Hockey Night in Nimes

Posted on January 4, 2016 by dperras56

It’s not true that I take my skates everywhere I go; it just seems that way to my wife Brenda. The big question when we first contemplated the teaching exchange was whether I would find any ice thereabouts. At least that was my foremost concern. Whenever I brought up the issue Brenda would change the subject.

Which is why my first choice was Switzerland. True, it is a picture-postcard beautiful country. Most importantly, there is lots of hockey played in those mountains. Switzerland, I convinced my wife, would be the best choice for all concerned.

In mid-March we received a phone call from Francois, a Franco-Swiss who lived in Neuchatel, a beautiful mountain town beside a lake in the Swiss Alps. Francois was very excited about coming to Canada. He taught History and Geography but twenty per cent of his course load was teaching Italian. Could I handle that ?
“Mamma mia, pizza, spaghetti – that’s it.”

There was silence at the other end of the line. “Oh, and excusio,” I added.
No response.
“Not good enough, I guess.” I was always good at reading between the lines.
Francois was doubtful. Perhaps I could drop that part of my teaching load and live on an eighty per cent salary ?
This time it was my wife Brenda who was doubtful. “Eighty per cent of one salary and the Swiss cost of living is twice that of ours’?” she asked, thinking practically.
“Well then, maybe I can add an ‘i’ or an ‘o’ to the ends of French words and they’ll be able to understand,” I countered hopefully. “Remember, that worked with that hotel clerk in Florence !”
Francois had now figured out what he was dealing with and hung up. That ended that. It would have been nice living beside an alpine lake in the Swiss Alps for one year, but to compensate we would just have to get out more in our canoe on the Scugog River.

A month later there was a call from the teacher exchange office in Toronto. “How about the south of France ? We have a partner for you there.”
Brenda was ecstatic. The south of France ? A thirty-five minute drive from the Meditteranean and not far from Italy, Spain and Switzerland ? Of course we were interested ! I nodded my head, trying to feign interest. The Meditteranean ? How many arenas would I find there ?

“Hockey ? In Nimes ?” My exchange partner, Philippe, struggled with the concept. “I don’t know anything about that, but there is a patinoire a glace (a rink).” That was good enough for me. That was good enough for me. Perhaps some ex-pats in the area got together for a once-a-week shinny session. I would settle for a leisurely Sunday skate with my family at this point.

August 23rd was a typically hot, sunny day with a cloudless blue sky in the south of France. Both kids were napping, Brenda was cleaning the pool, and I was inclined to do neither. I jumped on the Honda motorbike that had been left for me and sped off for parts unknown, in search of that elusive arena.

What is interesting about asking for directions in France is that when questioned, a French person will almost always direct you to contine on straight ahead. “Toujours tout droit.” Whether it is Jim Morrison’s grave at the Pere Lachaise Cemetery or the location of the local boulangerie, the destination one is seeking always seems to be just up ahead. That afternoon it seemed as if I had toured half of Provence before I mercifully came upon my Holy Grail, the arena, sitting in the hot sun right beside the railroad tracks. As I rolled into a parking spot a small lizard scampered to safety, reminding me that I was a long ways from the arena in Lindsay, Ontario. Inside the building was something more familiar, however, a worker wearing a Montreal Canadiens’ jersey. Finally, I figured, someone who would know how I could find some ice time.

“Excuse me, I’m a Canadian, and a big fan of the Montreal Canadiens, and I was just wondering if there was some way I could come in and play hockey once a week. Would that be possible?”
At the sound of the word ‘Canadian’ his eyes lit up. “Come with me.” I was led upstairs to the bar to meet Philippe, the president of the Nimes Hockey Team, National League, Division II. (Despite what you may now be thinking, not every man in France was named Philippe.)

As in all conversations in France it began with a handshake and like most, the offer of a cigarette. Philippe opened the conversation with the comment that his team had been looking for a Canadian for the past month. Each team in the French league is allowed one ‘etranger.’ Just in case he was expecting Eric Lindros or Mario Lemieux (remember this was 1995) I levelled with him right away.
“I’m thirty nine years old.” My heyday was behind me. I had aged and slowed down and I was now more accustomed to being just another oldtimer, short of breath and slow of step, than Canada’s representative on a European hockey team. Philippe pursed his lips and gave a Gallic shrug. “I’m not looking for someone right from the N.H.L.,” he replied generously. He blew out a cloud of smoke. “You can score goals ?”
I thought back to all the goals I had scored playing shinny at the Lindsay Arena these past fifteen years. “Mais oui,” I nodded.
“Well, we have a practice this evening. Bring your equipment and we’ll have a look.”

That night, though rusty, I was able to stay upright and not embarrass myself. Philippe was all smiles as he welcomed me to his team. “Now all we have to is pay a couple of thousand francs to get your release from your last year’s team and the Canadian Hockey Association and you’ll be all set for our first game on September 23rd.”

I smiled to myself. My last year’s team had been sponsored by the ‘Grand Hotel’ and the Canadian Hockey Association didn’t even know I existed.
Someone at the Grand Hotel was going to be sitting down to a few pitchers of free beer.

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No Moore

Posted on December 29, 2015 by dperras56

‘Appropriate’ is a much-used word in our time. For example, when I voice an opinion someone is sure to say, “That’s not appropriate.”

The end of the year, however, is the most appropriate time to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to those treasured personalities who have moved on to, well, I’m not quite sure where.

