Alan Skeoch

Category: Uncategorized

  • ANDREW AND MEGHAN: ‘FESTIVUS’…A WEDDING FOR ALL OF US

    ANDREW AND MEGHAN:  “FESTIVUS”… A WEDDING FOR ALL OF US

    I am not a person who follows weddings much.  Better things to do.  But this wedding trumped other weddings big time.
    here are a few pictures taken from TV that explain why.  Included is my favourite,  just STAND BY ME.
    alan skeoch
    May 19, 2018
    p.s. Why did I say Andrew …  I always get my Princes mixed up…same about Princesses … stupid…Most readers seemed to have not noticed which is comforting…probably all think I am supped anyway AS YOU KNOW I MEANT HARRY.

  • TICKS, INFECTION AND OBSOLESENSE alan skeoch May 2018

    FEAR STARTED IN OUR RHUBARB PATCH:
    (This is not a funny story…a warning story on dangers of infection)
    alan skeoch
    May 2018
    “Marjorie, I love springtime when  our slice of the world  turns green…bursting green in all shades.”
    “Rhubarb is in season Alan…in the back field.”
    “You pick it while I try to get the tractor started to plow, OK?”
    “Is the back field plowed?”
    “Nope, couldn’t do the plowing last fall…tractor wouldn’t start…dirt in the sediment bowl.”
    “I can get to the rhubarb through the weeds, no problem.”
    “Maybe make a Rhubarb pie?  Love that.”
    “Depends  on the amount of rhubarb back there.”
    And that is how the day began…anticipation of a  rhubarb pie.

  • Fwd: PARKDALE C.I. FLASHBACK: HE’S DEAD, SIR! MURDERED! SHOT TO DEATH TODAY! (FROM ALAN SKEOCH)

    HERE are a few flashback memories…most centred  on Parkdale C.  I. …   Wrote tis a couple of years ago for no particular reason.  … 

    alan

    “He’s dead, sir!  Shot!  Murdered!”
    by  Alan Skeoch,  Jan. 29,2014
     

    “Sir! Sir!  Someone just shot the President!  Someone shot Kennedy in Texas…might be dead!”

    A student burst into my portable classroom at Parkdale Collegiate with this horrific news.  First year I taught.  It may have been Conrad Blonski.  That assassination was etched into long term storage of people across the world.  Now, more than half a century later I can remember the moment so clearly.  November 22, 1963. A warm, sunny, late fall afternoon. Beautiful day.

  • MARY FIXPARK…DEVASTATED MAY 2018 WINDSTORM

    TANGLED FOREST:  WHAT 100 MILE PER HOUR WINDS  HAVE DONE   MAY 2018


    alan skeoch
    may 2018

    Marjorie Skeoch is dwarfed by the corpse of this giant tree uprooted in Mary Fix Park by the windstorm of May 2018

    TANGLED  FOREST

    Gazing with trepidation from our front porch I watched our hundred  year old trees sway and twist as  if dancing to some windy melody.  Would they snap?  Our house in Mississauga is
    located  on the last holdout of the Mississauga First Nations  people.  As  a  result the lots  are long and  densely forested because the slash  and  burn farmers did  not have a chance
    to level  every living thing.  This sudden storm in May 2018 changed things.

    Unseen at the back  of our lot a century old spruce tree was  completely uprooted.  Its corpse fell  across  Mary Fix Creek and nearly took a  slice out of a neighbours house.   The hole
    left behind by the roots was  deep enough for me to seem swallowed up.  A grave.

    Lucky  Mary Fix is  long gone.  She would  be horrified by the way the wind created havoc in her park.  Mary Fix park is a wilderness park left to the City of Mississauga by Mary when she died on May 2, 1972.
    She wanted to be sure her bit of wilderness was saved forever.   And up until May 2018 that seemed to assured.  The forest is the closest to Shangri-La I have experienced.  A year ago I sat absolutely still
    on a rotting birch log while a doe and her  fawn sidled past me.  And this  spring and  winter we have a trio of coyotes hiding somewhere in the forest along with the RABBITS  and squirrels that the
    coyotes regards as fine food along with the odd  cat that wanders too far from home.

