The harvest season in northern Ontario brings another crop of warm memories from my long-ago kindergarten teacher, Lydia Scott. Times have not always been kind since Lydia last updated her life story, but she and Jack have been able to persevere in the affection and kindness of family and friends.

This is Part 17. Click here to go to the beginning of the saga.

A few years have gone by since I last sat down to put my memories to the printed page, and it’s time to update my story.

This is October 2009, and I am 69 years old, so please forgive me if I don’t lay out things in the proper order or don’t quite have all details, but I do want to let you all know what has happened since I last wrote.

First of all, I want to give my most exciting news. On November 26, 2008, Jack and I became grandparents to a sweet baby girl, Shannon Rachel Scott!

More about this a bit later. Now back to the updates.

The first few years after my last entry here weren’t very eventful.

Jack and I have been doing fairly well health-wise, with occasional aches and pains associated with our age, but nothing very serious. I put up quite a bit of my garden produce, both preserving it or freezing it, but since we don’t eat as much as we used to (although you wouldn’t know that by the weight we both have put on), I give a lot of it away to friends and relatives.

Stephen, meanwhile, was let go from his job of many years when the company downsized during the recession, but has since found another, doing mechanical repairs on service vehicles. It isn’t what he wanted, but it’s work and he’s happy.

Amanda has been coming up for visits with her friend, when they can, but with working and university, there’s little time for Great-Aunt Lydia. We did go to see her at her university when I needed an angiogram, so we spent a bit of time with her.

Ashley and I had a falling-out for a few years after her last visit here, and I didn’t hear from her until last year, when we patched things up and became even closer. There’s more!

A photo doing the email-forward rounds passed on to me by Lydia. I immediately thought of the Smothers Brothers’ hilarious routine “Mom Always Liked You Best”. I used to watch their show every week because they were a whole lot hipper than Ed Sullivan, and certainly better than anything else on TV at the time (1967-69).

Naturally, the show turned out to be too controversial for television and, after an interminable string of skirmishes with the censors, it got the axe. The Smothers sued CBS and won, but couldn’t get the show back on the air, even after it snagged the 1969 Emmy for best writing. “I didn’t realise I was important,” Tommy once said, “until they made me shut up.” TVParty.com has a great profile of the series.

Among the musical talent on the Smothers’ show: the Beatles (the birth of the music video), the Who (Moon and Townshend injured when the drum kit exploded), the Doors, the Byrds, the Turtles, Buffalo Springfield, Paul Revere & the Raiders, the Blue Magoos, the Electric Prunes, Jefferson Airplane, Simon & Garfunkel, Pete Seeger, Herman’s Hermits, the First Edition, the Everly Brothers, the Chambers Brothers, the Righteous Brothers, Cass Elliott, Dion, Donovan, Steppenwolf, Peter Paul & Mary, Ike & Tina Turner, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the Hollies, Jimmie Rodgers, Janis Ian, the Temptations, the Bee Gees, Judy Collins, Ravi Shankar and of course frequent guests Glen Campbell and Mason “Classical Gas” Williams.

Plus, you could count on seeing some of the all-time great entertainers like Jimmy Durante, Jack Benny, Kate Smith and Carol Channing, as well as special appearances by the likes of Woody Allen and Bobby Kennedy. You can have your MTV.

Lydia has passed along the address of a webpage featuring a clock such as I’ve never seen before. Very clever, and it would be even more clever if they could figure out how to make it circular.

The page is hosted by a Dutch bit-of-everything portal, but of itself it only has an email address for “insertmonkey”. Easily tracked to the Insert Monkey website, where they’ve got all kinds of clocks!

… or at least links to articles on different types of clocks, and some that don’t seem particularly relevent to timekeeping at all. Maybe the website is still under construction, or maybe they’re not as good with webkeeping as they are with clockworks.

Lydia has passed on an email containing photograph proof that someone has the time, patience, enough papier mache and interest in humanity to give us all a point to ponder about just where we fit in the physical scheme of things.

The world might look majestically grand compared to its inner-Solar System neighbours, but scope back and (apart from a chuckle remembering what happened to Pluto) our piece of turf vanishes pretty quickly. And our main source of heat and light too.

Dorseyland can be regarded as a joke in itself, but a couple of specimens of the original species have recently been submitted by regular visitors Lydia, the first one, and Joe, uh, the second one …

A man who’s just died is delivered to the mortuary wearing an expensive black suit. His widow, though, says she always thought her husband looked best in blue and wants him buried in a blue suit.
She gives the mortician a blank cheque and says, “I don’t care what it costs, please have him in a blue suit for the viewing.”
The next day she’s delighted to find him wearing a gorgeous blue suit. And then she’s astonished when the mortician presents gives her back the blank cheque.
“A deceased gentleman about your husband’s size was brought in shortly after you left yesterday and was wearing an attractive blue suit,” the mortician explains. “I asked his wife if she’d like to see him buried in a black suit instead, and she said it made no difference as long as he looked nice.
“So I switched the heads.”

Ha-HAH! There’s more!