WHAT I REMEMBER ABOUT THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

            With the recent passing of the 53^rd anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and then the announcement that Fidel Castro, Cuba’s leader from 1959-2011, had died at the age of 90 on November 25^th, I was reminded of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when the planet was on the brink of World War III.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13 day, (October 16-28), confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning American ballistic missile deployment in Italy and Turkey with the consequent Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba. Along with being televised worldwide, it was the closest the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear war. Eleventh hour tense negotiations between USA President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev averted an all out war.

Our family was living in Lethbridge, AB and I was only five-years-old in October of 1962 but I can still recall the television coverage, the tension in the household, and the air-raid siren tests that only added to already heightened national and international tension. Keep in mind that this scary standoff was taking place merely seventeen years after World War II had ended and the horrific memories of the devastation of that conflict along with the atrocious after effects of the nuclear bombings of Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh in people’s minds.  

Some historians have sited this as John F. Kennedy’s finest hour in his all too short stint as the President of the United States. His patience and hesitance in escalating the crisis through aggression went against most of his advisors advice, including his brother Robert, then the US Attorney General. By not invading Cuba or further antagonizing the Soviet Union, thermonuclear war was averted. It must also be noted that Khrushchev did as much to defuse the situation as Kennedy.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the earlier global events that would define a decade simply known as “The Sixties”. The decade of the 1960’s was one of the most influential, controversial, fascinating, and, scary decades in the history of the world and the Cuban Missile Crisis was only at the beginning.

The Civil Rights Movement, prominent assassinations, the Vietnam War, the Counterculture Revolution, Anti-Vietnam War Movement, Feminism, the Black Panthers, the Cold War, the “Race to the Moon”, the “British Music Invasion and later psychedelic rock all melded together making the decade of the sixties explosive and memorable for anyone who grew up during those tumultuous times.

Fast forward to today and the world’s stability is once again under duress. The actual availability and need for an online “Global Conflict Tracker” to keep one apprised of all of the global conflicts currently happening is a sad statement of the worldly state of affairs unto itself.

There were people in both Kennedy and Khrushchev’s camps that were absolutely convinced that they were going to witness the end of the world as we knew it. In reality, we are barely five decades removed from that precipice and the world’s stability is still under continuous threat.

This gloom n doom nostalgic walk through the past was brought to you by an old Baby Boomer who is worried that if we don’t pay attention and learn from our history we are bound to repeat it. Let’s hope it won’t be too difficult to find cooler heads among our world leaders should similar events occur today.

“History repeats itself. First as tragedy, second as farce.”- Karl Marx (1818-1883).

THE ONE CONSTANT IS CHANGE

             Change can be sudden or change can be subtle but as Greek Philosopher Heraclitus stated a few hundred centuries ago, the main characteristic of change is that it is constant. Change is constantly happening.

             Another characteristic of change is that you don’t really know when it’s going to happen. That, of course, depends on the type of change. Take a change in the weather, for example, you know that it is constantly changing but there has yet to be a system developed that can correctly determine when the change in the weather will occur and by how many degrees. Oh sure, they’re ballparking it all the time but nobody has really perfected the art of the deadly accurate weather forecast and when they tell you that they have…well, they’re just stringing you along.

            Some changes you can deal with offhandedly and some will knock you on your arse in a heartbeat. Say you get the dreaded diagnoses of some incurable disease and that sudden change in your health will affect dozens of lives in a matter of seconds. And, sad to say, all too many of us have shared stories in that regard.

             Humans’ physical appearance changes every day but the change is kind of gradual until one day you are shaving and you look into the mirror and you wonder when the old man in your reflection took your place!

            In a recent conversation I had with our youngest daughter she reminded me of something that I had said to her that one day when I was a good parent. She had gone through some personal trauma and I had said to her, “life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it.” Hmmmm. Good advice, if I do say so myself. That quote is attributed to Lou Holtz, an American football coach.

            I also recently read a saying that says that your past doesn’t exist and neither does your future. The only moment that you experience is here and now. So be here now. Accept the changes and roll with the punches.

            So, things change. I have probably shared this information with you so bear with me while I share it again but in twelve years of public school I had attended five different schools in two provinces. That’s a lot of change. I went from having “a” (uh) classmate in Grade 6 in Marquis Public School to being bussed into Moose Jaw in Grade 7 with about sixty of us Baby-Boomers in our grade sharing two large classrooms in Lindale School. That was a bit of an adjustment, I’ll tell you that. From a one-room country school to an overcrowded city zoo.