Just before Christmas former Montreal Canadien Hall of Famer and six-time Stanley Cup winner Dickie Moore died in Montreal.
If you are under fifty five years of age that may not mean that much to you.
But the Moore family left their mark on me.

The first time I remember seeing the Moore name in Montreal is probably when I was about six. A nearby establishment that I loved to frequent had its owner’s name on its masthead: Dickie Moore’s Dairy Queen. “Who’s Dickie Moore?” I asked my mother, who in that time was my own personal Google Search.
“He’s a hockey player,” came the answer. I didn’t know much about that, because in those Precambrian days a boy couldn’t sign up for hockey until he was eight years old. I guess the older generation of that time held the quaint notion that maybe you shouldn’t commit your kid to something until he or she actually showed an interest in such an activity. Little did I know that I would later get to know Dickie. That pleasure came about through the close association I developed with his older brother Jimmy.

It was the spring of 1975 and a friend named Cam was watching me playing passionately for the Dorval Jets in a Junior ‘B’ playoff round. He was impressed enough to divert me from my talks with Providence College in Rhode Island to make a trip with him to Lennoxville, Quebec where Bishop’s University was located.
“Our coach is Jimmy Moore, Dickie’s older brother”, Cam informed me. “He’s the greatest coach. You’ll love him.”

Cam and I made the two hour drive to Lennoxville from our West Island homes later that spring. Cam always called me Davey and it was with that moniker that he introduced me to my future coach.
That was how Jimmy would address me for the next thirty eight years.

I didn’t know what kind of impression I made during my first encounter. Years later Jimmy would fill me in as he told the story that before he met me he asked Cam if I drank. “Oh, he’ll have a beer, maybe two,” Jimmy recounted that Cam had told him. “Jesus Christ, I could hardly sit down all afternoon as I was running back and forth to the fridge getting Davey more beers.”
Maybe Jimmy exaggerated a little. My mother certainly hopes so. Jimmy always had a well-stocked fridge to entertain his hockey players even if he didn’t drink himself.
“I’m a recovering alcoholic,” he later told me. “For awhile it got so bad that when I came up to a traffic light and it was red I had to turn off and get myself a beer.”

I don’t think it was ever that bad. But Jimmy always held onto that locker room/ barroom camaraderie. He was never happier that when he had a bunch of us players up to his house on Academy Street in Lennoxville for supper that always included as many steaks as hungry hockey players in their early twenties could consume. His buddy Bruce Coulter, the Bishop’s Gaiters very successful football coach was a frequent guest. He would bring along a couple of his players, some of them future CFLers. They sure could eat. Jimmy did the barbequing, his vivacious wife Barbara did the rest.

It was as easy to love Barbara as much as we did Jimmy. Both were from the hardscrabble area of Montreal known as Park Extension and she had lived through, and put up with a lot, through Jimmy’s long career in hockey’s minor leagues. Jimmy had once been a top prospect before Dickie, and both had an Irishman’s aversion to being pushed around.
“Frank Selke Sr. was the General-Manager of the Montreal Canadiens at the time. That was the era long before expansion in the NHL and certainly before the free-agency of today,”she told me one night. “Those old NHL owners and G-Ms owned the players lock, stock and barrel. Even Gordie Howe was afraid of saying anything to his coach Jack Adams. Adams used to walk around the dressing room before games with train tickets to minor league towns in his breast pocket, just to remind players where they might end up after a bad game. Old Selke wanted Jimmy to sign a particular contract. Jim didn’t think it was anything near what he was worth, and you know Jimmy. He stuck to his guns. Selke told him to sign that contract, or he would never see the NHL again. That’s how I came to spend a lot of years in Cleveland, Ohio.”

Both Barbara and Jimmy made the best of it, however. The two had attended a lot of wild parties, where characters such as the notorious drunken ex-NHLer Howie Young would literally enter parties by swinging in on a chandelier. Fred Shero, the Philadelphia Flyers’ Stanley Cup winning coach of the 1970s had also been a teammate. Barbara told me that even as a player one could tell he had the coaching gene, as he could sit and talk hockey strategy by the hour. No one could tell at that time that he would win his two Stanley Cups not through his strategy sessions however, but by getting his Broad Street Bullies to beat up the rest of the league, player by player. Jimmy was also a collector of one-liners that he had picked up from a variety of hockey folk. Once while I was hopping over the boards for a shift, the toe of my skate caught a teammate’s shoulder and I landed, ingloriously, face first on the ice below.
Jimmy enjoyed it immensely. “You can’t swim there, Davey, it’s frozen,” he cackled, as I struggled, red-faced to my feet. He also liked to remind wingers of their defensive responsibilities.
“You don’t just go one way,” he would remind lazy backcheckers. “You gotta go up and down, just like a toilet seat.” He later told me he had heard those lines many times from King Clancy, the old Maple Leafs’ great, who had spent years coaching in the minor leagues.

Dickie would often meet us in Montreal when we would play at McGill or Concordia University. He ‘d come out to dinner, sometimes bringing along other Montreal hockey personalities such as John Ferguson. Dickie was a multi-millionaire by that time, having expanded his two Dairy Queens to a large construction equipment rental business. Even my hockey-playing children never lost sight of Dickie’s name, because the change shacks where we put on our skates at Mutchmoor Park in Ottawa had his logo on them. Over the decades he had provided jobs for dozens of old hockey players who had found themselves down on their luck. Jimmy told me that it was not always an easy transition.
“They’d phone Dickie when they should have been going to work, saying that they had an Old-Timers’ game to play that day. Dickie would say, “Jesus Christ, do you want to work or do you want to play hockey ?” Jimmy would smile, shake his head and mutter, “Dickie should know the answer to that !”

