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The Citizen, 2017-05-11, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MAY 11, 2017. PAGE 5. Other Views Listen to what your mother says As Mother's Day approaches, here's a word of advice for those readers who still have a mother: not only should you listen to your mother but you should probably write down what she says, particularly if she's relaying the family history. My mother, who died 20 years ago this summer, was a storyteller. As children, my brother and I (my sister was older so I don't know her reaction) would roll our eyes when mother started into one of her stories which she had probably forgotten she had told us before. I suspect we were probably normal kids that way. My mother was proud of her family history. Her grandfather had come to the northern edge of West Wawanosh with his parents as an 18 - year -old in the 1850s, taking up one farm for the parents and one for the son. He began clearing his 100 acres but when his sister and her husband arrived from the U.S., according to family lore, they said they would stay if they could have the farm the young man had started to clear. Being 18, this didn't seem to be a big problem for him so he moved across what is now County Road 86 into Bruce County and started over. The farm he took up contained part of a lake which was named after him. The young man would go on to become reeve of Kinloss Twp. and warden of Bruce County for three terms. By the time he died in the early 1900s he had amassed 600 acres, a large holding for that time. So it was easy to see why my mother was proud of her family's history, having grown up in the house her grandfather had built. It would have been better for me if I'd forgotten some of her stories about him, however. Instead, I latched onto her tale of how, when her grandfather was out in the bush, he had been confronted by a bear. Despite the fact he had no gun, he somehow killed the bear (I have no idea if he had an axe or knife). Anyway, I found this story so fascinating that I shared it with my pals, who immediately thought this was so preposterous that I must be making up a boastful whopper and teased me about it for years afterward. But there are other stories I wish I'd taken time to write down. We inherited some family heirlooms, each of which has a story behind it — stories I've heard, but never took the time to remember or record. Recently we turned over an antique spool bed to one of our granddaughters. Our son slept in that bed when he was growing up. I shared it with my younger brother as a boy (long before it became essential for every child to have his own bed, let alone his own room). But that's as far as my history of the bed goes, although I know it probably goes back several generations further in my mother's family. Future generations won't know the family stories that go with it. The same goes for a drop-leaf desk we have in the back hall of our house today. I remember it in our farmhouse when I was growing up. It was already old. We heated with wood and it sat a little too near the stove and when the fire was roaring, the heat bubbled the old varnish. After we kids had left home, my mother undertook to strip the desk down to bare wood and refinish it. Looking at it today it brings back memories of the old farm kitchen and I can appreciate my mother's long hours of work in refinishing it, but I'm sure she probably told stories when I was young of where that desk came from and I've lost them forever. Similarly, we have four pressed -glass goblets that I remember my mother telling stories about their origin but I don't remember what she said. We were practical when I was growing up so we didn't think about things like antiques or heirlooms — they were just old. So I remember my mother serving us cocoa in those glass goblets, little worrying that careless little boys might break them. A few years ago at the Royal Winter Fair I spotted the booth of a man selling antique pressed -glass dishes. I looked over display and the prices, trying to see if there was anything similar to the pattern of our goblets. I didn't find a match but the prices were over $40 per glass. Those goblets may be the most valuable things we have in our cupboard — but I don't have the value of the history that goes with them. Like many of us, I finally started taking a more urgent interest in my mother's stories when I started to get older myself. I left it too late. A couple of years before she died I asked her to straighten me out on something I was confused about on some piece of family history. We were driving at the time and I looked over and saw she was struggling to remember and she finally burst out in frustration saying she couldn't remember. I have a theory that cruel fate takes from us, as we get old, the one faculty we take most pride in. My mother had always enjoyed a phenomenal ability to remember things. In her last couple of years she suffered from dementia and all her memories faded. Now I wish I'd listened to those stories she told instead of saying in exasperation: "There goes mother with her stories again!" So if you're still blessed with having parents or grandparents, listen and learn. Don't leave it too late to record you family's history. Capsules and other time machines f Facebook is to be believed, May has been a fairly important month for me and, over the past seven years, it's shown how my priorities have changed. In recent years, the social media platform has created a bank of memories for people to peruse showing what was important to them on that particular day throughout modern history. It's the first time that I've ever felt that social media has added an aspect which increases its usability. Looking through these memories and photos from May 8, years ago, is akin to pulling out a photo book and seeing the way things once were. There are the big days, of course. May 4, for example, will always feature a photo from my wedding. Christmas will, hence forth, be filled with hopefully -smiling photos of Mary Jane opening her Christmas presents. While those are great memories, I find the less obvious dates the really exciting ones to stumble on. Seven years ago, for example, I had recently moved into an apartment in Clinton, had started at The Citizen less than a month before and was celebrating the fact that I would get to beta test an exciting (then -new) video game. In more recent days, finding an hour or two to sit down and enjoy a television show, a movie or a video game is a tougher and tougher proposition, and thinking that once upon a time I publically announced I was excited to get to try a game that wasn't done yet seems pretty silly. Six years ago today, Ashleigh and I welcomed our first puppy Juno in to our home. At