This notice is for all of you out there who are members of Dunvegan’s Kenyon Presbyterian Church… or are new to the community and miss the camaraderie of your former place of worship. Commencing this Sunday, May 1st — and continuing through to the end of August — worship services at our lovely stone kirk will start at 9:30 a.m. rather than 11:00 a.m. Interim moderator, Jim Ferrier, asked me to extend an invitation to one and all to join them for worship, and fellowship, in this Eastertide season and beyond.
Clicks on the clock
Last week, I mentioned that the Glengarry Pioneer Museum is actively looking to recruit new volunteers. Naturally, they would love to hear from young people with vim and vigour who are looking to round out their résumé in exchange for a loan of their strength and stamina. However, the museum would also like to hear from folks with a few more ‘clicks on the clock’… empty nesters who want to combine their vocational experience with their avocational passions and discover a really rewarding way to get stuck in with the Glengarry community.
A perfect example is someone the GPM’s curator, Jennifer Black, introduced me to a few weeks ago: Alison Hall. She and her husband moved to the area from Dorval seven years ago. They live on the outskirts of Alexandria and, as gardening is one of her passions, she is a member of the Maxville Horticultural Society. In addition, for several years now, she has been a part of the dedicated team of ‘green thumbers’ that maintains the museum’s gardens.
I asked Alison how she first got involved with the Dunvegan museum and it turns out former GPM Chair Bill Gilsdorf snagged her at a Shakespeare in the Field performance. “After attending several other museum events, I became a lifetime member… and then joined the garden team,” Alison told me in an email. “I’m looking forward to working closely with the team again after two years of keeping our distance.”
This year, Alison is expanding her role at the GPM by combining her love of horticulture with her graphic design talents. For starters, she’s working with Jennifer on outdoor signage for the Star Inn garden that highlights the importance of herbs in the lives of pioneers, both medicinal and culinary. (Incidentally, this signage project was made possible by a recent donation from the horticultural society.) In addition, Alison has offered to put together a one-page ‘garden tour’ handout and has joined Marlie Tilker’s Glengarry Honey Fair committee.
If you’d like to see an example of Alison’s professional work, her most recent project was the design of a book about the buildings of Central Experimental Farms in Ottawa titled: Building Canada’s Farm. I’ve passed by ‘The Farm’ for years without giving it a second thought. After just skimming this lovely book, I can see that this was a big mistake. Copies of Alison’s illustrated guide to the buildings at Canada’s Central Experimental Farm are on sale at the museum’s gift shop. However, I suspect they’ll go quickly. To close off the e-interview, I asked Alison to sum up her time at the GPM. “The museum really appreciates their volunteers and treats us very well,” she wrote. “It is a pleasure to be involved in any aspect of supporting this important local museum.”
Buffaloes to boogies
While tiptoeing through past issues of the News on the Glengarry County Archives website, I came across a phrase I’d never seen before. In the Dunvegan column for January 5th, 1900, our hamlet’s anonymous correspondent wrote: “The scarcity of snow prevented many last week from participating in such holiday sports as ‘sleighing the dears and taking comfort among the buffaloes’.” I consulted Dr. Google, but in not one of the other occurrences of this unusual phrase that I came across — and there were not many — was the expression explained. However, the few references I did find all had one thing in common: they dated from about 1850 to 1900.
Like most idioms, this one is no doubt a product of its time. The Grammarist website defines an idiom as, “a phrase that is more than the sum of its parts, or in other words, has more of a meaning than the individual words used in the phrase.” For example, nine shepherds for ten sheep, pay the piper and jump the gun. The problem is that some idioms time travel well and others don’t. This is a representative of the latter.
My assumption was that ‘sleighing the dears’ and ‘taking comfort among the buffaloes’ were references to the 19th century equivalents of getting to one of the metaphoric ‘first, second and third base’ young lads of my generation snickered about, but rarely reached. But what do I know? So I asked persons older and wiser than I.
Ken McEwen, a frequent contributor to this column, wasn’t even born until thirty years after this expression went out of vogue. Nevertheless, he ventured that it was a play on words that might translate to “there is not enough snow for sleighing with the girls and cuddling with them under the buffalo robes.” As an RCMP constable in the early 50s, Ken learned just how warm and cozy buffalo fur could be. “When stationed in Saskatchewan, we were fitted out with three-quarter length buffalo coats,” Ken wrote me in an email. “Wearing them and a fur hat, one could withstand a prairie blizzard.”
David Anderson lives and breathes history and agreed with Ken’s play-on-words assessment. In fact, he even sent me a link to the sheet music for “Slaying the Deer,” a song written and composed by Samuel Lover in 1847. Part of the Smithsonian collection, the main image on the sheet music’s cover features hunters and hounds chasing a deer, while an image lower down on the page shows a man and woman riding together in a sleigh. This under-image is titled ‘Sleighing the Dear,’ which to quote from the item’s description, “is a play on words on the song’s title referring to the romancing of a woman by taking her on a sleigh ride.” David went on to say, “the popular jingle-bellish sport of sleighing the dears faded when ‘bundling in the rumble seat’ became easier.” Which I suggest was, in turn, supplanted with odes to ‘doing the backseat boogie’ and then ‘joining the mile-high club.’
Here’s another idiom for you: “there’s nothing new under the sun.”
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