The Village Squire, 1981-05, Page 33Last Word
by Harry Boyle
Cuiture - recording the days of our lives
I think we make too much fuss about
culture in this country. We have it but we
also have a dreadful kind of official.
preoccupation with it as being a
commodity rather than a sense of
ourselves, our lives, our communities and
the happenstance that placed us in this
place at this time.
Culture is in reality the collective
memory of a family and the bitter swccet
residue of joy. sorrow, happiness, spite.
jealousy and love that makes up living. It
is the legacy of hardship. famine and
persecution that drove our ancestors to
leave distant places in a search for
security and peace. All of us have heard
the story of the quest by warm fires on
cold nights. Work hardened men and
women have told us spine -tingling stories
of early pioneering adventures.
Culture is our knowledge that blood
lines extend to many parts of the globe.
We know of an uncle or a grandfather in
the 1914-18 war making a pilgrimage to
visit overseas relatives bearing thc same
names but separated by years and
geography. They were welcomed but
knew even as they were. that they were
strangers in the lands of their fathers.
Culture is learning of the trick of fate
that separated brothers and families on
an European dock and brought them to
America or Canada on slow. miserable
ships. It is the tenuous link between
ourselves and those distant relatives who
live in American places with strange
sounding names that we promise some
day we'll visit, but seldom do.
Culture is the record of spidery
handwriting and pale ink on dry pages of
the family Bible of those who died
peacefully or tragically in establishing
our secure heritage. It is also those
collections of tin types and sepia photos
of unsmiling people posed in their family
best, who seemed to want us to know that
they had been here, althouah their
children are now -scattered from Cape
Breton to Vancouver Island.
Culture is recorded in the phamphlets
and booklets assembled by someone with
a yen to put down what had happened in a
church congregation, a school district or a
township. There's a world of romance
and adventure, if we only recognized it,
in the simple words detailing how "so
and so took up land for clearing on such
and such a lot" on a conccssion in a
township in a newly formed county. It
marks the beginning of the clearing,
PG. 32 VILLAGE SQUIRE/MAY 1981
stumping and sowing of fields and of
building a log house and having a bee to
raise a barn. It is point of reference for
fiddle scraping and dancing and singing
and of good harvest and bad days and thc
birthing of infants and of the determinat-
ion to have a school so that children could
be educated and gain a better chance in a
new land than their parents had enjoyed
in an old place.
Culture is also being part of the North
American environment, for we have a
common experience in much of what has
happened to us, with the Americans. We
have blood tics and tradc tics and often
an overlay of the American experience.
and yet we have somehow remained
different. We chose different concerns in
social legislation. We have adapted in
different ways to our environment and we
have chosen to treasure varying things
from our common European heritage. We
_admire Americans but we work and visit
with them more as cousins than as
• brothers and sisters.
Culture is in reality how we have
adapted to this place at this time in this
way. Our politicians and our bureaucrats
and the officially concerned keep
seeking culture. without somehow re-
cognizing that only history can tell if we
have been successful. They spend too
much time in trying to inflict on us a
pattern of thc "grand cultures" of past
eras that were in effect the prerogative of
the privileged. True culture is happen-
stance rather than something that can be
planned. Shakespeare, now so rev crud,
wrotc desperately against time to make
enough money to live on. without a
thought for posterity.
Whether one of our writers. poets,
painters or composers produces sonic -
thing that will endure for centuries
remains a question that none of us now
living will ever be able to answer. Nor
docs it really matter. For that matter it is
futile to be concerned about alien
influences in our cultural life, for all
cultures since the dawn of man's being
able to record thc events of existence, is a
compendium of bits and pieces of the
whole history of the human race. It is fact
and fancy, truth and fantasy all inter-
woven with the human desire to not be
forgotten.
That's why the record of the days of our
lives is so important. It gives us a sense of
accomplishment. when we can treasure
the hope that our todays will not be
forgotten tomorrow. and even after-
wards. It is in reality culture. as we
record and remember the stories of our
families, for it has been truly said that the
history of man is an interwoven web of
events or a kind of bridge and each man
and woman helps to construct the span on
which succeeding generations will tread
and build more.
Coming in the next Village Squire
Blossoming bed and breakfasts
England's had them for ages, and they first gained a Canadian foothold on Cape
Breton Island, but now bed and breakfasts are rapidly gaining in popularity in
southwestern Ontario. Here they seem to go hand in hand with the rich theatre fare in
the area. The Squire takes a look.
And the curtains rise
From Taming of the Shrew to The Music Man to the story of Howie Morenz. It's all
availahle this summer as the area's three major theatres - the Stratford Shakespearean
Festival, the Blyth Summer Festival and the Huron Country Playhouse - put finishing
touches on their 1981 programs. We'll preview the conning seasons.
A different kind of catalogue
It's a different way to shop, and the Catalogue of Country Living has attracted
customers from across Canada and the United States. Blyth writer Laura Drummond
visits the catalogue's producers, Elmo Stoll and family from the Aylmer area. Watch
for it in June.