CLOSING AUGUST 30/14

July 30, 2014
29 Talbot Street,
Cayuga, Ontario.

To:  Mayor Ken Hewitt - Haldimand County Council
cc:  Councillor Fred Morison - Haldimand County, Ward 2

Subject:  Open letter re:  Parking in Cayuga

As we are sure you are aware, there is a petition circulating asking that Haldimand County Council purchase or lease property for the purpose of a public parking lot in the Village of Cayuga.

Our very survival as a small used bookshop in Cayuga depends at this point on the availability of parking for potential customers.  Our building at the corner of Talbot (Hwy 3) and Cayuga Streets includes tenants who claim four street parking spaces on the Cayuga Street side of the bookshop.  The wrecking yard adjacent to our building can claim as many as six or seven parking spaces for plated and unplated vehicles ~ not to mention the frontage that the yard takes up along both streets.

The parking spaces on Talbot Street are well signed as two-hour and snow-route parking.  We feel that the parking spaces on Cayuga Street need to be signed as two-hour parking as well and two-hour parking spaces need to be enforced.  Complicating the ease of parking at the bookshop door is the dangerous left turn onto Talbot from Ouse.

It is our observation that Caledonia, Hagersville and Dunnville have designated public-parking lots that are convenient to the shops and services.  We understand that sometime in the future Cayuga may have limited parking available in the area of the existing fire station;  however, a parking lot on Highway 3 close to the downtown businesses would serve the visitors, tourists, businesses, rental tenants, residents and service organizations, encouraging economic development.  Available for sale is lot #15, Talbot Street West -- the property between the Royal Canadian Legion and the former Cayuga Hotel.  It sits as a derelict eyesore, a constant reminder to those of us committed to improving our village.  The location is highly visible, easily accessible to traffic coming from all directions and if converted to a public parking lot would relieve the current parking issues and work in concert with the planned downtown revitalization.

We have personally witnessed over the ten years that we have been in business the squabbling over ownership of parking spaces.  It has been a comment on our lack of planning and has caused headaches for struggling shops in the downtown area.

We ask for your full support in the urgency for a parking lot with proper signage that would encourage existing business owners to stay and act as a signal to potential businesses that we are looking toward a future in Cayuga with a vibrant, attractive core.  We envision a revitalized village with walkways, streets and shops where residents can proudly welcome visitors.

Thank you for your immediate attention and continued support.

Sincerely,

John & Lorna Walker
The Neat Little Bookshop 905.772.5997 or 905.577.5635

www.theneatlittlebookshop.blogspot.com

Lot Opposite GALLERY WILLIAM BIDDLE on Talbot St.

 

First we make our habits

Then our habits make us.

 

~ J. K. Rowling

 

You Are The Author of Your Own Life Story

 

~ Unknown

Day of 1000 Canoes 2013 ~ York

"A Canadian is somebody who knows how to make love in a canoe."

~ Pierre Berton, author and television personality, quoted by Dick Brown in The Canadian, Dec. 22, 1973. [John Robert Colombo's FAMOUS LASTING WORDS, 2000]

"In John Robert Colombo's Canadian Quotations, Pierre Berton is quoted saying "a Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe."  Pierre says he didn't say it, or if he did he took it from someone else, but whoever the authority is, if that's the test, I fail.  I do know how to gunwale a canoe...portage it, right it without getting out of the water, and sail it home with my hockey sweater tied to a paddle.  But make love?  You got me."

~ Peter Gzowski, journalist.  The Private Voice:  A Journal of Reflections (1988). [John Robert Colombo's FAMOUS LASTING WORDS, 2000]

Grand River Canoe Festival 2013

"It is strange that all my ailments vanish as soon as I seat myself in a canoe."

~ Sir George Simpson, Governor, Hudson's Bay Company, quoted by John S. Galbraith in The Beaver.

"A really good paddle should come alive in your hands and put a smile on your face."

~ Ray Kettlewell, master paddle-maker, characteristic remark, Canoe Expo, Etobicoke, Ont., April 8, 1994.

"God first created the canoe and then thought up the ideal country to go with it."

~ Attributed to paddler Bill Mason by Donna Carter in "Peterborough Canoe Museum Makes a Big Splash,"  The Globe and Mail, Nov. 16, 1991.

