Bernie Has a Night Out

Bernie arrived at the shop with a bundle of clothes.  He explained that he was going out that night with his wife.  She was going to pick him up at the end of work, which was unusual, but this was an important event, and she was going to make sure Bernie didn't linger at the shop.  He'd brought clean clothes to change into before leaving so they wouldn't lose any time.

At the end of the day, Bernie's wife arrived, and he stepped into the bathroom to change out of his dusty shop duds.  When he emerged, he looked great, but for one detail.  "Bernie, you can't wear those shoes!" said his wife.  Sure enough, Bernie had forgotten to bring dress shoes.  His shop shoes were filthy, banged-up and worn at the heels.

Bernie thought for a second.  "Oh, I'll fix that," he said.  He wiped his shoes down, and then went over to the shelf where the cans of spray lacquer were lined up.  He picked out the gloss black, and commenced spraying, not even bothering to remove his shoes first.  After the lacquer dried, the shoes looked pretty good, if you didn't look too closely.  "See?  I've got a fix for everything."  Bernie and his wife stepped out for their evening of dining and dancing.  He left behind the black outline of his feet on the floor.

The next day, we asked Bernie how his evening went.  "Oh, we had a great time.  You shoulda seen all the food, they had everything, and there was a whole band playing, we danced all night!"  We looked down at his shoes.  They didn't look too good, big brown splotches showing through the broken black crust.  "Bernie, what happened to your shoes?"  He laughed.  "Well, you know, the lacquer held up OK at first, but as soon as we got dancing, it started to flake off.  I left little flecks of black all over the dance floor."

BC

My French-Canadian Moment

When I moved to Woonsocket, I already knew about its history as a mill city dominated by French-Canadians.  In Rhode Island, Woonsocket is famously French.  Just don't come here, as someone I know once did, expecting French cuisine.  You'll get meat pies and pea soup (both quite good, by the way).

I knew that my mom was half-French, whatever that meant.  I would ask her about it, and all she knew was that her family came from upstate New York, where it had been for a long time, apparently.  Were they from-France French?  She didn't know.  Her mother could speak French, her grandmother spoke nothing but French, and pea soup was a part of her childhood, but she didn't know where they had come from.  Canada was never mentioned.

In Woonsocket, my wife and I became friendly with the older couple across the street, Marcel and Terry.  Marcel, born in Quebec, was a musician.  We would occasionally catch him playing at local events.  His big hit was the song "Charlie Brown," which he would sing in French.  It was pretty funny, especially the "Why is everybody always picking on me?" part.  Marcel was close with some other musicians we knew, a fact we learned only after Marcel had fallen ill, and was confined to his home.  My wife called up our other friends, and arranged to have the gang of us visit Marcel at home one afternoon.  It was great fun, and it would be the last time we saw him alive.

Woonsocket is home to the largest American-French genealogical library in the country.  It happens to be within walking distance of my house.  In time, I formed a habit of walking over, notebook in hand, to discover the history of my family.  One odd thing for me about living in Woonsocket was that many women in town seemed to resemble my mom for some reason.  Not until I started researching my family's genealogy did it begin to dawn on me that my mom's family was not just French, but French-Canadian.  I was a bit nervous asking her about it, but she really had not ever heard Canada or Quebec mentioned overtly.  She supposed it could be true.  There was a story that her grandmother had been born in Montreal, for instance.

The term "French-Canadian" is confusing.  In the US it is used to mean those Quebec-Americans whose ancestry is French-Quebec, or Quebecois.*  But Canada, like the US, is a melting pot, so "Quebec" isn't really an ethnicity.  To get the ethnic sense of a person, you refer to him as French-Canadian or English-Canadian (or Pakistani-Canadian).  In the case of French-Canadians this is misleading, since the actual connection to France is about three or four centuries ago.  As with African-Americans whose families have been in America for three centuries, the cultural connection with the "ancestral homeland" is pretty abstract.

I do think that "Quebecois" can be used as an ethnic term.  A relatively small number of French came to Quebec during a relatively short period of time, then lived together in relative isolation, intermarried, and created a unique culture over three centuries.  The people are no longer strictly French, any more than meat pie is French cuisine.  And though their language is obviously derived from French, even the French can't understand it.  So why did my mom know she was French, but not Quebecois?

We went to Marcel's wake at the funeral home down the street.  His mother and many of his siblings were there, some having journeyed from Quebec.  The room was lit an eerie pink, and packed with older people who all seemed to be speaking French.  Some of the people we recognized from the neighborhood.  It was lively, like a giant family gathering.  We introduced ourselves to Marcel's mother, who spoke to us in French until my wife explained that she only knew "un peu," which made everyone listening laugh.  Then a priest called for attention, and conducted a brief service.  This was followed by a statement, a reminiscence, read by one of Marcel's friends.  All of this was in French.  We were immersed in a part of Woonsocket that we normally only glimpsed.

My mother grew up in Barre, Vermont, as did her parents.  Her grandparents, both sets, had come to Barre in about 1890 to work in the granite industry, an industry so grand at the time that stoneworkers were regularly recruited from all over Europe.  Though a small city in the middle of Vermont, Barre hosted several ethnic communities.  These communities arranged themselves socially based on the status of their work in the granite industry.  Italians were the prized stonecarvers, they were at the top of the ethnic ladder.  The Scots were trained stonecutters, right below the Italians in status.  At the bottom were the unskilled laborers, more often than not French-Canadian.  In fact, French-Canadians were recruited as strike-breakers whenever there were labor disputes.  This did not help their status.

