If I only knew then...

Hindsight is a funny thing.  They say that its vision is rated twenty-twenty. Scott Kirkhof has better than twenty-twenty vision. Which means that having Scott around is better than having 20-20 vision.  At least that is what he will likely tell you if you ask him about it.

On a somewhat more serious note, having the opportunity to turn and review events of our lives from the vantage point of time that has passed is an opportunity to comprehend circumstances that we were unaware of at the time that those events transpired. This perspective gives us the opportunity to, minutes, days, weeks or even years down the road, look back on our actions and blush at the memory of our foolishness. 

I was recently playing pick-up soccer with a friend of mine who I had not really hung around with since I was sixteen and we worked at summer camp together.  We were joking about how much we used to like working at camp and about all of the great experiences that we had. Just like clockwork, the old nostalgic feelings surfaced.  Fortunately for the people who we were playing soccer with, we just left it a a few comments about the old camp life and moved back to kicking field goals.

On Friday night I had the opportunity to listen to a man speak who was responsible for developing the interdisciplinary and history departments at Trent as we know them today.  This gentleman, Alan Wilson, was in his mid-eighties, and still had a strong public speaking voice.  He was also one of the best public speakers I have ever heard in that his choice of words was incredible in their precision. Without the use of lengthy or complex sentences he painted vivid mental pictures in the minds of each person in the room. He also mentioned Frenchy's, which, to an east coaster is to Value Village, what Sobeys is to Value Mart. I found him incredibly interesting to listen to, but, as his speech edged into the 35-40 minute mark, I realized that people around me were tiring of his reminiscing about people who they had never heard of, who lived in this strange place called Peterbra way back during the birth of Trent in the 1960's.

Gavin, just came on Facebook chat to see how I am doing. I like talking to Gavin and I found out why that is recently.  W. Prevenier and M. Howell, explain that a generation is formed when a group of individuals experience such significant events in a period of their life, that for the rest of their lives, they will continue to be identified by those events.  They will therefore identify with others who experienced it with them.  For this reason, two veterans of the military can chat for hours comparing people and places. Gavin and I were both tree planters on the same crew in northern Ontario for a couple of years. Now, inevitably, when tree planters meet they begin to tell stories of planting several thousand trees a day in frozen ground, through walls of black flies, in hail storms and without food or water. If you ever meet a group of tree planters at a dinner party and you hear the words kife, j-root, ghost-line, sphagnum, cream, or cattle-plant, run. They are not swearing at you, but you do need to leave.  You are about to be regaled with hours upon hours of stories that mean nothing to a non-tree planter, but can bring tears to the eyes of high and low- ballers alike. A generation defined by an experience.

If I ever meet a person wearing a Hope Valley Day Camp hoodie, I will ask them when they worked there (if they do not plead that they got it at Value Village, or Frenchy's), I will compare people and names. This is similar to Dutch-Bingo, played by many people who either immigrated from the Netherlands or are children of immigrants.  Those people were defined by an exodus out of one land and into another where they had to work hard to build communities and lives in a nation with another language and different customs.

Unfortunately for the speaker of Friday night's graduate dinner, many of the people at that dinner were not from "Peterbra" and were not alive when the events in his tales occurred. However, I am sure that his speech did have a role in shaping a new generation of graduate students at Trent and hopefully gave us an appreciation for the foundation that our colleges at Trent are built upon.

So the next time that you get caught amid the reminiscing of a generation lacking reticence, jut smile politely and run. It's not that they are trying to bore you.  The truth is that they are simply feeling a bit nostalgic for the good old days when pop was a nickle, when you could plant j-roots, wear klompen, design a history department from scratch, order fifteen children to line-up "heel-to-toe" or throw pancakes out the window at passers-by and blame it on Scott, who clearly has better vision and therefore, could see far enough to have thrown the thing in the first place.

In hindsight, if I had known that our dorm was going to run out of money  mid-year, I would have retrieved the pancake to freeze for future use. Starvation is much more palatable when you have a pancake to throw at passers-by.

Oh well, I guess that's why they say...