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IN THIS ISSUE

• Verda Cook leaves Vancouver on their travels by train
• Carol Hansen reminds us about the value of Freecycle
• Jack Peaker is happy in retirement
• Bruce Galway offers an answer to "Who was Kilroy?"
• Peter Rollo sends an example of unselfish behaviour
• Barbara Wear´s story is about a narrow escape

Verda Cook leaves Vancouver for Calgary while

EXPLORING CANADA "THE CANADIAN" WAY

No birds sang and the skies were overcast on our last day in Vancouver. We were to leave in the late afternoon.

Prior to travelling, friends told us we must walk down Robson St., Vancouver´s equivalent to New York´s Fifth Avenue. Robson St. was a half-hour walk from the hotel. What a disappointment! I expected to see a street lined with shops of elaborate architecture with attractive window dressing, but the buildings were extremely plain and window dressing was very conservative. I have seen better upscale shops in our local mall, at home in Ontario. What attracts well-known movie stars to shop on this street? I did not have an urge to open the door of any establishment and peer inside, nor did we encounter any famous people.

The Vancouver adventure had ended. Regretfully we said goodbye to the sub-tropical climate. Our next destination was the cold, snowy climate at Edmonton and Calgary in the neighbouring province of Alberta.

We boarded the train at 4:30 p.m. and quickly discovered that the air conditioning was turned on high and we were freezing. Passengers arrived in the lounge wearing jackets and sweaters. After an hour of shivering, I went to our room to put on a heavy ski sweater. John and Catherine also added another layer of clothing. On our way back to the lounge, we met our service assistant and asked if it was possible to have heat on the train. Shortly after we were able to ride in comfort.

In the lounge we engaged two couples from Hamburg, Germany, in conversation. As they left the lounge, a young couple from Lichtenstein entered. We learned a lot of interesting facts about this tiny country with a population of only 25,000.

This was our one-day excursion via train, so we didn´t unpack bags that evening. No need to do this since we would be on board only 24 hours.

When boarding the train in Vancouver, the strap on one piece of our carry-on luggage broke. We asked our service assistant if there was some way of temporarily reattaching the strap. He disappeared but shortly after arrived at our room armed with a box of staples, duct tape, etc. Half an hour later, the handle on the luggage had been securely reattached.

The morning passed quickly and soon it was lunch time. During lunch, the P.A. system announced that the engineer had noticed mountain sheep on the lower slopes of the mountains. The train was slowed so we could see them. In this area we also had spectacular views of the Athabasca River.

There would be no stopovers until later in the afternoon so we decided to play a few games in the activities car, and followed that with coffee in the lounge. While seated in the lounge, which was almost vacant, a dignified woman entered and sat beside me. She told me her husband asked her to go to the lounge for a while so he could have some peace. I asked where they are travelling to. She didn´t know but was sure they were going home to retrieve the cat, which was in a special home. She could not tell me where they had been. I recognized that she was the victim of some form of dementia. After some time, and after I had memorized her repetitive account of the cat, her husband arrived. He apologized but said he needed to have some "time out". We learned that both he and his wife were retired mathematics professors from the United States. They were doing extensive travelling before she would need to be placed in an institution. We counted our blessings.

At Jasper, where we had a one-half hour stopover, we left the train and walked down main street. No rain, hail or snow this time; instead we walked in brilliant sunshine.

The train arrived on schedule in Edmonton at 5:30 p.m. As we left the train, our service assistant presented us with a very official certificate indicating the date and time that we rode on The Canadian.

To be continued.

Carol Hansen believes this subject bears repeating:

FREECYCLE

I´m talking about the Freecycle Network. This is a non-profit movement where people like you or me offer up items they no longer want or need to people who can use the items themselves. This network is huge now and growing every day. Find a group that´s in your area and join (it´s done on-line). Basically it´s about giving things away opposed to throwing things away! This saves tons and tons of items from filling up our landfills. You might not have a use any longer for that old refrigerator in the garage but someone else might. Those clothes that are too good to throw away but you don´t wear any longer, someone else will welcome them. I see all kinds of items offered up on the group. I´ve even seen people offer up items that may need repair and someone that´s handy with fixing things will take them.

You can also request items that you might be looking for as well. If someone has that item and no longer has a use for it, they can e-mail you to let you know they have the item you are looking for. If you see something posted that you would like, you send them an e-mail asking for it. If they offer the item to you, then you both make arrangements for the item to be picked up. Usually, if you offer something on the group, the person to whom you offer the item picks it up. If you are the one requesting something, you pick it up from them.

It´s completely free; in fact, it´s against the rules to charge anything for the items listed. That´s kind of like a garage sale where everything is free and new things are being offered all the time! Yippee!

Here´s the link to the main site. From there you can find a group in your area (second link). Take a look, it doesn´t cost a thing.

http://www.freecycle.org/ (main site)

http://www.freecycle.org/groups/ (find your group)

Jack Peaker contemplates life in retirement:

FEELIN´ GROOVY ...

Members of the Evergreen Seniors Centre are sometimes asked, "Why and when did you decide to get out of the fast lane and start taking things ´nice and easy´?"

For that we may have to go way back to a wintry morning some time ago, with a large house with empty bedrooms and a demanding garden, when the realization hit hard that the children we´d done our best to raise to the point of no return had irrevocably flown the coop.

No more having to rush our porridge and take our coffee with us.

But there´s another reason for us being here today, doing as much - or as little - of what we like best. When the children were small, "The 59th Street Bridge Song", better known as "Feelin´ Groovy", was a monster hit with the immortal opening, "Slow down, you move too fast. You´ve got to make the morning last."

