One Grumpy Old Man's Opinion

What makes a good teacher ? Like art and pornography, you know it when you see it. Opinions can vary, and I’ve had school administrators who wouldn’t recognize a good teacher if they bumped into Socrates in the Athenian marketplace, or listened to Jesus in a Jerusalem temple.

Full disclosure – I taught for thirty one years. Was I any good ? Not for me to judge. I probably connected with some, and missed the mark with others. I’ve heard it said that everyone deserves to have had one excellent teacher in their lifetime and if you’ve had two then consider yourself extremely fortunate.

Me ? I’m a baby boomer. My father was the director of the Lakeshore School Board in Montreal and he said that in order to hire enough teachers to fill up the classrooms during those boom years the criteria was simple. Hold a mirror in front of an applicant’s mouth and if the glass fogged up then they were in. So I’ve had a lot of forgettable pedagogues lecture me in a lot of  classrooms where I can’t say I remember a whole lot of what I’ve heard. But then again, I’ve suffered more than a few concussions in my day as well.

Not that anything about the job is easy. My father had been an outstanding teacher before rising  to the top of the educational heap as the Director of the Council of Ministers of Education.At least that’s what he told me. I don’t even know what that job entailed except that he was able to go on a lot of sweet trips. But I do remember when my younger brother was having trouble learning how to read.  Since his son’s teacher was doing such a poor job, my father decided to put his own expertise to use. Grabbing some recipe cards from a kitchen drawer he wrote down some of the key words that were causing difficulties for  my backward brother.   ‘Who, what, when , where, why’ and a number of others that escape me now. He strode confidently into the bedroom that the two of us shared and held up the ‘why’ card.

“What !,” my brother blurted out. He didn’t have a clue. My father shook his head. Undeterred at the minor blip, he then held out the ‘where’ card.

“When ?” my brother guessed. He was less confident now and I was enjoying it immensely. I suppressed a giggle and my father gave me the glare that could only mean I better get myself under control…or else. Despite his exalted status in the educational world he wasn’t above using a little corporal punishment when more sophisticated, psychological methods were too slow to produce results. The three of us braced for one final test. My father lit a cigarette, probably hoping for some comfort in case his third son proved himself as hopelessly illiterate as an Arkansas hillbilly. He held up the ‘where’ card with a dramatic flourish, as if this would help cue a correct answer. My brother swallowed hard, knowing that this could be the third strike. He wasn’t as used to being disciplined as my older brother and me. Speaking now from experience, a parent is running out of energy by the third child. My sister, the fourth child, never seemed to receive a spanking at all.

“Wheeennnn,” my brother dragged it slowly, figuring that that card would have to show up sooner or later. I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing so hard  that I had to dive onto my bed and stick my head into the pillow. I looked up in self-preservation, wondering whether I’d have to protect my posterior, only to be met by my father’s red glare, a look I knew only too well. But he only inhaled deeply on his cigarette and then blew the smoke out his nose. He tossed the cue cards, his now- seemingly useless teaching aid, on the bed. “Study those cards”, he warned my unstudious brother. “I’ll be back for another test.”

And that was it. My brother Terry was never treated to another of my father’s lesson plans again. He did learn how to read, however. I don’t know how.

Terry did have the last laugh at my expense, however. It was years later. I was in my early twenties. I was, as they used to so kindly say, between jobs. I had played a year of hockey  in something called the British Premier Ice Hockey Association and had enjoyed it , but not wanting to live under seemingly sunless Scottish skies for the next ten years, had come home again. I worked at landscaping in Toronto, then went out to Alberta to work on construction. After a while, I landed a job as a manager-trainee in Edmonton for the Bay. I had  always hated even going into retail stores, never being a shopper, and now I found myself an unhappy lackey dragging myself around the toy department working under a manager I had nicknamed ‘Pigface’. Luckily for me he never found out that I thought he was the spitting image of Porky Pig. I came home and applied to teachers’ college.

My sorrowful predicament pleased my younger brother to no end. Despite the fact that he wasn’t up to much himself, he decided to point out my desperate straits while he, my father and I were watching television.

“David,” he stated firmly, “you better not screw this up.” He was getting our father’s attention as well. “You couldn’t make it in hockey, you don’t want to work in construction or landscaping all your life, and now you’ve messed up  in business.” Out of the corner of my eye I could see my father reaching for his pack of cigarettes. My brother continued in his gleeful analysis of my failures, reaching for the climax.

