Blessed Are the Poor

 

I have a friend with whom I regularly share our nostalgia about N.D.G.—Notre-Dame-de-Grace, an old inner suburb of Montreal. We both grew up there, at about the same time, and went to the same church and school, although we did not know each other then. 

Recently, he sent me a vintage photo of Montreal West, knowing I had lived there for a time as well. 

But I do not have fond memories of Montreal West. The feeling is completely different.

Which makes me wonder why. 

Growing up, I lived in and around Gananoque, a small town in Ontario; N.D.G.; Westmount, another part of greater Montreal; Montreal West; and then to university in Kingston. I have fond memories of Gananoque and N.D.G., and an abiding distaste for Westmount, Montreal West, and Kingston.

Thinking about it, I recognize the commonality. Westmount and Montreal West are posh. Kingston is cut by Princess Street, and this border is deeply significant. We lived on the south side, the posh side. And I was going to Queen’s, perhaps the poshest of Canadian universities. Gananoque was necessarily, as a small town, mixed. N.D.G. was mostly recent immigrants, many families in rented apartments.  In Montreal West, I found my friends down the hill in the duplexes of Ronald Drive, the one non-posh part of the neighbourhood. My truest friend in Kingston grew up north of Princess, and had no contacts with the university.

At one point, as the family business collapsed, we moved from a huge house in Montreal West to a house without running water four miles outside of Gananoque, where we slept two to a bed. Both I and my brother, in more recent years, have reminisced about how happy we were then. “Away from it all.”

I conclude that I do not tend to like rich people, and they are on the wrong side of life. To begin with, rich people tend to be aggressive and competitive. They tend to be emotionally unavailable, always wearing a mask and blinders; not open to new ideas or new experiences. They also tend to be one-dimensional, lacking interests. This makes them seem unintelligent. They are relatively robotic. They are not fully alive. They have sacrificed real life and selfhood to an appearance of life and self.

Poor people are more varied in their characteristics and their interests. They have fewer shared assumptions, and are more open to the assumptions of others. They are often creative, and often kind. 

They smile more. 

My poorer grandmother, a farmer’s wife with eight kids, used to laugh with her whole body; I remember her always smiling. 

I never remember my richer grandmother laughing; she would titter, but it was obviously calculated. She was a good woman, I believe, and kind to a fault, a rebel against her class and its assumptions; but not a happy person.

It can all perhaps be summed up in a short phrase: blessed are the poor.

Some rich people are good people, and some have diverse interests. But those who do suffer for this, because they are then alienated from their milieu. Their milieu is full of  the sort of people the New Testament calls hypocrites.

It is possible that what I say about the Canadian upper class would not apply in other countries; Canada does not have an upper class in the European sense. What I describe in Canada as upper class values might correspond to what Europeans call “bourgeois values.”

But I think of Jesus’s call in the Beatitudes. He plainly spoke of the lower class, the poor, or the poor in spirit, as his people, and not the rich nor the professional class. The rich, more or less by definition, are all in on this world, have committed to it and endorsed its rules. As Jesus says, “they already have their reward.” But, as St. Paul says, the wisdom of this world is folly to God. 

The relatively poor are often the more thoughtful, who consider things more carefully, who have more diverse or more balanced goals. Things like family, friendship, faith, morality, beauty, art.

The rich do not often get this; they see the only issue as money. But I remember the resistance of one factory worker when his progressive employer wanted to end the assembly line to make his work more meaningful: “they pay me for my time. I do not want to sell them my mind. I want my mind to be free.”

Probably the philosophy of most long-distance truckers; or most farmers. Or most shepherds, traditionally. One of the most interesting and erudite people I ever met was a shepherd at the livestock market in Al Ain, Saudi Arabia. Such people have time to think.

By contrast, I was acutely conscious going to grad school, and then working as a professional editor and college prof, that one was always required to accept and endorse some shared ideology; some group idolatry. Much of what we call professional education is really vetting people for conformity.

This being so, it is the poor who are the creative element in our, or any, society. The great breakthroughs and insights and poetic epics will appear in garages, or be proclaimed by shepherds returning from the hills.

Many Ingenious Lovely Things Are Gone

I miss the old Dominion Seed House catalogues. Old seed catalogues generally were a great bit of folk culture. Did you know, it is from them that we get the term “corny jokes”? They were once full of them.

Dominion Seed House did not feature corny jokes, but their product descriptions were always much more interesting that their competitors, like Stokes Seeds. They had their own names for things. Salsify was “vegetable oyster.” Much more informative. Broccoli was “hardy cauliflower.” Cantaloupe was muskmelon. Not as pretty a name, perhaps, but more descriptive. They were selling fantasy, and they understood this: people were reading the catalogue in midwinter, dreaming of their garden next spring.

I miss the old Free Press Weekly out of Winnipeg. A great farm newspaper. Not much in it about farming. I cannot even remember well what was in it; I remember a long fascination with a psychic in Holland. Nothing salacious, nothing phony like Weekly World News, not gossipy, but a taste for the offbeat. Stuff to interest real people, who do not have their heads filled with trivia like politics.

In the same vein, but more recently, I miss those old Loblaw's “President's Choice” fliers put out under Dave Nichol. And the products. Both were full of imagination; presented like little trips around the world.

These were all monuments of Canadian folk culture, and I find no traces online. I pray someone, somewhere, is preserving them.

Food in the Fifties

My memories are mostly of the Sixties rather than the Fifties, but this list still looks mostly right.

We did have curry, or something we called curry. It was an awful thing you did to leftover meat to make it seem edible. You can also get curry in Korea, or Japan. But you cannot find it in India.

We could get pizza in Montreal, but there was no such thing as pizza in my hometown, population 5,000. Pizza was still a rarity in Korea when I first moved there. It is everywhere in the Philippines—but just try to get one without pineapple.

I remember a great uncle used to order a crate of oranges shipped from Florida for Christmas. But I think we always had bananas. Bananas are not a seasonal crop. Banana trees produce year-round.

Cubed sugar was posh, and you dropped it in your cup using special little tongs. Ideally silver plated.

I still remember the first time I saw “chicken fingers” on a menu. I laughed. What could that be? But actually, chicken fingers have always been popular in the Philippines. Real. Chicken. Fingers. With the nails on.

I remember yoghurt being discussed on some fifties TV show. A teenaged girl was trying it to be sophisticated, to impress her friends, and get to hang out with the college crowd. It was supposed to look like an absurd affectation. Of course, she hated it.

We certainly did have kebab, and called it that. “Shish-kebab.”

There is still no such thing as a real pineapple in Canada. They do not travel well. To discover what they are supposed to taste like, you have to go to the tropics. The canned stuff probably tastes more like the real thing than the whole ones that make it to Montreal—soft and sweet!

I certainly do remember laughing at the idea that anyone would actually pay money for something, like water, that you could get free by turning on the tap. Surely nobody could be that stupid. I resisted for years. But when you move to Asia….

I also remember how we used to laugh at how crazy the Japanese were to pay a few dollars for a cup of coffee. I mean, coffee was coffee, right?

I remember buying a cookbook of Southeast Asian food, which advised that there was really no chance Thai food could ever be popular back in North America. Too much fish sauce.

I also remember thinking Loblaws was pretty foolish to start marketing a special line of “organic” produce. Really, do people have money to throw away? Are they really going to fall for that “organic=healthy” stuff? As if “organic” really meant something?

Yup. People have money to throw away.