My goodness, how this entered my brain and stayed there. Through the years and years of caring and sharing and cooking and housekeeping, whenever I felt my situation getting the better of me I´d belt out the words at full volume.

Oddly enough, I´d paid little attention to how the song ends and only recently discovered it predicts with amazing accuracy what happens when you do slow down:

"I´ve got no deeds to do, no promises to keep,
I´m dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep,
Let the morning time wash all my troubles from me.
Life, I love you, all is groovy."

Yes, Simon, Garfunkel, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all, it really is.

Bruce Galway remembers Kilroy, and offers this theory of who he was:

KILROY WAS HERE!

In 1946 the American Transit Association, through its radio program, "Speak to America," sponsored a nationwide contest to find the REAL Kilroy, offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article.

Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax, Massachusetts, had evidence of his identity.

Kilroy was a 46-year-old shipyard worker during the war. He worked as a checker at the Four Rivers Shipyard in Quincy. His job was to go around and check on the number of rivets completed. Riveters were on piecework and got paid by the rivet.

Kilroy would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi- waxed lumber chalk, so the rivets wouldn´t be counted twice. When Kilroy went off duty, the riveters would erase the mark. Later on, an off-shift inspector would come through and count the rivets a second time, resulting in double pay for the riveters.

One day Kilroy´s boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset about all the wages being paid to riveters, and asked him to investigate. It was then that he realized what had been going on.

The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn´t lend themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his checkmark on each job he inspected, but added KILROY WAS HERE in king-sized letters next to the check, and eventually added the sketch of the chap with the long nose peering over the fence and that became part of the Kilroy message. Once he did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks.

Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with paint. With war on, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasn´t time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy´s inspection "trademark" was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships the yard produced.

His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they picked it up and spread it all over Europe and the South Pacific. Before the war´s end, "Kilroy" had been here, there, and everywhere on the long haul to Berlin and Tokyo.

To the unfortunate troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that some jerk named Kilroy had "been there first." As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.

Kilroy became the U.S. super-GI who had always "already been" wherever GIs went. It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places imaginable. (It is said to be on top of Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, the underside of the Arch De Triumphe, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon.)

And as the war went on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for the coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first GIs there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo!

In 1945, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill at the Potsdam conference. The first person inside was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide (in Russian), "Who is Kilroy?"

To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters. He won the trolley car, which he gave it to his nine children as a Christmas gift and set it up as a playhouse in the Kilroy front yard in Halifax,Massachusetts.

ED. NOTE: For other versions of this story, check

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here

Peter Rollo forwards this story about

SAYING GRACE IN A RESTAURANT

Last week, I took my children to a restaurant. My six-year-old son asked if he could say grace. As we bowed our heads he said, "God is good, God is great. Thank you for the food, and I would even thank you more if Mom gets us ice cream for dessert. And Liberty and justice for all! Amen!"

Along with the laughter from the other customers nearby, I heard a woman remark, "That´s what´s wrong with this country. Kids today don´t even know how to pray. Asking God for ice cream! Why, I never!"

Hearing this, my son burst into tears and asked me, "Did I do it wrong? Is God mad at me?"

As I held him and assured him that he had done a terrific job, and God was certainly not mad at him, an elderly gentleman approached the table.

He winked at my son and said, "I happen to know that God thought that was a great prayer."

"Really?" my son asked.

"Cross my heart," the man replied.

Then, in a theatrical whisper, he added (indicating the woman whose remark had started this whole thing), "Too bad she never asks God for ice cream. A little ice cream is good for the soul sometimes."

Naturally, I bought my kids ice cream at the end of the meal. My son stared at his for a moment, and then did something I will remember the rest of my li! fe.

He picked up his sundae and, without a word, walked over and placed it in front of the woman. With a big smile he told her, "Here, this is for you. Ice cream is good for the soul sometimes, and my soul is good already."

Barbara Wear thinks this man probably bought his wife roses for Valentine´s day:

THE GOOD HUSBAND

Jack wakes up with a huge hangover after attending his company´s Christmas party. Jack is not normally a drinker, but the drinks didn´t taste like alcohol at all. He didn´t even remember how he got home from the party. As bad as he was feeling, he wondered if he did something wrong.

Jack has to force himself to open his eyes, and the first thing he sees is a couple of aspirins next to a glass of water on the side table. And, next to them, a single red rose! Jack sits up and sees his clothing in front of him, all clean and pressed. He looks around the room and sees that it is in perfect order, spotlessly clean.

He takes the aspirins, cringes when he sees a huge black eye staring back at him in the bathroom mirror. Then he notices a note hanging on the corner of the mirror written in red with little hearts on it and a kiss mark from his wife in lipstick: "Honey, breakfast is on the stove. I left early to get groceries to make you your favorite dinner tonight. I love you, darling! Love, Jillian."

He stumbles to the kitchen and sure enough, there is hot breakfast, steaming hot coffee, and the morning newspaper. His son is also at the table, eating.

Jack asks, "Son ... what happened last night?"

"Well, you came home after 3 am., drunk and out of your mind. You fell over the coffee table and broke it, and then you puked in the hallway, and got that black eye when you ran into the door."

Confused, he asked his son, "So, why is everything in such perfect order and so clean? I have a rose, and breakfast is on the table waiting for me?"

His son replies, "Oh THAT! ... Mom dragged you to the bedroom, and when she tried to take your pants off, you screamed, ´Leave me alone, I´m married!´"

Broken Coffee Table $239.99Hot Breakfast $4.20Two Aspirins $.38Saying the right thing at the right time ... PRICELESS

RECOMMENDED SITE

To put things into perspective, look at this site:

http://www.miniature-earth.com/me_english.htm

"Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world." - Dave Barry