That's what John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, called

his 1941 book of reminiscences. An 'M h-t-d' is a repository of memories in which one can revisit past times, places, people and events. This column will identify its scribe as having a long memory. . . .

For all those who own or rent summer homes, returning each July/August to a lakeside cottage is something like reopening those boxes of Christmas decorations in midDecember.

Each occasion is a reminder of so many years past. If the boathouse walls are not decorated with licences and regatta posters, the dock or the beach is reminiscent of now-grown children diving or paddling there. The sound of their frolics echoes back over the intervening time. Scenes from a past, revered or regretted, pop up on one's memory screen just as they do when strings of tree lights are unwound from sleeves of rolled newspapers that have survived since the times when we had to put up the tree ourselves and little children "helped" us. And there are those ornaments that evoke the cry "Look! Remember when we got this? Granny and Grandpa were still here".

I never walk barefoot in the sand or catch the scent of juniper on a hot summer day without remembering the cottage we rented annually from the aging Misses Wiley, next to the McKerrolls, at Bruce Beach. Two generations later, one has vivid memories of the sand castles and pyramids of stones that we built, all of them to be carried away by the elements or by wanton destruction - so much like the times through which we were later to live. Sic transit omnia except, of course, the memories. People may have left us for better worlds but the rugs they hooked, the cushion covers they made, the books and pictures they left, are still with us. And so is that open space, now vacant of a Sunday morning, where the cottagers, several of them Presbyterian ministers vacationing from city pulpits, once met for community worship before we found ourselves in this no-man's-land of open Sundays and closing churches - and of alien religious persuasions that generate violence and destruction.

I remember my mother preparing our city house for the family's month at the lake. Newsprint was put under moveable cushions on the chesterfield and chairs. All was sprayed for moths and covered by bed sheets, protection from dust. The breadman, the milkman and the iceman had all been notified of our expected return date. The refrigerator was emptied of food and its drip pan left dry. Was that in expectation that Dad, who would be alone in the house at least for two weeks, would eat out each night, perhaps at the local Honey Dew or at Child's restaurant downtown? Perhaps he might splurge and go to the Royal York or the Walker House.

I remember, at another time of year, the autumn coal deliveries. Every house had a coal bin in the cellar, well lined against escaping black dust. The shiny nuggets were delivered through a chute into an open basement window. I can still hear the sound of them tumbling in. When the heating season began fuel was then relayed shovel by shovel to the furnace. Dampers upstairs were opened and closed. The resulting ashes were put into "ash cans" that were put out curb-side for the garbage collectors whom some still called, appropriately, dustmen. In freezing weather, ashes were sprinkled on icy pavements. Like the roadway manure from wartime delivery horses - motor fuel was rationed - it all had to be swept up later. The animal droppings produced great roses when summer returned.

Those were the days when Jim Hunter rattled out the news nightly on CFRB, unless one preferred Lowell Thomas from south of the border. Wes McKnight gave us the sports news, implying that Beehive Corn Syrup was better than steroids for athletes of any age. And who remembers Orangeville's Claire Wallace with her 5.30 p.m. 'Teatime Topics' program?

I never hear her Spanish theme music (Ravel?) without remembering 'Dum-dada, dum-dada, dum-dada, dum dum dum', etc. In those days, just before television, radio was all we had. Then for two decades I, like most people, was a T.V. addict. In the past 10 years, those intrusive commercials have driven me first to tuning them out and then to avoiding television; 90% of the "messages" are unimaginative and boring and, like telemarketers, a ruddy nuisance. If television without five commercials every 10 minutes must die, let it do so. Let news and entertainment go somewhere else.

I remember the days when everyone had a front veranda as well as a backyard with a clothesline on which Monday's laundry hung to dry and on which dust was beaten out of rugs with a heavy wire carpet beater. Every house had a letter box and a milk box and every dining room a plate rail. In the street there were the knife grinders with their handbells, the delivery people mentioned above and the Depression street vendors who sold fruit and baked goods. And there were the rag peddlers with wagons laden with old mattresses and other household junk.

Our streets today are never so interesting to watch from our verandas (if any) as they were back then. Then, too, one remembers when The Toronto Star's home delivery meant throwing the paper right to your door. Now it means firing it from a car in a drive-by shootout anywhere it's convenient to the driver. That's why many hereabouts do not read The Star.

These are memories from a more humane and compassionate time. In the 1930s my parents provided a weekly bath and laundered clothing for Martin, an indigent who lived in Maria Street, then the least favoured address in West Toronto.

Do we need another Depression or a war to reawaken our charitable sensibilities? So many memories from the past century endure. Remember Sunnyside and its amusements, the days before the '400' highways? And when Betty Kennedy was on the radio daily and when Kate Aitken baked and talked with Elwood Glover?

Memory holds those doors wide open to me.