I last saw Jimmy a few months before he died, when I was in Lennoxville at a Bishop’s University Homecoming. While Barbara was as sharp and as effervescent as ever, Jimmy was in the throes of Alzheimer’s. He brightened up when we talked about the old days and the guys who had so joyously played for him, and then I asked him how Dickie was doing.
Jimmy couldn’t hear the question but Barbara later whispered that Dickie wasn’t doing much better than Jim. Jim died in January of 2014 and Dickie followed almost two years later. Ron Maclean on his broadcast of ‘Hometown Hockey’ last Sunday night mentioned the deaths of both brothers, adding that Jimmy, although the lesser-known of the two, was a legend in the Sherbrooke area.

Jimmy and Barbara had come to my wedding in 1987, making the ten hour drive to New Brunswick to join in the festivities. Later that night I thanked him and told him how much it meant to me for him to be there.
“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Davey,” was his reply.
And I wouldn’t have missed for the world the impression the two brothers left on me.

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A Villa in Nimes

Posted on December 18, 2015 by dperras56

Marco Polo I am not. However, I had hitchhiked all over Canada, worked in Alberta on a couple of occasions. Done the Eurail pass thing and even played hockey in Scotland. But I had been young, single and carefree. Those were my days of being an itinerant labourer and down-at-the -heels philosopher. I was used to sleeping on trains and park benches. And for this year of a teaching-exchange in France I was fully expecting cramped living quarters facing a busy street in downtown Nimes.

Annie and Philippe Paternot were our exchange partners. They met us on the train platform and we were somehow successful in getting everything packed into their two vehicles. This was no small feat; European vehicles are of course a lot smaller than our often- mammoth North American variety; especially so in 1995. Annie’s Renault V seemed to my spoiled eyes roughly the size of an elongated accordion. Brenda balanced two suitcases on her lap in the front of the car and a large cardboard box was leaving its impression on the back of my neck in the rear seat. I couldn’t move my head, but I hoped that our two and four year old sons had found their way into one of the two cars. There was a brief break in the traffic and we surged out into the middle of the street.

Some of you Baby Boomers might remember a mid-1960’s t.v. show by the name of ‘The Saint.’ It starred Roger Moore as some sort of James Bond-like private eye and it took place in Europe. What I remember most about that series (apart from the beautiful women who were always falling madly in love with our hero) was the speed with which ‘the Saint’ drove on those narrow, twisting and winding European roads. This time however, was not a scene on a male fantasy t.v. show, but our reality.

As we made our way out of the city centre the roads became increasingly narrow. Nimes had been built by the Romans more than two thousand years ago and like the ancient world’s most important city was also built on seven hills. Obviously these roads had been constructed to accommodate only one chariot at a time. Annie gunned the little Renault forward like Danica Patrick at Daytona; I slipped lower in my seat and checked my seatbelt clasp. “You certainly seem to know your way around,” I managed to say even though my teeth were tightly clenched. “Are there many accidents on these streets ?”

Fortunately, Annie didn’t turn around to answer Nervous Ned in the backseat. She was an expert driver and by now we were in the hills of North Nimes. No street lights out here. We finally slowed and turned into a large yard surrounded by stone walls, probably built by Spartacus before he had led his revolt. Not an apartment building in sight. The Paternots owned a three bedroom villa with both a summer and winter terrace and a loft upstairs with enough books and toys to stock an entire floor at ‘Toys ‘R Us.’ The loft also contained two extra beds, great to provide hospitality to any of our free-loading friends who might wander over to the south of France. “Let’s take a walk around the grounds,” Philippe suggested. “I’ll show the kids the pool. Annie can show you the olive, peach and plum trees and also the vineyard.
Great, I thought to myself. Now Brenda and I can become vintners. After all, we did have a lot of experience bottling our own wine at the ‘Do-It-Yourself’ facilities in Lindsay, Ontario.

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French Connection

Posted on December 10, 2015 by dperras56

My friend Chris always chuckles when I finish up every story about my year spent in the south of France with a shake of my head and the exclamation, “God, how I suffered.”
Not all of the time, mind you. It just seemed like it.

First of all, never trust your travel agent. With all due respects to that vanishing profession, I was taking its name in vain that first afternoon in Paris, burdened down with thirteen very heavy suitcases in the sultry Parisian heat. My wife Brenda and I had not slept a wink on an overnight flight that had left Toronto at 11:20 p.m. Our two sons, Liam and Adam, aged four and two respectively, had not slept more than two and one-half hours.
The Perras family’s adventure, up to this point, had not been excellent.
I rolled my eyes in frustration and cursed out my wife. “Another one of your great ideas,” I seethed. “Let’s go to France, you said. The south of France. It’ll be great.” I looked around the vast, crowded Charles de Gaulle airport terminal and made a decision. “I’m going to get a croissant and a café au lait.”

It was August 11, 1995. There were three weeks before the start of school in September in Nimes, in the south of France. Given our present predicament, we would need all of that time before we found our way there. With our usual lack of foresight we had failed to ship any of our luggage on ahead; hence our heavy burden. And you can guess who the pack mule was.
“Getting to Nimes will be a breeze,” our travel agent had assured us. “The train station is right beside the airport. If you’re whisked through Customs quickly enough you’ll be on your train 65 minutes after you land.”
Of course. And the cheque is in the mail and this won’t hurt a bit.

