The Brussels Post, 1974-04-10, Page 21$94410H:10 I
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WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 1974
ONTARIO.
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A thoughtful Good Friday
Sugar and Spice
By Bill Smiley
When :!ou travel close to 10,000 miles
and meet about 500 total strangers in five
days; not only the body but also the mind
begins to get a big scrambled.
I'm three days home from a crash trip to
Germany. My body feels like an old rubber
boot. My mind is like an Irish stew with
very little meat in it. not sure what day
of the week it is, what time of day it is, or
what my first name is.
Among us members of the jet set, this
condition is known as "jet lag". In plain
terms, it is total exhaustion,
Normally, I find it fairly traumatic just to -
change front Standard to Daylight Saving
time, It invariably throws me out of gear
for a couple of days.
But when you go through a lime change
of six hours, and then do it
backwards within a few days, the human
system can barely cope.
I feel as though my soul, or some other
piece of essential equipment, is still back in
Germany, or at least in mid-Atlantic ; trying
deperately to catch tip with the bag of
bones which is its usual habitat,
Just to complete the weird feeling of
alienation, the weather lent a hand. Left
Canada in a howling blizzard. Temperature
in the slack Forest diStrict in the sixties,
flowers blooming everywhere. Arrived
back home in — guess what — a howling
blizzard.
All lit all, I'm slightly unhinged by the
experience, so bear with me while I try to
sort out some impressions of tny jaunt.
Was it really I who was belting along the
autobahn a few days ago at 85 M.p.h., and
shuddering as those crazy Siegfrieds went
by us like a bat out of holt, doing, at least
120 r There is no speed limit on the
autobahns, A "suggested" limit of 81 is
the only guideline and nobody ,pays any
attention to it,
Wm it really I who climbed' into bed nit
a federbette at 4.30 io the afternoon and
Was it really I standing at a cocktail
party talking to charming Sandy Morgan, a
pretty Texan girl, and telling her I'd love to
go along to Spain on a trip she was
organizing 'for officers' wives, but that
• really had only two days left?
I'm afraid all these questions it
answered in the affirmative. But p
they will give some idea o
mind-boggling five days I had.
One thing I did not do was solnett itig my
wife, in a fit of pique, suggested I would.
We were being entertained by friends one
evening, just before I left. She
annoyed because she Wasn't goit
"1 haveto drive-through a blizzard to see.
lily Dad", she -snapped, "and,this one's off'
to -Germany with some Bitte Sehoen," Her
German is limited., -Our -friends are boil)
fluent: in` German, and I've neve hear
anyone laugh hatdet. I give my word
wasn't off with blue.
ttsi be
erhaps
f the
An Easter chick
slept until five in the morning? Don't raise -t
your eyebrows, gentle reader. A fedeibette
is not what you think, It's a huge down
comforter, about 10 .inches thick. As light
as an electric blanket and as warm as four
ordinary blankets.
Was it really I who sat over lunch
gaggle of generals discussing how
tanks the Russians have and what
would, do if they started anything?
Was it really I who sat in a "spaCe
with four little Canadian kids; all
wearing "space helmets", and joined
in the count-down?
Was it really! flying abo ye clot'
the rosy-fingered dawn with two
veterans, one of them, Albert Bro
Sarnia, president of the Can
War Association?
Was it really I standing, at a
officers' mess dinner, drinking toa
the Queen, the President of the
States, and Willi. Brandt, president o
Germany?
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Whatever one's religious faith, or the lack of it,
Good Friday, the most solemn day in the Christian
calendar, has something to say to the thoughtful.
At a time when the word 'love' turns up on
buttons, on car bumper slogans, and slops out of pop
songs as if it were the froth on a glass of beer, Good
Friday impels us to turn from the ersatz variety and
look, however briefly, at the real thing.
Genuine love for one's fellows, far from wrapping
the person who tries to embody it in a cocoon of
euphoria, means putting oneself out -- by infrerence,
a disrupting process.-- for someone else. When Lord
Donald Soper of Hyde Park and London City Mission
fame visited Canada he described his work with
indigent men. "There's nothing glamorous about
it,° he said "When you're washing old men's feet,
you're aware that they're ugly and that they smell.
You don't do it for a 'good feeling'. You do it because
it has to be done and you're committed to making
yourself available when you see a need." That's
what love of the genuine variety is all about.
Good Friday -- the term is a corruption of God's
Friday -- reminds us that every improvement in the
human condition is bought with what the late
German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called 'this
costly. grace'. From Jesus himself, the long, thin,
valiant line which includes such names as the
Tolpuddle farm hands, who organized the first trade
union and were banished to Australia for their pains,
Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Tom Dooley
and the Kennedys, the price .for this commitment
was heavy indeed. But, somehow, we move forward
on their shoulders, That, in part, is what Good Friday
is all about. (Contributed)
Newspaper errors
Recently, a university professor had a few unkind
words to say about newspaper writing and errors. To
answer these charges, wefelate to a penned version
of the late Thomas Richard Henry of the old Toronto
Telegram, who wrote:
"The newspaperman writes his story in a rush,
just one step ahead of the deadline for the edition.
He always does this, even when he could have
written it three days before. If he didn't wait for the
last minute to write it, he wouldn't be a
newspaperman.
"And for the story he must reply on sources of
information from those involved; changing of minds
by informants; not to mention the "no comments''
from doctors, police or political figures.
"Steaming with the speed with which it has been'
handled, the story stands before the reader in cold
print, a half-hour after it was just a nebulous theory
in the mind of some reporter,
"Then the university professor chortles with
glee, because he finds a present and a past tense
playing hide-and-seek with each other in the same
paragraph.
"But', let's look at the university professor.
"when he sets out to write anything, he takes six
weeks to write one short chapter of a book.
"The printer reads it, then the proofs corm back
tO the professor.
"He reads them.
"HiS secretary reads them.
"HIS Married daughter reads them.
"Then he gets an expert to read them.
"Six years later the book it printed With an extra
page enumerating` the mistakes' that have been
missed." (The Port Elgin TIMOS)