    (Mary Fix was born in 1896 in a French/Irish family.  She fought for the right for women vote when she was 16.  In 1918 the became the first woman lawyer in Ottawa.  In 1931 she married a musician named Albert Alphonse Fix 
    and they built their house in Toronto Township.  That house stands on the edge of Mary Fix Park…south east quadrant of the junction of Hurontario Road and  the Queen Elizabeth Way.  Being a  female lawyer
    was  tough sledding for Mary.  Alphonse died  in 1945 and Mary opened the Cloverleaf Dress Shop.  She expected a  modest life.  Then politics  intervened.  The chaos of  development after World  War II threatened
    to disrupt the beauty of Toronto Township, now Mississauga, so she decided to do  something about it and became an elected official determined to bring order to the thirst for monetary gain by unregulated development.
    She was  a  founding member of  the  Historical  Society, a helper in setting aside the quaint and fascinating Bradley House Museum,  a member of the Library Board…and  was also determined
    to save the trees  in her  neighbourhood.)

    Well,  Mary’s beautiful trees…towering white pines, spruce, black cherry, birch…have become a tangled mess.   So clogged with downed trees  that her forest is almost impassable.  It took 
    Marjorie and Woody, our Labrador. nearly an hour to cover a stretch of the forest that took five minutes before the storm.  And  there is danger as some of the towering trees  are hanging like 
    dark guillotines high above the heads of any urban explorer.  The only good  thing about the storm damage is that Mary Fix Park is no longer passable…it has  become a place that wild animals
    must treasure.  

    They probably watched us tumbling over windfalls and carefully moving below those wooded Guillotines.

    Now do  not get your underwear in too much of a twist.  There are lots of tall trees still standing in Mary Fix Park…and  a  host of  saplings ready  to shoot skyward.  The forest will survive.

    alan skeoch
    may  2018

    P.S.  ONE of the worst results of the storm is sudden decision by neighbours to cut down the towering trees that surround their houses.  Trees that survived those massive winds but cannot 
    survive fear.



    Mary Fix forest BEFORE THE WINDSTORM OF MAY 2018



    MARY FIX FOREST…AFTER THE WINDSTORM

    OUR LOT WAS HIT HARD BUT MUCH OF THE LOT REMAINED UNTOUCHED.  THIS DUMP RAKE, CIRCA 1880, WAS  MOVED  HERE FROM THE CRAIGIE FARM.


    IT IS A POLICY OF THE MISSISSAUGA FORESTRY PEOPLE TO LEAVE FALLEN TREES ON THE GROUND SO THAT THE NATURAL FORCES  CAN TAKE COMMAND . THESE OLD  LOGS
    PROVIDE SUSTENANCE FOR A HOSE SMALL UNSEEN CREATURES.   THAT POLICY WILL PROBABLY BE AMENDED SOMEWHAT FOR THE DEVASTATION IS SO WIDESPREAD THAT MARY
    FIX PARK IS NOW IMPENETRABLE.


    WHY OUR HUGE SILVER MAPLE SURVIVED WHILE OTHER YOUNGER TREES DID  NOT IS A MYSTERY

  • Fwd: WELCOME TO PORT CREDIT: LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL: WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A LOVE IN….PORT CREDIT



    Begin forwarded message:


    From: SKEOCH <alan.skeoch@rogers.com>
    Subject: WELCOME TO PORT CREDIT: LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL: WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A LOVE IN….PORT CREDIT
    Date: May 9, 2018 at 10:50:29 AM EDT
    To: Alan Skeoch <alan.skeoch@rogers.com>


    LET THE GOOD  TIMES ROLL

    alan skeoch
    May 2018
    (speech May 9, Clarke Hall, extolling virtues of Port Credit)


    What he have here today is a LOVE IN.  At least I hope that is what’d will happen.  There is going to be plenty of time for problems…and there
    are lots of problems facing Port Credit in future months and years.   Our population will swell … some low estimates say 10,000…and one high
    estimate is 58,000 new residents will arrive along the whole Mississauga lakefront.     People are coming.  This is not Fort apache…not the Alamo…not L’Anse aux Meadows.  We are not circling the wagons.
    We are saying welcome.  We want newcomers to love our community as  we do.