The travel agent was partially correct. Customs was great. Never had an easier time. Train station ? An official pointed through the front doors, leading out to the Great Beyond. Just beside the airport ? He gave a Gallic shrug, a gesture that I would only become far too familiar with throughout the next year. “You can catch the shuttle bus right through there. I cursed (quietly) in French, then in English, gave my baggage trolley a yank and watched two cardboard boxes and one suitcase topple over. Brenda was up ahead with the kids and didn’t hear a thing. When I finally pulled up alongside her she was joining the sweaty, surging mass of humanity boarding a bus to parts unknown.
“Thanks for your help back there.” I gestured to my burden, which even one of those Himalayan sherpas would refuse to shoulder. She had two kids and two heavy bags in tow. That left me with only eleven oversized cases to handle by myself. The bus doors were closing and it was obvious there was no room for neither me nor my caravan. “Now what am I supposed to do? ” I shouted in frustration. Brenda looked at me, shrugged and waved as the bus backfired and pulled away from the curb. What, I wondered, was the name of that train station ?

Ten anxious minutes later another bus pulled into place and once again the crowd surged forward. Unfortunately for me it wasn’t just a case of grabbing my two or three cases and charging on board to carve myself out a spot; there would be four more trips back to the curb. I shot a quick glance back at
the airport and for a brief moment wondered when the next flight to Toronto would be taking off.

Reality interrupted my reverie when someone stepped on my toe and shoved in front of me in line. I started running between the bus and the curb like a chipmunk storing a winter’s supply of nuts.
Never had I encountered a better-humoured bus driver. While answering questions in French, Spanish and Italian, he looked at me and smiled. “Just don’t pile them on the steering wheel,” he chuckled.
“Train station?” I inquired, not knowing the exact name.
“Ah, mais oui,” he answered. Between the two of us we were able to push shut the bus doors.

I kept an anxious eye out for Brenda and the two boys at each stop. Usually, even if I can’t see my family I can always hear them. But this was more difficult in a bus loaded with excited international travelers speaking at least six different languages.

My frantic glances finally caught sight of three exhausted, dejected figures sitting on a curb. Brenda leapt forward when she saw me. “Did you bring all the luggage?” she asked as a first greeting. I resolved to make sure that at the next wedding I attended I would shout at the top of my lungs for the bridegroom to run now, as fast as he could, and never come back.
“Is this the train station?” I yelled back.
“I’ll find out.” She grabbed the two boys and disappeared through the nearest doors.

It took a frantic hour of asking questions and lugging bags in the wrong directions before an amiable station employee ambled over and inquired if we were the lost Canadians. Evidently, less than two hours after landing in the country, we had already acquired a reputation.

Faith in guardian angels was very much in fashion at the time and now we had found ours’ in the form of a bulky and bespectacled Frenchman. He found us a room to store our baggage and sent us off in the right direction to locate refreshments. “The train to Nimes leaves at 5:10 p.m.,” he said. “I’ll see you back here thirty minutes before that. Ask for Gilles.” After finally locating a snack bar that was serving we discovered that it was not only Canadian airports and train stations that could perform legalized holdups.

True to his word, Gilles was at his specified spot at 4:40 p.m. Obviously he had realized that this train station was particularly confusing, or just that we were easily confused, because he stayed with us right until the train pulled in. The conductor jumped out, took one look at our paraphernalia and sent us seventy-five metres down the ramp to another door. We had just started storing our bags when he reappeared and ordered us back down to the spot that we had just left.
“Con,” cursed Gilles, sweating profusely and puffing dangerously. It was a word describing what he thought of the conductor. Its translation is unprintable.

Three minutes later the Perras family pulled out of the Paris train station, destination Nimes.

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Memoires

Posted on November 16, 2015 by dperras56

France , of course, has been in the news lately.
What this has done has brought back memories of my year in France. It was 1995-96 and it was a teaching exchange.

If it was a trip then it was my wife Brenda’s idea. We were living in Lindsay, Ontario at the time and had two sons, ages two and four. She probably brought up the idea while I was watching the Montreal Canadiens play hockey on the t.v., when I quickly agree to anything. I never want to miss a second of the action.
“I’ve been reading up on the possibility of overseas teaching exchanges. How would you like to live a year in France ?”
This was something that had to be stamped out immediately, lest any hope be allowed to fester.
“No way.” I was adamant. Montreal had just won a Stanley Cup the year before, the team was still strong, and I had dreams of attending the next parade as Lord Stanley’s celebratory march took its usual route through the streets of downtown Montreal.

But after a second’s reflection I didn’t want to seem totally dismissive. I knew Brenda and this idea would not disappear gently into the good night. I decided to throw her a bone.
“If you want to go on an exchange, I would consider Edmonton, Alberta. Al Veltman, who I coached soccer with, went there and thoroughly enjoyed it.”
I snickered to myself. I had worked twice previously in Canada’s oil kingdom, once on construction and another winter toiling for the Hudson’s Bay Company. I had often regaled her about the brutally cold weather in that area of the world and especially about the short winter days.
She said nothing but moved away from blocking the t.v. and I was left in peace. Another bullet dodged.

