meeting for a clandestine relationship just once a year. During the time they spend with each other, they discuss the births, deaths, and marital problems each is experiencing at home, while they adapt themselves to the social changes affecting their lives.

R and R time

My Dear Friends,

A few days of R and R are in order. Thanks for being faithful readers, and I'll be back with more "stuff" sometime next week. Have a good Canada Day, 4th of July holiday!

Arthur