            Apparently, I’ve had a few varied career choices over the years as well. I changed things up often, I guess. I was a farm hand, drove a bakery van, went to brick laying school, never laid a brick again, construction labourer, store clerk, worked in a glass factory making stubby beer bottles, among other kinds of bottles and jars, drove a Pettibone trackmobile moving rail cars around a railcar repair depot, purchasing agent, estimator and lumber sales manager, rec director and a maintenance man. I wonder what I’ll be when I grow up.

           

            “I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”- Jimmy Dean (1928-2010).

IT'S A BIG WEEKEND!

            I am ever so thankful that I have Remembrance Day and the Dale Blackstock Memorial Hockey Tournament to write about this week so I don’t even have to mention the absolute craziness that is the 2016 American Presidential Election. By the time you read this column the freak show will finally be over and it’s about bloody time.

I don’t know about you but I have saturated my limit of Clinton vs. Trump. I have tried really, really hard not to get sucked into their vortex of hate but it’s impossible. Just like the proverbial train wreck you cannot look away.

            Americans make it sound like it’s a difficult choice but I’m thinking if Trump gets in I’m going to have to convert my concrete cistern into a bomb shelter. Just sayin’.

The very reason that megalomaniac’s like Trump are even allowed to incite hatred and spout their bigotry and ignorance freely is because of the sacrifices of those who served and died to provide his freedom.

Americans honour their fallen on Memorial Day; the last Monday of May. This Friday, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month Canadians will gather in “remembrance for the men and women who have served, and continue to serve our country during times of war, conflict and peace". One cannot overstate how important this date is to our country. As the years roll past I hope this date’s importance never fades. Lest we forget.

Speaking of years rolling past I am having a hard time believing that this will be the 30^th Dale Blackstock Memorial Hockey tournament. Thirty of them! Wow! I was a member of the Kipling Royals Senior Hockey Club’s executive when we first sponsored this tournament in November of 1987. We were trying to raise $1000.00 for the team’s contribution to the new dressing rooms. We made that and a lot, lot more!

Dale had been a Kipling Royal and a real good friend to many of us on that Executive Board and when Dale succumbed to cancer at the much too young age of 30 we wanted to honour his memory by naming the tournament after him and the rest… as they say…is history.

Over the years many hands were involved in the operation of this tournament and the Blackstock family, led by Linus, put in countless hours to make the event as successful as it has been. It has become a homecoming of sorts for many of the participants and the fond memories of tournaments past are shared and added to annually.

There comes a time, however, when things change. Linus recently mentioned that the tournament has lived as long as Dale had and he thinks it’s time for the family to take a step back from their organizational role. After all, their parents, Melvin and Della are gone now and the spreading family is making the commitment to the event harder with each passing year.

The trophy will always have Dale’s name on it and the family would be more than pleased if the tournament continued on while raising much needed capital for the facility. It just won’t be them leading the charge anymore. My hope is that the Rink Management Committee will continue the tradition.

There are an awful lot of memories, (as well as some lost moments), from those thirty tournaments. Boy, was there a lot of fun provided over the years. I would like to thank Diane, Linus and the entire Blackstock family for their time, effort and commitment to what turned out to be an historical event for the Kipling Arena and the Town of Kipling. Thank you, thank you.

“From Humble Beginnings Come Great Things.”

I NEED SUN!

 

            I try my best to not push time forward. You know what I mean? Like doing the “can hardly waits” as in “I can hardly wait for the baby to crawl, or I can hardly wait until Christmas is here or for school to be out or for the winter vacation to be here”; that kind of thing.

As a general rule time flies by too fast anyway and the baby will be crawling before you know it and in no time at all you’re going “how did he/she grow up so darn fast??” However, this time around I cannot help myself from thinking that I can hardly wait until this gloomy October is done! Man, what a miserable month that was, wasn’t it? And, like some people I know around here, I don’t even have eight or nine hundred acres of crop still in the field. Yuck! Talk about gloom ‘n doom.

According to the statistical weather data we received precipitation on 16 of the 31 days in October and I think the other 15 days were all mostly cloudy. Or so it seemed. I was looking into the statistical data to see how many sunshine hours we normally would get in October and my source claims that we average around 171 hours in the month or, percentage wise, it’s 51% of the daylight time. Not 2016’s version, though. Oh no, it was more like 171 minutes, I’d say.

I have heard more than a few people mention how miserable and cranky everyone seems to be lately and I am convinced that it is mostly due to the overall lack of sunshine in the past few weeks. It really is. I’m thinking that humans really need sunshine to operate properly. Or “happily” at any rate.

In fact, I did a little research on the subject and I found that there are several reasons why the lack of sunshine can be detrimental to a human’s well being, both mentally and physically.

