A sentimental favorite

Of course. . . of course!

Mister Ed

Original name: Bamboo Harvester

Birth:

1949

El Monte

Los Angeles County

California, USA

Death:

Feb. 22, 1979

Burbank

Los Angeles County

California, USA

Animal Actor. Mister Ed, a Palomino horse officially named Bamboo Harvester, was a show and parade horse who was foaled in 1949 in El Monte, California. His parents were The Harvester (Sire), a Saddlebred owned by Edna and Jim Fagan; and Zetna, (Dam) who was sired by Antez, an Arabian imported from Poland. Bamboo Harvester was trained by Lester Hilton. Lester "Les" Hilton had been apprenticed under Will Rogers, and also worked with the mules in the "Francis the Talking Mule" movies. Due to old-age ailments, Bamboo Harvester was put to sleep in 1970. The producer of the Mister Ed series never would answer the question of how the horse's lips were made to move. There have been many theories over the years, including the use of peanut butter, but none have been authenticated. (bio by: Ronald Leon)

Cause of death: Euthanized

Burial:

Snodgrass Farm

Tahlequah

Cherokee County

Oklahoma, USA

Maintained by: Find A Grave

Record added: Jan 01, 2001

Find A Grave Memorial# 1551

This is a cobbling-together of a post I spent about four hours on this morning. Trying to fix the formatting, which I do for nearly every post, it suddenly disappeared.

ALL of it. It was just a blank.

I mean, no backup. Didn't even go into a recycle bin or anything.

I feel stabbed, ripped off and as if something has been snatched away from me (like four hours that I can never get back).  I don't know, all I can do to salvage this is put up some of the photos and whatever I remember of the text, though there were also three or four videos that were VERY hard to find, not to mention a gif that I can't recover.

Jesus.

Anyway, what I was GOING to say before the finished and polished post was ripped out of my hands, was something like this: as a little girl, I adored Mr. Ed, and I can see why. He was a character actor with a sweet face, and he was also a handsome palomino, a former parade horse, his shiny coat coming across well even in grainy black-and-white.

The show we saw on TV wasn't the original. There was a failed pilot starring the same horse, but a different Wilbur. This Wilbur was a clinker, and it didn't fly. But there was something about Ed. Network execs must have decided to give him another try.

(Now that I think of it, black lines kept appearing at the sides. Did that mean something? This version is awful, but I feel I must continue, damn it.)

Oh, what else? I wrote something about My Friend Flicka, a 1950s series which is now posted in its entirety on YouTube. At one point, I would have killed to see even one episode, but now I find I can't stomach Johnny Washbrook and the way he's always crying. He's a fairly good horseman, and the horse is beautiful (of course, of course!). But it was mainly that theme song I loved as a kid. It began with a little harp-stroke which isn't in most of the YouTube vids. It's cut off, probably because most people didn't notice it. But to me, it meant magic was about to begin. This video may or may not have it, because I don't remember which one I posted originally. Took me a while to find it, too.

There were others, National Velvet, Fury. . . Fury was, I have to admit, the best horse actor, and the handsomest of all. In fact, he was simply stunning. But the show involved a lot of shrill whistling and irritating yelling: "Fuuuuuuuuuu-reeeeeeeee!" . And NOWHERE in the YouTube videos does the announcer ever say, "Fury. The story of a horse. . . and the boy who loved him."It's probably something like "Play it again, Sam", a TV myth.

This is from one of those very old-format TV sites set up in about the year 2000:

But the true star of the show was Fury himself. Known as Highland Dale when he lived on a farm in Missouri, he was 18 months old when he was discovered by well-known movie horse trainer Ralph McCutcheon who first used him in “Return of Wildfire” in ‘48. Series producer Leon Fromkess hired McCutcheon to deliver a horse for the series. By this time, McCutcheon had changed the horse’s name to Beauty (often called Beaut) and had worked him in “Lone Star” (‘52), “Johnny Guitar” (‘54) and “Gypsy Colt” (‘54). He was cast as the black stallion in “Giant” (‘56); and several other shows after “Fury” ended.

Can't find where I got this info, but Highland Dale was an American Saddlebred, long and rangy compared to the rather dinky Ed. Flicka was somewhere in the middle. William Shatner breeds Saddlebreds. Lesson for the day.

