Never in the history of human consumption has so much been owed by so many to tofu...

All right, I get it. Some folks don't want to eat meat, you know, flesh. I can understand that. I can't imagine doing it., but I can understand it. I mean veggies are no doubt better for you. Broccoli, Cauliflower, lettuce, squash, cucumbers and tomatoes, yummy. No problem, I can understand the attraction of vegetables. I love them. Give me a nice side salad any day. Notice I said side salad. Slide that bowl of crisp romaine dripping with yummy Caesar dressing crunchy croutons, salty and zippy Parmesan (especially fresh grated), slide it right in beside a nice lean sirloin, fresh from the brazier with those beautiful char marks, heaven!



So I can understand the attraction of vegetables because I share it. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, "You are preaching to the choir." I am already a convert In fact I don't even have a problem with someone not wanting to eat meat. I understand that there are legitimate health reasons for not eating meat. Especially commercially produced meat from modern factory farms. High fat content, possible contamination with e.coli or salmonella, steroid used to increase profits, use of antibiotics in feed, mad cow disease, there are a lot of reasons not to eat meat. Still... crispy bacon, a juicy burger, golden roast turkey, ummmmmmm! Yes I can understand why someone might not want to eat meat.


What I have never figured out is why someone who has forsaken meat would want to eat a veggie burger or a veggie dog? Have you tried them? They are typically appalling. A true debacle of culinary proportions. I mean, if you are a vegetarian, or better yet, a vegan, why on earth would you want to eat pseudo flesh? If you have made the decision to forsake the eating of your fellow animals why make a fake animal patty and then consume it? Why not have a nice veggie stir fry? Perhaps a piping hot serving of broccoli? Some carrot sticks? What is the fascination of mimicking the thing that you have forsaken? Why consume some dry, tasteless mass that only loosely resembles a beef patty in the first place? I remember one comedian who joked "Should Lesbians be allowed to use dildos, I mean they made their choice!" Haven't vegetarians made their choice?
I walked into a fast food restaurant the other day which shall remain Harvey's )I mean nameless). I had placed my order and was waiting for it to arrive. A guy came up behind me and inquired about the Veggie Burger, "Do they cook them on the same grill as the beef burgers?" "NO." replied the cashier, "They are cooked separately." "Fine" he replied "I'll take one." "Would you like bacon on that?" came the reply.

Life is all about choices!

Why I Write

I love this Blog. Even if no one reads it, or perhaps because no one reads it. I write to get things out of my head and I write to remind myself of things so I can get them into my head. It is entirely therapeutic. It is similar to those aggression therapies where you shout out the things that frustrate you so you can get them out and deal with them. It is also a way that I can look at my thoughts as if I took my brain in my hands and moved things around a but like files on a laptop or Blackberry.
I had an English teacher tell me once that a book or story is like a room that you can close the door and no one will touch it. No one will move the furniture around. There is a good deal of truth in that. I suppose because we all use so much of our imagination in creating the world described in the writings. The detail cannot be so precise without boring us to tears so we fill in the blanks from our own experience. That is probably why when you see the movie of some novel you have read it is never the same as you imagined it. It is someone Else's interpretation of the blanks.
But the written word stays the same. It does not yellow and get dated and scratchy like film. It is not superseded by some new technological development in the media, it is virtually timeless.
And So I write. I write to get things off my chest and I write to firm things up in my memory, so that I will remember each beloved detail of some person or time that I loved and so I can remember each detail each smell, each color, each sensation, filtered and slanted by my own prejudice and past. As will the reader, if any, will filter it through their own rose colored glasses.
For sometimes I like to return to those rooms, so long gone on the physical sense. The furniture long since sold off or sent to the dump. Gone are the actors who strutted my life`s stage. No amount of my applause will bring them back for a curtain call, though I would so love it. Yet I can write them back to life, and in so doing I can distill what it was about then that made them so special to me. There is a sense that every time of my life, with a few notable exceptions is the best moment of my life. I do not necessarily want to live in the past. I love the present, I just want what none of us can have in any real sense, I want it all! I want the life I have now, with my wonderful Wife and my dog. I also want the others that I have lost, before I even met my Wife. I want my Grandfather`s smile. My Father`s laugh. Clarence and Gertrude`s love. My Aunt Violet`s warm kitchen. I want to have at least part of all of it. So I write...
I write to create a room, that does not exist without the writing. Longfellow or Shakespeare is not going to do it for me, they may have better skill with words, but they would lack the bigger picture, the fodder for the writing, only I with my poor skills of communication can write these things. The white page or the blank computer screen are my empty canvas, my `snowy linen land`yo quote Don Maclean. I must use my meager skills my wordy brushstrokes to paint the canvas and capture a moment in time. But writing is more than a paining, is it not More like a video than a still photo. Better yet because the photo or video is undeveloped, it is up ti the reader to develop it in the darkroom of his own imagination. What a place is the imagination! Perhaps the greatest nation of all, we should all have dual citizenship, in our own nation and in the imagination. I think we should all write, all keep rooms of what was best in our lives, that we can visit any time we want, where old Friends and loved ones never age, never fall sick, never die. We also need rooms that we can fill with the unwanted things in life, ill deeds, ill thoughts, the ill deeds of others, perpetrated upon us. These rooms, filled with the ugly furniture of life we mat lock, we may sweep thereto the dust of our existence before the company comes. These less attractive rooms have there place too. Perhaps in a diary that no one else needs see. For we are not the worst things that we have done, nor are we doomed to be forged in the fire of the worst things others have done to us. But to avoid being warped by these things we must look at them and where they lie in the house that is our lives. What goes in the basement and what goes in the attic
For a writer to let others read his writing is like taking his heart in his hands and saying here have a look. For any flaw in the telling, real or perceived will make the writer vulnerable. Like a heart without its ribcage. So when you read these things that I have written, remember that they are the writings of one such as you, a mere mortal, without the gifts of a Shakespeare or a Longfellow. Just a man with heart in hand, who wants it all, no matter how fleeting, who wants to ramble these old halls and occasionally open one of those old doors...

