February 2024 – Everydave Life

February 29, 2024

My Two Cents On Coins And Awards

It was a fun little exercise and mental jog the last couple of weeks, so why not do it again this week? Write about something, John at The Sound of One Hand Typing‘s suggested in his weekly “writing prompts”. This week he’s asked about awards we’ve won.

The first awards I won, and the ones which got me big trophies at times, were from an activity many would find bizarre – coin displays.

So, that requires a little back story. When I was little, my family didn’t do a whole lot together outside of summer vacations and occasional trips to a park with a swimming pool nearby in the warm months. But there was an exception – coins.

My dad was a big coin collector. I don’t know how he stumbled onto that hobby, but he was quite avid and knowledgeable when I was young. I think he liked the idea of perhaps finding a very valuable coin in change; he liked the hunt for a rare one to complete a collection (say every year of Canadian dime, for an example) , figured they were a good investment and probably just liked looking at some of them. Somewhere down the line, when I was likely only five or so, he gave me a coin album or two, and some coins and got me collecting them too. For awhile Canadian nickels were my big thing – cheaper and easier to find than say, silver dollars. He got me somewhat into it, and tried to do the same with my older brother who was more half-hearted about it. Eventually my Mom joined in, just to be part of the family “thing” I guess; she got very interested in the esoteric subject of “primitve money”. Many indigenous peoples around the world have used things like sea shells or rings as money and she was fascinated by such “money” and would try to find and collect some of that.

Back in the 1970s, it was a pretty big hobby, as I found out. My dad belonged to a local coin club and would go to monthly meetings, where various dealers would have binders full of pages of sleeved coins of every denomination, year, country, quality, for sale, and usually there was a short talk on some coin-related topic and refreshments. Before long the whole family usally tagged along with him and I was on my way to having a whole collection of the nickels and various other odds and ends.

Serious collectors were very serious, and with good reason I suppose. Rarity makes for a good demand vs supply situation and some coins that weren’t minted in big quantities were remarkably valuable. A 1925 Canadian penny for instance – a one cent coin – could be worth over $100. Some 1929 ones, I just looked up, are worth about 20 cents…but ones with a different “9” could be worth $100. Some coins had pressing errors and a number would be out of place or a part of the king’s crown would be missing and obsessive collectors would pay through the nose for such things. My dad was always on the lookout for such things, and taught me to as well. I don’t know if I always had a good eye for detail or if that is where it started, but noticing small differences between seemingly similar things can be useful in real life and has carries over in a number of ways. It makes it easier to know if a common garden Chevy pickup is my friend’s or a strangers; I notice things like the license plate holder or scratches on the side. It also applies to a hobby I enjoy far more than coins now, birding. When there could be 30 different types of warblers, little colorful bug-eaters smaller than sparrows, high up in the trees of a spring woodlot, noticing little things like a stripe across the wing or the color of the outer tail feathers makes it a lot easier to know what I’m seeing!

Anyway, to the awards. The local clubs would usually have big annual shows they’d try to get locall media to cover and encourage newcomers to visit. And there were several big provincial ones, sometimes in cities a good few hours from our home. My dad loved going to those, so we’d be along with him. Some were real treats because they’d be in a city 200, 300 miles away and we’d get to eat in restaurants and stay at a hotel overnight.

The shows would have displays for the public as well as the dealers selling coins. People could display their collection, or part of it. Most used big wooden cases with glass fronts, to display, say the set of Centennial year coins or the old Canadian pennies (which in the 1800s were “large cents” because they were physically about the size of a 50-cent piece). My dad made a few of those cases, and gave me and my brother one, and encouraged us to take part. I did, quite avidly, often with my Mom’s help. While many would just stick the coins in the case and maybe scrawl out a title , we were creative…made them something to look at. My dad liked to have a velvet background to set the things off, and put little writeups and pictures to go along with the coins themselves. I got into that, I loved the creative challenge of making them visually appealing. I’d cut out arcs in cardboard, have my mom cover them in fabric, put coins on them and display them in rainbow-shaped curves, with symmetrical little neatly typed, concise writeups – what is on the coins, how many were made, and so on. Maybe it was the first inkling of how I’d decades later write a daily music blog with details about what’s on the record, where it was made and so on!

It might be hard to believe, but many of the shows would have several dozen people taking part and entering displays, and they’d judge them and give out awards to the best – sometimes large trophies! Every one of us won a good number over the four or five years we went to such things regularly.

I think coin collecting, like many other hobbies, is becoming a thing of the past. It doesn’t have the appeal of Play Station games to today’s youth, that’s for sure. And I myself still look at the coins in my change, and try to keep one of each quarter when a new design comes out, but that’s about as far as my interest will rise these days. The trophies are long gone, as are any photos of me, or my family members showing off the displays. My dad is gone too now; the last few years I was up north with him I’d go to the monthly coin meeting in town with him most of the time. By then I found the meetings tedious, and the crowd to be mainly geriatric, but I liked spending the time with dad doing something he liked. We’d go get a donut or burger after and it wasn’t a bad afternoon.

