misplaced nostalgia – Page 4

This is the amount of energy (B) has left over

When I was a kid the second-most fascinating book on my parents’ shelves was the small pamphlet whose prosaic title was “Revised U.S. Edition of the Official Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Plans For Physical Fitness” (underline original). The cover depicts a pair of smiling Canucks in uniform striding across the tarmac away from their plane, presumably back from a long day of protecting Kapuskasing from bogeys. This book was actually “two books in one” as it contained both the official RCA exercise regimen for men and women. For some reason, the women’s plan was a minute longer a day at 12 minutes to the men’s 11, but still, such a deal.

I’m really not joking when I say this book held a strange fascination for me. There was something oddly authoritative about this being the actual regimen for a military service with the word “Royal” right there in its name. It claimed to be all you needed to achieve fitness, and as a chubby little nerd I believed it. I’ve always been a sucker for claims of expertise as well as for things that are short. Because I am gullible and I am lazy. But I was not alone in my interest in the program; 5BX was a big hit in the 1960s and the promotion of regular, intensive calisthenics paved the way for the aerobic craze of the 1970s.

Looking at the book today (I found a PDF of the 5BX pamphlet which was originally published on its own) what I’m most captivated by are not the exercises—a series of standards, some of which are neither effective nor safe—but the lengthy introduction which makes the case for physical fitness. Of the original 32 pages only 10 actually described the exercises; the rest were a series of cartoons, charts, and pep-talk to convince the sluggard to adopt this life-changing process.

And what wonderful bullshit they are! Beautiful examples of how graphics can skirt around meaning and imply that information is being given, without actually saying anything. My favorite is the following chart on page 7:

So much quantitative data is implied; none given. Look at that physical capacity scale, presented in authoritative percentiles. What is it? I don’t know, but that guy slouching at the desk sure doesn’t have any. Look at how much heavier the shirtless guy’s energy reserve is! More energy weighs more. And don’t you want to have more so you can enjoy your recreational activities? Activities like 5BX?

Smells like victory

My older brother used to play an elaborate game with a friend of his using those little plastic army men you’d buy in buckets. An entire back yard was the playing surface and moves were made in turns using a ruler; each piece got a set number of inches. Once in range of enemy pieces, dice were rolled to determine damage inflicted. Then once a piece had been “killed” the real fun took place: using a lighter and a spray aerosol can of lubricant, the poor soldier would be torched until it caught fire and melted into an olive drab pool.

Later variations on this game included using napalm in the form of setting a two gallon milk jug alight and dripping flaming gobs of polyethylene on the hapless fighters; I also remember one afternoon where the a fort was constructed of styrofoam and also torched, although it never really fully caught. But it did produce large oily plumes of smoke that seemed half ink and half air and were no doubt full of dozens of toxins. For that matter, none of us stopped to consider if the can we were using for flamethrower fuel was likely to ignite; or that the late-August grass was crisp and brown.

As pointless and dangerous as these pyrotechnics were, I have fond memories of them. In fact, it’s because they were pointless and dangerous that I have fond memories. If I had ended up burning myself I’d probably enjoy the memory more, because everyone loves their scars. I have a particularly large one on the bottom of my right index finger where I almost chopped the digit off by sticking it into a spinning exercise bike wheel when I was four; I have another at the base of my thumb to mark the time I fell backwards down some stairs and slammed my hand through the window of my back door. I love them both.

Looking back on our stupid choices and telling scandalous stories about the bad things we did is one of life’s joys. There’s the old adage that our mistakes are what makes us who we are; this is true, but I think our love of stories of drinking binges and disastrous romantic encounters and quarry diving and childhood games on thin ice speak to us on a baser level. We like to imagine a time free from responsibility and filled with possibility.

We just don’t want to imagine these things for our own kids.

After a good meal and a good pipe

Borkum Riff. About once a year, I’ll catch the distinctive smell of whiskey-soaked pipe tobacco, and for a moment I turn to look for my dad. When I do, I look up, because I’m six years old: my dad hasn’t smoked since the 1970’s. But that smell, of tobacco and sweet cream, was such a constant part of my childhood that it’s burnt into my memory so deeply it would take a pipe cleaner to remove it from my hippocampus.

Whenever this happens I don’t really know how to feel. On the one hand, it’s a smell that never fails to transport me to my youth. On the other, my dad quit smoking after I had a long outburst telling him with all the earnestness of a child that I hated the fact that he smoked and that it gave me headaches and that I was sure it was going to kill him and I wouldn’t have a father. I remember that I couldn’t stop shivering for hours from the emotional surge. I am, of course, very glad that my father did stop smoking, as he’s still with us today.

And yet. My father owned several pipes and they were all beautiful. He had curved rose-colored pipes made of burls (cherrywood? walnut?) that looked wise and mysterious, he had sharp-angled black pipes that looked like they belonged to Mr. Fantastic. He even had a corn-cob pipe that was hokey and wonderful. He had pipe tools for tamping and scraping and cleaning and a carousel that he kept his pipe in. And he had tins of tobacco with pictures of three-masted ships and peculiar European men and maps of the world on them. And when he read the Hobbit to my brother Robert and me and he got to the part about Gandalf and Thorin blowing magical smoke rings I knew exactly how that must have looked.

My ambivalence about pipes can be summed up nicely by Curious George. In the original H.A. Rey book from 1941, the monkey George is unceremoniously removed from the jungle by the Man in the Yellow Hat for sale to a zoo; Upon arrival in America, he spends what is supposed to be his last night of freedom in the Man’s home, where we are told After a good meal and a good pipe, George was tired.”

When my kids were little, they constantly watched a VHS recording of the 1982 stop-motion version of Curious George, which faithfully stuck to the text of Rey’s book and did in fact show George enjoying his pipe; however, immediately after George takes a couple of puffs the film shows George becoming ill and the Man in the Yellow Hat guiltily putting the pipe away—presumably shamed into quitting himself. And this part always made me very, very angry. Why? Why the need to editorialize? Children already know that George is doing something wrong, something forbidden. That’s what makes it fun. And Dad, I’m glad you stopped smoking. But I hope you can still find something wrong to do now and then.