Elizabeth Taylor on Highland Dale/Fury was a sight to behold. His size can be gauged by how tiny she looks on him, almost like a girl. She was a magnificent horsewoman who did not need a double, not even in National Velvet when she was 13. I've tried to make a gif of my favorite scene from Giant, very poorly cropped for some reason (to avoid a letterbox effect, no doubt).

And that's all I can salvage of this post. I'm sorry, but I'll bet I feel a whole lot worse about it than you do.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

I've been goosed: it's Kids and Company!

Incredibly, I just got this AVI file from an internet source to post on YouTube! Call me a techie genius. All right then, don't. But here it is, Kids and Company, one of the most surreal things I've ever seen on the internet.

How did this happen? I started off with one of MattTheSaiyan's old DuMont videos. I found the intro for this incredible kids' show from 1951, made three gifs of it, then wondered if I could find any more.

Kids and Company

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kids and Company
Presented by Johnny Olson
Ham Fisher
Country of origin United States
No. of episodes 39
Production
Running time 24 mins.
Release
Original network DuMont
Picture format Black-and-white
Audio format Monaural
Original release September 1, 1951 – June 1, 1952

Kids and Company is an American children's TV show that aired on the now-defunct DuMont Television Network on Saturday mornings from September 1, 1951 to June 1, 1952, and was hosted by Johnny Olson and Ham Fisher. The series was primarily sponsored by Red Goose Shoes.

This was Olson's third series for DuMont, previously hosting the talent show Doorway to Fame and daytime variety series Johnny Olson's Rumpus Room. Rumpus Room shared the schedule with Kids for the latter's entire run, and ended a month after Kids did.

The 1952 finale (stated by Olson as being the last before a ten-week hiatus; despite this, the crew appears onstage to sing "Auld Lang Syne") is held by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Two or three episodes, including March 25 and the finale, are held by the Paley Center for Media. One is held by the Museum of Broadcast Communications.

This Wiki entry has more links in it than text. By today's standards, the show ended almost before it began. But back then, they actually had weekly episodes that were weekly, period! So 39 episodes wasn't bad for a nine-month run.

The show is execrable. The goose, a horrible puppet that reminds me of the deformed bird-woman at the end of Freaks, flails around in one spot. It can't walk around or even hop or move at all except to flap and bounce. Its whole purpose is to be a shill for Red Goose shoes (which is why it's called Red Goose!) This ranks as one of the worst puppets I've ever seen, though Howdy Doody is right up there. The goose has a horrible kidlike voice that sounds like it's on the wrong speed, and also makes a rasping noise something like a death-rattle.

I had a weird feeling about this show. It reminds me very strangely of an SCTV feature called Happy Hour, with Happy Marsden introducing episodes of Six Gun Justice (A Republic Serial) from a bar. He had a strange puppet with him called. . . Sammy the Goose. The goose snapped its bill together in an alarming way, but didn't talk. Only its head and neck showed.

I did wonder, just now, if Sammy the Goose was based on one of those infinitely fuzzy embryonic memories, a first-childhood-memory thing all blurred in your consciousness, but, hauntingly, still there. When the writers at SCTV came up with Happy Hour and that bloody goose puppet, was there some faint echo of something they'd seen on Dumont Network in 1951?

It's possible.

This is before my time, but the SCTV crew are a few years older than me. I don't remember Dumont at all, but how could a 2-year-old remember Dumont? I just remembered that TV scared me half to death.

This was something I felt ashamed of - I was sure I was the only one - until I began to find HUNDREDS of YouTube videos of "scary", "terrifying" TV logos, most of them very old. Some of the comments mentioned very early childhood memories, and being scared shitless of these things.

So maybe people DO remember? But not consciously. For who'd drag this creature from hell out of his or her memory bank?

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Zeroes in my brain: time rolling backwards

It might be food: from Happy Living, A Guide for Brides (1970)

I'm thinking of. . . exploitation

This is just a little parable, but it is a poisonous one. It illustrates how artists take advantage of their subjects, trying to convince people they're "helping" them with their attentions when in truth, they are sucking the lifeblood out of them.

Artists, writers, creative types are ruthless. They get the story at anyone's expense. I've seen it time and time again. If you do not have this ruthlessness, you will not become famous.