Two weeks later I was bouncing my two year old son Adam on my chest. Brenda must have figured that it was best to deliver the news while I was lying down.
“I just got a letter from the Ontario Teachers’ Exchange Society. They have a likely candidate for us in Nimes, France.”
Adam stopped bouncing. The universe must have sent him the vibe that I was about to explode.
“There’s no way. Jesus Christ.”
As usual my wife was not intimidated. “Nimes is in the south of France, just on the edge of Provence.”
Young as he was, Adam already knew who would win this encounter. Just the day before, as I was driving him home from daycare, I announced that he wouldn’t be able to watch his favourite show, ‘Dark -Winged Duck,’ as he had to go down for an early nap.
Adam was unimpressed. He took his thumb out of his mouth and voiced his rebuttal. “I’m going to tell Mum that you were trying to boss me around.”

Two months later all the plans were made. The French exchange family would trade jobs, homes and cars with us for the year. I asked, but wives were not included. We had been advised not to exchange cars by the Ontario Exchange Federation. “It never turns out well. For instance, there is usually a discrepancy in the value and the condition of the vehicles. If something major breaks down, who pays for it, for instance ?” Good point, but both sides figured there were enough logistics to iron out without having to buy a new car in a foreign country as well. An 850 c.c Honda scooter would also be available for me to take to school, leaving the Peugeot Cinq for Brenda and the kids. Brenda would not be teaching, leaving that pleasure up to me. The French couple’s names were Philippe and Annie and they had an eleven year old son named Bruno. I would be teaching English in a lycee, a technical high school, which included Grades 10, 11 and twelve and two years of college. The school specialized in electronics technology.
“Jeezus murphy. Will I be expected to teach that too?” I asked Brenda. “All I can do is change a lightbulb.”
We were packed up and ready to go on August 10, 1995. At least Brenda was excited. The boys, still aged two and four, didn’t really know what was going on. To be frank, neither did I.
“At least the winters in Provence should be milder than those ones in Edmonton,” I said to myself as I put the car in gear and started towards the Toronto Airport. (to be continued.)

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An Unexamined Life

Posted on November 9, 2015 by dperras56

In my last years of teaching some of my younger colleagues liked to call me the “the Old Dog.”
I liked to think it was because of whatever wisdom and experience I had gathered over my thirty-one year career, but more likely it was because of my propensity for falling asleep very easily, especially during staff meetings.
Since that time, I’ve never deluded myself that the advancing years bring a perspective that anyone I know wants me to share with them.
I’m out of step with the times. I still eat white bread, Big Macs and french fries.

I’m not one to listen to tales of woe and I’m even worse for giving advice. Occasionally, very occasionally, my wife or daughter seeks me out to provide a listening ear. My wife does it more than my daughter.
It never ends well.

Too many days showing World War I battleground videos to my Grade 10 History classes. What it comes down to is that I have no sympathy for anyone who wasn’t gunned down and permanently maimed while running across the muddy swamps of No Man’s Land into a barrage of machine gun fire. Today’s problems, whether it’s dealing with a colleague who’s off their meds or an unsympathetic classroom teacher, seem to pale in comparison. So don’t take any marital advice from me. After most of our conversations my wife is ready to take the axe to me.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never undergone great suffering myself. The worst discomfort I’ve ever felt is freezing my feet while playing outdoor shinny hockey in -30 Fahrenheit weather. After a couple of hours of that I’d run home and roll on the living room rug, rubbing my thawing feet and screaming. My father would be in his favourite chair, reading the Montreal Star, having a beer and smoking a cigarette. He’d briefly look over at my misery, inhale deeply and then exhale in an exasperated manner. Then he’d snap his newspaper. It was all to let me know that enough was enough. It would all end when my mother called everyone into the kitchen for supper.

So don’t blame me for my tin-eared, awkward, useless, non-advice. It’s a combination of nature and nurture. I’ve learned that from keeping up with all the media reports on the latest psychological studies. I’m probably suffering from one of the many new ailments that are being discovered every day and I’m just waiting for the proper medication.
So I’m mentally ill. At least that’s what I’ll tell my wife.

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Knee- Capped

Posted on October 27, 2015 by dperras56

You’ve gotta love those military guys : plain-spoken, politically-incorrect, no bullshit. I’ve been playing hockey with a smattering of members of our armed forces for a few years now. But this is the first time, every Monday afternoon, where I’m the only one in the dressing room who isn’t formally signed up to protect our home and native land.

I was just bending down to untie my skates when one of the younger members of the group asked a question of our organizer:
“Is the old gentleman gonna play with us all year ?”

Ah, I thought. How very Canadian. Even the comments that sting are delivered with a polite overtone. An insult with just the right amount of respect. As Henry David Thoreau observed, time stands still for no man. (Ladies, I’ve always admired older women; it’s just that there’s not as many of them as there used to be.) But the reminders of the passing years are not just apparent when I look in the mirror every morning these days; it’s also there when I glance out the window. The fall season is bittersweet. The leaves are only beautiful for a short time until they are past their peak, falling to earth and becoming mulch for a new generation of foliage. The calendar pages turn, the days get colder and the nights longer and for those who don’t like winter the outlook is bleak.

Which is why I have always avoided doctors. This is sometimes difficult to do because the block I live on is full of them. They seem to come in pairs; a lot of them are married to each other. I was walking my dog the other morning when one the specialists who live nearby greeted me. “It looks to me like you have osteo-arthritis.” I can never remember what speciality this particular physician possesses; they all sound alike to me. But he seemed quite confident in his dire diagnosis.

