Happy Canada Day everyone! Tonight’s fireworks will just add only a tiny amount to the massive amount of pollution (cough cough) in the air.
Canada Day weekend was usually the first day of summer for me (because no more school, no more books and no more teachers dirty looks!)
When I was a kid, I would usually have a week or two to decompress before my parents would find my siblings and I things to do (presumably to keep them from going insane.) A camp here or there, summer sports like soccer or sign me up for intensive piano or language (French) lessons.
What I really enjoyed was spending the summer Fridays at the library. Mom would drag us around shopping and that was enough for her. When we were old enough she would throw us from the car to the local library (a red brick Carnegie library gifted by Carnegie’s foundation) to grab some books and let us hike the mile or so (1.6km in Canadian) back home while she put the groceries and her wits away.
Being a voracious reader, I ended up borrowing a lot of books. Lots of space nerdy stuff like science books and SF novels. I also ended up bringing back a lot of histories to read. If it had some strange picture on the cover I was sold which is how I ended up reading Space Vampires aka the basis for the terrible movie Life Force at the age of 12.
Books!
Today is also the anniversary of the day I moved to Manhattan 78 years ago. Yes. I gave up my lease on June 30th, crashed with a friend for a couple of weeks, and had my own pad and platonic roommate within 2 weeks. I am so glad I took full advantage of all of this when I was able to.
Happy Canada Day to all!
Two weeks to find a place?
Unheard of now.
It was like a fever dream. The Village Voice had real estate listings, mostly no-fee, and there was no competition for apartments, or at least not like nowadays. And most of them were rent-stabilized. We own our place now but I’ve never lived in a Manhattan apartment that was market rent; they’ve all been rent-stabilized.
A lot of people look at the past through rose-colored glasses, I know that, but I have empirical proof that the city was a lot more accommodating to ambitious, fun-seeking newcomers at one point.
kid me found all the sex education in pictures books in the literature section…
im guessing thats where all the dads hung out to look smart
(edit by sex ed i mean kama sutra….i worded poorly)
Lol. I didn’t know till later aka puberty that those books were kept under the watchful eye of the senior librarian… A friend of mine’s mom worked there part time told me.
Being a typical imperialist swine, I knew nothing about Canada Day, so I just looked it up.
I think it’s funny that there seems to have been such a conservative backlash in the 80s over changing the name from the old one, Dominion Day.
I’m glad to know we’re not the only ones to get wrapped up in stuff like this.
Usually it was the former Loyalists who got a bird up their butts about the change. The worst was when the flag was changed from the Red Ensign to the Maple Leaf.
Seriously? The Maple Leaf is one the best flags in the world.
The Canadians of British origin were pretty peeved because they thought it was strictly THEIR country while forgetting the French and Natives might have had some different things to say and then there was the non Brit Euros moving in (Netherlands, Italian, Portuguese and earlier waves of Eastern Europeans settling out west) as well as non Euros like my parents who were moving to Canada in large numbers.
The winning argument was the Red Ensign made us look like the UK’s bitch and no one wanted that. We wanted to be our own nation regardless of our origins hence the Maple Leaf.
Happy Canada Day!
I also have fond memories of hours spent in one of the local Carnegie libraries. They were so beautiful, looked like cathedrals outside and in with the curving staircases and stained glass. And given my reverence for books it felt more spiritual than the churches I was dragged to.
It was almost creepy that they kept the kids books downstairs in the poorly lit basement hallway.
I still get a kick out seeing one with the creaky wooden steps leading up to the main entrance.
The one I regularly went to had the children’s section on the first floor. The basement was used for community activities.
I rarely go to the library these days. I get most of my books on my Kindle. But I’ve been meaning to buy some cupcakes and packaged snacks to drop off at my local library. They get so much crap these days and deserve a show of support. Maybe this week.
oh man….its hilarious typing anything + metal on youtube
thats what i found typing bookish metal
its pretty good too
anyways ill shut up now
goodnight deadsplinter thanks for being you
The main library in downtown Chicago when I was a kid had this amazing record collection and listening rooms where you could sit down with headphones and a record player and just jam record after record. I sucked up everything I could, from classical to weird jazz to American songbook and Folkways recordings and rock and roll. Spoken word. Environmental sounds. Ginsberg and Burroughs.
I was a weird kid.
We used to rent 8mm films there as well. Lots of Disney and Three Stooges shorts. My sisters and mom don’t understand why Dad and I enjoyed the Stooges (hint, males are dumb.)
Same. Every so often one of the indy TV stations would show Three Stooges shorts and my father and I would be in stitches and my sisters and mother would leave the room. “What is so funny about poking people in the eyes and sticking your finger up someone’s nose to hurt them?” “It just is,” said pre-adolescent Mattie. Plus, in their day they were some of the most popular and highly paid performers, so ours was not a minority opinion had I been alive in the 1930s and 1940s.
I love libraries!
My current library was originally built as a Works Progress Administration building to be a bathhouse and management building for a municipal pool.
It’s not as pretty as a Carnegie library by any means, but definitely nicer visually than a lot of the St Louis County libraries which were built when brutalism was the thing for municipal building design.
UofT’s Peacock Library
A library I spent some time in. The inside reminds me of a space prison and the brutalistic /futuristic look made me call it (unimaginatively) as The Space Prison.