Perth & environs, Lanark Cty., Ontario, Canada – December, 2011

Perth & environs, Lanark Cty., Ontario, Canada – December, 2011, a set on Flickr.

It looked like it was going to be a green (more like brown) holiday in eastern Ontario until about 15 cm of sticky snow arrived on December 23rd. Perfect!

Toronto AIDS Memorial, 519 Church Street Community Centre

This gallery contains 10 photos.

With one eye on the wider world, marking thirty years of AIDS (and hopes that we may be seeing the beginning of the end), my other eye is on memories of friends lost here in Toronto (and hopes that many more may yet survive).

Medical update: I could do better if ‘good enough’ wasn’t still good enough

It’s been quite some time since I had the run of tests for HIV and diabetes, in part because of my fear of the results, so today’s news was quite satisfactory with clear room for improvement.

My viral load, a test which measures the activity of HIV in my blood, is below levels of present-day detectability. That’s the goal of this test of primary importance.

The CD-4/T-4 count, a measure of the immune response to infections, is 350. It has been higher, and also much lower (10 back in the early 90s), so I’m hoping that I can see it go up again. (I think my personal best is in the 600s.)

On the diabetes front, my A1c hemoglobin test – ideally at 7% (0.070) came back at 0.077. I know there’s room for improvement and, frankly, was surprised I did that well.

All in all, while I had some apprehensions about getting the results today, I was pleasantly surprised. Oh and my “head meds” are at acceptable levels.

Pig Penn – warped perspectives in the Penn State scandal

Very puzzling, but markedly less infuriating than the sexual abuse and cover-up scandal shrouding Penn State University, is the thoughtless, pigskin-headed response last night by student mobs to the sackings of the university president and, much more of an issue, the football coach.

Now that’s an improvement!

Watching a news conference held by the university’s board of trustees vice-chair, John Surma Jr., there was an audible gasp of indignation from assembled media and students alike as the forced resignations were announced. In the questions that followed it was easy to distinguish between journalists who had a bit of perspective on the tragedy of the abuse scandal and its victims and those muscle-heads who were apparently thinking only of the fabled football program, its storied coach and the team’s next game on Saturday.

How and when was the coach advised of the board decision? Was it in person or over the phone?

Objection: relevance?

I wish I had a transcript of the whole press conference.

From the board’s perspective, while voicing concern for the victims and their families, it clearly had a larger agenda: salvaging or re-building Penn State’s reputation among prospective students, staff, alumni and funders.

And while there were a few compassionate questions at the presser concerning the board’s relationship to the victims I couldn’t help feeling that most of the concern among those assembled was for the octogenarian coach, Joe Paterno, who seems to be among those who either engaged in an exercise of plausible deniability or unconscionable cover-up which led to the victimization of even more boys.

My skin was crawling (and burning and peeling a la this week’s episode of  “Michael Tuesdays and Thursdays” ).

This scandal combines unforgettable parts of my past – the bullying by a teacher in elementary school, further bullying by high school students and sexual abuse by men unknown to me in my adolescence.

While I am able to think and feel my way through these triggers, the now fifty-two-year-old man doing so feels tearful empathy for these Pennsylvania victims.

UPDATE: It was a relief to talk about all of this with a group of peers this afternoon. Triggers like this do not surprise me. It is helpful to hear my feelings reflected back to me.

Pte. Thomas Earl Butler: 17 March 1896 – 1 March 1917

It’s been over ninety-four years since my paternal grandmother’s brother, Tom, died on the World War One battlefields of France, roughly five weeks before the final  assault on Vimy.  It seemed to me that Grandma bore his death with pain right up until her own death in 1991.  She was already acting as home-maker to her widowed father and perhaps she thought he should have been staying home on the farm.

Perth newspaper accounts were quite limited, but brought the war home.

My father, who died in 2002, was given the first name of his late uncle (Thomas).

Any memories of Grandma talking about him are filtered through the eyes of the child that I was when these stories were told – less interested than I am nowadays. How I would love to hear them again.  I can only imagine he went off to war because. at the very least,  it was the thing to do at the time.

Though I’m sure there was at least an official telegram this is how Tom’s death was reported in the Perth Courier:

My sister has a formal portrait of Uncle Tom, in his handsome uniform (different from the one in the press clipping), taken in Perth before his deployment, as well as a cloth belt which was sent home completely covered with various regimental pins from across Canada.

The newspaper clippings come from Veterans Affairs Canada, as do these copies of Uncle Tom’s ‘attestation papers’. (Looking at his signature, I can see an amazing resemblance to my grandmother’s penmanship, as well as my Dad’s!)