“If you don’t make it in teaching, then you’re just about done,” he decided, using one of my grandfather’s favourite lines about “being done” the way Grandpa used to describe sending his steers to the abattoir. My father was listening. He took a long drag, held it for a second, exhaled, and then nodded in agreement.

That fall I headed to teachers’ college. No pressure whatsoever. (to be continued.)

“Do you even know what you’re talking about, Daddy?”

Yes, of course….well, maybe sometimes…. ummm, well….

That was my daughter Rachelle’s pointed question after I was giving my opinion about modern music, or what people spend their time watching on YouTube or maybe what they put up on Facebook. In other words, things that confound me completely.

In other words, I’m just living up to the name of the blog that I’ve started. I remember listening to my Uncle Earle, my mother’s only brother, as I grew up and helped him on his farm. We used to spend a lot of time  together during my formative years. I used to think he was old and had a lot of wild, outdated opinions. Now I agree with a lot of them.

Even though his formal education ended after Grade 10 and a short diploma course in agriculture from Macdonald College outside of Montreal he had opinions on everything. He shared them with me as we did chores around his farm. He was a unlingual, anglophone rural Quebecer whose only sister had married a Frenchman from Montreal, as my father was known in those parts. I must admit that I liked to bait him at times.

“What did you think when you found out that your sister was marrying a Frenchman,” I asked him one time while we were collecting eggs.

“No comment,” was his terse reply.

Among the many irritations that stood highest on his list  were the Montreal Canadiens, the governing Liberal party and especially Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

“You can’t have lawyers running the goddam country.”

“Half the bullshit coming out of Montreal is from the Forum and those eggsucking, goddam no-good Montreal Canadiens.”

“With all the problems we have in this country, all Trudeau ever talks about is bilingualism and the goddam Constitution. That bald-headed bastard.” The fact that Uncle Earle was bald himself was never lost on my father, who always had a full head of hair. We never failed to point out the irony in that.

Our heated arguments energized each other as we threw bales  around the hay mow and walked around the farm fixing fences. I was an unabashed fan of Prime Minister Trudeau and I worshipped at the altar of the Montreal Canadiens. Working with my uncle was a great education in itself, not the least of which was helping in the development of a thicker skin. I think he was always a little defensive about his lack of more formal education, but he had a funny way of showing it.

“Some people go to university and get a degree in history. What the hell good is that going to do them?”

I happened to be studying for a degree in history and political science at the time.

I wasn’t alone in being his sparring partner. My father often showed me the way. I remember Dad getting back from a trip to China in the late ’70’s from an educational conference and talking about it with Earle.

“Now none of those fellas can speak English at all?” my uncle inquired.

“”No, they’re all ignorant,” my father answered, enjoying a good guffaw at my uncle’s expense.

I don’t laugh at him much anymore. He died of cancer in 1998 at the age of eighty, even though he was still working in the woods and going bowling seemingly just weeks before his death. It’s funny how often I say to family members that I’ve taken on many of my uncle’s views and opinions, such as how Trudeau’s obsession with bilingualism and the constitution directed a lot of attention away from the economy, and how he thought we were moving away from a healthy dose of self-reliance and responsibility and more and more to blaming others when things in our own lives went wrong. You know, grumpy old men’s ways of thinking about things. The way I think.

But he’ll never change my opinion on the Montreal Canadiens !

It’s said that everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news that J.F.K. was shot. I do. I was seven years old, it was a dreary November day in Montreal, and I just wanted my mother to get up from the nap she was having and make my supper. I don’t know if she was lying down because of the tragic news or if it was because of the daily grind of caring for  four young kids, including a newborn. My dad had a successful career going, but the father’s job description in the early 60’s  didn’t include changing diapers and helping with supper. I tried following that model during my own early years of marriage, but it didn’t work out so well for me. It’s one of the many reasons I still idolize my father.The only politician’s face I could picture was the recently -defeated Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and I remember thinking, “Why’s everyone so upset?”

A different age, a different time. Those thousand days of the Kennedy administration have since been dubbed Camelot, but I’m not sure why, unless Sir Lancelot and King Arthur were also having their way with every damsel-in-distress that they carried home across their saddles. It seems as if every second female, from Shirley MacLaine and Marilyn Monroe, to the office girl who cleared the coffee cups after the White House meetings, had a clandestine tryst with Mr. President. And remember, this was a man who suffered from a bad back, migraine headaches and numerous other ailments. Viagara was not  even a thought in a pharmacist’s wildest imagination. The man was a giant.

