Rock the Casbah (Cont’d)

Douglas and I stayed put in our hotel the next day waiting for the antibiotics to take effect. We only had two days left on our car rental, but it didn’t make sense to rush because we would have to pull over every half hour to find a bathroom if we left too soon. My symptoms had abated sufficiently by the second day that we checked out, although I still wasn’t nearly 100%. We were interested in visiting a casbah and asked the young man at reception for a recommendation. We pulled out our map and he showed us where to find a large and well preserved casbah just off the road to Marrakesh.

The word casbah has two meanings: it can refer to a citadel, or to the central part of a town. We were stopping at an example of the former. Casbahs consist of several buildings surrounded by large, fortified walls. They served the same function in medieval Morocco as castles did in medieval Europe – they were home to the local leader and provided residents with a place to gather for trade and socialization, as well as protection from the menace of invading armies. Basically they are fortresses made of dirt and stone, and one can find countless examples of them scattered throughout North Africa. The casbah’s function changed through the centuries as peace came to the region, and they now act as small walled communities. Douglas and I had first heard of casbahs in The Clash song Rock the Casbah, but we were mostly excited to visit one because our guide book suggested they were a must see in Morocco. 

We drove on a highway for over an hour before we hit the two lane road that would take us to the casbah. Sand storms are common occurrences in the desert, and our guide book suggested that one should always be prepared as they can whip up at any moment. Douglas consequently wore a bandana around his neck and I a scarf around mine to pull up and use as masks should the need arise. We had only been on the smaller road for a matter of minutes when the landscape in front of us was suddenly engulfed in a raging vortex of sand. Douglas needed to keep his hands on the wheel so I quickly pulled his bandana up over his mouth and nose, tying it high enough in the back to cover his ears while leaving his eyes unobscured. I had barely gotten my own scarf in place before we plunged into the dark chaos of the storm. 

Most Canadians know how it feels to drive in whiteout conditions – the disorienting loss of visual contact with the road which leads to an ever increasing state of fear. Driving in a sand storm feels just like that, but with a few extra terrifying elements thrown in. First is the bone-jarring sound of everything the wind has picked up from the desert floor being relentlessly hurled against the metal exterior of your car, and next is the creeping suspicion that you are about to suffocate from the massive amount of dust which has filtered into the interior of your car. All you can do is close your mouth, take shallow breaths through your nose, and keep your steering wheel steady. I’m not sure how long we drove through that choking, cacophonous, blinding nightmare, but eventually we came out the other side to see a large and quite beautiful casbah looming up on our left. 

We gratefully pulled onto the hard packed dirt at the foot of the casbah’s walls and jumped out of the car, yanking off our masks and coughing uncontrollably. Presently a wiry young man approached us with a bucket of water and a ladle which he put down at my feet saying, “Please – help yourself.” I immediately used water from the ladle to rinse out my eyes before handing it over to Douglas who promptly did the same thing. We then shook out out scarves, wet them in the bucket, and used them to clean dirt out of our nostrils and ears. We swished water around in our mouths, spitting out the grit lodged between our teeth and the dust which coated our tongues. We were so intent on cleaning off the residue of the storm that it was some time before we finally took in the odd appearance of the man who’d brought us the water in the first place.

Most people in our line of vision were wearing traditional Moroccan clothing – the men in djellabas (full body dress-like garments with tall, pointy hoods) with the women in long-sleeved floor length dresses and head scarves. The men all wore brown leather sandals, while the women sported black flats. The young man in front of us, on the other hand, was wearing blue jeans, a black Harley Davidson t-shirt, and dazzling white high top sneakers with the laces undone. His hair was even more shocking than his outfit because it was the same style and colour as that of the lead singer from the British pop band A Flock of Seagulls. Take a look at the video for I Ran and you’ll understand how incongruous his hairdo was in that setting. He said his name was Mohammed, but everyone called him Mo. There was no doubt in my mind that he wanted everyone to call him that, but I rather suspected that no one did. Douglas and I encountered countless characters like Mo throughout our travels. These are people so enamoured with western culture that they do everything in their power to emulate it, turning their backs on their national clothing, language, and customs in a desperate bid to be cool. Mo insisted on acting as our guide in the casbah, showing us off to the locals as if his stature increased just by being with us. He protested when we offered to pay him for his services at the end of the tour, but we only had to insist a little bit before he capitulated. Mo was up on a lot of current Western pop music but somehow had never heard of the song Rock the Casbah, so we took down his name and address and promised to send him a tape. I wish I could say we made good on our word, but we lost that piece of paper somewhere in our travels.