Only tonight, watching the first part of “The Great War”, a film on CBC-TV by Brian McKenna, did I learn that “Complexion: Fresh” was racist code used to distinguish non-white soldiers, gladly accepted when county-by-county quotas were low, from their ‘fresh-faced’ comrades.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) web site provides these stark ‘Casualty Details’ (I have added links):

Name: BUTLER
Initials: T
Nationality: Canadian
Rank: Private
Regiment/Service: Canadian Infantry (Central Ontario Regiment)
Unit Text: 75th Bn.
Date of Death: 01/03/1917
Service No: 787151
Casualty Type: Commonwealth War Dead
Grave/Memorial Reference: VII. D. 17.
Cemetery: VILLERS STATION CEMETERY, VILLERS-AU-BOIS

There’s a bit more of an online tribute, however generic, here.

Rest in Peace, Jamie Hubley

“I’m tired of life, really. It’s so hard, I’m sorry, I can’t take it anymore.”

“I don’t want my parents to think this is their fault, either. I love my mom and dad. It’s just too hard. I don’t want to wait three more years, this hurts too much.”

As carefully as he worded his final blog entry, the pain being experienced by 15-year old Jamie Hubley of Ottawa is clear and heart-breaking. Jamie ended his life on Friday.

His father, Kanata Councillor Allan Hubley. released a statement citing bullying as one of the factors in Jamie’s death.

In a blog post from three weeks ago, Jamie wrote that he hated being the only openly gay guy attending A.Y. Jackson Secondary School in Kanata.

“I hate being the only open gay guy in my school… It f***ing sucks, I really want to end it. Like all of it, I not getting better theres 3 more years of highschool left…How do you even know It will get better?”

He also said neither the medications he was taking nor psychological therapy was working to alleviate depression.

Bullied as I was – by peers, yes, but far worse by a teacher – in elementary school and then by the back-of-the-bus crowd in high school, I don’t know sometimes how I could have survived when I can relate so strongly to the tragedy of youth suicides, and the hopelessness preceding them, today.  I certainly scoffed at all claims by my parents that these were the best years of my life!  At least the “It Gets Better” campaign makes no such present-day claims.

Jamie chose figure skating over hockey.  So that makes bullying him okay?  As someone who chose the band and drama club over any sport I can relate to following one’s passions over the pack mentality.  I would trade my worst day of rehearsing Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid or Lionel Bart’s Oliver! over my best shift on the ice trying to skate away from the puck.

As is more often the case nowadays than in my school in the 1970s Jamie not only knew he was gay but was open about it and he bravely tried to start a Gay-Straight Alliance in his school.  He was a courageous kid who did not live to see the many accolades and tributes from around the world.

My chosen method of indirect suicide, I guess, was the prolonged torture of excessive drinking, where some days were better than others for a long time thus numbing me to the damage that I was doing.  What had started as experimentation in high school plunged into the real thing once I was away at college.  Struggling to accept myself – let alone seek the acceptance of others – made for easily identifiable signs of problem-drinking just as I was turning eighteen (the last year anyone in Ontario could legally drink at that age).  These were hellish years as I tried to fit in to the socially conservative milieu I found myself in while barn-storming around looking for love in all the gay places (Buffalo and Toronto).

I guess that’s it then.  As unworthy as I felt, as hopeless as life seemed, my faith that an intoxicant of one form or another would at least temporarily change the way I felt probably kept me sufficiently comforted – however delusional – that even the frequent thought of ramming into an overpass abutment usually came after I was safely home.

“It Gets Better” only when teenagers such as Jamie, and peers who are on different paths, are taught about the varieties of sexual orientation early enough – before individuals have even begun to experience strong feelings – so that everyone might find her/his place and grow into as non-judgmental a school environment as possible.

Clearly setting out his last few words, it’s such a pity that Jamie was so desperate and feeling so devoid of hope.

I hope that his parents take Jamie at his word that they bear no blame for his final decision.

It’s just so sad for his survivors to say good-bye.

Walking the Glen Tay Block

This time last year, visiting Perth for Thanksgiving, I set out for a walk, the route of which I could easily picture in my mind but the distance (see map)…not so much.

It seems an even longer walk to recall, one year later, limited as I am by injury.

I was not even beyond the old town limits when I wondered what I had gotten myself into and yet seemed bent on proving something to myself.  I knew all the landmarks and, besides, the route is a running course for the historic Glen Tay Block Race and I certainly had no plans to exert myself beyond a steady walk.

The old stone mill along the Tay River at Glen Tay is now a private residence.