Which is why I’ve always avoided him and his ilk. Until now. I’ve made an appointment with a doctor four times in the past forty years and two of those times were to get my shots for overseas trips. Even though my oft-injured knees have hurt for the past twenty years I’ve managed to avoid doctors’ waiting rooms, those sacred sanctuaries in which the other inmates avoid eye-contact and read outdated magazines. To make matters worse, I had already prepped the good doctor with more evidence of bad news; my first- ever X-Ray had already been sent to his office. It was like handing the finger-printed murder weapon over to the prosecutor.

To me every member of the physician’s guild looks pre-occupied, harried and humourless. I guess working 120 hours a week as an intern is a contributing factor.

We nodded to each other and shared a perfunctory handshake. The Grim Reaper could not have looked more, well, grim.

The good doctor was too busy to butter me up with small talk and probably after one look at me he decided I didn’t have the time to waste anyway.
“The news is not good.”
I nodded. I was already picturing him wearing a hood, his scythe hanging over my head.
“You’ve got moderate-to-severe arthritis in one knee, severe in the other. Take a look.”

I glanced at the black and white evidence. I was never much of a science student, which is probably why I didn’t like those science-nerd types that got accepted into medical school. The photo looked to me like a shark’s open jaws, ready to bite into an unsuspecting surfer.

“What can I do about it ?” I asked. His answer echoed my neighbour’s pessimistic prognosis.
“Nothing. Arthroscopic surgery wouldn’t help, injections would only last a month or two, physiotherapy might help a very little bit.”

I gulped.

“Here you go.” He lifted two cumbersome braces onto the table between us. They looked a lot like what I remember Tiny Tim wearing in the 1930s version of the movie ‘Scrooge-A Christmas Carol.’ I could already picture myself moving with the agility of the Tin Man after Dorothy had misplaced his oil can.
“They’ll cost you $1400 each. Do you have insurance ?”

Avoiding such a fate is why I’m now almost addicted to turmeric, devil’s claw and shark cartilage. (Package disclaimer – Shark bones/cartilage was a previously thrown away by-product of the food industry. No sharks are caught for their cartilage. Don’t let any activist confuse you.)

So if you see an old gentleman hobbling by don’t stop and introduce yourself. You’ll only listen to another pensioner’s long tale of woe. Before you know it I’ll be introducing myself along the lines of.. “Hi, I’m David Perras and I’m gluten-free.”

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My Most Unforgettable Character

Posted on September 24, 2015 by dperras56

Back in the day the Reader’s Digest regularly featured an article written by a luminary figure who recounted their memories of a very prominent, usually an American, icon. Examples of the ‘character’ might be the famous writer Ernest Hemingway, the legendary New York City tough-guy cop Johnny Broderick or the C.E.O. Bernard Gimbel of the famous Gimbels Department Stores.
My Most Unforgettable Character was not rich nor famous nor even an American and whose name never made the news except for his death notice in the Sherbrooke Record in December of 1983. But he had a profound influence on me whether he was recounting stories about unfaithful farm wives during the two world wars, showing me the best places to hook speckled trout in the nearby creeks or spitting an endless stream of tobacco juice into the empty milk carton that he used as a spittoon. He grew up on a rock-strewn farm in between Lachute and St. Jerome, Quebec, ten kilometres from Morin Heights. This farming hamlet, named Mille Isles, was so small that I’ve since met inhabitants owning cottages nearby who have never heard of it. The isolation of the vicinity, however, pleased him so much that after briefly working as a carpenter in Montreal as a young man he bought a farm in an even more obscure, remote area; another hamlet that was twenty five miles east of Sherbrooke deep in the hills of the Eastern Townships named Island Brook. No one has ever heard of it either, so I explain that it is about twenty-five miles from each of the Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire borders, and that same distance from the now well-known town of Lac Megantic. That’s about forty- one kilometres to you young-whippersnappers who might not know what I’m talking about. His grandfather sailed to Canada in the midst of the Irish Potato Famine and his uncle was born on board the ship. He always told me that the English who made the decisions in Quebec at that time didn’t like the Irish and so gave them the un-farmable land north of Montreal in the Laurentians. He comes from another time and place and belongs to a Canada that doesn’t exist anymore. That was a place of one hundred acre farms, men who hunted and fished on their own land, women who made every meal from scratch and also helped out in the hay fields and neighbours who not only knew each other but also visited every night, played cards and then laid out refreshments for the whole group. His name was William John Dawson but he was universally known as Jack, but I called him Grandpa.

It may be hard to believe for those of you that know me, but I was young once. I can never remember my grandfather as being anything other than what I considered to be an old man. After all, he was born in 1889 and was sixty-seven years old in 1956, the year of my birth. He had once been just a shade under six feet tall with hair so thick and dark that he had been nicknamed ‘Black Jack.’ (No offence intended !) But I remember him as slightly stooped and also bald, but he could pitch hay, and later on bales of hay, all day long. There had been no organized sports in the late 1800s when he had had been a youth, but he still had two pairs of boxing gloves filled with horsehair with which he, his brother and their friends regularly boxed. They were ripped and of course the horsehair was falling out, but my brothers and I used them to pound each other into what we hoped was oblivion. There were no Neighbourhood Watch groups or politically-correct, overly-protective neighbors to report us. In fact the nearest neighbor was almost a half-kilometer away. We were always too busy to notice.