It is a kind of law.

Migrant Mother, taken by Dorothea Lange. 

The photograph that has become known as “Migrant Mother” is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month’s trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From – Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).





Dorothea Lange in 1936. Source

Lange’s photo became a defining image of the Great Depression, but the migrant mother’s identity remained a mystery to the public for decades because Lange hadn’t asked her name. In the late 1970s, a reporter tracked down Owens (whose last name was then Thompson), at her Modesto, California, home.

Thompson claimed that Lange never asked her any questions and got many of the details incorrect. Troy Owens recounted:

“There’s no way we sold our tires because we didn’t have any to sell. The only ones we had were on the Hudson and we drove off in them. I don’t believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed up with another. Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn’t have.”

Thompson was critical of Lange, who died in 1965, stating she felt exploited by the photo and wished it hadn’t been taken and also expressing regret she hadn’t made any money from it. Thompson died at age 80 in 1983. In 1998, a print of the image, signed by Lange, sold for $244,500 at auction.

The second parable freezes me in my chair. This is a photo of what people assume are inbred Deliverance-type hillbillies from deep in the backwoods. As with Dorothea Lange, Roger Ballen photographed these twins in an impoverished rural setting - not anywhere in the United States, but in
South Africa. The photo is considered a joke on the internet, often believed to be "fake" or photoshopped. It isn't. But it is so easy to locate that I only had to google "hillbilly twins" to find it (the first picture on Google images).

But the description I found on a site about Ballen and the twins (excerpt below) made my hair stand on end. Strange-looking as they are, and no doubt mentally-challenged, these are human beings, farm labourers cared for by their mother. No doubt their status isn't up to par for some people, which makes them feel free to compare them to chimpanzees or side-show attractions.

The twins and their family became world famous, but they had no knowledge of it because Ballen never told them he was a professional photographer and intended to display their pictures. They never saw one cent of remuneration, though the brothers are still groaned over and ridiculed on the internet as monstrous products of inbreeding.

For better or worse, one image more than any other has come to define South African photographer Roger Ballen - the photograph of adult twins Dresie and Casie taken in the Western Transvaal in 1993, an image distressing and unforgettable.

The twins have misshapen faces, necks as thick as bullocks', ears that protrude like chimps', bluntly cut spiky hair and prominent lower lips. Ballen has photographed them with a long thread of drool dangling from their blubbery mouths, their shirts wet and stained with dribble.

The image provokes an uncomfortable rush of thoughts and emotions: curiosity about the twins' genetic make-up, intrigue about their story, concern that someone could so brutally point the camera and shoot - did the twins understand the ramifications of that moment?

That photo, and others he took in the poor white rural areas of South Africa caused great controversy and resulted in Ballen being shunned by the South African arts community and death threats being made against him. His unsentimental and grim depictions of weird-looking people living in squalor and chaos, immortalised in the 1994 book Platteland: images of rural South Africa, were seen as cruel, denigrating and exploitative.

Hey! Listen! I beg to differ. I think this person's ATTITUDE is grotesque, particularly the assumption that anyone who is physically "different" is shameful, embarrassing, and meant to be hidden away.

I grew up with this sort of attitude. Anyone with mental illness was inherently shameful and usually "put away". Children with Down syndrome were called "mongoloid", and parents were routinely told it was the kindest thing for everyone if they institutionalized the child, forgot they ever had it and just had another baby.

Taking and even exhibiting photos of people who are outside the societal norm doesn't bother me, so long as it's done with full permission, full disclosure and a healthy degree of respect. More than anything else, the subject has to be aware that this is a professional photographer who is going to be doing all sorts of strange things with the photos, including becoming famous with them.

Publishing these photos doesn't automatically mean denigration or ridicule. Hiding people away or treating them as if they are inherently hideous and frightening isn't respectful. Is it completely taboo to show the world that some human beings look and even act radically different from the supposed norm? TLC wouldn't exist without breaking this taboo daily, but they do it in such a disgusting manner that I can't approve of it.

But I definitely disapprove of the viewpoint that says, for God's sake, don't take a picture of people with "misshapen faces, necks as thick as bullocks', ears that protrude like chimps', bluntly cut spiky hair and prominent lower lips". And if you MUST take pictures of such apelike, subhuman creatures, for God's sake, don't let anyone see them!