A Cup Of Joe

I am thoroughly convinced that there are principally two different kinds of Canadians, those who drink Tim Hortons and those who drink Starbucks. All right, before you get too excited, there are those weirdos in that third category, the teetotallers, tree huggers and hippies who are too sensitive to drink coffee. But for those real Canadians, real people, with real lives. We drink coffee, hot black, steaming nasty, smells good tastes horrible, coffee! Fix it how you will. Black, white, sugar, no sugar. Double double Double triple. Latte, Mocha chino whatever! COFFEE! We don't drink it because we want to we drink it because we have to. You know the first of the twelve steps is admitting we have a problem. My name is Greg T. and I am a Coffaholic! You really think you aren't hooked, especially to one or the other of the big chains? Try this spend some time in a foreign country.


I just got back from three weeks in the British Isles (I include Ireland in this so my sincerest apologies to the Irish as they are definitely not British). The first thing I noticed was the nasty black liquid that greeted me when the waitress finally arrived with two stainless steel decanters. I am sure she asked me if I wanted coffee. What was in my cup when she was finished pouring was a complete surprise to me. I picked up a small pitcher that contained a white fluid. I always pour a little cream into my coffee then wait. The dream slides down the side of my cup then swirls upwards magically turning the dark brown liquid a wonderful golden color. It changes the smell too, I think. It seems to soften to fill the nostrils with that cafe au lait smell that I love so much. However when the white liquid hit this stuff it was as if it had vanished. The volume in my cup increased but the color and odor did not change one iota. Milk, I reasoned. Then a second realisation hit me, Man this must be strong coffee the color is the same. I added more milk with no effect. I poured until my cup brimmed and I dared not stir as it would have sloshed. I ended up with a liquid the color of a Panther tank model I once painted. Flat battle grey I think the label on the paint bottle had read. As I was horribly jet-lagged and sleep deprived I raised the cup to my lips and took a strong pull at the now lukewarm mess. It was appalling. I have drunk some bad cups of coffee in my time, in college dorm rooms, cooked over an open fire, reheated day old Joe in a microwave at three in the morning, but this one beat all.

