Category: Me and Mine

Michael Flanagan, Esq.

 

More civic art. I noticed this week these two frames on the walls of the third floor. They are not side by side but they relate to the same man, Michael Flanagan, Esq. who was City clerk from 1846 to 1893 and after – and a junior clerk before that position was his. The painting is from 1846. The certificate below is from 1893. An amazing span of time in a working life of a Canadian, he would have been a perhaps a teen when Kingston was the capital of Canada in 1841, would have watched the building of City Hall and the fortifications at the harbour mouth protecting the Rideau canal and also during his career would have seen the electronic and instant messaging era of telegraph and telephone.

If you click on the certificate you will see a large version which may be readable despite the nutty font and my browser’s automatic reduction of the scale. At about two-thirds of the way down, there is a passage which any of you can feel free to apply to me:

Those of our citizens who have had the privilege of meeting him in private life will not soon forget the attraction of his genial society and the charm of his vivacious conversation enlivened as it is by unfailing anecdote and suggestive reminiscences brought forth from the treasury of a singular retentive memory and all pervaded by a spirit of kindest sympathy for his fellowmen.

Most interesting is the fact that this is not a retirement document as he is wished many years of good health to continue serving his fellow citizens.

Winter Harbour

I snuck up to the top of the dome this morning and got this shot of the harbour. To the right is one of a set of Martello towers built to guard the opening of the Rideau Canal from the US navy. The headland across the water to the left is Royal Military College, a military university, with Fort Henry, our historic British army fort, on its own separate point of land behind. Wolfe Island is entirely hidden on the horizon by the lake effect clouds, no doubt getting a dump of snow. Lake effect snow is a conveyor belt picking up moisture out on Lake Ontario, dropping it downwind a few kilometres later at first landfall.

Civic Art



 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Four Portraits in Kingston City Hall.

Click on image for larger scale, details on alt tag.

Not only is the building itself a work of art, but City Hall has a collection of around thirty or so portraits of past civic leaders of the City. The upper left of John Counter is interesting for a bunch of reasons, one of which is the form of the chain of office – a simple metal chain. Over the second half of the 1800s the chain gets medals added and transforms into gold. In the earliest state, the chain is only a symbol of obligation.

My understanding of the history of Kingston is limited but it appears that the City, like Halifax, was under military government to a certain point, then civil. The City celebrated its 325 anniversary of settlement in 2003 but only about 160 years of civil goverment.

Nice Buildings I Like: II and III

kingstoncathDouble domed because they could

In the second of a continuing series, I appear to be working out issues I have with domed buildings. This is the head of the Anglican Church in Ontario which sits a couple blocks west of work. There are two parts to it each under its own dome and the foreground one facing King Street East has a dandy smaller dome – verging on cupola – whose gold on black clock faces are quite the thing.

kingbajus210 years of brewing and office rentals

Another great building is down by my parking lot on Wellington, north-east of work. This was a brewery – apparently second oldest in Canada according to a picture at the Kingston Brew Pub. The brewery as a company started in 1794 but there was a move back from the street when the public road when through so these buildings are more in the 150 year old area. You can see the tower used in high fallootin’ industrial production of ale in the later end of the 1800’s as it was easier to lift all the ingredients up at the start of production and move them down through mashing, sparging, fermenting, casking, etc.

Sophat Vann

Unbeknownst to me last Saturday night, I ate at one of the favourite spots of Ra McGuire, the lead singer from Trooper. It’s information like that that doesn’t change your life but might lead one to pause over one’s Phanaeng Goong (spicy shrimp in basil peanut coconut sauce). [If I see him, there bending over noodle soup noisily, I will call him “Trooper Boy” – I will, I will…]

The Whig last Saturday had a great full page on Mr. Vann…or Mr. Sophat…who has started five different Cambodian restaurants in downtown Kingston – he starts one, gets it going, sells it to someone he trains for a few months and then goes on to open another. When I first moved here I asked whether there had been an immigration wave at some point, thinking it would take a fair number of families from one culture to sustain five restaurants. I got some odd looks. It was, I now learn, a one-man piece of work, creating a momentum for the stuff that helps keep the downtown thriving. Way to go. I have only attended one of his earlier shops, Cambodian Village, so far but his own kitchen Cambodiana is right around the corner.