Is there a responsible, ethical way to do this? What about respectfully asking the subject, or in this case the twins' mother, if it would be all right to display these photos as part of an art exhibit? And what about admitting that the photos he exhibits tend to be dark, sensationalistic, even creepy, and that he has made a name for himself from them? But then, surely, she would protest and say no.

Though I am sure he would go ahead and do it anyway.

Dorothea Lange became enormously and permanently famous, famous for the ages, for her Migrant Mother pictures - but she did not even know the woman's name! She didn't know her name because she never asked, and didn't ask because she wasn't interested. Surely this subject matter was more powerful (and better for Lange's career) if she was a sort of generic Mother Courage figure. A name would just take away from all that, wouldn't it? The photographer knew a good thing when she saw it, maybe a great thing, and greatness is usually achieved by stepping over (or stepping on) someone else whose status is lower.

But the most screamingly awful part of all this is Lange's assertion that they had somehow done each other a favour:

There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. 

There IS something that might have helped this woman out. Ms. Lange should have opened her wallet then and there, given her the contents, gotten her address and made a promise to send her a cheque at regular intervals. Even a very modest amount would have made a huge difference. A portion of the proceeds of her exhibition would then go directly to this woman and her family. Thus she wouldn't be starving to death for someone else's entertainment, making the photographer into a celebrity at her expense.

People are strange when you're a stranger 

Faces look ugly when you're alone 

Women seem wicked when you're unwanted 

Streets are uneven when you're down 

When you're strange 

Faces come out of the rain 

When you're strange 

No one remembers your name 

When you're strange 

When you're strange 

When you're strange 

People are strange when you're a stranger 

Faces look ugly when you're alone 

Women seem wicked when you're unwanted 

Streets are uneven when you're down 

When you're strange 

Faces come out of the rain 

When you're strange 

No one remembers your name 

When you're strange 

When you're strange 

When you're strange 

When you're strange 

Faces come out of the rain 

When you're strange 

No one remembers your name 

When you're strange 

When you're strange
When you're strange

POST-SCRIPT. This post threatens to go on and on. But I did want to share something I found: Dresie and Casie, the much-ridiculed "hillbilly twins", now live comfortably in a nursing home in South Africa. As you can see, they're people, they laugh a lot and aren't scary. They live simply and have serious mental disabilities, but appear to enjoy life and are well cared-for.

For their sakes, I am glad that particular story ended happily.

Artwork by Krysantemum

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Dear Blank: the death of the letter and the human soul

For thirty years of my life, I was a prodigious letter-writer, but not now. I just don't do it any more, nor do I know anyone who does. So what's the difference? Emailing is just the same, isn't it?

No, it isn't. It's not even close.

My letters would run to ten or twelves pages, handwritten in coloured ink on funky stationery so my personal "vibe" was thick on them, and went deep into my life and the lives of those around me. When my correspondent answered, the envelopes were always fat, and my heart beat a little faster when I opened them. They were a little bit of Christmas morning in a humdrum day.

My emails are the usual hi, how are you doing, when should we meet for coffee? They are news bites and have nothing to do with how I feel.

The letters - they're gone, and, I think, gone forever. This is after they were humankind's main means of communication over distance for hundreds of years. When has anyone noticed, let alone grieved this loss? Doesn't anybody care? Does anyone pick through old emails, inhale the scent of them, notice how time has made them yellow, crackly and dry?

I've felt a sort of smothered, shameful sense of irrevocable loss about this, because after all, who misses letters, that dinosaur means of communication? It's embarrassing even to admit it. Who even writes them except Grandmas with Alzheimer's who don't know the first thing about computers? It's almost as bad as printing out your photographs and keeping them in a book.

Why don't I text? Why aren't I on Twitter? For God's sake, isn't it a better, quicker, more efficient form of communication than stodgy old email, which is now the dinosaur method of "keeping in touch"?

I feel a smothered shame because I feel left behind, but I am left behind because I don't want to go. Fuck it! It means nothing to me. The blog is important because it's my last means of self-expression, but I know my total of views is small (with a few bizarre exceptions that I still don't understand). I don't write for "likes" or hits or to be popular, but because if I don't write, I begin to die inside.