[Tomorrow:  Canadian writer, Pierre Berton's comments on canoes.]

Quotations from John Robert Colombo's FAMOUS LASTING WORDS, Douglas & McIntyre, 2000.

Thought for Today ~

Something has become sadly apparent to us.  Hoping that we are missing something.  Are there no Cancer Society volunteer drivers in the Cayuga area?  A friend who has been supportive of the bookshop since the beginning is  unfortunately facing many trips to the city from Cayuga and so far ~ other than ourselves and a couple friends ~ her drivers are coming from Port Colborne, Grimsby and Dunnville.

George Eliot's* At Set of Sun comes to mind.

If you sit down at set of sun
And count the acts that you have done,
     And, counting, find
One self-denying deed, one word
That eased the heart of him who heard --
     One glance most kind,
That fell like sunshine where it went --
Then you may count that day well spent.

But, if, through all the livelong day,
You've cheered no heart, by yea or nay --
     If, through it all
You've nothing done that you can trace
That brought the sunshine to one face--
     No act most small
That helped some soul and nothing cost --
Then count that day as worse than lost.


*Mary Ann Evans, Victorian novelist, journalist, poet (1819 - 1880), used the pen name George Eliot in order that her writing be taken seriously.

[Driver reimbursement information available at www.cancer.ca "Information Driver Centre"

Marshall McLuhan said,

"I suggest, therefore, if you want to save a fantastic blood bath on this planet which would be dramatic, cathartic and tragic in the Greek sense, we turn off TV totally, for good."

~in a panel discussion, St. Michael's College, Toronto, Dec. 1970.

 

 

 

Nostalgic Five-Span

 

 

One-by-One Sections Coming Down

There were five now there are four ~ Bridge Spans

 

 

 

 

 

 

"I experienced this awakening one day when I was rewriting my resume for a new venture.  As I listed my accomplishments, I wondered 'Who is this woman?  Do I know her?  Do I have multiple personalities?'  For if detectives arrived at my door to search for her, they wouldn't have found a shred of physical evidence. So I started searching for clues, rescuing proof that mountains had been climbed from cardboard boxes buried in the basement.  I took some of my favorite memorabilia ~ my book covers, the announcement of my column ~ to the framers.  When I hung them up in our living room, I stood back and looked at them the way a stranger might.  Wow!  It was astounding, exhilarating, stupefying."

~ Sarah Ban Breathnach, author.  A Time Warner Company.1995 SIMPLE ABUNDANCE.

Coming Down

 

Heading East Over The New Bridge

[Photos Wed., July 23 lbw]

 



"Fun is a much under-estimated activity.  In North America we tend to think of it as something trivial, as something that isn't part of the real world.  You do your work which is serious, and then when you want to do nothing, or nothing of any import ~ when you want to goof off ~ you have fun."

~ George Cohen, senior chairman of McDonald's Restaurants of Canada.  To Russia with Fries (1997) written with David Macfarlane.

"Peace is friendship/ friendship is love/ When you put them together/ It is one big hug."

~ Lina-Marie Leone

Thought for Today ~

"What has one enjoyed most in life?  I daresay it varies with different people.  For my own part, remembering and reflecting, it seems that it is almost always the quiet moments of everyday life.  Those are the times, certainly, when I have been happiest.  Adorning Nursie's old grey head with blue bows, playing with Tony, making a parting with a comb down his broad back, galloping on what I feel to be real horses across the river my fancy has set in the garden....Happy games with my mother.  My mother, later, reading Dickens to me, gradually getting sleepy, her spectacles half falling off her nose and her head dropping forward, and myself saying in an agonised voice. 'Mother, you're going to sleep', to which my mother with great dignity replies, 'Nothing of the kind, darling.  I am not in the least sleepy!'  A few minutes later she would be asleep.  I remember feeling how ridiculous she looked with her spectacles slipping off her nose and how much I loved her at that moment."

~ Agatha Christie ( 1890 - 1976) Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977.

Cayuga's Fire Station & EMS

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Writing ~

"I usually feel happier either writing things in longhand or typing them.  It is odd how hearing your own voice makes you self-conscious and unable to express yourself.  It was only about five or six years ago, after I had broken a wrist and was unable to use my right hand, that I started using a dictaphone, and gradually became used to the sound of my own voice.  The disadvantage of a dictaphone or tape recorder, however, is that it encourages you to be much too verbose.
"There is no doubt that the effort involved in typing or writing does help me in keeping to the point.  Economy of wording, I think, is particularly necessary in detective stories.  You don't want to hear the same thing rehashed three or four times over."