This is the way it should work. Coming from Nova Scotia, I was used to Lunenburg Greeks, the Lebanese of 1948, the Greeks of the mid-50’s, the Vietnamese of the mid-70’s, the Lebanese of the late 70’s, a guy in my class called Zoltan whose folks got out in ’56, and the former Yugoslavs and their neighbours in the 90’s – and ate their sausage, kibbe, mousakka, croissants (remember the guy at North and Agricola who was a Saigon french pastry chef?), donairs, kapusta and other stuff. In undergrad, I wouldn’t trust a pizza not made by a guy who wasn’t raised on the Mediterranean. I would eat their mother’s home cooking, whatever it was. Food should be an entry to the immigrant experience for the non-immigrant. Eat curry and nans when you are 18 and get a little understanding of understand Mr. Khana, the grade 12 supply math teacher who posed unbelievably hard questions to keep us from being little bastards. Eat a donair from Sam Kasam and Lebanon is a little less about terrorists. Have apples and honey and listen to a friend’s grandfather quiz the young rabbi into embarrassment, think about the menorah. Share a joke over Tom Yum Goong and the jokes at the expense of others quickly sour. All in the cause of shaking up the brain and its residue of preconceptions through tasty food.

Even though I am the kid of two immigrants, I don’t, however, expect to see diners based on smoked herring and haggis. Your loss. Maybe in south-east Asia there are trendy corner stalls with chip butties and Irn-Brew…and deep fried Mars bars.

A Fund for George (II)

Going through the Yahoo Group I mentioned that Brian Cormier set up for remembering George Earles, I noticed that there was a photos section and I saw this. First week of third fourth year out to Peggy’s Cove to drink bad white wine and watch waves. Luanne would be soproud to know I am a Mason. [I still think its fairly foolish but you can’t take it away from me – except if I get caught saying its foolish.] Who took the photo?

How could I have been so thin, I thought when I saw the picture…nineteen years ago. Well there was that thing called summer unemployment which saw me humping my increasingly diminishing arse all over Halifax looking for jobs that were not there until I had to go back to Truro to mow lawns. Good old George. Didn’t get to get old. Makes me as sad as I was when I heard he died seeing that picture.

Send to the fund: (902) 422-1271. They take VISA.

A Fund For George

I got an email from my pal Ann in Winnipeg about a mutual friend from University of Kings College days, George Earles, who died earlier this year. Brian Cormier, another Kingsman, has set up a web group. At Brians site, there is a bit of a bio of George and some posts from friends which goes with the picture at the right: “George Earles, BJ Hons. ’86, University of King’s College. Born on May 7, 1964, George passed away in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, on March 4, 2003. Family, friends and colleagues are welcome to post messages and photos to remember George.” George was well loved by all who knew him, even if, sometimes, we suffered from his Newfie wit turned on our inability to keep up.

Ann wrote:

When I was in Halifax this August I dropped into the Alum Office inter alia (as lawyers say) to see how the endowment for George’s memorial scholarship was doing. I just got an update letter with my tax receipt saying that it is sitting at $7700 – $2300 short of the $10,000 needed for the endowment. Do you think there are any Crows who would be inclined to support the scholarship but haven’t gotten around to it or don’t know about it?

Here is the contact information for UKC alumni:

Bev Mahon, bev.mahon@ukings.ns.ca
Alumni and Public Relations Officer
University of King’s College
6350 Coburg Rd.
Halifax, NS B3H 2A1
Phone: (902) 422-1271
Fax: (902) 425-0363

Put the hand in the pocket, guys and give Kings a call. And if you have lost touch with someone…give them a call, too.

