Major & Minor Notes

Joe Macdonald's Stories & Songs

Archives for May 2017

On Borrowed Time

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This is difficult for me to write about. It’s been a year now since I experienced a horrifying car crash. It was my fault. I made a bad lane change and ended up sideways on the grill of a transport truck at 110 km/hr. There’s no reasonable explanation for why I didn’t die but good luck and the truck driver’s skill somehow allowed me to live.

I heard a loud bang and before I understood what was happening, I saw that to my left was the front of an eighteen wheeler. Had I taken my hand off the steering wheel, I could have touched it. But I held on. Two feet on the brakes, two hands on the wheel, glass shattering all around me, my car seemingly on the verge of exploding or flipping or crumpling, I rode it out for the longest minute or two in my fifty years.

Miraculously, I survived and walked away without a scratch. The car was a write-off and I got a $110 ticket for an unsafe lane change.

But I’m not the same anymore. I don’t like driving. I see danger everywhere. Every lane change is a terrifying event. Every merging car looks like a potential threat. It’s been a year and it’s still there. And I doubt it’s going to change. There really are moments in our lives that change us. That we don’t just get over.

It’s an odd feeling. Like surviving a plane crash, there’s almost a guilt to it. Why me? Why did I live when others didn’t? It’s paradoxically liberating and paralysing all at once. I don’t even know how to describe it and I’ve spent a year trying.

But I now fully and completely understand that some injuries are not visible. And unlike broken bones or the bruises we can all see, it’s not clear to me how the less visible damage many of us have suffered will heal. Or if it will heal at all. And you don’t have to crash a car to have this damage. We all have it. In some way. Somehow.

Random Wednesday Thoughts

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  • I was driving on my quiet little street this afternoon and ahead of me in the middle of the road was a man riding a recumbent bicycle. He didn’t seem too interested in moving over to the side and though I wasn’t in a hurry, it was still mildly annoying. When he did move over and I eventually passed him I saw that he had a prosthetic leg. In a split second I went from being bothered by him to admiring him. I have no way of knowing his story but I like to imagine that if he lost his leg as an adult, one of the first things he thought while on his way to recovery was, “I’m going to need a good bike”.
  • If song-plays by buskers in front of the liquor store determined the music charts in Canada, Neil Young would be top of the pops every week.
  • I like seeing people holding hands. Kids and parents, brothers and sisters. Brothers and brothers and sisters and sisters. Older couples who have been holding hands for fifty years. Gay couples who feel comfortable holding hands in public in a way they didn’t when I was growing up. Something that may have made me slightly uneasy thirty-five years ago now warms my heart and makes me feel bad for all the people for all the generations that felt like they couldn’t hold hands. What a shame.

    My dad and his little brother Peter
  • I had to take down a bird house today. The roof was starting to peel off and it was listing on its pole and birds weren’t using it any more. So I had to take it away. It had a good run. Eight years. My father-in-law built it for my wife and me as a house warming present. He was an amateur carpenter and he loved building bird houses. Often replicating some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous houses. He would then donate them to charities like Amnesty International and they’d be auctioned off to raise funds for causes close to his heart. The one he made for us was light purple and had protruding round green windows. The windows were doughnut-shaped and there were four of them. It was named Green Bagels. I like to think of Dave coming up with this pun in a fleeting thought and then taking that pun and spending hours bringing it to life. He would have been 83 at the time. The next time I sit outside in the back and look in the direction of where it used to be, I have a feeling I’m going to be a little sad. But not too sad. Everything is impermanent in the face of nature. But what will make me smile is the thought that for eight years my wife and I had a one-of-a-kind special birdhouse whose very existence was borne out of an idea that made an old man laugh.

    Green Bagels dimensions

On the Wicked Dying

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When famous people die, the beloved ones anyway, there’s a natural tendency to remember how much they meant to us, how it’s sad they died when they did and how the world is a slightly diminished place. I felt that way about David Bowie’s death. But truth be told, I hadn’t listened to his new music in years, if not decades.  I think he was a good person, as much as any one of us is, but I don’t know for sure. But he was a significant part of some of my younger years and for that reason it made me sad.

In polite society, when complicated characters die, let’s say a Ronald Reagan, it becomes more nuanced. Beloved by tens of millions, loathed by as many or more and regarded as somewhere in between for the majority, when the eulogies come we tend to err on the side of  “if you can’t say something nice…”. I would suggest that this is a pretty good default position for a great majority of these circumstances. We’re all complicated, each of us with our redeeming qualities and our character deficiencies and to be judged on a black and white scale when we’re mostly all varying shades of grey seems ungenerous.

