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While the new prime minister is frantically trying to decide where to stick our Israel embassy, and most of my seriousâ€"minded friends are vaguely programâ€" ming their lives around the contingency of the sky dropping in on them in the next couple of weeks, I have been thinking about yellow. I don‘t normally think about yellow. The whole thing started with me nipping along through .Guelph, going a few kilometres over whaâ€" tever the limit was, when I spotted a bright yellow car parked up ahead. If it had been blue and white or black and white, I would have driven ahead to my doom. But something made me focus on that yellow sedan until a voice within me screamed RADAR! As I drove by, the man in blueâ€" gave me a strange look. In the time it took me to drive by him two bikes and five pedestrians passed me going the same way. I didn‘t think about yellow again until I got to the next block and I passed a fire station. They had a couple of vintage ladder trucks in bright red and what was obviously their newest acquisition, a pumper, in screaming yellow. I always thought red was the eaâ€" siest colour to see, and that‘s why these things are painted crimson so you get a few seconds to drive up It is embarrassing, confusing. and stupid. Now, with a stapler, their essays will be all in one piece, though it‘s quite possible they will find a piece of fingerâ€"skin stapled to the essay. I‘m not much good with compliâ€" cated machinery Not to be outdoné on my birthday, I bought myself a present â€" a couple of fair belts of a wellâ€"known arthritis reliever. It comes in a brown paper bag. and. thanks to a greedy provincial government. is a leader I still have a copy of that book, but it doesn‘t sound nearly as farâ€"fetched in view of an article in the most recent issue of Quest, ‘"Canada‘s Urban Magazine®‘. We all reacted differently. The insurance company sent me a 30â€"cent birthday card, signed by a guy I never heard of. He‘s about the eighth agent who has wished me a happy birthday, over the past four deâ€" cades. I‘ve probably outlived the other seven. My wife, at a loss to buy a gift for the man who has everything, bought me a stapler. Very good. I am conâ€" stantly coming home with masses of essays to mark, none of them stapled together. As a consequence, I am constantly getting pages of one student‘s essay mixed in with pages of another student‘s essay, with discombobulating results. For example, on page 4 of Joe‘s essay. he finds writâ€" ten, ‘"Well said, Linda. An excellent parallel."" And on page 7 of Linda‘s essay. she might find."Right to the point, Joe." The article called The Book Banners, is primarily about a group who call themselves Renaissance Interâ€" national. The group is headed by a selfâ€"proclaimed evangelist, Ken Campbell. There was a book I read in high school, called Fahrenheit 451. I enjoyed it because it was a science fiction novel, and I remember thinking how farâ€" fetched it sounded at the time. The story was about a society where it was against the law to read, buy or collect books of any sort. When they were discovered in someone‘s possession, the ‘‘fire department‘‘ rushed to the scene, sprayed them with gas and burned them. Campbell and a group of loyal followers, spend their time going through books used in Canadian High School English courses, and deciding whether any Had a birthday the other day. Nobody remembered it except me, my wife, and the North American Life Assurance Company . I, because I was one year older and not dead yet. My wife for roughly the same reason. And the insurance company like wise. They don‘t have to pay off that thousand dollars, and can go on investing, at huge inâ€" terest rates, that $12.00 annual premium my mother made me take out when I was sixteen. By Geoff Hoile Howard Elliott given book is fit to be taught to "our children‘"‘. Renâ€" aissance International is also known for protesting ‘"family life" (sex education) programs in our high schools. The main aim of this group is supposed to be to ‘"reâ€" tain the Judeoâ€"Christian ethic as a cornerstone of the educational system‘"‘. Rarely, if ever, have I heard an organization or its leader spout such unadulterated, selfâ€"righteous, narâ€" rowâ€"minded bull. â€" According to Campbell and cohorts, The Diviners, a winner of the 1975 Governor General‘s award for liâ€" terature, is unfit to be taught in high school. So is J. D. Salinger‘s classic novel, The Catcher In The Rye, and Alice Munroe‘s Lives Of Girls And Women, W.O. Mitâ€" chell‘s Who Has Seen The Wind and even John Steinâ€" beck‘s Of Mice and Men. If Campbell and his group have their way, high school and public school students may never discover the joy of reading a creatively written novel. on somebody‘s front lawn when they come rocketing out of that big area where the guys have their poker parties. _ . , So why the sudden change to yellow? By now I was out of Guelph and proceeding along a new stetch of highway 7 that is restricted to single lane traffic because they are painting a I needed help. A friend of mine who is supposed to know about colours and their various qualities told me that red is overâ€"rated and yellow is now in. Red is definitely a hot colour, but yellow excites your visual senses and is more easily seen. Trust Kodak to be getting us all worked up all these years with a yellow box. No wonder there are so many camera nuts walking around loose. â€" McDonald‘s, those sly devils, aren‘t missing any tricks. They use both red and yellow on their logo. new...aaagh....yellow line down the middle of the road. I‘m beginning