Category: History

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New Found Land

Happy anniversary ‘Essence of Water’,

Peter invited me to be a contributor a while back, and I didn’t write for a while as I was afraid of messing up.  In this little harbor of the Internet, the tone is both serious and light.  We don’t need to write about deep thoughts, but we do because we care.  We see the world change in front of our mind’s eye, and we see its people struggle (including ourselves) to find meaning and a satisfying way of life.  I love that we get to talk about it here; and so here I am with my first post.
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Conspiracy theories

I had a wonderful closing lunch with my host in Tirana on Friday.  He took me to a very posh but very traditional restaurant in a modern building just off a small lake which is the centerpiece of the only proper large park in the city.  We went for a nice, if quite hot and humid walk along the lakeshore before heading back for our reservation.

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Valuation

I used to work for a bank called ATB Financial, which was really just a “doing business as” name for something called the Alberta Treasury Branches.  I have some of my fondest memories of my life from ATB, and met some of the best people on earth, period, during my time in Alberta.  ATB is essentially a regional bank (although please don’t tell the Canadian federal regulators it’s a bank) owned by the Province of Alberta, making it unique in North America as a full-service banking institution owned by the people of a state or province (there is a Bank of North Dakota which is state-owned, but doesn’t offer a full slate of banking services and doesn’t have an open-ended mandate).  I loved my time at ATB but a friend of mine reminded me tonight that I really loved the concept of ATB – the bank itself is, alas, just another human institution.

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Community affairs

I have friends from across the political spectrum – an increasingly rare and difficult thing to pull off these days – and while they have vastly different reasons for doing so, they all complain about “society” and its rejection of their values or political views or whatever.  My right-of-center friends complain about how media – both news media and movies and television – reflect a version of society that is uncomfortable for them, filled with gay marriage and casual sex and with no room for faith.  My left-of-center friends complain about the persistence of traditional notions of marriage, gender roles, and the pervasiveness of casual violence in society.  They all talk about how “society” seems to denigrate what they hold dear, and many of them talk about how they have felt isolated or rejected by society for the choices they have made.

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