The car was running badly when we pulled into the small town where we stayed that night, and while it did start the following morning, it would only run for about 10 seconds before shutting off again. We managed to get it to a local garage where I explained the problem to the  mechanic. I suggested, in my very broken French, that perhaps sand had gotten into the engine and was gumming up the works. The man looked under the hood, made a calming gesture with his hands as if to say everything was going to be fine, and then motioned for us to sit in the chairs against the far wall to wait for the work to be finished. In less than half an hour the mechanic waved us to him and turned over the car’s engine which now purred like a kitten. Douglas shook his hand and took out his wallet to pay. The mechanic then quoted a price so outrageous that Douglas and I were both stunned into silence.

Douglas shook his head in shock and disbelief, indicating that he had no intention of paying that much for what had obviously been a simple and quick repair. The mechanic remained adamant. He took the keys out of the ignition and clasped them in his fist, signalling that he would not hand them over until his price was met. Just then an older gentleman and a teenage boy came out of the office in the back of the garage. There was a definite resemblance between these two and the mechanic which led me to believe I was looking at three generations of the same family. They walked up to where we were standing and the older man and the mechanic had a conversation in Arabic. The old man then nudged the boy who said to Douglas in French something along the lines of the price being firm. I looked at the older man and said in halting French that we couldn’t afford that. The old man simply ignored me and continued staring daggers at Douglas. 

It was immediately clear that he was not going to listen to anything I had to say unless it originated from Douglas’s mouth. I guess it was beneath him to deal with a woman. The bargaining now became torturous: Douglas spoke to me in English, then I translated his message into French and conveyed it to the teenager who then passed it on to the old man in Arabic before translating his response back to me in French which I then relayed to Douglas in English. After a while Douglas started to get cheeky. He knew he didn’t have to tell me what to say – I was well aware how haggling worked – so he decided to have some fun and began rhyming off silly non sequiturs. He would stare at the old man with a stern expression on his face and wave his arms angrily in the air while saying things like “Cap’n Crunch is so the best cereal.”, or “I wonder if the actress who played Marcia Brady ever got married.” I was still very weakened from my illness which made cobbling together the right phrases from my grade 9 French extremely difficult and taxing, and now I had the added burden of having to keep a straight face thrown in. Eventually I got the price down to a reasonable amount, although I’m sure we still paid much more than a local would have. Douglas had a good laugh about his antics as we drove away but I was not amused, having found the entire experience insulting and mentally exhausting.

We managed to get the car back to Marrakesh on time by recklessly speeding the whole way. The lady at the rental place kindly came outside after we had settled our bill and showed us where to stand to catch a bus to the train station. Douglas and I thanked her and then humped our bags over to the stop and prepared to wait. We had arrived in Morocco at the end of Ramadan, the holy month during which Muslims don’t eat from sunrise to sunset. The guide book had assured us that most Moroccans didn’t expect tourists to observe the fast, and we had certainly found that to be true in the two weeks we’d been in their country. Restaurants happily served us during the day, and the family in Rabat had made sure there was something for us to eat at breakfast even though they never joined in the meal. 

This day was Eid, the end of the fast, and it traditionally culminates in a communal celebration and feast when the sun goes down. Douglas and I looked forward to joining in the party when we arrived at our destination, a small town on the Atlantic coast called Essaouira. The bus finally arrived but it was so full that we had to stand. It was well past lunchtime, so Douglas pulled out a bag of dried apricots for us to munch on until we could get an actual meal. No sooner had he popped one into his mouth than the man sitting in front of him punched him in the stomach with such force that the apricot shot out, ricocheted off the window, and landed on the floor. Douglas doubled over in pain while his irate assailant, who was now directly at eye level, repeatedly yelled “Ramadan!” in his face. A few people around gave nods of approval, but most of them turned away, preferring not to get involved. I grabbed the apricots and stowed them in my bag, made sure Douglas was okay, and then the two of us remained silent until we disembarked at the train station. It was a tense ride, and we were both grateful to make it off the bus without further incident.

