Tag: Canada

Men in Kilts

Yesterday, I connected with my roots at the Central Florida Scottish Highland Games.

My middle name is MacPherson, you see.

I am descended on my maternal side from a line of Scottish soldiers who served in the late 18th century in the Eastern outreach of the yet-to-be confederated British colony that would eventually become Canada.

The retired soldiers settled on land that would become the province of New Brunswick in 1867 with the confederation of the Canadian Dominion. It is one of the four so-called Atlantic provinces that hug the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

That burgeoning colony produced sailors, boatbuilders and farmers aplenty in the early days of British colonialism. Scottish soldiers who had faithfully served His Majesty and were honorably discharged were given tracts of land as payment.

In the case of my descendants, they settled along the banks of the Nashwaak River in what is now central New Brunswick. Many of their descendants still live in the area today.

This was the 46th edition of the Central Florida Scottish Highland Games held in Winter Springs, Florida.

Spread across a number of fields were border collies demonstrating their sheep herding skills, men in kilts tossing cabers which look like old wooden telephone poles, and a changing program of Scottish bands that boomed in the background.

The bands were no match for the Pipe and Drum bands that paraded on the field in front of us. Bagpipes are not to everyone’s musical taste. People either love or hate them. The crowd gathered yesterday were in the former category. I am firmly among them.

The sound of bagpipes and bass drums stir something in me that is either memory based or stuck in the ancestral echoes of my DNA. I am not quite sure. But I quite love them and their oddly grating sound. It is an acquired taste for many.

So when the announcer said the Parade of the Clans was beginning, my ears perked up. I was wearing my newly acquired MacPherson Clan T-shirt. Would my ancestral crowd be represented? I should never have doubted it.

When they rounded the corner of the entrance to the field and began marching my way, I jumped up to show them the credentials emblazoned on my shirt and was welcomed into the parade. It was oddly moving and restorative.

It was fairly astonishing to watch competitors (male and female) in the “Boulder Boogie.” Any and all comers could jump in to pick the large granite boulder of their choice. Carrying heavy boulders or tossing a caber were prized demonstrations of strength and necessary skills back in the day.

The goal was to hoist it up and carry it as far around the field as possible. A dutiful handler with a measuring wheel followed behind them to record the outcome of their effort. The lightest boulder, I’m told, was 98 pounds. The heaviest was 178 pounds. When they start competing with a handful of river rocks in each pocket, I might consider participating.

Out here in the middle of the sun and fun state, I encountered a bit of the “old country.” I am no longer immersed in the daily reminders of that culture like I was, say, when growing up in Newfoundland. To be fair, that was mostly Irish based music but I dare you to try and tease out the difference in tone or tempo during a pub crawl.

Reconnecting with my Scottish roots was more soul-restoring than I had imagined it would be. Something that mattered to me in my environment when I was younger is still healthy and alive out there. It heartened me.

It was fun to connect and engage in the ages-old argument of the differences between “Mc” and “Mac” in that old and historical family name. It was fun to smile and celebrate our shared family motto on the MacPherson crest.

“Touch not the cat without a glove.”

It is a motto that has served me well and often many times in the past. I intend to hang onto and refer to it a little more often thanks to the weekend refresher course.

I look forward to what future Highland Games hold in store. I’ll be signed up for the Parade of Clans beforehand and be totally “ready, aye, ready.”

150 Years Ago

I often wonder what our ancestors would think if they miraculously came to life and wandered into our modern life. Culture shock in extremis, most likely.

How we fill our days is motivated by need. We all have to keep body and soul together. How we do that is 180 degrees away from the ways our ancestors worked and lived.

My people on both sides were working class and mostly rural. Some made it to the “big city” to find work. But when the population of your “city” is a fraction of 1873 New Brunswick Canada’s entire population which was made up of 35,000 souls, well … that’s tiny.

My great-grandfather Lemuel Parker Brower was a machinist. His job was taking care of the town clock in Fredericton’s City Hall. See it up top there in the picture below. Lemuel Brower was taking care of it daily around 150 years ago. The clock functions pretty much the same way today as it did back then.