There follows a small excerpt from a book I intend to read, if I can step off the merry-go-round of my own life for long enough. I did not even think of it as a merry-go-round (sometimes, I admit, it is an ugly-go-round) until I began to think on the things Rebecca Solnit describes here.

Since the Amazon page for her book has a "Look Inside!" feature which gives away hundreds and hundreds of her words, I think I can justify quoting her here. They are but small excerpts from a chapter called We're Breaking Up, but all of them ring true for me. They express a vague uneasiness that never quite leaves me.

I too keep a blur going to partially erase or at least obscure my emotional pain. But until this moment, at least part of me assumed I was the only one who did this. Malignant uniqueness is the malady of the era. In a time when everyone is supposedly connected as never before, there is a profound sense of isolation.

Or at least, I think there is. Maybe I'm the only one.

https://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Trouble-Spaciousness-Rebecca-Solnit/dp/1595347534?ie=UTF8&tag=braipick-20

On or around June 1995, human character changed again. Or rather, it began to undergo a metamorphosis that is still not complete, but is profound — and troubling, not least because it is hardly noted. When I think about, say, 1995, or whenever the last moment was before most of us were on the Internet and had mobile phones, it seems like a hundred years ago. Letters came once a day, predictably, in the hands of the postal carrier. News came in three flavors — radio, television, print — and at appointed hours. Some of us even had a newspaper delivered every morning.

Those mail and newspaper deliveries punctuated the day like church bells. You read the paper over breakfast. If there were developments you heard about them on the evening news or in the next day’s paper. You listened to the news when it was broadcast, since there was no other way to hear it. A great many people relied on the same sources of news, so when they discussed current events they did it under the overarching sky of the same general reality. Time passed in fairly large units, or at least not in milliseconds and constant updates. A few hours wasn’t such a long time to go between moments of contact with your work, your people, or your trivia.

The bygone time had rhythm, and it had room for you to do one thing at a time; it had different parts; mornings included this, and evenings that, and a great many of us had these schedules in common. I would read the paper while listening to the radio, but I wouldn’t check my mail while updating my status while checking the news sites while talking on the phone. Phones were wired to the wall, or if they were cordless, they were still housebound. The sound quality was usually good. On them people had long, deep conversations of a sort almost unknown today, now that phones are used while driving, while shopping, while walking in front of cars against the light and into fountains. The general assumption was that when you were on the phone, that’s all you were.

Letters morphed into emails, and for a long time emails had all the depth and complexity of letters. They were a beautiful new form that spliced together the intimacy of what you might write from the heart with the speed of telegraphs. Then emails deteriorated into something more like text messages… Text messages were bound by the limits of telegrams — the state-of-the-art technology of the 1840s — and were almost as awkward to punch out. Soon phone calls were made mostly on mobile phones, whose sound quality is mediocre and prone to failure altogether (“you’re breaking up” or “we’re breaking up” is the cry of our time) even when one or both speakers aren’t multitasking. Communication began to dwindle into peremptory practical phrases and fragments, while the niceties of spelling, grammar, and punctuation were put aside, along with the more lyrical and profound possibilities. Communication between two people often turned into group chatter: you told all your Facebook friends or Twitter followers how you felt, and followed the popularity of your post or tweet. Your life had ratings.

Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the nuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat. I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deeper zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others.


It seems less likely that each of the kids waiting for the table for eight has an urgent matter at hand than that this is the habitual orientation of their consciousness. At times I feel as though I’m in a bad science fiction movie where everyone takes orders from tiny boxes that link them to alien overlords. Which is what corporations are anyway, and mobile phones decoupled from corporations are not exactly common.

A restlessness has seized hold of many of us, a sense that we should be doing something else, no matter what we are doing, or doing at least two things at once, or going to check some other medium. It’s an anxiety about keeping up, about not being left out or getting behind.


I think it is for a quality of time we no longer have, and that is hard to name and harder to imagine reclaiming. My time does not come in large, focused blocks, but in fragments and shards. The fault is my own, arguably, but it’s yours too — it’s the fault of everyone I know who rarely finds herself or himself with uninterrupted hours. We’re shattered. We’re breaking up.