It was a beautiful walk, although I don’t have a lot of pictures to show for it. If you refer again to the map, you’ll see a jag off the “block” route. I misjudged just how far it would be to go to my Mom’s very first home on the Upper Scotch Line. When I did finally get there I photographed the wrong house! Next time I go back for a look, it will be in a car!

Bursa – and not the city in Turkey!

The ever-increasing pain I have experienced recently now has a name – bursitis.

I’ve narrowed down the cause to being on my feet or, alternatively, sitting on concrete, the weekend of Jack Layton’s funeral.

Yesterday I began physical therapy treatments and learned that we all have bursae, at which I inquired, “As in bursitis?”, not knowing what that is, having only ever associated it with people of a certain age.

I have been given a few simple exercises to do between visits and am continuing to use my cane and choosing my chairs carefully. Nice to know a little more about anatomy, even if it takes pain to educate me.

A most memorable trip to London long, long ago

I have been scanning some photos stored in shoe-boxes and managed to touch up several from a class trip to London which took place during March Break in 1976.  (How fortunate I was – what a privilege – to have been able to go on such a voyage as a high school student!)

It was just a few months before Montreal was to host the Olympic Games, as London is preparing to do in 2012.

This will take you to the collection, taken from the point-of-view of a teenager, mind you!  Should any former classmates spot themselves, feel free to tag the photos.  I have not done so, other than those of my sixteen-year-old self!

The Winchester – from draft beer to coffee since before Confederation

I did a short double-take walking up Parliament Street today, approaching the former Winchester Hotel. At the sreet-level entrance to what are now apartments upstairs – to the south of Tim Horton’s - a sign says something to the effect “Winchester Gardens – since 1861″.

 

 

 

That would be the landlord’s way of putting a time-stamp on the building, I suspect, whose main floor has undergone more than one transformation over the years.  When I first moved into the neighbourhood nineteen years ago it was still the Winchester Hotel, in its original incarnation, run-down and seedy, a tavern with rooms upstairs.  (They may even have called themselves apartments by then.)

The second photo shows the Winchester Street side which, as I recall, was once the “ladies and escorts entrance” – an archaic designation, commonly seen at watering-holes across Ontario, mandated by liquor control authorities of past generations.

The tavern, modernized with a kitchen serving finger foods, continued to try to make a go of it until relatively recently – my last visit there being a Michael Shapcott election campaign celebration.

Things changed, however, when the building’s fine brick-work had the beejeezus sand-blasted out of it a few years ago in preparation for its current main floor tenant, a Tim Horton’s coffee shop.

Neighbours will remember the fight Tim’s had to wage to claim its place on the corner as heritage preservationists rightly demanded that the franchise adapt its typically cookie-cutter plans to befit the historic Victorian architecture of the Winchester.  Even skeptics would be hard-pressed to argue that they haven’t done a good job with the thick brick interior walls accented with framed pictures of the hotel and Parliament Street.

Like any Tim’s location in Canada it is a busy spot, even without the customary drive-thru window, and is a meeting place in Cabbagetown for people of all ages – men, women, escorts and children!

Follow-up on my aches and pains

The x-rays (not exactly as pictured) last week were negative for anything untoward. All bones, and metal objects substituting for same reinforcing my femur, are intact. That’s a relief!

The aches and pains continue intermittently, however, with suggestions of recovery pointing to physiotherapy or just grinning and bearing it (or grimacing and bearing less weight as the case may be).

Self-assessing, as I am wont to do, I’d say that 2003-installed parts in a nearly 52-year old leg (and gait traits – “the Butler-Chaplin walk” – which go back generations) lead me to conclude I might just as well modify and adapt to my circumstances…for now at least.

The spare parts don’t bend in the same way, in the same place, as those from the gene pool. That stands to reason.

Pun not intended, but left in once I saw it!

So I shall add “elegant walking sticks” to things that I collect!

Aches and pains of fractures of old

This post serves as a reminder of what has ailed me in recent days.

On the day of Jack Layton’s funeral I spent an inordinate amount of time on my feet, standing in one place, taking pictures, standing in line, etc. A few days later I noticed some pain in my femur, which I could only visualize as the metal device in my femur driving into the lower half of the bone. The pain seemed to pass a few days later but returned last weekend.