It was a long time ago. Several of the larger shows we went to got me to “gopher” – go get snacks or drinks for the dealers who didn’t want to leave their tables. Most would tip quite nicely. My first sort of “job” , back when I was about six, or seven years old! How it taught me to pay attention to design and aesthetics. But mainly, how one hobby could bring a family together . Memories of that are the real awards, it turns out.

February 22, 2024

In Every Castle A Heartache

Well once again, John at The Sound of One Hand Typing‘s come up with an interesting topic to write hastily about – a castle you’ve visited in real life.

I don’t really envy Europe on many things, but one thing I do concede is that they do have some really cool old castles. The type of storybook, Prince Charming ones like Neuschwanstein in Germany above (I don’t envy German kids having to learn how to spell things like that however!). The so-called castles over here I find, are rather lacklustre and underwhelming by comparison.

For instance, I live not far from one that locals call “the castle” – in fact, the whole neighborhood is referred to as “Castle Heights”. It was famously renovated not long ago by TV’s favorite get-things-done couple, Joanna and Chip Gaines. It is a fairly impressive stone building complete with a small turret that took over 20 years to complete, though that had more to do with finance troubles for owners than the complexity of it. While it is a noteworthy and impressive structure indeed, it hardly seems like what some little girl would have envisioned say, when hearing fairy tales of kings and queens and long-haired princesses. It doesn’t help that rather on a splendid estate it sits on a rather small lot overlooking a row of used car dealers and appliance repair shops. You can take tours of it, but I’ve yet to do it. But I have been inside one “castle”.

The town I grew up in had a “castle” we could see merely by standing on our driveway and looking to the west. It was built in the 1850s by a low-level nobleman who’d come to Canada. It was the largest individual residence in the country for years, and had it not been for his reputed gambling addiction, it might still be some blue-bloods private estate. However, in the 1870s he was in debt and sold it to the Methodist Church and in time, it was made into a school. It is an impressive looking building, long and stately looking, built of yellowish bricks and featuring a grand-looking entrance way up stairs from the grounds and topped off with little mini turrets. Impressive but no Disney World castle. It’s been used for shooting a few movies and TV shows, and the grand interior through the front door, elegant sweeping wooden stairs leading up to a huge window, is a popular setting for wedding photos. However, its main function is still being used as a private school for high school girls. Which is where I came in… but the story isn’t as fun or risque as that might suggest!

My mom was a teacher, but gave that up for years to raise my brother and I. By the time he’d moved thousands of miles away and I was well into my teens, and she and my Dad had divorced, she decided to go back to it. Initially she was a substitute teacher for the local school board, but after a year or two of not knowing if she’d be working the next day (and often finding out by being woken up around 6 AM and told to report to a school that could be 30 miles away to teach kids she’d never met before) she decided to try for something more stable. She got hired on at the private school. Though she did teach a class at times, her main job was to be a “house mother.” The school is a boarding one, with many kids living there. Many were from wealthy families overseas. So they needed adult women to stay there and stay in built-in mini-apartments overnight to make sure the kids were all accounted for, take care of any medical emergencies that might arise and so on. My mom did that for a few years, and boy, did she have tales to tell! Turns out teenaged daughters of millionaires from Europe and Asia often behaved like … yep, teenaged girls. Many a time my Mom would have to try and track down the source of a whiff of ganja floating down the hallway, and call police when suddenly one or two girls hadn’t shown up by curfew or an hour or two later. Conveniently, there was an inexpensive motel a block away. Police seldom had to look further than it to recover the errant lasses, and disappoint many young lads no doubt in dragging them out of said motel rooms.

It wasn’t a place males were supposed to be inside of, except for one or two male teachers and maintenance guys I guess, but occasionally I went in, helping Mom move some things to her “apartment” or taking something she’d forgotten at home to her. I was probably college-aged at that time, and she told me several of her students wanted to meet me in a bad way. She successfully endeavored to make sure that never happened. Err, thanks Mom?

Anyway, the thing about the building was that once you got off that grandiose staircase, it was a pretty run-of-the-mill old, slightly rundown building. Hopefully they’ve redone it and modernized it by now, but it was rather grubby looking, the rooms were small and a little dark. It was poorly insulated, thus rather cold in winter no matter how hard the noisy radiators tried. Windows had no screens so bugs including bees regularly got in and they weren’t surprised to see bats winging their way down the hallways at night. The electrical grid was not designed for late-20^th Century appliances I think, and there seemed to be power outages more than one would expect in a fancy school.

It reminded me of Prince Harry. When I read his book last year, one thing that stood out was how he described many of the old castles the Royal Family resided in – old, dirty, stuffy, small-roomed, narrow-passaged, drafty and lacking many a modern amenity people in new mobile homes would take for granted.

I guess it goes to show. A man’s home might be his castle, but his castle might not be all that it seems. Everyone has their own problems and no matter how the “castle” looks outside, no matter how big or stately, it’s probably not all fun, wine and roses inside.

February 15, 2024

Life In Six Sentences?