A couple at the next table to us were also on the same tour. He raised his mug in a morning salute and said cheerily, "Good stuff, just like Starbucks, eh?" He emphasized the "eh" as a reference to the fact that we were Canadian, they were from Oklahoma. I suppressed a grimace and waved, too appalled to speak. I am a Double Double man myself. A medium double double to be exact. You cannot be human nowadays without having a coffee Identity. I suppose to be honest I am now a double double sweetener as a concession to my diabetes. In actual fact, (no body's listening right? I mean, you can keep a secret?) I don't really like coffee. I drink a cup or so a day, more as required, but mostly for medicinal purposes. In other words I drink it to get awake or to stay awake. I add milk and sweetener so I can get the stuff down. To me it is the Buckley's Cough Syrup of the beverage world, It tastes awful but it works. That's why I like Tim Horton's, you can doctor it up and make it passable with caution. I believe that most Canadians, if the truth were told, love the smell of coffee but the taste is somewhat less appealing. Starbucks people are different. They love the taste so much they want you to slap them with it. No, harder, like you mean it! They are masochistic sorts. Tim's people like to be awoken with a gentle word or a nudge in a mug. Starbucks people want to be grabbed by the ankles and inverted, and shaken awake by a seven foot drill instructor of a coffee. No subtle nuances here, just pure, raw savage power. Well folks if this is you, you'll love England, Strong coffee without a trace of cream. No wonder the English drink so much tea. They do Tea very well, hot fresh and sweet. Sublime. By the end of our tour, when the waitress arrived with the two gleaming carafes, I said, "Tea, Please!" When in Rome... Hey, did you see that tree, let's see if I can get my arms around it...

That's Not The Way It Feels

This September 20th will mark the thirty fifth year since Pop Singer/Songwriter Jim Croce was killed in a plane crash. In the summer of 1973 I was fourteen years old and had just bought my first record album, ever. "Life and Times" By you guessed it Jim Croce. I sat in my old room in the second story of my parents house in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and played that album until I wore it out (It wouldn't be my last copy, I have owned it in Vinyl, 8 Track, Cassette CD and MP3). Little did I know as I listened and sang along that his life would be brought to such a sudden and tragic end just a few months later.

Croce was born in the south side of Philadelphia, in a rough part of town. His love of music started early and he joined numerous musical groups. He attended Villanova University where he met his wife Ingrid at a Hootenanny. He was a member of the Villanova singers and formed a number of bands. Jim played in coffee houses and at neighboring Universities. After graduating in 1965 he and his wife toured and performed mostly folk music doing covers of Ian & Sylvia Tyson tunes, he also emulated Gordon Lightfoot and Woody Guthry. He would continue to do thoughtful covers and interpretations of the works of other artists such as Sam Cook when he made it big. It wasn't an easy life and after having moved to New York, and lost everything he owned except one guitar he left the business and went to work driving truck. He would later chalk this up to "Character Development" but it must have hurt, a lot. But like most things that do not kill us, it made him stronger.

While they were struggling he and Ingrid wrote many fine tunes, such as "Spin, Spin, Spin" and "Age". These folksy tunes stand up well and are worth a listen. While playing some very tough bars Jim developed a style of talking between songs that endeared him to his audience and doubtless saved him from a lot of abuse and perhaps a few stitches from flying beer bottles. His style was funny, if a bit bawdy, pithy and studded with the experiences of someone who had worked for a living,The kind of humor that he used so well in his "Character Songs" about people like Leroy Brown and a roller derby queen who "Was built like a fridgerator, with a head.".

Life is often a series of fortunate accidents and in 1970 Jim met Maury Muehleisen through a mutual friend. Maury was a classically trained guitarist and initially it was Jim who backed up Maury. It was a match made in heaven, they complimented each other beautifully. Eventually Jim would take the lead but always, Maury was there with his crystal clear tones and haunting chord structures. Jim's diamond would not have shone so bright, nor had so many facets without Maury, his brilliance and Jim's were symbiotic.

When fame came it was meteoric. Croce was your typical overnight success that was ten years in the making. In 1972 he released "You Don't Mess Around With Jim" and "Life & Times". "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" went to #1 on the Charts in the summer of 1973. Jim was at the very zenith of his career. He was having success with "Operator that's not The way it Feels" and only one day before the release of his third album under the ABC label "I Got A Name"it literally all came crashing down, when the small plane he was riding crashed on takeoff, killing all aboard. Jim was just 30 years old. Like so many music stars he had been taken In the prime of life in a plane crash, the bitter news was heightened by the death of Maury Muelheisen who was only 24. In that summer of hope in 1973 when I was so young and the world seemed so endless and vast, I learned something of what it was to feel loss and sorrow. Jim will be forever young as he joins those whom time has frozen, like fruit picked at the peak of the harvest. To paraphrase what I once heard about Stan Rogers, what Jim did with the first thirty years of his life leaves you to wonder what he would have done with another thirty years.