~ Agatha Christie (Sept. 15, 1890 - Jan. 12, 1976) Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, Collins, 1977.



The Neat Little Bookshop

Talbot Street (Hwy 3) & Thorburn

Cayuga's New Fire Station ~ Taking Shape

 

 

Smile for Today ~ On the subject of small talk

"Franklin Roosevelt found the polite small talk of social functions at the White House somewhat tedious.  He maintained that those present on such occasions rarely paid much attention to what was said to them.  To illustrate the point, he would sometimes amuse himself by greeting guests with the words, 'I murdered my grandmother this morning.'  The response was invariably one of polite approval.  On one occasion, however, the president happened upon an attentive listener.  On hearing Roosevelt's outrageous remark, the guest replied diplomatically, 'I'm sure she had it coming to her.'  (Maxwell Perkins, the distinguished editor, peppered his own small talk similarly at literary gatherings.  Evidently writers, as well as politicians, don't listen to one another.)"

~ THE LITTLE BROWN BOOK OF Anecdotes by Clifton Fadiman General Editor, 1983.

"Where Friends & Family Meet"

 

The Neat L'l Bookshop ~

 

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you:  the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.  If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."

~ Ernest Hemingway Old Newsman Writes.  From Esquire, Dec. 1934.

Dismantling the Old Bridge

There is no trail along this portion of the riverbank ~ only brush with a steep, muddy "slide" I assume used by adventurous kids.

Hearing voices in the trees at the top of the cliff, I replied and accepted a gentleman's assistance to get back up.

Looking upstream, the old abandoned Wabash/CN railway bridge.

[photos: lbw]

Looking upstream

[Photos taken Monday, July 14.]

 

 

 

[Tomorrow ~ The other side of the Bridge]

 





 

"Sir Henry Wotton. . .was a most dear lover, and a frequent practicer of the art of angling; of which he would say, 'it was an employment for his idle time, which was then not idly spent. .. a rest to his mind, a cheerer of his spirits, a diverter of sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moderator of passions, a procurer of contentedness; and that it begat habits of peace and patience in those that professed and practiced it.' "

~ Izaak Walton (1593 - 1683)
BARTLETT'S Familiar Quotations, 1992.

Smile for Today ~

"At present I'm in lodgings, and while they're quite good as far as lodgings go I can't ignore the blasted RADIO which seems a feature of everyone's life these days, and it prevents me from sitting thinking and scribbling in the evenings, yet if I grumbled my complaint would be regarded as eccentric as a complaint against the traffic or the birds or the children outside.  Do you have radios in Japan? or can you sit long silk-colored evenings wrapped in a cocoon of silence sipping sake, or whatever it is, while the hours pass over as lightly as glances?  If so, me for there.  It is on now, subjecting me to its pathological highpitched burble, damn it.  Excuse this outpouring.  Obviously I ought to live out in the moors somewhere."

~ Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985) English novelist, poet, librarian. In a letter to Dennis Enright, April 27, 1955.  Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940 - 1985, edited by Anthony Thwaite.

Perhaps *

Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,
And I shall see that still the skies are blue,
And feel once more I do not live in vain.
Although bereft of You.

Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet
Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay,
And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet,
Though You have passed away.

Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,
And crimson roses once again be fair,
And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,
Although You are not there.

Perhaps some day I shall not shrink in pain
To see the passing of the dying year,
And listen to Christmas songs again,
Although You cannot hear.

But though kind Time may many joys renew,
There is one greatest joy I shall not know
Again, because my heart for loss of You
Was broken, long ago.

*Poem written to her fiance Roland Leighton after he was killed.

~Vera Brittain (1893 -1970) British writer. [Vera lost four close friends in WWI, including her only brother and her fiance.  She became a pacifist for the rest of her life.]

Vera Brittain (1893 - 1970) V.A.D. Nurse

Shortly after British writer Vera Brittain's death, her papers were purchased by McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. 

