A coffin, a beetle and a non-existent picture

I've had a picture in my mind for almost 40 years - a picture that I would love to transfer to paper. The picture would save many words and be many times more effective than any written or spoken description. Alas, the ability to illustrate is a gift with which I am not blessed, and the subject of the said picture is so absurd that even the seemingly infinite resources of Google Images would not help. Yet the story the picture would tell is a true story which could have been recorded for all time if there had been an insightful photographer at hand. It wasn't to be, so my attempt at a word picture will have to suffice.

Mrs Bricky and I were to travel by air with a group of friends to a convention in a distant city, at which we were to perform a humorous sketch. Our sketch required an unusual prop: an authentic coffin. A cardboard imitation wouldn't do, as it needed to be sufficiently strong to carry a (live) body. We needed to acquire it from a source in or near our destination city, as we sensed our air carrier would be less than enthusiastic about carrying it as accompanied baggage. A sufficiently friendly funeral director might have lent us one from his shelf stock, but we didn't know one. But wait a moment - what about good old Dad? My father, who lived in a country town within a two hour drive of our convention venue, and whose DIY skills have been documented in a previous post , was a skilled woodworker who had recently retired and thus had time on his hands. A phone call determined that he was willing to make a coffin for the cost of the materials and deliver it to a nominated city address. And so it was settled. We thought no more about it until the convention weekend arrived and we travelled to our destination. Sure enough, there was a beautifully crafted burial casket awaiting us at the agreed address.

The picture that has been lurking in my mind for almost four decades is not just one of a coffin. You see, I had (reasonably, I thought) expected that my father would transport the coffin from his country hometown to the city on a truck, or possibly on a car trailer. I suppose I also thought he would discreetly cover it with a tarpaulin. But no, there wasn't a tarpaulin. Neither was there a truck or a trailer. He had carried it, uncovered, on a roof-rack atop his car - a VW beetle.

DIY as it once was

To say my father was the ultimate DIYer is a bold statement, but he was a standout even in an era when neccessity dictated that almost everyone was a DIYer to some extent. And he wouldn't have had a clue what DIY meant - he just did it himself if there was any possible way he could. Buying was a last resort. There simply wasn't the money available in most instances so if he couldn't make it (or do it) himself, we as a family had to go without in most cases. But we did have the neccessities. We even moved into a brand new house when I was about 12 years old. My father had borrowed money to buy a low-lying, swampy residential block of land about 15 years previously.

He raised the level by laboriously carting in topsoil that he obtained from the side of a country road where a grader had done some widening work. He shovelled it onto his 1937 Chevrolet 2 ton flat-deck truck (similar to the one pictured), carted it home and shovelled it off - all 300 loads - in the weekends and on evenings after work. It took him years.

 
He then made hundreds of cement blocks from gravel and sand he shovelled and carted home out of a nearby riverbed. He designed and built the mold he made them in. He designed and built the house and fitted it out with joinery of his own making. The only tradesman he engaged was the electrician who did the wiring, because the law didn't allow him to do it himself. He even did his own plumbing and drainage, having convinced a registered plumber to inspect and sign off his work.

Building the house was only a part of his my father's DIY effort. He lived it every day of his life, feeding the family by buying live sheep from a farmer and butchering them himself to catching trout and salmon on homemade tackle and canning them. He was not a miserly man; he had simply learned to live and provide for his family on a shoestring because it was the only way he knew.

Yesterday my car needed a wash, so what did I do? I drove a 12km round trip to the petrol station, paid $14 for the privilege of waiting 35 minutes in a queue to have my car washed less perfectly than I could have done it myself at home for free. My dad just wouldn't have understood. I'm not sure that I do, either.

A Story With Two Morals

Like everyone, I receive recycled emails every day from well meaning acquaintances who feel a need to brighten up my life. Truth is, most of them are so inane, farcical or otherwise uninteresting that my acquaintances evidently think I have a sad life indeed. This one tickled my fancy, though, probably because of moral number 2.

It was the coldest winter ever. Many animals died because of the cold. The hedgehogs, realizing the situation, huddled together to keep warm. This way they covered and protected themselves, but the quills of each one wounded their closest companions. After a while, they decided to distance themselves one from the other and they began to die, alone and frozen. They had to make a choice: either accept the quills of their companions or die - become extinct as a species even. Wisely, they decided to go back to being together. They learned to live with the little wounds caused by the close relationship with their companions in order to receive the warmth that came from the others. This way they were able to survive.