If you’re not careful, a lack of sunlight can actually lead to a form of clinical depression. The less sunlight we see in the winter months, the more likely we are to develop Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Symptoms of SAD can be extreme: mood swings, anxiety, sleep problems, or even suicidal thoughts. I’m thinking that some people are just experiencing an earlier version of SAD because of the recent lack o’ sunshine.

90% of humans’ Vitamin D comes from direct sunlight but everyone knows that unprotected overexposure to the sun’s rays may increase the chances of developing skin cancer. Then again, on the flip side of that is that a Vitamin D deficiency may be just as dangerous to humans. Vitamin D deficiencies may lead to the development of prostate and breast cancer, memory loss, and an increased risk for developing dementia and schizophrenia.

Also, for your information, and I’m not making a personal statement here or anything,  just reporting the facts, people, and the facts say that women are 200% more likely to develop SAD than men. Hmmmm….I’m not saying who’s crankier than who but…you know…statistics and all that.

I realize that you’d have to miss a bit more than the “normal” amount of sunshine in one month to create any ill effects on your system, but still, this past forty days or so have been pretty darn depressing and it’s starting to show. I’m hoping that in the next month we can make up for the sunlight we lost in October or this coming winter is going to be really, really SAD.

“A cloudy day or a little sunshine have as great an influence on many constitutions as the most recent blessings or misfortunes.”- Joseph Addison (1672-1719).

HALLOWEEN MEMORIES

 

           Here we are closing in on another All Hallows Eve and we might not even need a snowplow to go door to door this year. Sorry about that. I hope I haven’t jinxed it. Time will tell, I suppose.

            I’m fast approaching my sixth decade on the planet so I’ve accumulated a fair number of Halloween memories over the years. There have been years when you’d swear you were trick or treating in Antarctica and then there was that one year…

            Thinking back, I believe there were probably eight or nine years when you are at the age to trick or treat. That’s it! Nine years, if that. Somewhere around six to fourteen years-old, unless you were one of the short ones, and then you could probably stretch it out for another year or two. I gave it up at fourteen, I think, as I found it easier to snitch the treats from my little sister’s bag or the stash in the pantry.

            My first time Trick or Treating was in Lethbridge when I was about six-years-old and we went door to door calling “Halloween Apples” instead of “Trick or Treat”. That was back in a time when you could trust, and welcomed, fruit and home made food treats from the homes. The apples were usually pretty beaten up by the time we dragged them home but Mom could always whip up some Apple Brown Betty with them.

            I wasn’t much of a trickster, though. A little window soaping or egging or something like that, nothing too serious. I just wasn’t that comfortable with the destruction of public property for fun. Just didn’t work for me. Others, mind you, couldn’t get enough of it.

            Back in my high school days, in the early 70’s, Kipling’s Volunteer Fire Department members used to assist in policing the streets on Halloween in an effort to curb the vandalism. Thankfully, you just don’t see the kinds of things that kids used to do in the name of Halloween anymore. Stuff was moved everywhere. Farm implements, lumber, vehicles, hay bales, there was some outhouse tipping going on, of course, maybe a few farm critters were freed for the evening…that kind of thing. There was usually a lot of clean up that’s for sure. I don’t know how long the Fire Department kept up the practice but the real bad stuff soon fizzled out in the late 70’s or early 80’s I think.

            Then there was my best bad choice of Halloween costume. I wasn’t dressing up for Trick or Treating I was dressing up for my first school Halloween Dance. I was in Grade 7, my first year at Lindale School in Moose Jaw and it was the first school dance of the year, and my life, and it was going to be a Halloween dress-up dance.

            Now, here’s where things get foggy. Someone or two or three thought it would be a great idea to dress me up as a girl for the dance. I know!  I have five older sisters and three of them were still living at home at the time and I think it was their grand idea. Well, I know it was. I don’t think the decision was ever in my control.

Oh, but did they have fun on me with their hair pieces and bobby pins and brassieres and nylons and mini skirt and heels and make-up and all. I guess I made a pretty cute girl for a twelve-year-old boy! Not a great choice if you were going to try to catch the eye of Rosemarie Drackett at the school dance or explain to the chaperone why you were in the Boys Washroom! I think I was a ghost every year after that.

Here’s to creating your own Halloween memories. Have a Happy Halloween Everyone!

 

“We used to go around tipping outhouses over, or turning corn shocks on Halloween. Anything to be mean”.-Loretta Lynn (1932-).

TECHNOLOGY AND PATIENCE!

            Do you want to hear something ironic? The theme that I had running through my head for this week’s column was patience and technology, and, wouldn’t you know it, my technology just exhausted my patience. Weird how that works sometimes, eh?

