Re; Record keeper or journalist? Unleashed Thoughts by Mandi Hargrave

I find Town Council meetings in Orangeville, under the watchful eye of the eminently personable and proficient Mayor Rob Adams, riveting; my mom, a crusty hazel McCallion -ish seventy nine (more "ish" than Mrs. McCallion really) years young, finds them so exciting she practically jumps up and raises he hand to try to participate in the frequent votes. We love our "smalltown" civic life and politics (if not the "big-time" accrued debts that will cost more than $1 million alone to service this year, a reality inherited by His Worship - something that makes even the redoubtable Mr. Church evasive and shuffling - and fiduciary paucity of which Mr. Adams is excruciatingly aware of at all times rather like one suffering impacted wisdom-teeth).

I have found in my life that when I have spoken of or written (alarmingly) of frustration or discontent with my externalities, the utterances invariably reflect more fully interiorly on me than on another. His Worship Mr. Adams, Jr., is a fantastic mayor for Orangeville at the present time: he offers great stability, perspicacity, and dignity to the office he clearly relishes. He allows all voices to be heard and respects every speaker. The Mayor has started well, from the moment he received the chain of office from his father, Mr. Adams, Q.C., Associate Judge (Province of Ontario), and has conducted himself excellently throughout, not even considering he's in business full-time and has four young children.

His Town Council meetings are efficient and are not drawn out, antagonistic, smarmy, quite sarcastic affairs like his predecessor's. This man clearly loves his wife and wants to get home to his children whom he adores (and to re-cycle!!), and to put his feet up after a long day. Thus his council-management is highly efficient without reducing effectiveness, clarity, thoroughness, or compassion one iota. Mr. Adams is a true son of Orangeville: he exudes quiet rapturous enthusiasm for this community like Emmerson did for Walden Pond' Rob's beloved mother Gwenyth is buried here (near to where our young fallen soldier has been laid to rest recently).

I think in many ways, and this is psychological speculation on my part - but Mr. Adams has become my friend over the last year as I have endeavoured to carry the Carnegie Library's banner high and into the public eye - that he revered his mother (perhaps as his father, Judge Adams, was building an estimable and busy career as a lawyer and a judge which busy-ness kept him away from home for doubtless multitudinous hours) who likely was around each day with her fine eldest son.

Mr. Adams has been unbelievably patient and tolerant with my musings on the Carnegie Library's (and the reading public's) behalf; he has been unbelievably patient and solicitous with my elderly mother who is a bit doddery. I fully believe that when he took the mayoralty, Rob did so - in part - knowing that his mom was watching his each and every movement from Heaven, and that he would always want her to be very proud of him in all his human interactions and decision making.

Ms Hargrave - who looks routinely bored at Town Council meetings - has obloquyed His Worship both callowly and shallowly, a common fault of bored youth. Perhaps she had hoped to become a journalist in the pattern of Anderson Cooper (or whatever the interesting guy with superb grey hair is called on American TV) or the CBC's magisterial Mrs. Barbara Frum. My elegant and highly intelligent first wife's central teaching to me is that a great deal of any given day is boring drudgery, repeated over and over ad infinitum; ad nauseam. Little in our civil society prepares us for this bitter reality: certainly not our schools where "fun" and group activities are the new yardsticks (metre-sticks now). We Canadians, expect nonstop exciting events and entertaining distractions. However, we learn to our sorrows, life teaches us this cannot be so.

President George bush's mother, Mrs. Barbara Bush, said that when the current President was small and growing with his brothers in a rambunctious Texas-fashion, she spent at least two hours a day - everyday - loving and attentively doing laundry for her sons. Such routine drudge tasks are increasingly shunned or farmed out in our busy highlyscheduled and activity-centred lives in North America; however, there are central character-building moments in all tasks where we must be "Marthas" and not "Marys."

All Canadians over age forty will have had months and even years of totally boring occupations. Ms Hargrave's writing reflects fully her boredom with her current tasking; it reflects very little on our fine Town Council's painstaking running. Were I in charge of the excellent Orangeville newspaper, our Citizen, I would set her the journalistic equivalent of laundry for the next six months - proofreading for misspellings. I can guarantee then that she would return to our fulsome Council meetings refreshed, with alacrity, and with a better, fresher, crisper attitude to future of our community and Town now carefully unfolding.

Rob Bredin Orangeville