Tag: New Brunswick

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.”

The Grave Marker Maker

Where I came from, country people had a wry and realistic view of death. They had to. As farmers and stock keepers, the cycle of birth and death was up close and personal in their every day lives.

Roast chicken for dinner? No supermarket down the street where it was easy to pick up a roast chicken – cooked or uncooked. The hungry farmer sought out the poorest layer in the flock and headed to the butcher block. Off with its head.

I came from a small and mostly rural Canadian province. Stories about birth and death were awash in myth and mystery. And, occasionally, ridiculousness.

As a television reporter in the 80s, me and my cameraman were assigned to investigate a tiny graveyard nearly an hour’s drive outside the booming metropolis of Fredericton (population: 44, 000+).

CBC TV had been invited by a local historian to investigate a smattering of bespoke headstones in a small local cemetery. We were met at the cemetery’s entrance by a local woman who looked clearly discomfited at the arrival of nosey city folk.

What we saw at first glance was a field of small, boxy headstones, mostly lopsided and irregular in shape. Upon closer inspection, we saw that someone had carefully spelled out the name and birthday and date of death of each deceased person. In twigs.

It was evident the maker wanted to remember the deceased and grant them the dignity of a grave marker. In a spirit of love and generosity, he – I am assuming it was a he – had made over three dozen headstones, each painstakingly crafted by hand.

He had laid out the names and vital statistics in twigs in a wooden box and then poured concrete into them. Alder was the wood he used, I imagine, as it was plentiful and its’ young branches were long, thin and pliable. Two problems: the grave marker maker was a dreadful speller and had little sense of proportion.

The twigs didn’t cooperate very much with his aesthetic efforts by staying fully in place. What should have been straight lines were a little wavy. When the deceased’s name was too long, the grave marker maker simply rounded the corner of the box and finished up the name down the side.

The end result looked a little less than professional. More like the work of an earnest kindergartner to be accurate. Grave markers to be sure that were filled with misspelled and misshapen names and dates. Lots of them.

We didn’t do a story that day. I sensed that while the historian had a professional distance from the comical stones, the local who took us to them was clearly uncomfortable. There is a fine line between poking fun at someone who is in on the joke and someone who has inadvertently attracted ridicule.

Years later, I heard all of the stones had been replaced by more staid and suitable granite headstones. With the names spelled right and lines as straight as arrows.

Still, it is poignant to think of the hours invested by some earnest and well-meaning member of the community to properly remember his kith and kin. We pick where we choose to invest our labor on this earth.

It is sweet and a little sad to think that, in spite of the odd and disastrous products he produced, this chap felt he was doing sacred homage with his labors.

Then and now, I felt a little sad that his work did not survive. It is said that it is the effort we should praise and not the outcome. I can’t help thinking that the poor man’s efforts might have lasted a little longer on this earth than they did. And remembered with kindness, not ridicule.

Meandering Around the Mall

I was 18 years old when I got my first writing job at a newspaper. Full disclosure, my mother was one of the co-owners. And she was the newsroom equivalent of chief cook and bottle washer.

Mom and a similarly disgruntled journalist friend who met at the Telgraph-Journal in Saint John, NB were sick of the bland and myopic editorial point of view espoused by The Northern Light in Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canada. To read its competitor and dominant local news source The Northern Light was to be assaulted with consistently positive stories about the city’s overseers with zero political or social analysis and scant actual news content.

The rest of the provincial newspapers were owned or influenced by the powerful and famous/infamous K.C. Irving and his family.

The complaint was the Irving corporation’s interference in its’ newsrooms and its’ journalism. Offensive or unseemly stories about Irving’s business practices or government entities or friends of the Irvings were largely ignored and swept under the rug. Bumpy rug.

My mother and Sharon Miller cooked up a plan and were determined to put a stop to it. The paper was published weekly and included a section in French. The paper was composed on old typesetters in those days long before computers became widespread, printed, trimmed, and attached with wax to the broadsheet page template.

My first assignment was to produce copy for the Meandering Around the Mall column in its regular weekly slot. I hied myself to the Bathurst Mall to meet and chat with people. If I knew them, the more the better. But often the interviews were along the lines of, “What brings you to the mall today?” “And is that your granddaughter with you?” “And oh, it’s her birthday?” “Which one?” “And is she having a party?”

From this meaty exchange, I would dutifully jot down both grandma and granddaughter’s names, record her age (the granddaughter’s, of course, not the grandma’s), and weave this information into flowing and supple prose. Of course, I had to talk to a few people or the column would have been very thin indeed.

Three to four people were usually enough to give me adequate column inches. Interspersed this with upcoming deals or events or special guests coming to the Mall. It must have been paid advertising but I never saw it as that.

But looking back, it was pure New Brunswick. People are curious about other people. Most people back then loved to see their names and the names of their loved ones in print. In any section but the obituaries. Depending on the relative.

A fond memory I had was the frantic activity around “putting the paper” to bed. We had a deadline at the printer in another city three hours away. And sometimes the typesetter would pile into the company van and head down the road with our precious cargo. The formatted newspaper original laid in a broadsheet-size box.

The printing press worked us into the schedule among the dailies it produced. We’d wait at the printer all night. I still remember sleeping on a pile of mailbags in the press room. The next morning, the published paper was loaded into the van. We trundled back to Bathurst, turned the van over to the distributor, and the newspapers were dropped at their appointed destinations all over the New Brunswick North Shore.

Meandering Around the Mall was an extremely modest forerunner to Facebook, which has taken the model to unimaginable heights. But it does hearken back to much simpler days when – essentially – stalking and chatting people up looking for personal information wasn’t a slightly sketchy or maybe even a criminal act.

I had some wonderful adventures at The Bathurst Tribune but my newsroom tenure didn’t last long. I started there in the spring and by early August, I had been admitted to university. My life was about to change dramatically.

The Bathurst Tribune didn’t last long either. It survived until finances and local hostility from the powers that were in charge at the time killed it off. Just under two years in all.

In retrospect, the Quixotic journalism effort seems faintly quaint and very twentieth-century. But there was a sense of being involved in a meaningful upstart project designed to disperse “hard” news that the population might otherwise never hear about.

Meandering Around the Mall was clearly not that. But it was a charming “slice of life” that elevated locals to mild levels of recognition when that sort of thing mattered.

I wrote “hard news” stories, too about politicians speaking in town or union meetings or car accidents and their outcomes. But for some reason, it was that odd little weekly column that sticks in my memory.

To this day, I can still have a lively, if fleeting, conversation by engaging a proud grandma with her granddaughter at a shopping venue. Some things never change.

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 …