Home  >> Stories  >> The Tale Spinner #2016-36

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IN THIS ISSUE

• Doris Dignard solves her living arrangement
• Cynthia Chan describes a weekend trip
• The editor writes about her only claim to fame
• Catherine Nesbitt sends the story of a senior citizen´s prank
• Pat Moore forwards an article about "the green thing"
• Here is a nostalgic poem by Robert Frost
• Sites are recommended by Barbara Wear, Jay, and Tom Telfer

Doris Dignard resolved the question about living in

A HOUSE OR AN APARTMENT

Except for a brief period in my late teens, I had always lived in a house. I was not thrilled with apartment living at that time and therefore never wanted to live in an apartment again. Well, I have just moved into an apartment.

For all of my married life, plus a few extra years, it was a house that I called home. Not the same house, as I have lived in a few. My houses were wonderful places. There was plenty of room until children filled them up. Space magically returned as the children began to strike out their own.

During all of these years, a house constantly needed repairs. Windows were replaced, roofs re-shingled, and a new furnace and air conditioners installed. Appliances, no matter how good, did wear out. Still, most of us would not have it any other way.

As children leave and spouses pass away, there you are, alone in the house. Children come to visit, often to make repairs that used to be done by the male head of the family. It was time to rethink living in an apartment. Could I afford one in the Toronto area with real estate prices going through the roof?

I finally began to think about it very seriously. If appliances went on the fritz, not my worry; household repairs, not my worry. This was beginning to look interesting.

I was able to find a good senior residence at an affordable market value rent. I filled out an application, only to find there was a long waiting list, as much as two years. This was disappointing, but time passed, and I now have my apartment. I wish I had done this much sooner.

The main floor is a hive of activity. The main rotunda has large tables and chairs where many congregate daily. Asians enjoy a good game of Mah Jong, some tenants like cards, and many just meet over coffee and a good chat. The laundry is along a hall on the main floor, so this leads to another area for visiting as well. Once you leave the main floor the building is extremely quiet.

I have chosen a wonderful place as my new home. Do I miss my house? Not really.

ED. NOTE: I agree with Doris - living in a house alone is not a desirable situation. I have lived in more houses than I can remember; then I graduated to owned apartments; and eventually I moved to rented apartments. I will never own a house again. Repairs are the responsibility of the owner; appliances are repaired or replaced at no cost to me. I do not garden or shovel snow, or pay for new roofs or basement floors, as I did when I owned an apartment. All I have to do is to remember to lock the door after I come home, and l have to make sure the cat does not slip out into the hall when I´m not looking.

Cynthia Chan writes about

A TRIP TO CALGARY

Have you ever taken the time to think about just how beautiful Canada is? This summer, I was lucky enough to have travelled in three provinces, although I have been to four in total in my life: B.C., Alberta, Ontario, and Newfoundland. Although they all belong to the same country, the provinces have such different and beautiful landscapes, culture, and people.

My most recent trip took me to Calgary, Alberta. My husband decided to go on a spontaneous road trip. He has always wanted to do a road trip across Canada, and although we did not go across the whole country, I think that it satisfied a bit of his wanderlust.

We drove from our home in Coquitlam, heading out about 7:00 a.m. It´s a long drive to Calgary - about 11 hours long. We drove past Chilliwack, Kamloops, Salmon Arm, Revelstoke, Golden, Banff, and finally arrived in Calgary at about 6:30 p.m. We stopped only twice, and that was mainly because my husband insisted he drive the whole way. I don´t think I would have been able to handle such long stretches of driving.

As we drove, I was able to admire the changing landscape from British Columbia to Alberta. At first, the highway was just stretches of concrete past buildings, farmland, and small lakeshore towns. Eventually, we arrived at the the mountains, which might have been the most beautiful view I have ever seen in my life. If the distant silhouettes we see from Vancouver are beautiful, the real thing up-close is even more phenomenal. Tall, majestic, some snow-peaked, some covered in lush forest, and some quite barren, but all amazing sights to see.

At one point I asked my husband, "Are those mountains really tall, or is it that the clouds are hanging down lower?" There were points where the clouds were actually touching the mountains, like balls of cotton candy on a cone.

When we reached Calgary, the landscape changed to plains - stretches and stretches of field, rolling out into the horizon. We had dinner at a friend´s house. It was a reunion for my husband and his university friends. One of this friends was kind enough not only to let us stay with him at his apartment, but also to spend much of his weekend playing tour guide for us.

Our first day was wonderfully sunny, and so we went downtown to see Prince Island. We explored downtown, tried desserts at a cafe, and visited Inglewood, a neighbourhood with eclectic shops and a few pubs.

