This December 7th, 2023, I am sixty-six years old.
Thank you for the birthday wishes. Bless you all.
I can tell you that I appear to be hanging in there. Daily exercise makes a difference.
Sleep, Water, Diet, Exercise and Belonging.
Missus cut my hair and I did fifty Tyson pushups before showering. Those were a bitch.
The real suffering came when I turn the water cold. BRRRR!
My determination is to be a competent defender male until I’m gone. I will live healthily until I am one hundred years old and then die in my sleep.
I’m reminded too that I was born forty years and a day past the greatest explosion on earth prior to the nuclear era. Here we are 106 years later, and the story grips me every time I read it.
My Grandma Rita (nee Carew) was the daughter of Francis Carew of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
On the 6th of December 1917, the greatest explosion ever to occur in the world up to then happened when the French munitions ship Mont-Blanc collided with another ship in the Halifax harbour and caught fire.
From the definitive account by Ken Cuthbertson in his book “The Halifax Explosion,” this description:
“The crew members of British Cargo ship the SS Picton were also watching the Mont-Blanc burn. The Picton was moored next to the Acadia Sugar Refinery while a crew of about eighty longshoremen emptied her cargo holds of crates of food and explosives; the ship was about to go into dry dock for repairs. The unloading was still underway when the Mont-Blanc drifted ashore on the Halifax side of the harbour. When it did, the heat from the fire was so intense that Francis Carew, the sixty-year-old foreman of the workers aboard the Picton, feared it could set the ship alight or ignite the explosives that were still in the holds. “That’s some hot, boys. We’d better secure those hatch covers before we have a fire!” Carew shouted. The men set about securing the ship in a race against the clock. But it was a contest they were destined to lose.”
Rita was just a young girl when the explosion devastated the harbour that morning. She searched for three days in a snowstorm looking for her father.
Later in his book, Cuthbertson tells what happened:
“At GROUND ZERO in Halifax harbour, along with the Mont-Blanc, the explosion obliterated Pier 6 and Pier 8 and all the buildings on each of them. All disappeared. Aboard the SS Picton, which was moored at Pier 8, supervisor Frank Carew along with his two assistants and sixty-four dock workers and members of the ship’s crew died instantly; fortunately, they had secured the ship’s hatches before the blast and so the munitions in the cargo hold did not explode.”
Three hundred and twenty-five acres of Halifax were nearly obliterated by the blast. A witness said, “… the sight was awful… with people hanging out of windows dead. Some with their heads off and some (bodies) thrown over the overhead telegraph wires.” (Billy Wells’ account)
Calamity is possible at any time. Shit happens. Floods, fires, explosions, liberals.
Men ought to be prepared as best they can. There is never a time for complacency.
Don’t kid yourselves, the sisters help but it is mostly men who defend life at large.
Despite early years where I was shot, stabbed, run over, and hit with various implements (hockey stick handle, chains, ball bat, etc.), I’m alive and defending life.
I suppose I sometimes gave as good as I got (and later earned a pardon for it).
Despite a hidden bout of Hep C (which killed dear friends of mine), and broken bones and nose, scars here and there, I’m alive and defending life.
Gilead Sciences (Big Pharma) found a cure for Hep C, Toronto Liver administered it (get tested).
Despite decades of addiction which I finally defeated some years ago, I’m alive and defending life.
I realized I was addicted to fear (read about how that works in SIPPING FEAR PISSING CONFIDENCE).
See ^^ Dr Robert Glover’s review below
My dad was also addicted to fear (and a friend of Bill W). Funny how that works. My bet is the five generations of Wallace men who preceded me here in Canada were all so afflicted. It’s the nervous system you see, it remembers.
My dad taught me some things about writing when I was in my forties. I’d sent him a letter at Christmas. The old man sent it back corrected. Boy, was I pissed.
Then I thought, oh yeah, he was an editor. So, I wrote him back thanking him. It took me two weeks.
He replied, “If you’re going to bother writing, double space it so I can do my thing.”
And I did. After all, we were a safe three thousand miles from each other.
That went on for a few years until probably 2010. By then I’d moved to Toronto and could visit.
I’d drop something off on trips to Ottawa and pick it up on my way out of the city.
One time I dropped off an essay and upon returning, he hadn’t marked it up.
I asked him if he was too busy and he said no, I didn’t need it. He looked away.
No encouragement. No final pep talks to see me off. But I knew: at some level, I’d graduated.
I found out if you can hang in there learning about your parents it can pay dividends.
Doing a family history is good pretense for enquiry. You are simply curious, with no ax to grind.
First a cub reporter and then a Lieutenant Commander in the Canadian Navy, dad married a “tough, stout and devout” wife who hailed from the cold North Atlantic’s Newfoundland (known as “The Rock”).
Ma told me when she was born her mother said, “I can’t take another one” and gave her away to her mother. And so, Ma was raised by her grandmother, and kept from her eight siblings.
Her dad represented a liquor concern and traveled a lot. At fifteen ma was allowed to stay overnight at the family home on Water Street in St Johns, Nfld. The next day she refused to leave.
My father was the fourth and last child born to my Grandma Rita and my Grandpa Gimpy.
Grandpa Gimpy, so named after being shot in the leg by a sniper as a scout in WW1, was an original “mad men” in the early days of advertising at Wallace Advertising. Regrettably, he disavowed my father as his son. My old man equally regretted not having knocked him out when he visited in the 1960s.
Still, my father held his father’s hand when Gimpy died at age 98… quietly hoping for some kind of reconciliation. None came. Dad said both his parents broke his heart.
After my grandmother had Gimpy committed for his violence (probably shell or war shock related), dad was raised with his mom, Grandmother Carew, and three sisters in full view of the Halifax harbour.
My mother had ten pregnancies in twelve years of which nine survived. An old colonel had told dad as a young officer to keep her “barefoot and pregnant” whilst he was sailing the seven seas on behalf of Her Majesty’s Royal Canadian Naval Service.
I personally never saw ma barefoot. Usually, she wore granny boots and moved in a blur.
They produced five sons and four daughters with me landing in the middle of a family of eleven.
Perhaps that makes me a natural manager. Four brothers and four sisters shaped me.
One of the great gifts of my life has been my son Corrie. We message each other almost daily. Now forty, he lives in Ireland with his lovely wife Carol and gives me advice. Raising him saved my life. I’m sure of it.
Second chances are my thing, and so, unsurprisingly, I have a second family. My Missus is amazing. We are blessed with a ten-year-old son and twelve-year-old daughter as magical as children are. No one is taken for granted in my home. There is no martyrdom. There is no enslavement.
We continue to learn from each other every day. I learn plenty from the kids and it is true that little girls teach men about love. It’s just as true that a man with a loyal woman by his side has the wind at his back… as long as he stays out in front of her to feel it.
For it is only men who can ensure that love prevails in a home. She can’t do it alone. That’s not how Team Human works. And so, it falls to me. For when a man uses his power and love in service of himself and others, he finds meaning and freedom.
However unlikely, I have developed into the Advisor to Men™. It seems to be the right thing to do. What else is there but to live in such a way as to somehow attempt to make a difference in people’s lives.
It provides a modicum of freedom from the suffering of life.
May you all enjoy your freedom and stay true and free.
I send you blessings of power and love.
True and free…
cw
________________
CHRISTOPHER K WALLACE, BST, CH, CPIC
Counsellor and Advisor to Men ™
chris@advisortomen.com
advisortomen.com
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amazon book link SIPPING FEAR PISSING CONFIDENCE
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