Moral number one: The best relationship is not the one that brings together perfect people, but the relationship when each individual learns to live with the imperfections of others and can admire the other person's good qualities.

Moral number two: Learn to live with the pricks in your life.

Proposed drug testing of beneficiaries

New Zealand's present government doesn't often come up with an idea to gladden my instinctively left-leaning heart, but the recent proposal to require recipients of the unemployment benefit to be drug-free is an exception. Effectively there are only four prerequisites to receiving this benefit, commonly called the dole. Two relate to citizenship and residency, one to age and the other requirement is that "you must be available for, and looking for full time work".

In this country, employers have a legal responsibility to maintain a safe workplace. A workplace cannot be safe when it employs people under the influence of alcohol or drugs, therefore it is usual and responsible practice for employers to require a clear drug test prior to hiring a new employee. It is reportedly common in some industries for job applicants to be rejected because of their failure to pass such a test. In fact, I have seen clear evidence of this in my own experience. Not many years ago I found myself out of work and applied for one of a number of unskilled positions at a meat processing plant. Along with seven other applicants I was promised employment, conditional upon my attending a half day orientation programme including a drug test. Of the eight, only two of us passed the drug test and were subsequently hired. The other six made no secret of their relief at not having to forgo their unemployment benefit. Work & Income NZ requires unemployment beneficiaries to provide evidence that they are actively seeking paid employment. Many of them evidently set out to fail these tests in order to avoid losing their benefit entitlement.

New Zealand has a number of benefits available to those who need help for one legitimate reason or another, including sickness benefit and domestic purposes benefit. I don't advocate drug testing for recipients of those or any other benefits, because the unemployment benefit is the only one that is conditional upon the recipient being "available for, and looking for full time work". I fail to see how genuine jobseekers would not abstain from taking illicit drugs when they are well aware of those drugs rendering them unavailable for paid employment.

Mr Key and Mr English, much as it pains me to say so, I support you on this one, but only insofar as it applies to the unemployment (jobseeker) benefit. Having said that, I don't trust you not to use it as the thin edge of the wedge in extending the testing to recipients of other benefits.

Signs of Illiteracy?

Signs in the Timaru Botanic Gardens, South Canterbury, New Zealand. OK, the signwriter stuffed up - twice - but wouldn't someone on the gardens staff have noticed and sent them back for correction? Apparently not, as I first spotted these errant signs three years ago and they're still in place.

Where does respect begin?

We often hear the cry "One of the problems with the world today is that kids have no respect for anyone". Like most attempts to apportion blame for perceived wrongs, that is a generalisation of massive proportion, but I do think there is some truth in the claim that many kids don't respect their elders as they did in years gone by. Undoubtedly the causes are many and varied. One of them is that so many adults, by their actions and words, don't deserve much respect, but that was always the case.

I was giving some thought to this today and came to the realisation that in the long gone days of my childhood and early adolescence, we addressed every adult by their family names, preceded by the honorifics Mr, Mrs or Miss. The only exceptions beyond the extended family were close family friends who in some cases were honorary aunts and uncles and were addressed as such.

I suspect today's seemingly universal practice of kids calling adults by their given names has evolved from the desire of modern adults to be "with it" and accepted as a part of the kids' scene (hence, "Just call me John"). I'm wondering how significant the erosion of the older tradition has been in our perception that young folk no longer have respect for their elders. After all, how are they to differentiate between their peers and adults? Have we taught them to see no difference between their schoolyard friends and their elders?

When cowboys were our celebrities

I'm taking my six-year-old grandson to a disco at his school this evening - a disco at which the kids are to attend dressed as famous persons. He's going as Michael Jackson, resplendent in red jacket, black hat and white glove. I got to wondering what famous person I might have represented myself as when I was six. That is, if I was going to a fancy dress disco, which I wouldn't have been because I wouldn't have known what a disco was. Neither would anyone else have known because discos hadn't been thought of back then. The only celebrities I can recall in those pre TV days were cowboys, such as Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy and the like, who we saw on the silver screen and in comic books. Indians weren't celebrities because they were a generic bunch without individual identities. Robin Hood or William Tell might have been candidates, as might Donald Duck, but they were all fictitious characters rather than famous people. There were famous sportspeople of course, but without TV we didn't know what they looked like. The Royal Family were popular but today they probably trail behind Justin Bieber in the eyes of kids. How times have changed!