the time, I had explained to Ashleigh that we now owned a house and that meant we had to have a dog. There wasn't a choice in the matter. Soon we had Juno. Purchased from a neighbour, the miniature Denny Scott Denny's Den poodle was 10 pounds of energy in a five - pound bag. The first day we introduced her to friends and family she ran around excited for so long that she passed out standing up. The first day we brought her home, May 8, 2011, she chased my wife's cats out of a small animal hut and claimed it for her own. Now, Juno is living with a friend and enjoying her life immensely, but it's still fun to look back on those early days of co -habitation and remember what once was. Five years ago today was one of the infamous "super moon" evenings when the moon was supposed to be so close to the earth that it seemed gigantic. Ashleigh and I sat in our driveway and looked up at the so-called super moon, trying to get photos of it and waxing poetic about the life we had laid before us. While I did post about the moon, I also posted about not being able to sleep the day before. Maybe the two were related? Three years ago today, at approximately 4 p.m., Ashleigh and I were sitting in an airport waiting to get on to a plane to Scotland, marking the start of two of (what were then) the biggest adventures in our lives. We were embarking on our honeymoon, four days after our wedding. Sure, since then Mary Jane has been born and the term adventure has been redefined, but that was one heck of a trip to mark the second most important day of my life. By 4 p.m. landed time the next day, Ashleigh and I had made our way across the ocean, showed up at our hotel several hours before check-in and fallen asleep in the lounge of said hotel under the watchful eye of some incredibly friendly and helpful front -desk clerks, woken up, claimed our space for the next four days and started to explore Glasgow. It was then that we found a tavern called The Hootenanny where my wife had her first taste of true Scottish cuisine, but that's a story for another day. Photos, comments, sounds and videos have a way of taking us back to times that we may not have reflected on for quite some time which is what makes time capsules, social media memories and the aroma of baked apple pie (for me anyway) such a great way of connecting to the past. At the same time, they also provide a metric through which we can measure how we have grown or changed over time. Seven years ago, getting into a video game beta was the hot news of today for me. Six years ago, that had changed to sharing a puppy with my soul mate. Five years ago today, I was sitting under a full moon wondering what the future held for Ashleigh and me. Three years ago today, I was a married man for the first week ever and looking forward to an amazing trip. The young man who was excited about a video game certainly isn't the same (much older feeling) man who woke up this morning to help feed his daughter breakfast. Once upon a time I wrote a column explaining that getting older, getting more mature wasn't something that happened over night. I'd like to amend that and say it doesn't happen overnight, but, if you're able to look back at the same day, year after year, you can see the changes. Shawn Loughlin Shawn's Sense Bite me Years ago — and we're talking years ago — I confused the entire office of The Citizen in Blyth when I returned from Belgrave after taking a picture I thought was quite creative. Apparently it was creative. So creative, in fact, that no one had ever seen it before. That, my friends, is getting in on the ground floor of creative. It's probably the photographic equivalent of the joke t -shirt that plays on the hipster notion of listening to a band before they were popular. The t -shirt trumpets the fact that the wearer of the t -shirt "listens to bands that don't even exist yet". So... back to the picture I took. It was of a handful of young girls, three or four of them I think, who played together on some sort of sports team (like I said, years ago). The team had won a gold medal for their efforts. Being the imaginative photographer I am, I turned to the oldest trick in the book for a gold medal picture: I had the girls bite their medals. I was just a lowly reporter then and so I bounded into the office with the energy and enthusiasm of youth and handed my pictures over to the editor at the time — only for her to ask me why I took a picture of the girls biting their medals. I told her that every time someone wins a gold medal in the Olympics the famous medal - biting picture is taken. She ran it past some other people in the office and the verdict was in: I was the only person who knew that this iconic photo was iconic. Heck, I was the only one who knew this iconic photo existed. I bring this up because in this week's issue of The Citizen, we have James Speer of the Brussels area winning provincial public speaking gold. He's handed his gold medal and what's the first thing that happens? A photographer orders him to shove his medal in his mouth and bite down because it's the most famous and repeated photo ever taken — with the possible exception of hostages being photographed with a copy of the day's newspaper, but even then I think medal -biting photos likely outnumber those. Despite what some who have worked in this office may think, James is just the latest in a long line of people who have been victorious in one endeavour or another who've been made to chomp down on the hardware they've just won. Heck, I've done it myself as a member of the two-time provincial champion Pickering Pirates baseball team. So... why do we do it? The practice is said to date back to the real old days when people were doing business and they would bite down on gold coins that were part of a transaction. The reason, of course, is that gold is softer than many metals. If the coin was true gold, you'd see the imprint of your teeth in it. If not, you wouldn't — and you might break a Chiclet. Not to burst Mr. Speers' bubble, but it's unlikely that his medal is real gold. So, just like James, and those girls in Belgrave all those years ago and likely the medals I won at my baseball tournaments, we're all just trying to be like the Olympian big boys and girls. Or are we? Apparently Olympic gold medals are simply gold-plated. The last reported solid gold medal was awarded in 1912 in Sweden. And, apparently the practice of biting medals seems not to really be a desire of the athlete, but rather a command of a demanding photographer (demanding bunch that we are). So there you go! Why do gold medal - winning athletes bite down on their medals? Because they (they don't — the photographers do) want to see if the medals are real gold (they're not). I've cleared it up for you, right?