My family physician is away but his receptionist recommended that I try the walk-in clinic on the main floor of their office building. “Walk-in”, I have discovered, is not synonymous with fast availability as people without family doctors were given priority having booked appointments with “walk-in” doctors. I took it in relative good humour, only once getting up to ask if I would be seen by closing time – which I was and with room to spare to have x-rays done upstairs. Now I wait to see my family doctor on the 16th’

Referring to a 2003 report from my orthopaedic surgeon, which I took with me, the “walk-in, sit down for an undetermined period” doctor reminded me of the technical terms that had been lost in my memory. “Displaced intertrochanteric fracture of the right femur and a displaced fracture dislocation of the right distal radius and wrist…The patient was taken to the operating room the following day where open reduction internal fication of the proximal right femur fracture was performed using a DHS plate and screw system. Under the same anaesthetic an open reduction internal fixation of the right distal radius was performed utilizing a plate and several screws.”

Although the prognosis back then pointed to me having troubles with my wrist, and a good recovery of the femur, the wrist and radius are fine.

In the meantime, I’m back using my cane which I had stopped doing several years ago – even around the apartment where short walks seem to be more difficult as I need a few steps to get my balance and confidence.

I’m not out of commission, but am taking things easier than I’m accustomed to (which was easy enough!). No long walks are being contemplated for now.

Final tributes to Jack Layton in pictures

It was an emotion-packed, life-affirming day.

There are some blog posts I’d like to forget – on returning to the NDP

I’ve always tried to make this blog somewhat of a record of my life, however fragmented, warts and all.  Here in the archives is my defiant abandonment of the New Democratic Party for, let’s say, greener pastures.  However right it felt at the time, and for a couple of by-elections and a general election after, I have been back to embracing my NDP sentiments for a while now.

Unless I am mistaken, my leaving had only minimal impact on the party at the national level.  However, at the level of my local riding association on which I served as a member of the Executive, there are amends to be made when the time is right.

This is all swirling through my conscience this week as Canada observes the passing of NDP leader Jack Layton.  Everything from his departing letter to Canadians to the public outpouring of affection for Jack-the-man serve to point out what a great loss the country has suffered.

In one of several meetings with him, I remember running into Jack in the corridors at the national convention held in Quebec City a few years ago.  I had something, forgotten now, to discuss with him.  Surrounded by his closest aides, anxious to continue their walk, he pulled me to his side and said, “Walk with me.”  We conversed, I was satisfied, and the convention proceeded as he headed to the stage.  I don’t know whether Jack always knew my name, if ever, but he always knew my face and knew my passions, particularly as an AIDS activist.

We grew up about forty kilometers, and nine years, apart - Jack in Hudson, me in Valleyfield.  Hudson is on the Ottawa River, Valleyfield on the St. Lawrence.  Friends moved up there midway through high school so I used to cycle across the flat St. Lawrence Valley and make the huge climb up into the hills which hugged the Ottawa.  It was an athletic feat for someone not otherwise very athletic!  I particularly remember making the trip to see the Olympic torch run through Hudson on its way to the 1976 games in Montreal.

I look forward to what is sure to be an outstanding send-off to Jack on Saturday, and to intentionally re-connecting with NDP friends in the days ahead.

The Town of Perth, Ontario’s appreciation of her past

My heart goes out to the people of Goderich who learned this week how quickly our architectural heritage can be severely damaged or wiped out completely.

Having recently returned from a summer visit to my ancestral home (in Canada, at least, say ancestry.ca friends) I am renewed in my delight of how seriously the Town of Perth and her proud people take the idea of preserving the past. Whether it is her dubious distinction as the site of Canada’s last fatal duel (and accompanying folklore), the storied Tay Canal, or her prominent stone architecture (both commercial and residential), Perth is continuing to entrust future generations with a town of sheer beauty.

This next photo shows what happens when a landlord starts to renovate an ice locker-turned-apartment building.  A smaller, original stone building with an amazing round window has emerged.  Town historians are scrambling, I am sure, to find out what went on here.  It might well have gone back to the town’s founding, as a military settlement after the War of 1812, when military stores were located in the next building down the hill.  I look forward to seeing what else might be revealed when I next visit at Thanksgiving.

The Perth campus of Algonquin College is renowned for a program in trades geared to architectural preservation and authentic restoration.  Below the stone walls at the Matheson House on Gore Street, Perth’s Museum now for many years, are being re-pointed by a crew.

When an Algonquin-trained crew set to work on this place below from the inside out, one of them – a family friend – told me how interesting it was to work with original logs, unfinished to the point where he called them trees,  in the building’s structure.

Perth is considering a proposal to designate a Heritage Conservation Area. They should meet no opposition. Meanwhile, just this month, it has launched a Facade and Signage Improvement Program – again something which should be encouraged. These things matter! More can be read at http://perthcanada.com