Lemuel and his wife Julia had twelve children together. They were not French Catholic where large families were the norm. But they both came from the countryside and Lemuel was of Dutch descent. The Dutch farmers had passels of kids to help run the farms. As did many other European descendants.

Later I saw the apartment building in Fredericton where Lemuel and Julia raised those twelve kids. Think of a modern two-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t much bigger than that. The urgency to launch those kids into their own lives once they were of age was not only an economic but a space imperative.

Their eldest – my grandfather Orlo Lemuel – found work in the Hartt Boot and Shoe factory. He worked there all of his life until he finally retired well into old age. That option has also changed dramatically in our modern era.

People hopscotch from job to job today like kids in a schoolyard playing the old hop, skip, and jump game. The idea of loyalty to a company and vice versa is a long-dead value that went the way of the dodo bird with the introduction of the microchip. Where steady, meticulous, quality work was the agreed-upon social standard for work products in days gone by, now it is speed and profit.

I am reminded of Bill Gates’ strategy when he started Microsoft. Gazillions of buggy Microsoft Office products were released and sold worldwide deliberately for sound business reasons. Create a dependence on “our” product and get to the market first. We’ll fix any problems later.

And so it is the norm now that we see version after version and upgrade after upgrade of our commonly-used tech products and software. iPhone is on Version 14. I swear Version 13 came out six months ago. Whether the changes are significant enough to justify the cost of upgrading is an individual choice.

Often the changes are as insignificant as a few more pixels in the phone’s camera or a marginal increase in the size of the screen. I’ll stick with my trusty old iPhone 11 until it no longer serves the functions I use it for.

Need expands to fill the space allotted. When my great-grandparents were raising 12 little kids in a two-bedroom apartment in the “big city,” they made it work. Astonishingly.

In rural New Brunswick, Canada, where small family farms were the norm, it took some time for the notion of smaller families to take hold. It would take the social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution and World War One and the Great Depression to alter society significantly enough to pare down the expectation of how many kids a family should have.

I think of my grandparents Lemuel and Julia often. They made do and raised a solid family who went on to do solid working-class work for most of their lives. Their lives were not flashy nor vital in the grand scheme of things but they were important: to their community and to their family.

One hundred and fifty years ago, there wasn’t a single piece of bling amongst their possessions nor had a single article been written that mentioned their existence. Until now.

Wells From Which We Spring, Pt. 1

Grace Smith came from a small Canadian town near the border between Canada and the US. The Canadian province of New Brunswick and the American state of Maine, to be clear. Grace was born in 1900. Her life and Canada’s were at the same starting gate of sweeping social change brought on by the industrial age.

As did most young girls of her era, young Grace anticipated entering a marriage and having a family of her own when she grew up. Several hours away in Nashwaak Bridge, NB, Scott McPherson was born somewhere in the middle of a passel of Scottish immigrant descendant kids – eight in total. He had older brothers and sisters. Younger ones, too.

The original McPherson clan were retired Scottish military who were given land grants along the Nashwaak River in the late 1700s as a pension for their service. By the early 1900s, most of the McPherson military cachet had worn off. The family mostly made its way through farming and supplemental seasonal work.

It was clear from early on in his life that young Scott would follow in the family logging tradition to earn his keep and make his way. When and where he met young Grace Smith is unclear. But it is pretty safe to assume it was at a church-related function.

For girls and boys in rural New Brunswick just after the turn of the twentieth century, opportunities for social intercourse were strictly contained and chaperoned. Young Grace and Scott probably met up at a Saturday night or Sunday afternoon social.

The girls would have brought baskets full of homemade baked goods as their offerings to the refreshments table. Each food offering was clearly marked so all and sundry would know who had prepared what and how well. The boys had likely washed their hands and hair and even put on a clean shirt for the occasion.

Whatever young Grace Smith was offering, young Scott McPherson took a liking to. Their courtship was focussed and brief. A wedding and casting off into married life ensued pretty quickly.

All and sundry waited patiently – as was the tradition – for news of a blessed event that would herald the start of this new branch of the McPherson family tree. For an unseemly number of years, everyone waited in vain.