Well last week’s was fun, so why not try it again? John at The Sound Of One Hand Typing sometimes puts up Writing Prompts and invites us to use one of them and post something based on the suggestion. This week I’m doing his idea about “write a whole post in just six sentences”. So here we are:

Do unto others as you’d like them to do unto you. Something is always better than nothing. Follow your passions and you’ll be surprised what they’ll lead to. Perception is reality. Realize other people think their opinions are right just as much as you think yours are. Follow those rules and you’ll have a good, rewarding life to look back on and probably have others looking back at it fondly too.

February 8, 2024

Does It Pay To Think About ‘Stuff’?

John at The Sound Of One Hand Typing is an interesting blogger who posts more or less daily about a variety of things. Sometimes he puts up “Writing prompts”, inviting other writers to put down their thoughts on a particular topic. This week, one was “stuff”. A word that means many things to many people! Telling someone to “stuff it” isn’t very nice, but when you stuff a turkey, it generally makes it even better. Mostly though, “stuff” is everything we collect physically, isn’t it?

It’s been on my mind this month as I just paid the storage unit rent again. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

About five years ago now, my family – my lovely wife and her daughter and I – moved in with her sister and brother in law. They are a bit older than us, had kids who’d left home, leaving them the proverbial “empty nesters”. At the time,we were renting a nice, but small house in the main city. The in-laws had a much bigger house in the suburbs. Moving in with them was, and largely is, a win-win. We help them out with the bills and buy many of the groceries, help with the cooking and the yard; they have that help and people around to watch the place when they go on vacation. We still end up paying somewhat less than the rent and utilities we used to pay. So, basically it’s good all around. Of course, there are occasional sacrifices on both halves but for the most part it’s been good. But, of course there is a catch.

Even though the old house was smallish, we had a lot of “stuff” in it. For instance, the big “stuff” – living room sofa and arm chairs, coffee table, a good stove, frig and of course all the small “stuff” – clothes, shoes, more shoes, pictures on the wall, mementoes of this and that collected over the years, books, electronic gadgets, cookware. That all wasn’t going to fit into our new accommodations of two bedrooms and a bathroom besides the shared kitchen and living room. They had their own sofa, they didn’t need ours. Same goes for the coffee table, stove, pots and pans, lawn mower… you get the idea. So , like every other Texan it seems, we rented out a storage unit to put the excess “stuff” in. There’s a joke I’ve heard that you know you’re NOT in Texas if you can say “I haven’t seen a storage unit facility in two miles!”. In it went. Boxes and boxes as well as the furniture, appliances, Christmas decorations, you name it. It was an arduous job moving stuff in there.

I packed away about half my CDs, many of my books, some photo albums, framed photos, a lot of clothes that were out of season then, my Toronto Blue Jays salt and pepper shakers… they’re there somewhere in the concrete-floored 150 square feet . I thought, quite frankly, I was being a bit more clever than my family. I made a point of putting a big letter code on each box I packed, and having a little journal in which I noted what was in each. Only my cleverness didn’t extend to packing the seemingly most valued things in first…ergo, burying them in the back behind about a ten-foot deep wall of more boxes, sofas, lawn mowers…

We did somehow put the Christmas tree near the door, and most years have rescued it at the appropriate time; this past December however, we were feeling a bit collectively lazy I guess and I just went out and got a new, smaller tree to use. Other than that, much has stayed in place there. My sweetie did give the lawn mower away to an old friend of hers whose machine had bitten the dust and whose husband was out of work. From time to time, I find myself thinking “I know I had that Sting CD, but I can’t find it” and I realize it’s probably in box D11, stacked against the rear wall of the unit. “Let’s check Amazon…” . Likewise, my wife often says “I wish I had” this shirt or that jacket but it’s not in the closet and she figures it must be packed away in storage. She usually adds, ever-so-optimistically, “rats have probably eaten it by now!” . I certainly hope not!

But it does make me think, “why?” . After several years of paying well beyond $100 a month, the price we’ve paid for that rent exceeds the cost, or insurance value, of everything contained within it. I sometimes think about buying a smaller storage shed, putting it out back, and moving the important “stuff” into it. The rest could get donated to Goodwill or other friends whose husbands might be out of work, sold in a yard sale, or thrown out if indeed rats have eaten it. It would pay for itself in less than a year. But we don’t. At least not yet. The largely metal storage unit gets blisteringly hot in summer, so we don’t want to visit it then. Right now, the weather is pleasant so we actually probably could stand to work in it , or work through it perhaps, a few days, but we always seem to have more important things to do. But we keep paying on it, because it’s too important to lose. With me, the clothes I have in it… well, if I haven’t worn them in four or five years, I can probably do without. I could probably order new a copy of every book that I actually want but is in storage for far less than a month’s rent. But my photos, and a few other things, those I want to get back one day. Same with my wife and the kiddo; they both have things too valuable to them to lose. More often than not, they aren’t the priciest things in there. Sometimes the most important “stuff” is not the expensive “stuff.”

Someday soon, maybe we’ll go over there and start digging through that wall of boxes. But it may not be this weekend, or next. I guess it turns out time is even more important than “stuff” when you get right down to it.