Of course, there was no way of foreseeing that the hungry seven year old in 1963 would become the astute political analyst now writing these lines. That afternoon the news affected me so slightly that I can remember gathering up my road hockey stick and tennis ball and going out to take slap shots at Gordie Robertson. It’s said that dying young, especially from assassination, is a wise career choice. At least as far as becoming a legend is concerned.

J.F.K.’s human weaknesses notwithstanding, I think we all look back at that time with wistful nostalgia. A glamorous wife and beautiful family, the Cuban Missile Crisis averted, the Peace Corps begun and Vietnam not yet the controversial quagmire that it was to become. When was the last time that any country had such an attractive, witty and inspiring leader ? Even when he pronounced himself to be a jelly doughnut in Berlin (problem in translation) he was cheered wildly.

It has been said that there have been 40 000 books written on the subject of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Probably only Jesus, Napoleon and Alexander the Great surpass that number.

I only wonder if we ever will really get to the bottom of all those conspiracy theories ?

I’m not alone in noting that Canadian war veterans  were never enthusiastic about recounting their experiences. That goes for veterans of both world wars, and there were even a good number of Great War survivors still around while I was growing up. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was not even recognized as existing back then and former fighting men were just expected to come home and get back on the job, making the Canadian economy great.

The former soldier that I have the strongest memories of was mon Oncle Jacques. He was actually my father’s uncle and so of course was my great uncle. His family moved from a small village in the Gaspe Peninsula to the growing city of Montreal before the start of the Roaring Twenties. He was one of eleven surviving children and decided for himself in Grade 4 that he would attend school in English because he thought it would be a good thing if every Canadian were bilingual. All his life , however, he spoke the language of Shakespeare with a heavy French-Canadian accent. My siblings and I thought it was hilarious the way he always put the emphasis on the wrong syllable when speaking English. This was in the days before sensitivity training and laughing at somebody’s accent was considered just good fun.

Besides a couple of young siblings’ deaths in the Gaspe, his sister, my father’s mother, died in Montreal when she was thirty two years old, after working for twenty years in a textile factory. Uncle Jacques helped raise my father who was now an orphan. My grandfather was already dead, having died before my father’s first birthday.

Jacques own domestic life was far from marital bliss. His first child died at birth, and his young wife died herself in childbirth with another stillborn baby a year later. Jacques joined the Canadian merchant marine where his boat was sunk by the Germans. He survived, made it home and joined the army.

The only memories we kids were able to pry out of him was how as a radio man landing on Juno Beach he dropped his gear because it was slowing him down and ran for cover, finding shelter behind a couple of already-dead bodies.

Returning to Canada he made his living as a stationary engineer, looking after the heating and cooling systems in factories in Montreal. He lived in Verdun, always alone in an apartment with a balcony and a spiral staircase and we visited him often, and he came out frequently to our West Island home as well. He loved watching baseball and hockey and he loved making up elaborate betting pools for us kids. Before the war he had run an illegal gambling site on a boat in the Montreal harbour. I never saw him without a cigarette in his mouth and he would often send me on errands to the fridge in order to get him a beer. We kids loved it when he bought us soft ice cream cones and he never forgot our dog, plunking it down wherever we were and laughing as it was lapped up in about four-and-a-half seconds.

His last few years were spent in the Veterans Hospital at Ste. Anne de Bellevue, right beside John Abbott Cegep which I attended for two years after high school. I remember hospital staff bringing the veterans over to the college to skate at noon, right after we students had finished playing shinny on the Macdonald College ice. It was supposed to be exercise for them, but they never seemed to be too interested, preferring to smoke and drink rye whiskey out of the mickeys that they always held onto with shaking hands.

Uncle Jacques died there when he was eighty one years old, I believe. It was a small funeral as there were not many of his peers left and we were never a sentimental family. He left a trust fund, for ‘Les pauvres et les malades’ that we still administer today.

His legacy is what I remember best every November 11th.

As a former teacher and a current father and husband, I know that anything I say is neither listened to nor taken seriously. And there’s a certain freedom in that. Like heading out to Montreal for a weekend road trip without the family.