The next day, we drove to Banff. It was a cloudy day, but we enjoyed our walk around the village in Banff. It was bustling with tourists. By the time we headed out to Lake Louise, it had begun to rain. However, I don´t think any sort of weather could ruin the view at Lake Louise. It was absolutely stunning - calm blue waters stretching out to the horizon, flanked by two majestic mountains.

I was really able to appreciate how beautiful Canada is during this trip!

Long before modern technology changed the craft forever, I was a printer,

A WOMAN IN A MAN´S TRADE

When I graduated from high school, the war was in its second interminable year and all the young men had long ago signed up, leaving no-one to begin an apprenticeship in the local printshop. Recommended by my high school principal for being "neat, practical, and methodical," (not for my brains nor brawn, obviously) I was given a job by Peter Campbell and his son, Don, who owned the small weekly newspaper in my home town, "The Salmon Arm Observer."

During the year it took for the last apprentice to finish his time and become a journeyman, I did odd jobs - everything from sweeping the floors and the sidewalk in front to sending out the bills, with the occasional reporting of a Women´s Institute meeting or rewriting of an account of a local wedding or afternoon tea. One of the hardest things I did was listening to Mr. Campbell tell stories of his youth in the Hebrides in a brogue so thick I could only pretend to understand him. He was a delightful old gentleman and I liked him very much, but it was still a trial to talk to him.

At the end of the year, I became the first woman apprentice anyone in the trade in British Columbia had ever heard of. I was sworn into the ITU, the International Typographical Union, "the biggest and best union in North America." Like the old-hot metal printing, that union has now gone the way of the dodo.

I started at a salary of $7.00 a week. Every six months for the next five years I received another $2.00, so that by the end of my time I was earning $25.00 a week. Those were less expensive years, but if I had not been living at home I could not have survived on my wages.

It was a good thing I was built low and sturdy because the work was heavy and dirty. We worked with hot metal (a mixture of lead with some additive), an echo of the early days in the trade when the average lifespan of a printer was 28 years.

Much of the type that went into the newspaper was cast on the Linotype, a machine with so many moving parts that people would stand and watch, fascinated by its complexity. Those machines are museum pieces now, but in those days it was the fastest way of setting type, and over the next few years it became my special domain.

A number of sizes and fonts of type were housed in magazines which fitted onto the top of the Linotype, and while most type was the size and font which appears in newspapers still, there were heads to set, and different types for advertisements and printing jobs, which entailed changing the magazines. They were heavy and awkward, but it never occurred to anyone (me included) that someone else should lift them for me.

The Linotype was not infallible, and if the interface where the hot lead was forced onto the recessed type faces was not tight, hot metal would squirt out of the lockup, often splashing the operator before he could move out of the way. Cleaning up one of those messes meant chipping off the solidified lead which had coated all the moving parts. We were our own machinists, and cleaned up our own squirts.

In addition to operating the Linotype, we set type by hand from a variety of trays which held fonts of all sizes and designs, from large wooden letters to tiny letters used for business cards or wedding invitations. The type was laid out in these cases in individual boxes, with lower case letters arranged at the bottom and capitals at the top - which is where the designation of upper and lower cases came from. The worst part of hand-set type was putting it away again, and we avoided it for as long as we could. The type would be tightly wrapped with string and stored on shelves (in case we needed it again), but eventually we would need it for another job and would have to sort it out into the appropriate boxes.

Headlines and larger type for ads were set by hand, but the stories were set on the Linotype. The "lines of type" were lead slugs cut to the desired length, about half an inch high, with reversed type on top. (This is where we learned to read upside down and backward.) These slugs were arranged in columns, which were transferred to iron frames which rested on large slabs called stones. The type was fitted into the frames so tightly that the whole thing could be lifted and carried downstairs to the press. On rare occasions, they were not properly tightened and the whole thing fell onto the floor, which is where the expression "printer´s pi" came from.

The iron frames, or chases, were the size of tabloid newspapers, and four of them would fit on the big flatbed press downstairs. The flatbed was literally a flat piece of metal on which the frames were arranged, and it moved back and forth under a huge cylinder, which carried individual sheets of newsprint down onto the type and out the other side. Feeding the press was a dreary job, and sometimes a very hot one, flipping one sheet at a time onto the roller. The printed sheets went through an automatic folder, which turned out about a thousand eight-page newspapers every Wednesday.

Then, of course, the papers had to be delivered to the local stores, or wrapped and addressed and mailed. After the newspaper was finished, the type was washed with gasoline; Linotype material was thrown into a bucket to be carried downstairs to be remelted into pigs, and hand-set type was put away.