Despite the fact that he had never lived regularly in any area that had more than a small number of locals, he wasn’t going to be content just marrying some local-yokel. A visiting schoolteacher from Hudson, Quebec, caught his eye when she took over the local educational institution and my grandfather dated her all that first year. He later went to visit her in the summer in her hometown and when he got off the train he asked the first bystander he saw how to get to the Wilson family’s farm. “Which one ?” asked the local. “There are two. One has a family with nine girls.”
“That’s the one I want to go to,” replied my grandfather.
The habit of marrying out of the local gene pool was passed onto his two children. His son married the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who had settled in Montreal and his daughter, my mother, married a French-Canadian raised in the slums of St. Henri in downtown Montreal. The man who became my father had lost both his parents by the age of six and had been raised both in an orphanage and by relatives. I asked my grandfather once what he thought when he found out that his only daughter was going to marry a Frenchman.
He reached down to the floor where he kept his milk carton/spittoon. “No comment,” he said, but he was smiling as he said it.

My grandmother wanted to move the family to Detroit in the Roaring Twenties, as so many of their hardscrabble neighbours were doing. But working in a factory never held any appeal, even if Henry Ford was paying an exorbitant five dollars a day. Being your own man and doing things your own way was the only way to live and although Grandpa had long since put his homemade still out of business by the time I reached adulthood he still kept its remnants in a place of honour.

When he was almost eighty he used the sizable creek behind his barn to fashion a huge pond which he always kept stocked with trout. We spent a lot of time down there together and I would always fry up our catch for dinner, followed by one of the three pies that he could get at the local grocer for the exorbitant price of one dollar. Neither one of us worried about our cholesterol.

A bad case of pneumonia seemed to knock the stuffing out of him in his ninety-fifth year. We would sit in his kitchen in two rocking chairs with his latest dog in between us, a faithful canine that I had found as a puppy wandering in the wounds and which bore an uncanny resemblance to a coyote. He would still be chewing his tobacco and I loved smoking those rum-flavoured little Colt cigars which were the style at the time. “I don’t want end up in an old folks’ home,” he would tell me. “Some call them an old folks’ home, but I call them an old folks’prison.”

He never had to. We buried him on December 5th, 1983 on a freezing cold day. I left early, before the casket was covered. I couldn’t stand watching what I felt was the end of two eras, his life here and my life with him. But I know he died happy.

He never had to spend one day of his life in either a factory or an “old folks home.”

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Canadian Open (Part Deux)

Posted on September 3, 2015 by dperras56

I had never refused a freebie in my life, and I wasn’t about to start now, on my,um, final stretch. Back in the buffet line for a second go-round I found myself elbow-to-elbow with Jason Day, the Aussie golfer and eventual winner of the Canadian Open. I desperately wanted to say something witty, or at least look partially cool.
“Good day, eh ?” I stammered.
Really, that’s the best I could do.
To his credit Day, apparently a friendly and down-to-earth Aussie, looked briefly in my direction and nodded. Who could blame him for finding the roast beef more interesting ?

It was a hot day and I felt like Chester,the old deputy from the 1960s western ‘Gunsmoke’ as I limped after Richard, who was intent on following Jason Day, Bubba Watson or the Canadian who led most of the way before losing at the end, David Hearn. Chester had a limp, and in 1962 my grandfather called him a cripple. Fifty three years later I refer to myself and my chronic sore knee as ‘mildly disabled.’ I keep hoping that I’ll soon be able to put a sticker in my car window.

We had only the one day pass and a lot of the golfers were finishing up their round. “How far is it to Port Colborne and this hotel we’re staying at tonight?” I asked Richard.
“Actually, it’s a Bed and Breakfast”, Richard corrected me.
“A Bed and Breakfast?” That was a bit of a letdown. “Isn’t that for older married couples?”
“Don’t worry,” Richard replied. “It’s 2015. What? … Are you worried they’ll ask to see our wedding rings?”
My anxieties were not yet dissipated. “Port Colborne near St. Catherine’s… isn’t that where those two psychopaths, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, did their raping and murdering?”
“That was Port Dalhousie,” corrected Richard. “That’s a ways away.” As a newsman and a near-local he had kept it straight. “He’s locked up for life now. And she’s down in the Caribbean somewhere, I heard.”
“Well, as long as it’s nowhere near the golf course.” I felt reassured as we climbed into the shuttle bus that would take us to our car in the Oakville parking lot. “How come you didn’t ask your old friend Muldoon to come ?”
Muldoon had worked with Richard for years as a colleague in the news business. They often golfed together. “Muldoon’s off golfing somewhere in the Maritimes.” He chuckled as he recalled a memory. “Did I ever tell you about the time we were at a black tie gala event on Parliament Hill when Muldoon and another guy came crashing out through the bathroom door, covered in blood and duking it out. I jumped in to try and break it up, as the other guy was a well-known real estate tycoon, but Muldoon was so incensed he just started throwing punches at me. It was a scene right out of Mission Impossible III, near the end of the movie, where Tom Cruise and Philip Seymour Hoffman come crashing through the door, intent on killing each other.”
It was hard for me to envision the likes of that happening today with ,say, Peter Mansbridge and Conrad Black crashing through bathroom doors in bloody tuxedos into the tables of the Prime Minister, respected journalists and wealthy fundraisers. “What did they do with Muldoon? Does that sort of stuff go on today ?”
“Naw…that was in the early ’80s. They just sent Muldoon away for a month, on full pay, to dry out. Nowadays they would have fired him.”