My mother's mother came from a line of French-Canadians who had left Quebec generations earlier, before 1840.  They had worked in New York's Ausable Valley, had fought in the Civil War, and generally regarded themselves as Americans.  When she married another Barre native, a Presbyterian Scot, in 1923, it was a scandal, but hadn't her family been in America longer than the Scottish family?  Hadn't her family been in America long enough to be called American rather than Canadian?

A couple of weeks after Marcel died, his friends and family held a musical tribute for him.  The tribute took place at a performance hall run by one of the musicians we knew.  The hall was packed, and there were several different groups of musicians who played fiddle tunes, French songs, and Country-Western songs.  The MC kept everyone entertained in French, sometimes translating into English (but not the jokes).  What most impressed me was when the entire audience sang along with the French songs.  The songs reminded me of songs my mother had learned from her mother.  I don't know if they were French songs, she never sang them in French, but the melodies had a similar lilt to what I was hearing that night.  It was dawning on me that I, too, was French-Canadian.

BC

* I am using the word "American" here to mean someone from The United States, though technically anyone from South, Central, or North America, including Canada, is an American.

Calm

While reading about the attack at the Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, a detail caught my attention.  This is from the New York Times,* October 5th:

Lil Nissley, whose daughters had been playmates with one of the victims, said she was at the farm where those fleeing the schoolhouse - the male students and the adult women - had taken refuge.  "Any outsider would have said, what's wrong with these calm people?" she said.  "I mean, we were crying, we were praying, but we weren't hysterical."

But Ms. Nissley and her husband, David, who are not Amish, said the composure was a matter of culture and training, not suppression.  "Their blood runs red," Mr. Nissley said.

This couple is apparently addressing a comment or criticism that was made about the Amish, but not mentioned in the article.  The comment must have been about the apparent lack of emotion expressed by the community, a lack that must have seemed a flaw in Amish character:  perhaps the Amish were emotionally cold, the effect of isolation or of a cult-like element in their religion.

The response deserves attention.  The Amish do not lack emotion, of course; "their blood runs red."  But their calm is the result "of culture and training, not suppression."  In other words, calm is a refined skill, and does not indicate a lack of something.  If you practice calm, you should expect calm as a general response to life.

Conversely, if you practice hysteria, panic, and emotionality, don't be surprised if you have hysterical, panicked, and overly emotional responses to everything.  You can't simply add a little calm on top of this and expect it to work.  And overly emotional responses, however satisfying as drama, are not the same thing as healthy emotion.

BC

* link here, subscription needed to view entire article.
Here's a lovely and sympathetic take on the Amish response to the attack.

Ye Olde, Gone Berserk

I've always loved the affectation "Ye Olde . . ."  The attempt to establish venerability is laughably misguided.  And as a marketing strategy it isn't even remotely convincing; therein lies its charm.

I remember going on vacation as a child, before interstate highways existed.  You could travel a hundred miles - it would take three hours - and wind up in a world utterly different from where you began.  My family really wanted to get away, so we would drive 6 or 7 hours to spend a week at a cabin on a Vermont lake.  Inevitably we would pass through two or three ye olde tourist havens.  There would be "authentic" rustic trading posts and Indian villages, general stores and log cabins.  There would be larger-than-life wooden statues of bears, Indians, and lumberjacks.  One particular trading post had an outdoor platform advertising a live dancing bear.  The traffic would always be terribly slow, giving us kids plenty of time to harass our parents to please stop and let us watch the bear, or buy salt-water taffy.  Mom and Dad were not fooled by "ye olde."

"Ye", as an alternative to "the," is an accident of technology.  Old English made use of an Anglo-Saxon letter called "thorn" to indicate the sound we know as "th."  It looked like this:  Þ or þ.  During the Middle Ages, "þ" was eventually replaced by "th," except in common words like "the," which looked like this:  þe.  When printing came to England, printers looked for an alternative to "þ," which they didn't usually have in their lettersets.  A handwritten "þ" looked like a capital "Y," and so "Ye" was born (often looking like this:  Ye).  It was still meant to be pronounced "the," but eventually everyone came to pronounce it "yee."

So "Ye Olde Clock Shoppe" is meant to signify age, and thus authenticity.  The fact that "ye olde" is used for the least authentic establishments gives it its campiness.  Modern usage is meant for sentimentality (those good ol' 1950's!) when it isn't being just plain quaint, or wrong-headed.  One of my favorite modern uses is a window store in Warwick RI that inexplicably calls itself The Window Shoppee, with the extra "e" thrown in for emphasis, I guess.

I met a guy once named Bob whose life appeared to be taking place in the eighteenth century.  He wore period clothing when he could, wore an antiquated hairstyle, and had appropriately remodeled his house, right down to clever ways to hide modern amenities like electrical outlets.  We called him Ye Olde Bob.

Recently I played a gig at a bar in the basement of The Ancient Mariner Inn, in Foxboro MA.  It's one of those old hotels you can still find in some town centers.  Before the gig, I tried to locate the bar in a phonebook or an online listing, but I had no luck until I finally stumbled across it - the official spelling is "The Ancyent Marinere."

I knew it was probably just a local dive, but I sure was hoping that the hotel would have an old, dilapidated, possibly neon sign with "The Ancyent Marinere" in big 1950's letters.  You know the kind of sign I mean.  They used to be all along highways like US Rte 1 and US Rte 6, advertising motels and restaurants and miniature-golf courses.  This was prime "ye olde" territory, though much of it is gone now.

But modernism had taken its toll in Foxboro as well, and to my disappointment I was greeted with a modest, newer sign that said "The Ancient Marinere."  The sign was probably put up the same time as the vinyl siding.  I was cheered by that extra "e," though, and at least in the phonebook you can still find "The Ancyent Marinere."

BC

Here's Wikipedia on "ye" and "thorn."