For the rest of the week, which was 44 hours long, we worked on other jobs - letterheads, envelopes, hand bills, business cards, invoices, invitations - anything and everything that local businesses and people needed. We were the only printers in town.

For five years, during which the war raged on and was eventually won, I worked five and a half days a week, studying my lessons in printing, while the foreman, Don Campbell, and I got out the newspaper and did all the other printing jobs that came in. Only during holidays did the ink stains come off my hands.

Toward the end of my apprenticeship, the paper was sold, and when I completed my time, the new owner told me he could not afford to keep two journeymen on staff full time, and I could not afford to work only three days a week. So ended my six years spent in that little shop.

You have undoubtedly heard more than you ever wanted to know about printing as it used to be, but the next instalment will be less technical as the rest of my 30 years in the trade was spent as a Linotype operator.

To be concluded.

Catherine Nesbitt sends this story:

WHERE ARE YOUR GLASSES?

Yesterday my daughter e-mailed me again, asking why I didn´t do something useful with my time.

"Like sitting around the pool and drinking wine is not a good thing?" I asked.

Her talking about my "doing-something-useful" seems to be her favourite topic of conversation. She was "only thinking of me," she said and suggested that I go down to the Senior Centre and hang out with the girls.

I did this, and when I got home last night, I e-mailed her and told her that I had joined a parachute club.

She replied, "Are you nuts? You are 78 years old, and now you´re going to start jumping out of airplanes?"

I told her that I even got a membership card, and e-mailed a copy to her.

She immediately telephoned me and yelled, "Good grief, Mum, where are your glasses? This is a membership to a prostitute club, not a parachute club."

"Oh dear. I´m in trouble again, I said. "I really don´t know what to do. I signed up for five jumps a week!"

The line went quiet, and her friend picked up the phone and said that my daughter had fainted.

Life as a senior citizen is not getting any easier, but sometimes it can be ever so much fun.

Pat Moore forwards this:

THE GREEN THING

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the much older lady that she should bring her own grocery bags, because plastic bags are not good for the environment.

The woman apologized to the young girl and explained, "We didn´t have this ´green thing´ back in my earlier days."

The young clerk responded, "That´s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."

The older lady said that she was right - our generation didn´t have the "green thing" in its day. The older lady went on to explain:

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles, and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so It could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn´t have the "green thing" back in our day.

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags that we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags.

We walked up stairs because we didn´t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn´t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

Back then we washed the baby´s diapers because we didn´t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts. Wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn´t have the "green thing" back in our day.

Back then we had one TV, or radio, in the house - not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen we blended and stirred by hand because we didn´t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.

Back then, we didn´t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn´t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blade in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service in the family´s $45,000 SUV or van, which cost what a whole house did before the "green thing."

We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn´t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.

But isn´t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn´t have the "green thing" back then?

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

- Robert Frost

SUGGESTED SITES

Barbara Wear always dreamed of having a car that turned into a plane. She knows she probably will never own one, but thinks that her kids or grandkids might someday have one:

Jay forwards this link to a video of an island overrun by rabbits, which has become a tourist attraction:

Tom Telfer forwards the URL for an animation created by a student, who was offered a job by Disney after they saw it:

Tom also sends this link to a video of an Amazon parrot and his owner, guitarist Neno Alfenas, performing a duet in Sertanópolis, Brazil:

A depressed man in a nursing home reacts to hearing music from his youth:

If you are interested in different types of housing and living scenarios for older adults, check out this article by co-housing pioneer Charles Durrett:

A grateful group of parents and their children show a beloved NICU nurse at WellStar Kennestone Hospital in Marietta, Georgia, how much her loving care was appreciated in their time of need:

The world is facing the largest humanitarian crisis since WWII. Today, over 130 million people around the world are caught in conflict and disaster, and need humanitarian assistance to survive:

Gracing the stage from Italy and the Netherlands, visual dance act Another Kind Of Blue bring something new and exciting to Britain´s Got Talent:

Diseases and viruses from open-net fish farms are spreading to more and more wild salmon, leading to the worst Fraser River sockeye salmon run in recorded history. Moving fish farms inland will provide sustainable jobs without putting wild salmon at risk. Sign this petition to stand up with wild salmon:

Dr. Brian Day, better known as "Dr. Profit," has launched a reckless challenge in the B.C. Supreme Court aimed at allowing for-profit, U.S-style delivery of medically necessary services. Sign this petition to protect our public health care system:

To check out the features of the "freedictionary," which changes daily, go to