to get paranoid about this whole thing. My friend suggested that more people would read the Chronicle if we used yellow newsprint instead of the conventional white. Aside from not giving our competitors any straight lines in reference to the coâ€" Drop in on their greatâ€"uncle Ivan,. at his beautiful rustic retreat on Calumet Island. Then to Green Lake, on the Quebec side, where I spent my happiest childâ€" hood summers. Down along the river to Ottawa, and cousins galore. Maybe drop in on Joe Clark and give The card was innocuous. The stapler didn‘t do much harm either, except for the two staples I put into my thumb while trying it out. A little thumbâ€"sucking, not at all an unpleasant activity, cured that. It was my own present that did the damage. Carried away by a flood of birthday sentimentality and malt, I decided to take my daughter, grandsons, and wife on a trip this summer. â€" I felt a warm flood of kinship or something, and made up my mind that I was going to visit my ain folk, show off my clever and beautiful daughter to aunts and things who haven‘t seen her since she was in diapers, and proudly parade my grandboys to greatâ€" aunts, second cousins, and anyone else who would look at them, or put up with them. This wasn‘t so bad. It‘s not far out or weird to take your mob for a campingâ€"visiting trip. At the time, it seemed a great idea. Even my old lady was lukeâ€" warmly interested. My daughter was excited. The boys were ecstatic. Ah, yes. A sweep down and around old Ontario. Through Algonquin Park, camping amid the bears and deer and hooligans. Visit my niece at Pembroke, who has a kid the right age, five. Dig out old recluse Don McCuaig at Renfrew and catch some trout in his pond. Across the Ottawa River at Portage du Fort, and a visit to their greatâ€"grandmother‘s home, sitting on an island, high above the river. in the inflation rate According to Hoile Bill Smiley I wish "Rev.""* Campbell would read that book, but I suppose that‘s about as likely as having a large chunk of Skylab land on him. The most amazing thing about this man is the fact that in the last 20 years, he‘s never read a novel. The guy is actually promoting illiteracy, as if we don‘t have enough of that in our school system. If the success of Renaissance International and groups like it continues, I shudder to think of what shape our English teaching may take in future. Perhaps, "Reverend** Campbell, you‘d be happier if students spent their English classes reading Harâ€" lequin Romances. _ And most terrifying to me, is the fact that Renaisâ€" sance International is having a great deal of success. Many teachers and staff members have found themâ€" selves facing a wave of irate parents, sporting books with all the dirty words underlined in red ink. As I said, Fehrenheit 451 may no longer be science fiction. lour of journalism we choose to print in our tabloid, I personally felt it might not be good for our readers if we used subtle chmE:ic technique to excite their inâ€" terest in the local news. As an alternate choice my friend suggested a backâ€" ground of green since, as he claimed, it has a relaxing influence on people. Yellow on green, he says, is the ideal combination, although he didn‘t say exactly why. Not waiting for me to ask him to run through that one a second time, he raced ahead to give the exâ€" ample of the various school boards around the country making the switch from blackboards to green boards in an attempt to soothe the students. While I was tryâ€" ing to figure out what the example was supposed to prove, he went on to complain that the school boards, being a bunch of pennyâ€"pinchers, had not thrown out their fiveâ€"year inventory of white chalk in favour of the more exciting yellow, and consequently they had ruined the whole effect. I guess there are a lot of things we could in‘fprove by colouring yellow, like golf balls.... Being a very busy and highly excitable type of felâ€" low, my friend raced off to keep an appointment and le{t me standing around still thinking about yellow. That‘s going to be a couple of hundred bucks a week. plus grub and gas and everything that goes with it. It‘s going to cost me more than a trip to Europe. I shoulda stood in bed on my birthday So the answer seems to be a camper, one of those great, ugly things that pollute the high ways and drive other drivers crazy. I‘m too old for tenting on the old campâ€"ground, with an insomniac wife and two kids who would be pulling out the tentâ€"pegs as fast as I drove them. And things that go bump in the night. My first throught was scrounging on relatives, with the odd night in motel rooms. A modest trip. Then I began to realize that two motel rooms would be at least fifty bucks a night. And also that five of us can‘t come crashing in on some poor aunt who has one spare bedroom. Then a swing down to the St. Lawrence Seaway, see another sister, and then the long swing home, campâ€" ing and cooking out, and detouring to things like Niaâ€" gara Falls, the weekly newspapers‘ convention in Toronto, the Stratford Festival, and any zoos or points of interest along the way. Now, I didn‘t say all these things. But they are starting to build up. What began as a germ, a oneâ€"week swing through the Ottawa Valley, has turned into a threeâ€"week Grand Tour. Show the boys the swimmingâ€"place where I won prizes, the park where I kissed girls, the sandpit where I had my first smoke, the old Presbyterian manse where I learned to swear (from listening to my father, ear against the pipe, as he cursed the furâ€" nace). him a tip or two. Then to Perth, where I grew up. June 27, 1979 â€" Page 7