    So, Today we are extolling the virtues of Port Credit.  Doing so in the hope…no, in the belief, that our new residents will share and protect our community.

    What is worth protecting…what do do we love about our home … our village by the Lake.

    “How much do I love thee,
    Let me count the ways”
        (borrowed  from poet Robert Browning)


    1) First and foremost is our river…the Credit river…the curving spine that winds through our city and terminates here in Port Credit.
    A few years ago I  wrote a book extolling the virtues  of the Credit River.  WHERE THE RIVER SPEAKS   But let me be brief
    -love watching the fisher people on its banks
    -love watching the rowers and paddlers…young people honing olympic  skills
    -love seeing the power boats in harbour
    -love the fishing derbies
    -love the fact that not far out in the Lake…200 feet down…there are schools of salmon as there have always been
    -love seeing the great snapping turtles emerging to lay their eggs from our railway bridge to the QEW bridge
    -love the wildlife…beaver, muskrats,  deer, foxes, coyotes, mink, — just above above the railway bridge…a highway of  wetland for living things
    -love seeing those sleek Go Trains rocketing over our upside down railway bridge
    -love the fact we have a large public park along the banks of the river
    -love that our library is in that park
    -love that we have huge public celebrations annually on the banks of the river
    -even love the fact that our last vestige of commercial fishing days lies hidden behind a derelict house on the west bank
    -love the fact our public ice arena is  close by the river

    -love the times when an early freeze up makes our river a mile long skating rink.


    2) Love Our Waterfront on Lake Ontario…much of which is publicly accessible
    -love the sunrise vista on a summer day
    -love the angry waves on a winter day with slabs of ice smashing the shoreline
    -love seeing the flights of water birds zipping along in flocks and alone…
    -love the occasional discovery of fossils in our tiny shingle beaches…speaks to a time deep in the past when we were at the bottom of a vast inland sea
    -love the wind surfers, the stand up paddlers, the sailors,  the sleek cigarette boats; the porcupine looking fishing trawlers
    -love to reminisce about those days long gone when different boats  were on the water…
        -Love to think about Lorne Joyce aboard his father’s fishing boat heading for those islands in the middle of Lake Ontario…and returned  ice encrusted with a load of whitefish.
        -Love the bootleggers who  hid their crates of booze in gunny sacks near the old  lighthouse in Prohibition days
        -Love to imagine that broken down schooner, the Lillian, with its crew levering great slabs of shale as building foundations for Toronto
    -love the wreck of the Ridgetown resting immobile where river and  lake meet.


    3)  Love our First Nation connection…Barely visible though it be
    -Love to imagine the banks of our river, at the river mouth where for hundreds of years indigenous people gathered…set up tents…gossiped…procreated
    -Love to be  reminded that  Port Credit was native land longer than it has been our land.
          -some time ago I wrote a book titled YOUR HOME ON NATIVE LAND that extolled those First Nation years…tragic and betrayed years in many ways
          -Love  their values especially the concept of ‘sharing”…Canada’s native people had deep trouble understanding the difference between owning and sharing
          -Fences in those early years of European settlement were hard for them to understand…as was greed.  


    (PAUSE: …Consider these two words:

                    GREED?  Everyone say “My, my,  my, my, mine, me, me, me”…that should open up our minds a bit.)
                    SHARE?  Now everyone say “We, we, we, we, our, our, our, our, share, share, share.”)


    4) Love Our Village…the commercial community…the shops, restaurants…even the place where men smoke big cigars  in easy chairs.


    -I asked three young 15 year old boys what they loved best about Port Credit … they said three things immediately
       – “The winding trails…room for bicycles…and the stores’…they didn’t mention the girls but next day  I saw them

         socializing with three females….love Port Credit as a meeting place.


