mynas in Vancouver, and it seemed safe to assume that the species was represented in North America by Morris alone. As healthy as he was, he couldn’t last forever, and passed away in September of 2007. In a way, Morris was an icon of the changing face of North American avifauna.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Curse of the White Guys
REASON NUMBER FIVE FOR INTRODUCING A FOREIGN SPECIES: BECAUSE MY PREVIOUS CROP GOT WIPED OUT BY A DISEASE.
I N THE FIRST MUZZY MOMENTS after waking, I could make absolutely no sense of the world around me. Lisa was on the other side of the king-sized bed, which virtually guaranteed that I had not died and gone to hell. Instead, it started to look as though I might have landed in Heaven. I spied a package of anti-malarial tablets on the bedside table, and so assumed that we were somewhere tropical. Wherever it was, we had gone in style. The room, five-stars or close to it, was decorated in dark wood and brass. Over the dull hum of a ceiling fan I heard the crash of surf, and after retrieving my eyeglasses I spied palm trees. Wherever we were, it was very exotic. All I needed now was a good book and a nice cup of tea.
When it comes to an easy-reading book, it is hard to beat the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. When Doyle got tired of writing about the great detective, he turned his attentions to a dazzling array of other short fiction—dazzling mainly because it is so blindingly awful that even undergraduate students of Englishliterature are not required to read it. As evidence, I offer up the short story “De Profundis,” written by Doyle in 1892. In “De Profundis,” a man dies at sea from smallpox and his body is tossed overboard by his shipmates. A couple of weeks later, his corpse pops to the surface just as his widow sails by. She spots her husband’s corpse an instant before it is devoured by a passing shark. To me this is a shockingly bad storyline.
However, in “De Profundis,” Doyle also wrote about the production of tea in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, and is frequently quoted by persons proud of that industry. He wrote,
Those were the royal days of coffee-plantation in Ceylon, before a single season and a rotten fungus drove a whole community through years of despair to one of the greatest commercial victories with pluck and ingenuity ever won. Not often is it that men have the heart when their one great industry is withered to rear up in a few years another as rich to take its place, and the tea-fields of Ceylon are as true a monument to courage as is the lion at Waterloo.
It is a shame that such a good quotation comes from such an awful piece of piffle.
I had been drowning in tea since childhood, but I really didn’t know much about the life of tea before it hits the hot water. And so, when the opportunity came to attend the wedding of friends on the island of Sri Lanka, coupled with a trip to see tea in a field instead of just a cup, I couldn’t resist.
Charu Chandrasekera has enough personality for three people. She has deep copper skin and broody eyes, and I have never seen her in a mellow mood. When she arrived at the University of Calgary to begin graduate studies in medical physiology, the match between Charu and her supervisor was gritty, bordering on incandescent. After consulting with a graduate student advisor, Charu was directed to speak with my wife, Lisa, a little further along in her graduate degree. Knowing many of the pitfalls, Lisa helpedCharu avoid some of the nastier ones. Charu came to think of Lisa as a big sister, and me as a big brother by extension.
Charu eventually took up with fellow Sri Lankan Chaminda Basnayake, who was working toward a Ph.D. in engineering. Chaminda has an unfair advantage over other males; he is impossibly handsome, but in a boy-like unthreatening way. Chaminda saw Charu in all of her moods and loved each of them. The fullness of time saw them married in Prince Edward Island, but something was left unfinished. The
CHAPTER FIVE
The Curse of the White Guys
REASON NUMBER FIVE FOR INTRODUCING A FOREIGN SPECIES: BECAUSE MY PREVIOUS CROP GOT WIPED OUT BY A DISEASE.
I N THE FIRST MUZZY MOMENTS after waking, I could make absolutely no sense of the world around me. Lisa was on the other side of the king-sized bed, which virtually guaranteed that I had not died and gone to hell. Instead, it started to look as though I might have landed in Heaven. I spied a package of anti-malarial tablets on the bedside table, and so assumed that we were somewhere tropical. Wherever it was, we had gone in style. The room, five-stars or close to it, was decorated in dark wood and brass. Over the dull hum of a ceiling fan I heard the crash of surf, and after retrieving my eyeglasses I spied palm trees. Wherever we were, it was very exotic. All I needed now was a good book and a nice cup of tea.
When it comes to an easy-reading book, it is hard to beat the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. When Doyle got tired of writing about the great detective, he turned his attentions to a dazzling array of other short fiction—dazzling mainly because it is so blindingly awful that even undergraduate students of Englishliterature are not required to read it. As evidence, I offer up the short story “De Profundis,” written by Doyle in 1892. In “De Profundis,” a man dies at sea from smallpox and his body is tossed overboard by his shipmates. A couple of weeks later, his corpse pops to the surface just as his widow sails by. She spots her husband’s corpse an instant before it is devoured by a passing shark. To me this is a shockingly bad storyline.
However, in “De Profundis,” Doyle also wrote about the production of tea in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, and is frequently quoted by persons proud of that industry. He wrote,
Those were the royal days of coffee-plantation in Ceylon, before a single season and a rotten fungus drove a whole community through years of despair to one of the greatest commercial victories with pluck and ingenuity ever won. Not often is it that men have the heart when their one great industry is withered to rear up in a few years another as rich to take its place, and the tea-fields of Ceylon are as true a monument to courage as is the lion at Waterloo.
It is a shame that such a good quotation comes from such an awful piece of piffle.
I had been drowning in tea since childhood, but I really didn’t know much about the life of tea before it hits the hot water. And so, when the opportunity came to attend the wedding of friends on the island of Sri Lanka, coupled with a trip to see tea in a field instead of just a cup, I couldn’t resist.
Charu Chandrasekera has enough personality for three people. She has deep copper skin and broody eyes, and I have never seen her in a mellow mood. When she arrived at the University of Calgary to begin graduate studies in medical physiology, the match between Charu and her supervisor was gritty, bordering on incandescent. After consulting with a graduate student advisor, Charu was directed to speak with my wife, Lisa, a little further along in her graduate degree. Knowing many of the pitfalls, Lisa helpedCharu avoid some of the nastier ones. Charu came to think of Lisa as a big sister, and me as a big brother by extension.
Charu eventually took up with fellow Sri Lankan Chaminda Basnayake, who was working toward a Ph.D. in engineering. Chaminda has an unfair advantage over other males; he is impossibly handsome, but in a boy-like unthreatening way. Chaminda saw Charu in all of her moods and loved each of them. The fullness of time saw them married in Prince Edward Island, but something was left unfinished. The
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