journal features

thanksgiving in Niagara

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

St. Catharines, 2012.10.06

We picked up a car today and did some errands. Then we headed for Niagara, with Mari ooing and ahing all the way about the vivid Autumn colors all around us.

In fact, we left the highway in Oakville and took the Lakeshore route to Hamilton. Then in Fruitland we once again left the QEW and took highway eight across to St. Catharines, stopping to see the wares at a road-side vegetable stand where we bought some of the season's last corn.

Mari couldn't get enough of the reds, oranges, pinks, and yellows. We discussed just why it was that she was so surprised when last Autumn had been so picture-perfect, and we realized that it was because she'd been so sick with morning sickness last year that she'd missed the whole thing!

(Our rental car was a Chrysler 200; I don't know how the things are still on the market when every one I get has vicious shimmy and roll whenever it hits the slightest thing on the highway. Awful!)

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)