    John, Jackson, Sean , three Grade Ten boys living in Port Credit…interviewed

       -Love the fact that 3 fifteen year old boys loved the village…the streetscape.
      -Love the people mixing together on our sidewalks…all ages…all origins…a vertical community

        -Love to eat and drink in Port Credit…from a dollar cup of coffee to a $400 dinner for eight…and  everything in between.

      -Love The Farmers Market
      -Love the churches of all denominations…distinctive architecture that breaks the straight line severity of the apartment buildings.
      -Love the designated  Heritage village on the west bank
      -Love the night life when neon replaces the sun and  people relax on street benches or inside our bars.

        -Love the music of those summer nights


        The are the men and the horse that paved Lakeshore Road.  No more muddy streets. 


    5) -Love our public parks
      -In many ways  we are a community still surrounded by fields on all sides and in our centre
      -the Adamson estate on the east
      -the rhododendron park on the west
      -Love Confederation park in the centre

        -Love our huge lakefront park on the west bank

       -Love our long cement spit where people stroll on the east bank

      

    6) Love our Festivals
    -Love Busker Days…salespeople  of a different sort.
    -Love Paint the Town Red parade where thousands gather dressed  in Canadian  flags
    -Love the Waterfront festival where fake Blues  Brothers entertain in the midst of blues, jazz, folk, rock bands of all hues
    -Love the Fishing Derby even though I never fish.

    7) Love our connection to Jane Jacobs…a livable village with a ferment of human activity…on foot…ON FOOT!
    -Love our Wide sidewalks with lots of room for diversity as Jane would  admire…perhaps even where restaurants seem  to usurp the public space.
    -Love People watching…Humanity  of nosiness…certainly so in Port Credit at all times of day
    -Love the architecture that stresses Windows on the Street… facilitates people watching…


       WELCOME TO ALL:


    Young men outside the Port Credit Post Office around  1925.   

    “What are these men and boys staring at?”
    “The radial street car has just arrived  from Toronto.”
    “So?”
    “So there are young women on the street car.”
    “So””
    “It is  a  long step from the street car to the road.:
    “So?”
    “So when they stop down they show a bit of their legs and stockings.”
    “So?”
    “So, mixing of the sexes has long been a part of our village

    -Love the fact that Port Credit has been a welcoming village for a long time.

     And if you are a newcomer to Port Credit, we say welcome…like the Mississauga First Nation people…we  want to share
    our community with you…and we hope and pray the concept of sharing has equal place with the concept of owning.

    alan skeoch
    May 2018

    Detail:  An excellent research paper was done by Frarm Sloker … developers …back in 2006 …draws a  profile of
    our population a decade ago when Port Credit was converting from a formerly small industrial village into’a high
    end residential community.


  • HORSES HAVE TROUBLES WITH FLIES…BUT HAVE NO HANDS TO WIPE THEM AWAY

    BEING A HORSE … AND HATING FLIES BECAUSE A HORSE HAS NO HANDS TO WIPE THEM AWAY



  • FARMING TUJRNED UPSIDE DONW OR NEARLY SO

    FARMING TURNED UPSIDE DOWN OR NEARLY SO

    Sorry to say this but a number of Ontario farms have fallen into this kind neglect as speculators buy

    up the land in expectation of future growth and huge profits.  No one lives  on the farm anymore.

    And there is  another factor at work.  Farms get rented out to people who really do not give
    a damn about farming.  they can’t even if they wanted to. for great swaths of Ontario farm land
    is now owned or managed by corporate agriculturalists who are interested only in cash cropping.
    So the barns fall down and, in this case, a Ford half ton truck gets posted up on its side so
    some mechanically minded  person can  get at its entrails.

    alan skeoch
    May 2018

  • SO, WHO BELIEVES IN GHOSTS? (FARM ABANDONED ON COLLINGWOOD ROAD)

    “SO, WHO BELIEVES IN GHOSTS?”


    alan skeoch
    May 2018

    The house and barn were abandoned  a long time ago.  People just walked away leaving everything behind…furniture, farm equipment, last mail delivery.  
    I bet some of you noticed the place on the road to Collingwood…west side between Duntroon and Collingwood.   Nearly all gone now.  Buildings sat there forlorn for
    two decades  or longer. Then a couple of years  ago The house was
    demolished but the barn still stands with the ghostly wreck of the giant threshing machine still standing on the threshing floor visible to passersby on the Collingwood  road
    since
    many of the barn siding has been blown off by the winds of time.