I recently downloaded a video of Jim singing "Operator" with, of course, Maury at his side, not in the back but sitting side by side, playing so beautifully. The video was sublime. It also opened an old wound that I did not think would be so close to the surface some 35 years later. Jim has been gone longer than he was on this earth. His music holds up so well, though. Especially for me anyways, his ballads and love songs. Give them a listen and I know you will agree. After his death I was left with only his older music, and some very bad recordings of his coffee house and barroom days. The talent was still there, a diamond in the rough. As I listened to Operator" it occurred to me how appropriate were his own words to the reaction of his millions of fans on the September morn....

I've overcome the blow-
I've learned to take it well-
I only wish my words could just convince myself-
That it just wasn't real.... But that's not the way it feels...


No,NO,No,NO.... That's not the way it feels...

The Turnbulls in the British Isles

Day one; Lina and I worked up until time to go. I was greatly relieved that the weather held and we were able to board the single engine Caravan for the 18 minute flight to Norman Wells. We flew over the murky MacKenzie its waters the color of coffee whitened with skim milk, a sort of grey brown compared to the green blue waters of the Bear river as the two merge at the base of Bear Rock.
In Norman Wells we were met at the airport By Dee Opperman, Store Manager . She took us on a tour of The area around D.O.T.(Department of Transportation) lake where the float planes that take hunters into the wilderness fly from. We then had lunch at the hotel and killed a few rainy hours by visiting the staff of the Northern Store. We got on the much larger Canadian North jet and flew to Yellowknife. YK was not as rainy and within the hour we were enjoying the hospitality of the flight staff and enjoyed a hot meal, a rarity on a plane in Canada in 2008. Soon the fields of Northern Alberta stretched out below us as we approached Edmonton International. The patchwork fields were a quilt of yellow, greenand brown. The plane hit the ground hard and soon we were waiting for luggage and boarding the shuttle for the 45 minute drive to our hotel at the West Edmonton Mall. The room is huge and I marvel at the endless blanket of lights that stretch to the vast horizon. There are more people within

a few blocks of here than are in the NWT the Yukon and Nunavut, combined! We are exhausted after a long day and soon we will sleep. Tomorrow we have errands to do, so goodnight all...

The Quilt

In 1999 it became necessary to have my Father institutionalized. It was a very trying time for my Mother as it was for the whole family. The decision to do so was inevitable, the question of where Dad would end up was the real issue. In the end we were very fortunate to place Dad in the VMB Halifax's Camp Hill Veterans Memorial building. It had all the facilities and wonderful programs to keep the veterans busy. Still it was an institution; they can be very cold places. The staff is what saved us, they breathed life and warmth into the cold sterile walls. Within weeks of his arriving they asked us to put together a memory book for my Dad. It didn't have to be anything fancy, just a collection of family pictures and mementos of the life that each veteran head lived prior to coming here. It served a couple of purposes, it was a way to keep the men and women in touch with home and their former world. Many suffered from Dementia or Alzheimer's and the book could be therapeutic. It also served another purpose, it humanized or perhaps more correctly re humanized the patients. In such an institution it would be easy for staff to see the patients as faceless, their personality and voices largely wiped clean by the scourges of time and disease.They had become symptoms. The books breathed life back into these men and women who had served our country so well under the most horrible circumstances. I guess in a Veterans building you would expect this, but it also showed that they had lives after the service, they worked, they raised families and they contributed to their church and communities. Over the years we have all seen horrible videos and heard horror stories of nursing home staff who have abused patients. The VMB was taking measures to see that this did not happen.


My brother undertook the project with his usual zeal. He used his computer skills and his skills as a writer of training manuals to put together an impressive volume, outlining the life of my father before he found himself in Camp Hill. It was shown to staff and visitors. It was very popular and definitely helped humanize my Dad to those who had only known the shell of a man left by the progress of his condition. As well as the book, there were shadow boxes outside of each door that allowed the vets to put some personal items in that would make a statement about what kind of person lived there. These were sensible remedies for the almost inevitable dehumanization of these types of institutions. There was one other very visible project that was undertaken by the staff and the vets shortly after my father arrived. It was a quilt, seven columns of five squares. Thirty five Vets, each square contained the name of one Vet and a few stitched on pieces of cloth to represent something about the man. There were musical instruments, fishing rods, pets, flowers, sports equipment, favorite books and much more. Each square summed up something about the individual, something of his character. These icons gave you a feel for the person, often an opening gambit for a conversation. I have had conversations about fishing, hunting, sports and other hobbies I have shared with one of the men on the quilt.