Granted, it won’t be as exciting as just another normal day in, say, your life. I am over fifty-five years old, after all. And hopefully I won’t be making the same kind of dumb mistakes I’ve made in the past on these weekends away, when I did things like set a hotel mattress on fire while smoking a Colt cigar, watching t.v. and carrying on a conversation.  That was back in the early eighties before we all became such efficient multi-taskers.  It’s easy to consider oneself wise when one has already made truckloads of mistakes in life. I’d have to be as dim as a burnt-out forty watt bulb not to have learned something along the way. And it’s not as if I’m heading out on the road with Brad Pitt and George Clooney in a Cohn brothers movie, with all kinds of weird excitement guaranteed.  We’re on our way to just another Old-Timers hockey tournament. But we are going to Montreal and not somewhere like Peterborough, Ontario. And I’m sharing the trip with Brett,  who has been married three times. The first time was to a  Mexican girl he met in a bar in Cancun, and then married her the next day on a beach. She couldn’t speak any English, he knew two words of Spanish. They did make it back to Toronto together, where the marriage lasted almost two weeks. Come to think of it, this weekend could turn out to be something.

There were five of us from Ottawa who would be met by another nine guys from Boston, Massachusetts. I’d never met any of them. Someone in our group knew someone in their group, and I was never interested enough to listen to all the details. I also seriously wondered what kind of shape they would be in for a weekend of hockey, they being sports-lovers and the Red Sox  having won the World Series just days before. You know, Americans and their cheap alcohol prices and all that. Once we were settled in at the Chateau Champlain downtown, we headed out to the arena in Brossard. There was one of the American guys already in the dressing room. He stuck out his hand and introduced himself. “Pleased to meet you, Mattie,” said Brett, upon hearing his name.

“It’s not Mattie, it’s M-a-a-a-a-r-t-y,” he corrected Brett, who looked as confused as my grandfather would be sitting in on a modern-day Women’s Studies seminar. Having been to Boston several times in my life, I had to step in to enlighten him.

“It’s like M-a-a-a-a-r-t-y went to H-a-a-a-v-a-a-r-d,”  I interpreted. “You know, they have trouble with their ‘ars’.”

“Oh,” Brett responded. I guess we’ll leave it at that.

Our first game was as disjointed as Brett and Marty’s introduction. None of us had played together before and after three periods that resembled the Three Stooges trying to get through a door at the same time, we found ourselves on the short end of a 7-2 score.

Glen, one of the guys from Ottawa, had seen enough. “That f—— sucked,” he opined in the dressing room afterwards. “The defensemen were caught up the ice all game long and we didn’t connect on even two consecutive passes.” We  are old guys, long over the hill even if any of us did play a fair level of hockey, but no one can accuse us of lacking passion. So Glen was given the  assignment of putting better lines together for the next day’s shinny and we all repaired to the bar to calm down.

The dinner was delicious and the company, as it always is post-game , was both ribald and raucous. I was proud of myself for not overdoing anything, keeping my own bill to $35.00 as all about me I marvelled at what I saw as the over-indulgence in everything from appetizers to bottles of wine.

“Here comes the bill,” someone announced as the waitress deposited one slip of paper on the table.

“What do you mean…the bill,” I sputtered. “Where are all the other bills?”

“Didn’t you hear?”, Brett informed me. “In the States the waitresses always just bring one bill to the table.” He looked over the figures quickly, doing a quick add-up. His first career had been in accounting. “That’ll be $85 each.”

I gulped, a gesture that was not lost on anybody. “Pay up, you cheap son-of-a-gun,” I was told. That wasn’t exactly the expression that was used.

At fifty-seven years old, I felt as naïve as a farm boy riding into town on a load of watermelons. I could have tasted Chianti for the first time in my life and had someone else pick up a large part of the tab.

But I soon cheered myself up. This was only Friday night. Saturday night’s meal was still to come. But it would be just my luck that the decision to use  Canadian practices would made while I was visiting the bathroom.

I buried Hamee the Hamster today. You may wonder about the spelling; my daughter Rachelle was only eight years old at the time we acquired the little rodent and spelling wasn’t exactly her trump card. She still has his name written all over the little closet/room in the basement where she stores her crafts and we store our wine. And it’s my fault that he’s not around with us today. Whenever Rachelle brings that up, I tell her that hamsters have a very short life anyway.

