Throughout my life I have prided myself to be acquainted with interesting people, people who are as often themselves well connected and who seemingly likewise profit from knowing the right people. Not unexpectedly the consequence of such nutritious alliance is frequently added benefit.
When an extended-family member from the city asked me today about “a nice little tea room in the country” it got me thinking. There are presumptions about the country, some favourable, others not so, we all know that. The Town Mouse vs the Country Mouse has been going on for a long time. But the enquiry today hinted at a greater depth than was readily apparent.
“The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse” is one of Aesop’s Fables. It is number 352 in the Perry Index and type 112 in Aarne–Thompson’s folk tale index. Like several other elements in Aesop’s fables, ‘town mouse and country mouse’ has become an English idiom.
In the summer of 1963 I was 14 years old, travelling with my sister (age 12) and my parents from Montréal, Canada to Le Havre, France aboard the QSS Arkadia. Apart from an Irish priest (he may have been an Archbishop for all I know) he and our family were the only ones in First Class. My mother (who was a devout Roman Catholic) spent time drinking with the priest. My father did not drink. We all dined together.
“If I am inclined to suppose that a mouse has come into being by spontaneous generation out of grey rags and dust, I shall do well to examine those rags very clearly to see how a mouse may have hidden in them, how it may have got there and so on. But if I am convinced that a mouse cannot come into being from these things, then this investigation will perhaps be superfluous.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosphical Investigations
It isn’t as often that I am consumed by plans for the future as I am currently. Oddly it is the most strategic of those plans which inspires the least consumption. Instead the overriding competition comes from matters of far less significance – or, at least, of far less current import. That got me thinking; whence derive the whys and wherefores of collywobbles?
My mother died in October, 2018. While I cannot point to the precise day of the month, I remember what I was doing at the time. I was lying by the pool on Longboat Key, Florida. We had just arrived there from Canada. My partner had (I presume) received an email from my sister – or perhaps it was a telephone call – notifying us of mother’s death. When he came to pool and bent to my ear to whisper the news, my reply was, “Good!”
It is easy to lapse into a melancholic state of mind and in the process lose touch with reality. We have a habit of mystifying things from a distance, colouring them with perhaps unmerited speculation. Yet looking at things frozen in a moment renders an oddly expansive image of the whole which embraces the past and the future in one frame. Reflection is both fanciful and insightful. And at times lachrymose. The important people in one’s life are like the finest strains of doleful music, the softest garmet of silk, the tenderest flush of hues.
“But time is ticking!“
When you think of it, there isn’t much we really need. The word “need” is one of those funny words like “want” which have a meaning different than at first understood. As I am certain you already know, the word “want” has through usage developed an import from lack to need to desire. Hence, if you want something, it may have nothing whatever to do with either insufficiency or necessity; rather, want may merely express desire. The issue about what we either want or need in life then becomes one of desire.
Cinco de Mayo (pronounced [ˈsiŋko̞ ðe̞ ˈma̠ʝo̞] in Mexico, Spanish for “Fifth of May”) is a yearly celebration held on May 5, which commemorates the anniversary of Mexico’s victory over the Second French Empire at the Battle of Puebla in 1862, led by General Ignacio Zaragoza. The victory of a smaller, poorly equipped Mexican force against the larger and better-armed French army was a morale boost for the Mexicans. Zaragoza died months after the battle from an illness, and a larger French force ultimately defeated the Mexican army at the Second Battle of Puebla and occupied Mexico City.
More popular in the United States than Mexico, Cinco de Mayo has become associated with the celebration of Mexican-American culture.
Almonte is a small town in the country about 45 kms outside Ottawa the nation’s capital. When I came here in 1976 it had a population of about 4,500. Its population as recorded in the 2016 Canadian Census was 5,039. Although there have been many changes in Almonte over the past half century it frankly feels that nothing much has happpened. The new residential areas have merely overtaken the fields – such as where Howard Sadler grew his strawberries – that we never saw in any event.