The sun had started to set by the time we pulled in to the B and B, located right on the golf course in Port Colborne and a mere seventy-five metre walk to Lake Erie. An older couple were being helped out of their car by the establishment’s proprietors. The man must have weighed three hundred pounds and his wife was a good match. They would end up sharing a bathroom in the hall with us. Richard and I nicknamed them ‘The Honeymooners.”

Before we ate supper there was some freshening up to do. Richard suggested a dip in Lake Erie.
“Wait a minute”, I objected. “Didn’t Lake Erie catch on fire in Cleveland at some point?”
“Yeah, well, that was in the 70s. It’s a lot cleaner now. Look, if it makes you feel better, I’ll text my son Jake in Toronto. He works for the Ministry of the Environment. He’ll have the latest update. But I’m going in. It’ll be refreshing.”
I didn’t want to be seen as a stick-in-mud. We received Jake’s return text soon enough, but just as we were toweling ourselves off after our dip.
Like most text messages, of course, it was brief.
“It’s been nice knowin’ ya !

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Canadian Open

Posted on August 12, 2015 by dperras56

The summer had been, well, uneventful. Our yard had been ripped up, stonework had been laid down, and our vacation budget was shot to hell. Then a friend of mine, a recently-retired news correspondent, gave me a call.
“What are you doing for the next few days,” Richard inquired.
“I, uh….” I didn’t want to admit it, but probably a lot of grocery-shopping, dog-walking and verandah-sitting. Plus trying to avoid the omnipresent chore-list, with which my wife waved in my face and chased me around the house, blackening my mood for hours at a time. We hadn’t been invited to many Glebe parties ever since I mentioned, at the last one we attended, that I was looking forward to the day that midget wrestling made a comeback.
“Never mind what you’ll be doing, anyway,” Richard interrupted. The former newsman in him was used to pursuing his agenda aggressively. “I bid on a golf package at a silent-auction fundraiser I was at. I won. I dunno… maybe I was the only one who bid. Anyway, what happens is that we’ll have one day at the Canadian Open. I know a vice-president at the Royal Bank of Canada that sponsors the event. Maybe she’ll get us V.I.P. passes and we’ll eat in the diningroom/clubhouse for free and we’ll get some swag, too.” Richard, ever the schmoozer, knew how to play the game. Way better than I did, anyway.

My ears perked up. With this kind of incentive it would be worth the effort of convincing my wife that I should be sprung from the work camp for the next few days. “When do we leave?” I asked. “Tomorrow ?”
“The next day.” But the retired newsman who had always pulled down a good salary but now collected only a meager pension from the huge broadcasting company, was ever practical. “The event I bid on includes thirty-six holes of golf with a cart on a course in Port Colborne, as well as two nights in a bed-and-breakfast. You can pay for the first night’s hotel in Oakville, near the Glen Abbey course where the Canadian Open takes place.” To soften the blow of not offering a complete freebie he added, “We can take my car.” He paused for a second, perhaps re-considering his generosity. “You can pay for half the gas.”

It was still a good deal. Although golf was not my passion, I had played a lot in my youth, and then not much for the past thirty years. It was hard to hide that fact with the evidence being my inconsistent game. My older golf clubs could have been used by Ben Hogan or Sam Snead, both of whom won tournaments in the 1930s.
And Richard was not yet finished. “See if you can replace that golf bag you have. It looks like you bought it at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.”

The drive to Oakville was as quiet as the first night was not. Richard and I were awakened at 12:30 a.m. by loud screams of anguish that sounded like they were coming from the next room. Richard was up and out the door before the piercing cries had subsided. “What in hell’s name is all the yowling about?” he demanded.
“I’m sorry,” came the reply from a woman’s voice in an obvious American accent. My son got his hand caught in the door when it was closing.”
“Yeah, well, what’s he doing up at this hour?” Richard retorted. He had not charged out of a comfortable bed in order to be easily placated. His point made, he barged back into our room. His years working abroad had seemingly not furnished him with much sympathy for a newcomer’s unfamiliarity with an alien country’s cultural mores. “These people bring all their bad habits into this country.”

The lack of sleep did not dampen our enthusiasm the next day as we made our way between holes at the Glen Abbey Canadian Open. The course had been designed by the legendary Jack Nicklaus and I couldn’t help compare it to the cow pasture-like course in Quebec’s Eastern Townships where I had first started knocking around the dented golf balls that I had found in the woods. We were both wearing the V.I.P. passes that enabled us to bypass lineups and even worm our way into the dining room. A middle-aged woman working at the event squinted at me as I came through the door.
“Excuse me, sir,” she inquired politely. “Are you an ex-NHL hockey player?”
My chest swelled slightly as the filing cards in my head briskly considered many possible replies. Could I come up with a name of an ex-player who might resemble me slightly ? Should I smile indulgently and mumble something about that being many decades ago and I was flatted she remembered. Or should I admit that no, I was just a retired schoolteacher.
I couldn’t come up with a name quickly enough to avoid suspicion. I had to come clean. “Uh… no. ” But I had to claim some notoriety. “But I do play a lot of Old-Timers’ hockey.”

I found Roger digging into both the steak and the roast beef that was being served up to both the professional golfers and those wealthy or like me, lucky enough to wangle the free pass.
“I’m kind of a big deal,” I said to Richard. I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. Richard could only give me a sidelong glance as he rose to help himself again to the free buffet.
To Be Continued.

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