Tag Archives: St. Lawrence Seaway

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Lock Seven

When Elaine Jakes was in her thirties—those days were as vividly vibrant with the colors of the late 1960s/early 1970s as Elaine was vibrantly vivacious—she twice took a summer vacation with Sheila and me to Canada. Sheila, if peradventure you’ve read the Curious Autobiography, you’ll recall was my mother’s closest friend in those days. They lived together and jointly raised me when I was but a lad, as difficult as such a proposition may then have been when a nontraditional family structure was viewed with great suspicion.  “There’s no man in the house,” some could be heard muttering.  “How will that boy turn out to be a man?”  I will, however, set their complaints about the lack of a male role model aside, as there were, in any case, a number of men who served as positive role models, prominent among whom was my grandfather, Harry Reed Jakes.

Permit me return to the aforementioned twofold Canadian excursions. As a school teacher, Elaine did not have a great deal of money, especially in those days when teachers were not just underpaid[1] but grossly underpaid.  Still, she could make her rent most months, if not always on time,[2] and even afford a small summer vacation—a few days in Canada—in an era when small summer vacations were still affordable.

And the primary destination for her in those days was not a grandiose hotel in Montreal but the far humbler “Lock 7 Motel” in the perhaps surprising destination of Thorold, Ontario. That now refurbished and finely updated structure is currently known as the Inn at Lock Seven (http://innatlock7.com/) from the back balconies of which one could see the large ships that had travelled down or would shortly travel down the St. Lawrence Seaway make their way between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie through the series of locks that connected those lakes.  It was then, and is now, not so much a thing of beauty to behold the ships as it was a thing of majesty, for cargo ships are, in their own way, majestic.  And one could wave to those ships’ sailors who, in those days at least, would most often wave back when they saw you.

Yet there was something more than mere majesty. There was a lesson in beholding those great ships stuck in those narrow locks. It was the lesson of patience and grace under fire.  More often than not we find ourselves stuck between things. We’re hoping for something, looking forward to it, as we wait for our figurative lock to fill up, as if whatever it is that we are seeking could alone bring us happiness.  Now sometimes, of course, there is a modicum of happiness attached to that new thing, that new phase of life, as it must have been happier for the sailors to be on the open sea (or at least open lake) than carefully maneuvering the slender confines of the lock system.  But even in the narrow maneuvering, there may well have been for them some fulfillment qua sailing, for it was chiefly in the locks, no doubt, that they had the chance to prove what good sailors they actually were.  They waited patiently between locks and gracefully discharged their duties of steering the ships carefully between those narrow ducts.  And to some extent, I imagine, they were the happier for it, for they were doing what they were called in this life to do.  And even here, I fancy, you could say I had male role models, for all the sailors I saw were men, if role models only at the great distance between the motel balcony and the ship’s prow.

And so it may well be for us: when we are in between things, when we are constricted and confined in ways that seem to take away some of our freedoms, maybe that is when we have the opportunity to prove ourselves as human beings. Maybe we were created for such days as those.  And, if we are good at navigating this human experience known as life, maybe, in the midst of our busy activity, we will take a moment to give a wave and a smile at the little kid who is watching us from life’s balcony.  That, at any rate, is what the sailors did for me as I watched in amazement the majesty of those ships and indeed the sailors’ own navigational majesty, all those many years ago in Thorold, Ontario, from the balcony of the Lock Seven Motel. 

[1] While I despise white-collar unions, I nonetheless deeply sympathize with the teachers in Oklahoma who are protesting unfair wages.  https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/06/us/oklahoma-teachers-walkout/index.html

[2] For an amusing story of Elaine being late with her rent, see the Curious Autobiography, pages 124-129.

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Italian Toothpaste

Italian toothpasteIt is not only Italian toothpaste that teaches you that variety is the spice of life. A brief story will illustrate this point. I met my father only when I was in my mid-forties. I had managed to live out the majority of my life as the son of Elaine Jakes, a person so vivacious, so sui generis, so unique that there is a book written about her even though she was a mere schoolteacher. I say “mere” because most schoolteachers—or at least schoolteachers from Neshaminy District’s Cherry Street (later Oliver Heckman) School—don’t have books written about them. And it was this schoolteacher, whose piebald life tapestry, whose robust embrace of diverse cultures, whose predilection for atypical choices, first taught me that variety is the spice of life.

Then I met my father, and I soon learned that interestingly enough he had a boat named The Spice of Life. By the time he died—he and Elaine, who had not seen each other since they were 25 years old, died but two days apart in May of 2011—The Spice (for that is the foreshortened name by which the eldest of my younger brothers, Scott, calls the boat) was my father’s most precious earthly possession. Now I say possession quite pointedly, for I exclude his beautiful family, his charming wife, Nan, and the four brothers whom I never really knew (though I’ve now met a few times) along with his extended family.

But to return to variety being the spice of life. The boat by that name is a beautiful vessel, nearly all mahogany, if I am not mistaken, though of course I could be, as I saw it but once. That vision of it came at the Clayton boat show in Clayton, New York, on the St. Lawrence Seaway. thousand islandsIt was a privilege for me to tag along with my father and brother Scott, to see what my brother’s life must have been like in a boating family. A far cry from the spice of life that my mother had shown by her randomness, but a beautiful alternative—a fine family, and a wonderful weekend for me and, I think, for my brother, father and Nan, as well.

Sadly, I haven’t a picture of my father’s boat, but I have found a picture of another similar boat that at least captures the spirit of the kind of vessel about which I am speaking. Sadly, this one features a beautiful boat marred by bad Latin, as the boat’s name should read mahagony boatSenex Turpis, “Bitter Old Man” (but more on that and erroneous tattoos another time). This is not the type of plastic hulled boat that a real boatman might disdainfully call “Tupperware.” Rather, it is a carefully crafted vessel, a boat meant to last for years, to run about on the seaway belonging to Saint Lawrence, allowing its pilot to visit Canada on occasion or to go to the inlet where my father’s ashes and those of his brother, Hollis, are scattered.

But I return to Italian toothpaste, which is where we started. If one should have boring parents, which I clearly did not—The Curious Autobiography records 9781480814738_COVER.inddhow Elaine bought a monkey, which she bedizened with a dress and called my sister, even though it turned out to be a boy and thus actually my brother—one can learn from something as interesting as Italian toothpaste that variety really is the spice of life. The picture I think tells the story pretty well, though Marvis makes many more flavorsscotch toothpaste beyond these, including Jasmine. And I’ve learned, too, of Scotch Whiskey flavored toothpaste, but I’ve never seen nor tried it (nor been tempted to try it).

In the end, I suppose one’s mother, one’s father and indeed one’s toothpaste teach the same lesson: variety is the spice of life. And if one wants some of that spice, one should then seek actively after such variety in this life, seek to embrace those who are diverse. Seek not sameness but difference. Were we to do that, I think we would be living like the wise carpenter from Galilee, who taught that the “different” (a Samaritan) could do far better than the “religious” in a story about a man who was mugged, beaten and left for dead; or a woman at a well, who had never found a source quite like that wandering and solitary Rabbi. It would not be the issue of a certain color of skin particularly mattering, but a person’s soul and view of the world that mattered. But I’m talking about Italian toothpaste, I’m talking about the spice of life, whether a boat, or monkey or a way to clean your teeth. (By the way, I’m suspicious of that six proof toothpaste; I suggest you stay away from the whiskey, especially before your morning commute.)

riggs,scott,hr
H.R. Jakes (center) with his brother (Scott) and their dad.