Dr. Alan Bishop joined the English Department at Mac that year, and "having read and admired Testament of Youth, was soon drawn to exploring Brittain's unpublished writings.  Among them was a diary that she had begun as a schoolgirl, and continued as a personal and historical record of the War, until overcome by exhaustion and grief in 1917.  That diary impressed me deeply, not only as a war-record, but also as a moving account of love and loss which, partly owing to Vera Brittain's literary talent and ambition, has qualities of a tragic novel."*

Dr Bishop with the encouragement of Vera's Literary Executor, Paul Berry, decided to edit the diary for publication, using her intended title, Chronicle of Youth.

The Neat Little Bookshop is extremely pleased to invite you to meet Dr. Bishop in the bookshop on THURSDAY, JULY 17 at 1:00 p.m.  Everyone welcome.

~ *Dr. Alan Bishop, Youth and the Great War.

                                        THURSDAY, JULY 17 at 1:00 p.m.

[A canal in Germany was recently named after Vera Brittain. Vera had written a controversial paper in 1943 critizing saturation bombing of Germany. An interview with Vera's daughter, Baroness Shirley Williams can be found on BBC, July 2, 2014,Woman's Hour discussing the honour.]

British Author, Harold Acton,* was asked to perform at a Conservative Garden Fete.  He decided to recite [T. S. Eliot's] The Waste Land from beginning to end.  "His audience's good manners were severely tested, as this dirge for a godless civilization, delivered in Harold Acton's rich, resounding voice, swept irresistible above their heads;  and one or two old ladies, who were alarmed and horrified but thought that the reciter had such a 'nice, kind face,' rather than hurt the young man's feelings by getting up and leaving openly, were obliged to sink to their knees and creep away on all fours."

*(July 5, 1904 - February 27, 1994)


THE LITTLE, BROWN BOOK OF Anecdotes, Clifton Fadiman.

Accounting & Tax Services

R. S. ACCOUNTING & TAX SERVICES

R.S.Accounting is located at the corner of Talbot Rd (Hwy 3) and Cayuga Street.

 

 

 

Thought for Today ~

"We strongly support free speech and we believe that all authors and publishers must support the following fundamental freedoms:  freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.  These fundamental freedoms are embodied in the Canadian Charter of Rights."

~ Statement made by Avie Bennett, Chairman of McClelland and Steward Inc., rejecting a demand that a book be withdrawn from publication, Newsletter of the Canadian Centre of International PEN, Dec. 1990.

"...what is important about free speech in a democracy is not only that everyone has a right to express an opinion, however ill-considered, but that fools should have full liberty to speak so that they can be recognized to be fools."

~ Northrop Frye, cultural critic, Entry 774.  Notebook 1997.1. Northrop Frye Newsletter, Summer 1997.

Smile for Today ~

Beauty in the most unexpected places ~ A small green-leaf plant, decorated with artificial berries for commercial sales last Christmas, displays its true colours in July!

Wet Paint!

 

 Law Office Shawn Richarz

 

The Craftsman, his assistant & the Genie Lift

This beautiful landmark stands as a reminder of Cayuga's historical past.

Smile for Today ~

PLEASE WALK ON THE GRASS *

 

 

*Wording on signs in Toronto's public parks introduced by Thomas (Tommy) W. Thompson, first Parks Commissioner, Metropolitan Toronto (1955 - 81)

 



Thought for Today ~

"You think we are lonely when we are out on the land.  I tell you it's the people in the cities who are lonely."

~ Roger Kuptana

[John Robert Colombo's FAMOUS LASTING WORDS Great Canadian Quotations, Douglas & McIntyre Ltd., 2000.  Photo: lbw ]



"It is only after long practice and much interest in the work that one can set down plain truth, without over-embellishment or wandering from the point....When this is done even the truth itself sounds a little better than true, which is the basis of what is called literature."

~ Stephen Leacock (1869 - 1944) Canadian teacher, humourist, writer.

Selkirk ~ Haldimand County ON

Pretty in Pink ~

"Life's a pretty precious and wonderful thing.  You can't sit down and let it lap around you. . . you have to plunge into it;  you have to dive through it!  And you can't save it, you can't store it up; you can't horde it in a vault.  You've got to taste it;  you've got to use it.  The more you use the more you have. . . that's the miracle of it!"

~ Kyle Samuel Crichton (1896 - 1960) Author The Marx Brothers