            You see, I was all geared up to get writing this column so I could get back to the TV for the baseball playoffs and such so I fired up the old desktop and it took longer for the darn beast to come alive than it usually takes me to write the whole column!

Did you hear a foot tapping incessantly? That was me. “Oh my goodness…this is taking foorrreeevvverrrrrr! Why isn’t instantaneous instantaneous? Hmmm? What is taking sooooooo long?”

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? We’ve done it to ourselves, haven’t we? The technological advances have spoiled us into thinking that everything is going to be done immediately. We don’t have patience for anything anymore because we want what we want and we want it NOW!

            I have come to the conclusion that the single most valuable human attribute one must have to eliminate the most stress in one’s life is patience. My source defines the word “patience” as: “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.” Is that even possible? I don’t think so. At least for me it isn’t.

            I have found that nothing will get the dander up and try the patience more than technology and the reason for that is because we are too impatient to teach our selves the right way to do things because we don’t have the time, or something, so we go ahead and try to learn on the fly, because, you know, it cant’ be that hard now can it, so we learn as we go and we have to do most of it all over again and so we get angry because it was supposed to be so simple and usually the only thing simple is the operator and on and on and on it goes. It’s just a vicious circle.

            Funny, or odd as it were, how the word “suffering” is used in the definition of patience. “Suffering” was exactly what I was doing while I was programming a new piece of technology that was supposed to be a “1-2-3 ENJOY” type of setup. HA! The “1-2-3” setup was four hours long! And it’s still not done! That would test the most patient person’s patience, don’t you think?

            Oh yes, by the way, just for your information…if you come across someone who is showing the signs of total impatient meltdown, like a husband or father or someone like that… whatever you do…don’t tell them to calm down. Tsk, tsk, tsk…fuel on the fire people…fuel on the fire. You might want to just back away or maybe leave the house for a little while. Just saying.

             Technology has improved our way of life in so many ways, in its very exasperating way, making it is a necessary evil and I just hope that I can find enough patience to learn how to use it.

            “Patience is not the ability to wait but how you act while you’re waiting.”- Joyce Meyer (1943-).

THAT'LL STRESS YOU OUT!

          During this past Thanksgiving weekend many of our family members gathered at our house for the annual celebration. We had a great time feasting and visiting and the event went by all too quickly as usual. We did manage to cover a lot of our favourite activities as we shared an abundance of the holiday’s standard treats.

Led by our seven-year-old Grandson, Treyton, who reminded us to share what we were all thankful for by saying he was really thankful for the baby his mom was carrying who would become a little brother or sister to him and his sister Ava. That little gem got the ball rolling as everyone else also shared something they had to be thankful for.

            During the weekend the conversation naturally came around to news items and current events. Hurricane Matthew, Dumbass Trump, the sudden stop to the fall harvest, Brad and Angelina splitting, all sorts of bad news out there dragging us down it is not difficult to find something to be thankful for.

            Our daughter told us that she had stopped listening to the news because it was too distressing. She said it just agitated her so much that she had to stop. Being a working mother of two and having one on the way she has enough balls in the air at any given time that she cannot possibly take on any more stress because the world is going crazy like the news and social media lead us to believe it is.

            Our daughter was on to something, though. I did some reading on the subject of tuning out and during my research I found an article describing the effects of negative or pessimistic headlines and there was some very interesting information in there. In fact, one study showed that, “viewing tragedy in the media has proven to be capable of creating PostTraumaticStressDisorder.”

            Here’s an excerpt from an article I found on the subject: “After the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, the University of California, Irvine published a study that assessed the level of stress symptoms affecting people who watched it on television, social media, in print and on the radio. They found that ‘Acute stress symptoms increased with each additional hour of bombing-related media exposure.’ As a result, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs Center for PTSD concluded there is a link between watching the news of traumatic events and stress symptoms.”

            So she’s right-cut out the news coverage and you’ll lessen your stress level. I prefer to stay somewhat engaged but not overwhelmed but that’s a fine line, too, especially on the internet where one article leads you to another article which leads you to another article.

            Thankfully we are merely observers of many of the scarier events going on in the world around us and we remain somewhat insulated and isolated from a lot of the world’s woes back here in our little neck of the woods. Humans are hard-wired to be empathetic, though, so no matter how isolated we feel we cannot help ourselves from being affected by other people’s strife. It’s humanity.

            If you’re looking to lower the stress in your life, (and, really, who isn’t?), then simply lower or remove the negative current events you expose yourself to and it would be a good start.

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”-William James (1842-1910).