Campbell is a freelance writer.
When I was around four or five years old, my grandma used to urge me to eat my entire piece of bread, including the crust.
“Every time you eat the crust, a soldier comes back from the war,” she’d say.
This was back in 1933 and it bothers me somewhat when I think of all the wars that have been waged since then – and how many soldiers I have prevented from coming back.
My mom also had some favourite sayings about food. One of them was, “Eat it up. It’ll warm the cockles of your heart.”
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This one usually came about when my brothers and I complained that our food was too hot. When I grew up, I did a little research into this old idiom and I discovered that the heart doesn’t have any cockles. Ventricles, yes, but not cockles.
Obviously my mother didn’t know this and so, throughout my childhood, she went along happily quoting it over and over, determined that no child of hers was going to be walking around with cold cockles.
Another favourite saying of my mother’s was, “Wait until your father comes home, then you’re going to get it.”
This frightening warning of impending disaster had a tendency to spoil the rest of my day, especially if it happened in the morning. Dad didn’t get home from work until 5:30 p.m., and I well and truly knew what was coming as I had received “it” several times before.
It was difficult to find much fun in the day when you had “it” to look forward to at the end. You’d think I’d have learned to behave better under such circumstances, but I didn’t. I was a slow learner.
One of the things I was slow to learn was getting up early in the morning. My dad was a big promoter of this endeavour. He, himself, was a great one for rising at the crack of dawn and he felt strongly that his oldest son should do the same.
“Remember son, the early bird gets the worm,” he was fond of saying to me. I pointed out to him that another way of looking at this was if you were an early riser you’d get worms.
He didn’t much care for this spin on one of his favourite sayings though it did prompt him to quote another: “I never worry about my oldest. He’s just as happy as if he was in his right mind.”
As an adult I came to have some favourite sayings of my own. I am fond of Pierre Berton’s quote: “A Canadian is a guy who can make love in a canoe without tipping over.” There is a lot of Canadian born men that can’t do this, of course, and I am one of them. Just as there are a lot of Canadian men that wouldn’t want to, along with twice as many Canadian women who wouldn’t let them even if they did.
Still, it does conjure up an interesting picture, though one wonders what the participants would do with the paddles.
Apropos of the above, I once heard a Las Vegas comedian say that the difference between a Canadian and a canoe is that a canoe tips, but I don’t much care for that saying, even if it is true.
All of the above leads me to share an old saying with you that I made up myself. Like Pierre Berton’s, it has to do with Canada and Canadians: “Take any two healthy male human beings over the age of 18, give each a big stick, set them facing each other an arm’s length apart, and within a few seconds they’ll start beating on each other. This phenomenon is called human nature, except in Canada, where it is called hockey.”
Hey, if you don’t believe me, ask Bertuzzi.