Warsaw Voice

In the good old days of 1996 before needy ernest blogs, e-mail clogging spam, Lord Google, when flaming and cross-posting was killing off Usenet, when you used to surf the net to find stuff knowing it was all entirely unreliable gossip, I used to copy the weekly quotes from the web version of the English language paper The Warsaw Voice to mail to my buddy Gary, then in Vancouver.

I lived in Poland in 1991 and would, when on the trains to some end of the country, at stations with unpronouncable names, grab any copy of the tissue paper printed rag I could find. The life of an English as a Second Language teacher in a coastal city in Poland was pretty pleasantly self-defined and small. Having little access to TV or local chit-chat (only 8 people in the City seemed to have any grasp of English, others preferring to curse at us behind our backsNeimieck! which means both German and something like “not human” – to which my retort of being Canadian and therefore an ally against the Nazis often brought great wailings of apology and hugs from stinky drunk pensioners), The Warsaw Voice told us that life in Poland was not all cream cakes, tinned boar or elk and Russian champaign: we lived in a still-subsidized Baltic resort fairly oblivious even of the Balkin wars starting a few hundred kilometres to the south.

The newspaper at least let us in on the very grim Polish humour in relation to news of the day, government officials and Germans, which grimness I suppose is natural when your country has been a playground for other’s generals for centuries. Here are some I saved from then:

“He was very, very handsome.”

A Polish woman at the Polish consulate in Paris, in enlisting help to find the French father of her baby.

“The Germans approach these mementos with a sense of humor and sometimes buy them; for them they are funny souvenirs from Poland.”

A shop assistant in an Old Town store selling original Nazi medals from World War II and photographs from Hitler’s occupation of Warsaw

“My sports results depend mostly on what time my buddies drag me out of the bar.”

-S³awomir Drabik, Poland’s speedway champ, about his career

“We have many regular customers. The record holder was someone we discharged at 7 a.m.-he was back at 3 p.m.”

Doctor at a Warsaw drunk tank, commenting on its recent increase in “visitors”

“Germans pay more, because they are more cultured.”

A mobile restroom agent at the beach in Gi¿ycko, explaining why the price is listed as gr.50 in Polish but zl.1 in German

“His lively movements assured me that everything was all right.”

Henryk Wojciechowski, newly appointed Gdañsk province administrator, telling reporters about the accident when, driving in the heart of the city, his driver ran over a boy who got up off the road and ran away.

“It’s not a sacrifice but a sensible act of civic duty.”

Zinaida Bolieva, a 46-year-old resident of Northern Ossetia, who offered to be a donor if Boris Yeltsin needed a heart transplant.

“Today, not having regained consciousness after a long illness, the secretary general resumed his office.”

A Soviet joke from Brezhnev’s times, recalled by General Aleksandr Lebed in an interview for Stern magazine. Lebed said that with Boris Yeltsin’s illness, the Kremlin situation is reminiscent of the Brezhnev joke.

Po-Tree

About twenty years ago right about now, I was entering the third year of my four-year slacker-paced BA in English Lit. I can’t say I have carried the literary banner high since about then, especially as law just about killed my ability to read books – as being an usher in a playhouse just about killed my ability to sit through a play or a movie. But, this being the first summer since 1991 that I have not spent September picking beans, digging up spuds or braiding onions, one poem kicks tricking its way into my mind: Keats’s Ode to Autumn. [Once, when absent mindedly signing up for seminars, one of the others, all-female in romantic poetry, tuned and said – “sorry, I took the last Keats”. I couldn’t recall when I had been aleing with her. I had thought she said “Keith’s”]   So, in honour of three years of English Lit classes, the impending season and our planning for the next garden plot in, maybe, 2005, here you are, copyright-free ’cause he’s a long time dead.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Hmmm… full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn… time for the mint sauce.