It’s hard, now, to be with someone else wholly, uninterruptedly, and it’s hard to be truly alone. The fine art of doing nothing in particular, also known as thinking, or musing, or introspection, or simply moments of being, was part of what happened when you walked from here to there, alone, or stared out the train window, or contemplated the road, but the new technologies have flooded those open spaces. Space for free thought is routinely regarded as a void and filled up with sounds and distractions.


I watched in horror a promotional video for these glasses (Google Glass) that showed how your whole field of vision of the real world could become a screen on which reminder messages spring up. The video portrayed the lifestyle of a hip female Brooklynite whose Google glasses toss Hello Kitty-style pastel data bubbles at her from the moment she gets up. None of the information the glasses thrust into her field of vision is crucial. It’s all optional, based on the assumptions that our lives require lots of management and that being managerial is our highest goal. Is it?

I forget practical stuff all the time, but I also forget to look at the distance and contemplate the essential mysteries of the universe and the oneness of all things. A pair of glasses on which the temperature and chance of rain pops up or someone’s trying to schedule me for a project or a drink is not going to help with reveries about justice, meaning, and the beautiful deep marine blue of nearly every dusk.


It is a slow-everything movement in need of a manifesto that would explain what vinyl records and homemade bread have in common. We won’t overthrow corporations by knitting — but understanding the pleasures of knitting or weeding or making pickles might articulate the value of that world outside electronic chatter and distraction, and inside a more stately sense of time.

Getting out of [the rabbit hole of total immersion in the networked world] is about slowness and about finding alternatives to the alienation that accompanies a sweater knitted by a machine in a sweatshop in a country you know nothing about, or jam made by a giant corporation that has terrible environmental and labor practices and might be tied to the death of honeybees or the poisoning of farmworkers. It’s an attempt to put the world back together again, in its materials but also its time and labor. It’s both laughably small and heroically ambitious.


POSTSCRIPT. (Is that one word or two?). There may be quite a few postscripts here. Let me tell you about a longstanding friendship that broke up  - not easily, but extremely painfully. And it had to do with the issues raised by this piece of writing: in particular, modes of communication and how they can dramatically affect its content.

There were a lot of problems in this friendship, though for years I had thought of her as my best friend. No doubt some of them had to do with the uneasy transfer from written letter to email. She lived far away, though our connection first began when she lived here. Letters were our preferred method of contact for at least ten years, but like everyone else, at some point we made the switch. What happened was a gradual shift: there were fewer and fewer emails from her, though I continued to send her long, personal ones while hers became increasingly mundane. I felt as if I was running back and forth hitting the ball from both sides of the net, a pattern I loathe, and which she used to heavily criticize in others.

It wasn't just impoverished content. I couldn't see her handwriting any more. Her handwriting clued me in as to how she was really feeling. (By the way, many schools are no longer teaching cursive writing to children. Why, when they won't be using it for anything?) Pasting on a link to an interesting article just isn't the same as tearing pages out of a magazine and scribbling all over them, marking them up with circles and arrows, comments, criticisms, and exclamation marks. Sending these chunks of paper was fun, but receiving them was a delight.

Then her emails became so spaced-apart that communication had virtually ceased. Occasionally she phoned to try to catch up, and her conversation took the form of, "And how is - " (Bill, my kids, the grandkids, the cat, even my psychiatrist!). Though asking after people is seen as the hallmark of politeness and a splendid way to get people talking about their favorite subject (themselves), it isn't. That's a crock. It's what we used to call in the '60s a "copout", a way of ducking out of any sort of self-revelation, not revealing anything that could create a dangerous vulnerability.

Was she playing it safe? Had she given up? How should I know? She was only my best friend, and she wasn't giving me any clues.

Meantime, her increasingly infrequent but sometimes breathtakingly long emails went from mundane to ranty. These came as huge blocks of tiny flyspeck print with no paragraph breaks (and most people seem to have forgotten paragraph breaks exist). I had to literally copy and paste them and enlarge them in another program so I could make them out.

She lived in a small town in the Bible Belt of Alberta, and increasingly felt hemmed in by what I like to call "small town small minds". But a kind of paranoia was entering the one-sided discourse (for I could not reply in kind - there was a sort of abyss between us now, and I was growing tired of trying to reach across it). Some of them were downright shocking in their sense of persecution, and her sour attitude towards her husband made me wince. She was treating him like a burden she carried with martyrish glory. Surely if she stayed with him, when she really didn't want to, it made her a good person?