Grace and Scott lived through the Great Depression in the early days of their marriage. Scott worked seasonally and with little enthusiasm. Country people generally fared better than city folk in those dark ten years. At least on a farm, there were cows for milk and meat, and chickens for eggs. The bread was homemade and a yeast cake cost four cents. Sweet baked goods were part of the daily fare.

It turned out the delay and eventual abandonment of hoping for that “blessed event” were based on a medical condition. The condition was not that Grace was barren.

Scott’s shiftlessness did not apply to what they called “the pretty ladies” where he was reportedly quite industrious. He was a great flirt and quick with a story and a laugh. Good-looking and well-built, he apparently had a stable of young farm wives and ladies of lesser social standing who were happy to share their baked and other homely goods.

The ultimate outcome, however, neither he nor Grace wanted nor could have they easily foreseen. Scott contracted a venereal disease. He passed it to Grace. Scott’s dalliances and the disease he had caught passed to Grace and rendered her sterile. It is hard to imagine that it was all hearts and flowers in the McPherson marriage.

It is hard to impossible in our modern era to imagine the obstacles young Grace was up against as a young married woman in a rural conservative community. First, she would only have had access to rudimentary medicine. Her life and Scott’s were spared by whatever treatment methods were available at the time. Their potential future progeny were not.

TO BE CONTINUED …

Poor Bird

Missed my 3X Weekly Writers Group ZOOM meeting yesterday. I was wrung out. I slept poorly the night before. Woke up at 4 AM on Sunday morning. Sat down in front of the computer to make myself sleepy again. Got sleepy. Fell asleep and didn’t wake up until after the noon hour. Our group meeting starts at noon.

The bloody domino effect. I had been awash in nervous tension all week around a decision I needed someone to make in my favor so I could travel. The decision was not made in my favor. In fact, no decision was made at all. In any case, that nil decision completely upended my plans for this week, travel and otherwise

I am not 100% certain how to rebalance myself but it does seem like a “learning opportunity.” (Thank you, Oprah, for that emotional exit strategy.) I started by letting go of the outcome over which I had no control anyway. That was easier said than done. And it appears my psyche didn’t get the memo. Otherwise, I would not have been up in the middle of the night fretting and fitful.

So it goes. Now I have a brand new set of tasks ahead of me this week as I try to recover what I lost in losing out on the travel plans. So there’s that. Lots of busy work ahead.

After this is posted today, I have a 15-minute consult scheduled with KN Literary Services. I need help. They want money. Seems like a marriage made in heaven. KN Literary Services is the brainchild of author/publisher Kelly Notaras. Her book title is pure marketing genius. The Book You Were Born to Write. There is not a budding writer in the world who hasn’t frequently wondered if, and how, to scratch their book writing itch. Notaras nails it.

As a bona fide twenty-year veteran of the New York “big house” book publishing scene, Notaras is now embedded in what appears to be a mutually fruitful collaboration with the Hay House publishing company. My current focus is on writing a book proposal to submit to the Hay House Writer’s Community publishing contest (Deadline: May 5 or June 5, 2023) depending on the power of the procrastination phantasms. (I was looking in Merriam-Webster for an alliterative synonym for demons. Phantasms is way better than phantoms in this context, don’t you agree?)

I had already put off this consult with KN Literary Services twice. I feared I was not focused enough on what I wanted to write about to have that conversation. I feel I am clearer now but I expect they will tell me. I write a series of scenes dutifully each day, then save them to my computer in a file called “SCENES.” The so-called narrative “arc” of my memoir is building. Salty-sweet, let’s call it.

It is about the struggle of getting from where I was sprung to where I am now. A place of peace. That was the most implausible of dreams in my youth, but here we are. There is a whole literature devoted to society’s tendency to “blame the victim.” What I didn’t expect was to experience blame from a parent for violations that happened to me on my parents’ watch. My mother (my primary antagonist) had a number of memorable sayings. One I remember that is germane to this discussion: “It’s a poor bird that shits in its own nest.”

Maybe in writing this memoir, my mother was right. Come to think of it, Poor Bird isn’t a bad working title. At the very least, I can thank my mother for that.