Despite being a sixth-generation Canadian, my family has always manifested an interest in our heritage - quaffing single malt scotch on Robbie Burns Day may have been an incentive. Lots of fascinating historical lore available on the website, Clan Mackenzie in the Americas. I've always taken the family motto, "I shine, not burn", as a commitment that effort is to be coupled with scrupulously ethical/honourable behaviour.
My father's family mortgaged the farm, literally, to send my father to medical school at the University of Toronto, the first in the family to go beyond an elementary school education. He interned in Oshawa, where his early assignment included teaching chemistry to the nursing students. He failed only one student but ended up providing remedial instruction - and eventually marrying her. To repay his father for his increased debtload, he took up a practice in the village of Orono, a police village which, during my childhood, had a population lesser than that in the cemetery. This year, the village celebrated the 175th anniversary of its creation. The name was suggested by a wanderer who attended the meetings considering creation of the village, who spoke (obviously eloquently) of the resemblance of the landscape to that surrounding his own home town of Orono, Maine. (Don't be concerned that you are blind. The Regional Municipality of Clarington absorbed Orono, Newcastle, Bowmanville, Tyrone, Kirby, Solina, etc. It was a simmering cauldron of old animosities and rivalries - only failing to tumble into bloodshed of a Yugoslavia thanks to the ingrained WASP traditions of restraint and cutting politeness of the majority of its residents.
Although I intend to move back to Orono when I retire, as a teenager I couldn't wait to shed the dust of the village from my heels. First to Toronto for university and employment with the Toronto Public Library, with a jog west as Chief Librarian for the Town of Caledon, before hopping to points east for work with libraries of two ministries of the Government of Quebec.
Quebec City's public library is the only one in Quebec operating under a board, largely because - while others have been created as departments of municipal government, in the capital, the library was administered by a separate body, L'Institut canadien de Quebec. L'Institut was created in 1828 and, until I was hired in 1988, had been staffed uniquely by francophones (and catholics, ca va sans dire). While I was in Quebec, there was a major expansion of the system with construction of a 30K square-foot Central Library as the cornerstone of the Quartier Saint-Roch. The Chief Librarian was in hospital while I was going through the interview process and, he maintained thereafter, that the recruitment of an anglophone of Presbyterian stock prolonged his hospital stay by an additional month.
My third photo is of one of the ten neighbourhood libraries that I supervised, installed - just outside the walls of the Latin Quarter - in a former Anglican Church, St. Matthew's. It maintained a working bell-tower which drew bellringers from Boston every year on the American Memorial Day weekend to ring a peal [see Dorothy Sayers for background]. In ringing a peal, as many as twelve bellringers 'pull' a single bell in succession, eventually after several hours exhausting all the permutations of sequence in the order of their ringing. It was tough enough mastering the vocabulary and the concepts in English. Imagine having to explain this English eccentricity to the French-language media. There were advantages to being the token anglophone in Quebec City. I was 'exotic' and was called upon to serve as tour guide when the City - and therefore the Library - received distinguished visitors [the Chief Librarian's wife was a senior official in the ministere des Affaires intergouvernementales]: Rostropovich, Veronica Tennant and Frank Augustyn, the Governor-General and Brooke Shields!
Finally, this exposure to new technology has introduced me to new fads: lolcats - the viewing of which I sense could become quite addictive! I am quite taken with the argot - and the underlying humour. This one combines three of my favourite things in life (and no, I'm not referring to the blanket).