She began to obsessively write about her search for an apartment in Vancouver or, perhaps, Saskatoon. An apartment? Yes, she was going on Kajiji every day to hunt for a place to live (which amazed me, because her husband was chronically ill with Parkinson's and she had vowed in an act of total selflessness never to leave him). She was prone to saying things like, "We'll be here another fifteen or twenty years. Or maybe less," in a manner which evoked making marks on stone walls to measure time until her release.

When I figured out what she really meant, it shocked me. Her "release", the thing she was counting down for, was obviously widowhood, something which springs the trap for many unhappily married women.

Finally, I had had enough. I started an email asking her if she and her husband would witness our passport applications, but then it all came flooding out of me: what is going ON here? Are you leaving Sam, or what? Why are you spending hours going on Kajiji every day?  Are you going off on your own, and where are you moving to? Why do you keep saying you'd never even think of leaving him if you're making such definite plans? Does he even know you're thinking of leaving him? 

Then, at the last second, realizing I couldn't send all this stuff and that I'd regret it later, I deleted it and stuck to the request for witnessing our passports.  Shortly thereafter, I received a reply: "Hi, Margaret! I decided I'd expedite things by answering this. Sure, we'd be happy to do that. Sam."

I had come within a hair's breadth of blowing their marriage apart. Or had I? Perhaps he alreadyknew that she was thinking of leaving him - but I didn't think so. It would be the worst kind of news, and I would be the inadvertent messenger, reviled by both of them. But then I was hit with another shock. I didn't know if this was an isolated event, or if he was reading all her emails. Just mine? Or everyone's? For how long? Monitoring email generally doesn't happen unless a spouse is "checking up", suspicious about something. It is not a natural state of affairs.

At any rate, I was furious. Livid! I never wanted to be in that position again, risking having sensitive and highly confidential information disclosed to the wrong person. In fact, I decided I would never use email with her again. Obviously, it wasn't safe.

But she didn't get it, at all, and had absolutely no idea why I was so upset. "He was just trying to expedite things," she said in her very short paper letter, meaning (I assume) she was OK with what he was doing. Or just wanted to stay out of trouble? When I told her what nearly happened, about how I had nearly blown her secret, she had a sort of bland non-reaction. I didn't understand this at all. Did our friendship not mean anything to her now? And what about her marriage? I didn't even want to go there.

I just had the thought right now, as I contemplate the shift between letter-writing and emailing, that never by the farthest stretch of the imagination would Sam have seen one of her letters from me sitting on the table, ripped it open, read it, then answered it "to expedite things".  It just wouldn't happen. Why? It would be seen as a grave violation of privacy, at best unthinkably rude and at worst, creepy and disgusting.

It's like someone rifling through my purse, or upending its contents on the floor and pawing through it, pocketing this and that.

What has happened to privacy in 2016? Do boundaries exist? We casually speak for each other, as if we are doing the other person a "favour". Do we think about the violation of ripping open another person's thoughts and feelings? In my paper letter (which I assumed Sam would not read ), I told  her I felt too frustrated by the longstanding deterioration of meaningful communication between us to carry on with the friendship.

There was a stony silence, and I am sure she withdrew and felt deeply hurt. I had been horribly, monstrously cruel to her, for no reason! She likely believed she had played no part in this at all.

I don't know to what degree the dramatic change in our mode of communication (from letters to email) led to the drying up of our friendship. I don't even know exactly when the change happened. But it can't change back. I don't know what I learned from it, either. Time can't be turned back, we can't start writing with quill pens again. I don't even want to. A few years ago I began keeping my journal on the computer, and it is heaven - no dusty binders, ink blobs, pens running out.

But I understand Rebecca Solnit when she writes about the yearning to return to something real. She mentions knitting in particular. An ephemeral thing, and yet it produces a result, something useful or fun. I have never been more attached to my writing, or less restricted. Something is there, some sense of something growing almost organically. I can't say what it is or why it is there, but it is one of the reasons I sit up in bed, pull out my earplugs and peel off my eye mask, and start my day.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!