Ghandi was racist toward black Africans. MLK was a philanderer. JFK too. Maybe they all were. There were only a handful of Presidents before Lincoln who weren’t slave owners. John Lennon was probably a real asshole most of the time. People revere Mother Theresa while many think she did some bad, bad things. And the list goes on.

Roger Ailes died today. He doesn’t fit into this narrative for me.  He was an evil man. A television genius, he entered the political field in the sixties. From Nixon through Reagan and Bush and Fox News, he’s done more than any other in the last fifty years to make America the mean, dumb, paranoid, racist, sexist, fearful place that it currently is. A sexual predator himself who created an environment that condoned such behavior, he died with his reputation destroyed. Without him we wouldn’t have had Bush, Palin, O’Reilly, Trump and just about every other mean, racist and sexist provocateur who makes millions spewing lies to an audience whose ignorance has been cultivated for generations. He didn’t create our most base and crass emotional tendencies but he did more than anyone to exploit them. How much blood stained his hands?

And it was all for money.

Of course, he’ll have an expensive funeral and his ancestors will live well for generations. His family may have loved him and maybe he had some friends who are now sad. He’ll be remembered as a pioneer of a certain kind of media. But he pioneered nothing to be proud of. He most certainly did exponentially more harm to his industry, his country and this world than he did to better it.

Dying doesn’t deserve respect in and of itself. We all die. The way we live deserves respect. It’s not that I’m happy he died. He was old and powerless and the immense damage had already been done. I simply wish he’d never been born. We all would have been better off.

Water

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“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” – Greek proverb

My wife and I recently attended a cocktail party/reception in honour of the good works of Margaret Trudeau, the mother of Canada’s current prime minister. For over twenty years, she has been an integral part of a charity called WaterAid Canada, once called WaterCan. It’s an organization that raises money for projects that provide access to safe water and sanitation in developing countries.

The reception was in the poshest private club in Ottawa and though I was wearing my best suit and nicest tie, I still knew I didn’t really belong. I’d never been there before and was unlikely to return but in the two and a half hours I was there, I think I learned a little something.

My wife worked for WaterCan for a few years more than a decade ago. She was the event coordinator and any time there was a fundraising event, I was always enlisted as a volunteer, so I was well-acquainted with the hard work involved in such endeavors. But that was a long time ago and the efforts of this organization kind of slipped off my radar. But listening to Mrs. Trudeau speak brought it back to my attention and gave me a brand new perspective.

Clean water in struggling African nations is the single biggest predictive indicator for the health and education of women and girls. Water is women’s work there. To travel from remote villages carrying litres and litres of water everyday, women are unable to do much of anything else. Their daughters, who need their care, accompany them. Hours upon hours of walking with unimaginably heavy loads. They are habitually attacked by animals and humans. Robbed or raped. However, when a well is built within their own village, it allows the women to feel more security and affords them the time to become empowered. They can start earning incomes and their daughters can be educated. Where wells are built, schools are built.

Mrs. Trudeau said that on her third visit to Africa, she was a different person because she had just lost one of her children and though she was still deep in her own anguish, she now had a better understanding of the anguish of the mothers she was trying to help in these impoverished countries. Where one in five of their own children die from preventable diseases caused by the lack of clean water. The simplest and most elemental of things. That which we probably take for granted the most – safe water.

As I stood there in my finest clothing, drinking free wine and eating fancy appetizers, it struck me that, in spite of the way I think, I don’t actually do much of anything that makes this world a better place. I try to vote conscientiously but I doubt one of my votes has ever made a difference. I try to think and speak thoughtfully whenever social issues are at hand but I can’t recall changing anyone’s mind about anything important. To sit at my computer and lament the actions of Donald Trump doesn’t do anybody any good. To post links on Facebook about the latest atrocities or cases of injustice doesn’t improve things. It all becomes noise after a while and I find it’s destructive.

My wife has been a monthly donor to WaterAid Canada (WaterCan) for fifteen years and for whatever reason, I wasn’t. Now I am too. Positive action instead of the negativity of paralysing inaction.

Almost thirty years ago, I was a tree planter. I wasn’t very good at it but I probably planted 40,000-50,000 trees. I never did see them grow but I like to think they grew tall. Like planting a flower you know you’ll never see or a garden that you know will never feed you, I hope my tiny contribution to these water and sanitation projects provide health and education and empowerment one day. And perhaps the world, a world that I will never see, will be a slightly better place. And while it’s never too late to help others, I wish it didn’t take me so long to learn that. As I imagine what’s already been lost.

 

 

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