Over time some of the men on the quilt passed away. "None of them will ever leave here." My Mother remarked sadly one day as we read of yet another Veteran who had left us. As the years went by the number of men on the quilt who were still alive began to dwindle. I began to look on the quilt with a different eye. It began to become like a death knell. I started to have reservations about the quilt, looking at it as a list of the fallen. A thing of sadness. I live in the NWT and so my visits were restricted to my annual holidays. Each year the quilters thinned until finally I looked at my Mother and remarked "He's the only one left." It was so for nearly two years. Dad had been in the VMB for eight years when he too passed away.

True to form the wonderful staff of Six West turned out in force at my Father's funeral. Over ten of them were there, nearly all of the regular staff. "Who's holding down the Fort?" I asked one of the nurses. She informed me that they had all made special arrangements for other staff from different floors to cover their shifts. Our family was greatly touched. "You must come see us when you come home on holidays." she insisted. I promised that I would. When summer came my wife and I made our way up to the sixth floor. It was hard to walk past Dad's room. It had been his home for so long. To see someone else's picture in the Shadow box and to see different decorations on the wall brought a lump to my throat. Lina and I approached the nursing station and were greeted by hugs and handshakes. We had sent a fruit basket the day before as a small token of our gratitude for the love that these people had shared with the Vets. After a few minutes we wandered into the lounge where the quilt still hung on the wall. I was a bit taken aback. I don't know why but I had assumed that since mt Dad was the last one to go that they would take it down. My eyes scanned the squares, line by line. As I read each name, I pictured each of them. I remembered something special about them all. A tear crept down my cheek and I wiped away, but not before my Wife had noticed and tenderly squeezed my hand. I hadn't been prepared for this. "I never thought it would still be here." I said in a thick and unsteady voice. "They are all gone now. I thought they might take it down." "I hope they never do." She said. "It's like they are still here." I hadn't thought of it quite that way. To me it had been a reminder of death. It had been made by caring hands to capture something of the humanity of those who time and ill health had robbed of their individuality. It had been meant to give voice to the silent. To allow someone who knew nothing of each of the thirty five rugged individualists to have a key to unlock the silence between strangers and give them the material to build bonds. It was still serving a purpose. It wasn't a reminder of death, it was a reminder of life. It was a way of saying "We were here, don't forget us." I too hope they never take it down. I hope that it continues to memorialize those thirty five special men.

Nostalgia, it aint what it used to be...

Today is Hockey Day in Canada. Much is made of how central hockey is to the Canadian soul. It IS absolutely central to our understanding of what it means to be Canadian. Who of us does not remember where he or she was when Paul Henderson scored that mythic goal that won the summit series? Who over forty anyways? For our parents generation it was the Richard riot. Canadians are hockey mad! That Americans are not is blatantly obvious. They call it "Ice Hockey"! Hockey does not need a qualifier. Do they play 'Grass Baseball"? Of course not. Field hockey, underwater hockey, air hockey, street hockey, and roller hockey all require their qualifiers, but not good old hockey.
When we were kids we knew the names and numbers of every player on our favorite team. For me it was the Montreal Canadiens. The Habs.To me the world was unfolding as it should when, the Habs were the Stanley Cup Champs, Ali was the heavyweight champ and Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister. When these factors were in alignment then the forces of good were winning. Well the Habs haven't won since '93, Pierre is gone and Ali, alas has been silenced by Parkinson's. Today players in the NHL are like chips on a poker table. They are traded and spent like plastic counters. They seldom stay with one team long enough for the fans to build allegiances. Players make staggering sums of money that distance them from the fans. Performance enhancing drugs call into question the prowess of athletes. The longer seasons make the new records they create a devalued commodity. One wonders if they should have asterisks after them.
Some days I wish that Guy Lafleur (#10) and Yvan Cornoyea (#12) were streaking down the ice, backed up by big Ken Dryden (#29). The good old days... Nostalgia nowadays sucks, when I was young we had real nostalgia...