    Robert Root and I visited the site…with permission…sort of permission that is to say.

    “Hey, Rooter, let’s ask the farm across the sideroad if we can go in to take some pictures.”
    “Are they the owners?”
    “Don’t rightly know.”

    “Could Rooter and I take some pics of that’d abandoned farm?”
    “We are not the owners.”
    “We won’t touch a thing.”
    “Suppose that is your business…not mine…go ahead.”
    “Why has the place been abandoned…looks like it was once grand…”
    “Dispute over the will…No one quite sure who owns  what so no one can touch nothin’…or so we’ve been told.”
    “Us?  Promise not to touch a thing.  Rooter is a Baptist…honest as the driven snow.”
    “Not my business.”

    So  Rooter and I walked through the tall grass to the house and then out to the barn.  No sign of life but lots
    of evidence of a life that was once lived here.  Books, letters, newspaper collection…phone book.   

    “Hey Rooter, look here.  There’s even a section of the house for the hired man…at the back…separate.”
    “Could be a hired  woman,  Alan.”
    “Reckon?”
    “Barn is full of things…Thresher, fanning mill, single horse plough, root pulper….”
    “And the water pump still works…want a sip…a little brown.”

    And that was an hour that both Rooter and I will never forget.  Sad. Tragic.  Like a love affair gone bad.

    “Did you see any  goats, Alan?”
    “Nope. did you?”
    “Nope…supposed to be ghost here, you know.”

    WE MISSED THE GHOST…HE WAS OUT BACK WITH THE HARNESS…GETTING READY TO HARNESS  UP HORSES…THE GHOST WAS THERE. (scroll down)

    alan skeoch

    May 2018
















  • “MY OWNER COES NOT BELIEVE IN CARS OR TRUCKS.” (DAY I MET A TALKING HORSE)

    “MY OWNER DOES NOT BELIEVE IN CARS OR TRUCKS?”


    ALAN SKEOCH
    May 2018
    (picture taken years ago at a winter farm auction)

    “Hey Bud?”
    “You mean me?”
    “Yes, you with the big coat…scarf and boots and brush cut.”
    “I didn’t know horses  could talk.”
    “We don’t like people to know we can talk.”
    “So?”
    “So, could you slip over to the Women’s Institute food booth and get me a hot chocolate?”
    “I thought horses ate oats and drank water.”
    “On a  day like this  I need a hot chocolate.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Listen Bud, the water is frozen and the oats are as hard as rocks…I want hot chocolate?”
    “Show me the money!”

  • IRISH COUNTRY ROAD …IN 2014

    IRISH COUNTRY ROAD


    When Gabriela, the kids and Marjorie and I toured Southern Ireland a year or so ago, the roads  were empty as the tourist season had not begun.
    This quaint and starkly beautiful road get jammed  in the summer but for us it was a lonely adventure.  I think it is located down in the Southwest
    corner of Ireland…perhaps the Dingle.  No matter, places like this are easy to find.   Just imagine subsisting on potatoes on those tiny fields and then
    suddenly discovering the plants had shrivelled up and died.   That happened in the 1840’s.   Remnants of bad times are easy to find.  But the
    local pubs wash away the grief…or maybe just hide it deeper.

    When I worked  a few miles from here in  1960 sites such as tis were not uncommon around Bunmahon, County Waterford.  No doubt long  gone now for Ireland
    underwent a wave of investment that made a lot of changes.  But not so many that the flavours of the past were all consumed…for this picture was tanned in 2014 I think.

    See if you can find  one lone cow.

    alan skeoch
    May 2018