BorealFAREWELL POSTINGSIntroductionDEDICATION To Life! At her request, I had ordered smoked salmon on bagel and cream cheese for lunch and her favourite wine as accompaniment. It was a few minutes before the nurse who would get her ready for what came next to make her appearance when Lucette raised her glass and said: "I would like to propose a toast." What she wanted us to toast caught all of us by surprise. It was not what you would have expected from someone whose existence, as was her wish, would shortly come to an end. We all raised our glass and she said: "À la vie!”(To life!). And To a celebration of life that was the Arab Civilisation. I am not aware in the entire history of civilisations of a more gracious, more loving, more vibrant society than that of the Arabs before Islam. [It was a time] of unbound freedom, lofty sentiments, a nomadic and chivalrous way of life, [a land] of fantasy, joy, mischievousness, bawdy impious poetry, refined love-making… Ernest Renan, cf. Robert Montagne, La Civilisation du désert FOREWORD Dear..., It is always nice to hear from you. Thanks for the pictures. Everyone looks great. I may live another ten years, and then again I may not. Isn’t that the situation for most people my age? In informing me of the result of my latest thoracic echocardiogram my doctor said that I had been dodging a bullet for years, and I may continue doing so, but the odds were no longer in my favour. After what Lucette went through, I consider my aneurism a godsend, even if I don’t believe in the guy. A silver lining; with my last book, Fade to Black, I thought I had nothing left to write about, and lo and behold I get to write about Lucette and me again and revisit stuff I wrote about Islam. I am writing my Farewell Postings without the benefit of a proof-reader, or a Lucette to tell me “you can’t say that”, so expect more than some grammatical surprises that I hope will make you smile and not make you sad. If I beat the odds, won’t I have egg on my face. Love You Bernard On February 5, 2025 I met with a cardiologist. He said there is nothing to worry about for at least another two years. While the aneurism has grown slightly since by last echocardiogram, it’s still below the threshold for intervention. With that piece of bittersweet news I will now attempt to transform my Farewell Postings into another book like they do in academia when one has nothing new to add to their published scholarship. It’s revisit, rehash and recycle time. Having said that, among the déja vu material you will find a sprinkling of postings to boreal.ca, but never published, going back to the start of my website in 2003. Putting together Farewell Postings keeps alive the hope of getting you interested. Of course, for those who have not read anything I wrote, and decide to take the plunge with my latest and hopefully last book, it will all be new. PROLOGUE (Abbreviated from Shooting the Messenger - Till Death Do Us Part, Boreal Books) I was born in Hearst, Ontario, a mostly French-speaking town about 150 miles southwest of James Bay on a northern leg of the Trans-Canada Highway. When the glaciers retreated, they deposited a lump of clay in the middle of the great Canadian Shield, and on this lump of clay, in the middle of muskeg and stunted pine trees, grew the town of Hearst. On this lump of clay, hardy farmers managed to grow some vegetables and enough forage to support some animal husbandry—mostly dairy cattle—but it is with the logging industry that Hearst is first and foremost associated. Sawmills were the town’s primary economic growth engine. Whenever a new sawmill opened in or near the town, Hearst experienced a mini economic boom. Those who could profit from these periodic booms, by risking big and not going bust, would be set for life. Enough did that it was said that Hearst had, at one point in time, more millionaires per capita than any other town in Ontario. Many of the people who got rich were those who obtained the contracts to supply these sawmills with trees and, to a lesser extent, the vendors who sold and maintained the equipment to harvest the forest for these sawmills. My father was one of these vendors. I was not yet a teenager when Hearst experienced another of these economic booms. This time it was not just another sawmill that was coming to town, but a plywood plant. A plywood plant whose appetite for trees would dwarf the demand of most of the sawmills that doted the Hearst landscape. The owners of the logging companies, who would get the contracts to supply what some claimed was destined to become the largest plywood plant in the world, would be the new millionaires. My father teamed up with one of the owners of a small logging operation. His company financed the purchase of the equipment the logger would need to make him a serious contender for these lucrative contracts. The logger did not get the sought-after contracts and my father was left with having to pay for a large assortment of expensive logging equipment, only a portion of which could be resold to the successful bidders. My parents might have been able to weather this setback if fate had not been particularly unkind and if my father had not used this setback as an excuse to drink more heavily than usual. It was sometime in June after midnight when I was awoken by people shouting and the glow from a fire that illuminated the basement bedroom where I slept. The house next door was on fire. The family home, along with most of its contents, was quickly reduced to a pile of smoldering embers when the fire next door caused a rupture in the natural gas line where it entered our house. This momentarily turned the gas line into an impressive flame thrower that spewed fire into every corner of the basement where three of my siblings and I, only a short time earlier, had been sound asleep. My parents loved this nondescript little town floating on a lump of mud in the middle of a swamp. Hearst was home. They were middle-aged and the idea of being left homeless and penniless with six children still at home must have been frightening. They rebuilt the family home after the fire, but not enough time had passed to build any equity when their worst fear became reality. In the fall of 1967, Traders Finance forced them into bankruptcy. On a cold Sunday afternoon in November, in a scene reminiscent of The Grapes of Wrath—with a snowstorm threatening, my mother at the wheel, and my father nursing a bottle of gin or rye—the family set out on a journey of more than 2,000 miles to begin again. A few hours into the journey, the gently falling snow became a blizzard. Somehow we made it to Thunder Bay where we spent the night. ... [Seven years later] I am not sure why I chose to come to Ottawa. It may have been the glimpse I got of the city from the train I took to Expo 67. I knew I had missed something. In high school in British Columbia, because I came from (Northern) Ontario, whenever Ottawa was brought up, they assumed I knew the city and what went on there. I didn’t, but I was curious about what it would be like to work for the Federal Government, even for a short time. I made the return trip in early September when I was half my mother’s age and conditions were ideal. She did it in near-winter weather during the unpredictable month of November. She drove more than two thousand miles in under three days, driving from sunrise to past sundown on a highway where four lanes were the exception; driving from dawn to dusk with four kids in the back seat, the youngest in the front sandwiched between her and an alcoholic husband who could not be trusted to help with the driving. As I encountered one familiar sight after another from that remarkable journey, I could not help but marvel at the courage it took. Three days after leaving Kelowna, I was in Ottawa having a cold beer on the terrace of the National Arts Centre next to the legendary Rideau Canal. Now, where to stay?
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