Actually, I’m not only responsible for the death,in which even I, ahem ,admit to a small involvement,but also when I did find the little critter’s remains I initially swept him up and deposited the wee lad in the garbage can.  In truth, I am not as evil as my daughter believes. My wife  Brenda and I were busy cleaning out a storage nook in the basement and we found the tiny, ugly  skeleton under an old box spring.

“Ewwww-it’s a rat”, Brenda exclaimed.

“No, it’s Hamee,” I countered.  At least I hoped so. We’d  never had so much as mice in the house before. I felt a little guilty about Hamee’s present condition, but just as Senator Mike Duffy can excuse himself, I too have my side of the story as well.

Ever since she was a little girl, Rachelle wanted a pet. A kitten, a puppy, a baby bird, it didn’t matter. She even asked about giving a home to the live lobsters she saw in the tank at Produce Depot. We finally compromised by buying a package of those sea monkeys from Mrs. Tiggy Winkles, the toy store. I remembered them from way back in my youth, advertised on the bank cover of comic books, right beside the X-Ray glasses, which promised you the power to see right through girls’ dresses. The pictures made the so-called sea monkeys look like  seahorses, but our purchases never fulfilled their promise. Just like the X-Ray glasses.

“When are they going to look like monkeys ?” Rachelle asked, after peering through the increasingly murky water at what looked like tiny tadpole amoebas.

“Never,” her brother Adam enlightened her. “The Scottish Screamers had some. They look like that forever.” The Scottish Screamers were three little girls born in Glasgow who lived down the street. They were an excitable bunch, hence the name. “Their mother eventually flushed them down the toilet when the water got too murky.”

Rachelle started to cry and I had to assure her that I would never flush her pets down the toilet. I didn’t say that I would sweep them up into the garbage can instead. Despite my careful housekeeping, I still get accusatory glances from time to time and reminders that, “You killed Hamee !”

I never meant to. Hamee was an active little guy, very cute, and Rachelle would spend a lot of time holding him in her hands as he struggled to get free.

“Let’s buy him one of those clear plastic balls that you put him in and he can roll through the house,” I suggested. “That way he can see things.” I was tired of watching him climb up the sides of his cage, swinging from one little paw like a rodent Tarzan, as he tried to chew his way through the bars to freedom. I might be an accused killer, but I’m a soft-hearted one.

The ball lasted a couple of weeks but it soon suffered from wear-and-tear. I’m a libertarian at heart and I suggested that since we had no cat and our newly-acquired dog named Jasper seemed to be afraid of hamsters, we could let Hamee run free for a few minutes every day. “No problem,” I assured everybody. “I’ll keep my eye on him and just scoop him up back into his cage at the end of his run.”

Hamee was a little bit dense at  first about finding hiding places and so my job was easy. But as his rodent-like cunning improved, he soon learned how to navigate going down the carpet basement stairs. From there he found a small opening beside the staircase and slipped away. I couldn’t find him.

“What if he gets outside?” Rachelle asked, distressed.

“Don’t worry- Hamee’s too smart for that,” I assured my worried daughter. “Something will eat him if he gets outside.”

Not the smartest thing to say. I quickly tried to recover. “We’ll put out Hamee’s food and some water every night in the lid of a jam jar and he’ll be okay until I can sneak up and catch him in the middle of the night.” My plan was foolproof. I didn’t tell my daughter that the chances of a near-sighted 185 pound man sneaking up on anything in the middle of the night were quite remote. But I did continue to put out the food and water. It did continue to disappear.

“We’ve got rats down there,” my wife accused me one morning. “They’re coming in through some tiny hole now that it’s getting colder and eating the hamster food.”

“Don’t be silly,” I sneered, trying to look a lot more confident than I felt. I did continue to  distribute the food after everyone had gone to bed, but now I kept a wary eye out for giant rats that I may have nourished into super size.

Hamee never appeared again. When Rachelle would mention his name, which was often, I would tell her that he was happier being free in the basement than trying to escape that cage of his. Maybe, I continued, he even found a girl hamster living in one of those bags of outgrown hockey equipment that we had yet to throw out. And then I would quickly change the subject.

So on garbage day I did go through all the bags in the can on the front lawn trying to re-find his tiny skeleton. The neighbours are used to me doing things like that. And let the record show that I was successful.

Hamee is buried out back, well away from the spots where our dog Jasper usually pees. Rachelle and I are content that Hamee lives on in Hamster Heaven, free from cages, predators and musty basements. After all, he did show a lot more personality and spirit than many humans that I know.

Rest in peace, Hamee.