We had already decided that we wanted to stay in Essaouira for several days, both because we were tired from travelling and because I needed rest to fully recover from my bout of dysentery. The guide book informed us that people on the coast often rented out apartments for a week at a time, so we booked into one of those. It was a cosy place with a small working kitchen, a large bed, a separate seating area, and an en suite bathroom. The toilets in Morocco, and in most of the Islamic world, are completely different from ours. There is no seat or bowl, rather it is simply a hole in the floor topped by a ceramic plate with the outline of two large feet at the front. You simply place your feet on the forms provided and squat over the hole to do your business. This design works fine when you are strong and well, but I learned the hard way that it leaves much to be desired when you are weak and ill. Also no toilet paper is provided, rather there is a spigot in the wall beside the hole and you use water to wash yourself when you are done. The tap is always on the left side because one is expected to use the left hand in this process, as people traditionally use their right hands when sharing food. 

Tajine is a delicious traditional Moroccan stew which is served at dinner with couscous. The ingredients in the stew may change, but the spicing is always the same. Douglas and I were rather tired of tajine by the time we got to Essaouira, and were excited at the idea of making something different in our cute kitchen. We decided on spaghetti with meat sauce and garlic bread as our inaugural meal, and headed into the souk (market) to buy the ingredients. I went to get the tomatoes, garlic, and onions from a vegetable stall while Douglas headed off to find butter and, if possible, some kind of cheese. I was just finishing my transaction with the green grocer when I heard an argument break out down the street. I headed in the direction of the noise and before long could distinguish Douglas’s voice in the mix. I began running and soon came to the group of people who had gathered to witness the confrontation.

I forced my way to the front of the crowd to find two men angrily shoving Douglas back and forth while yelling at him in Arabic. I pushed past them to get to his side and asked what was happening. He told me that he had simply asked for butter when these two men had exploded. I then turned to the men and said “Parlez vous Francais?” It turned out one of them did, so I asked him what the problem was. He responded that Douglas had insulted them by trying to buy alcohol. The souks in Moroccan cities are generally situated in the medina, an exclusively Muslim and therefore dry part of town. Even mentioning booze in the medina is a real affront. I turned back to Douglas and asked what he had said, and he again insisted that he had only requested butter. Knowing how terrible he was with foreign words and accents, I then asked him to repeat what he had said word for word. “You know, bière. I asked for bière.” Buerre is the French word for butter, while bière is the French word for beer. Douglas had inadvertently offended the vendors with his atrocious pronunciation. I explained to them what he had meant to say and they both laughed heartily when the cause of the misunderstanding became clear. They were so amused by Douglas’s terrible French and the ridiculous mix-up it had created that they insisted we have the butter for free. We thanked them, hurried home with all our ingredients, and made our much anticipated spaghetti dinner. Unfortunately it turned out that the only container we had for preparing the sauce was a clay tajine pot which was so imbued with tajine spices that everything cooked in it ended up tasting exactly like tajine. We were sorely disappointed.

Essaouira is famous for a large, decrepit sand castle at the end of its beach. Legend has it that this dilapidated structure was the inspiration for Jimi Hendrix’s song Castles made of Sand. No one seems absolutely sure whether or not this is true, but the local vendors have certainly made the most out of this story. The web page for the town starts with the phrase, “Experience the laid back, hippy charm of Morocco’s historic coastal town of Essaouira.” There is Jimi Hendrix paraphernalia and clothing in the local souk, and one can stop at the Jimi Hendrix Café for a cup of mint tea. Douglas and I walked down the beach to the castle ruin one day, and it looks exactly as you would imagine – like an enlarged version of a child’s sand castle dissolving in the oncoming tide at the end of a beach day. 

Seeing as Essaouira touts itself as a “hippy” town, Douglas thought it would be a good idea to get some hashish there. The drug laws in Morocco are incredibly strict, and the punishment for breaking these laws is famously harsh. The movie Midnight Express documents the true story of one American’s harrowing experience in a Moroccan prison. With that movie in mind, I strongly recommended against buying drugs, but Douglas insisted everything would be fine. I don’t know how he found the guy, but just a day after he’d made his decision a young man who introduced himself as Jarman showed up at our door with a good sized chunk of hash. Douglas paid him for the drugs and as he left Jarman invited us to his house for dinner the following night to meet his family. I was really angry at Douglas for exposing us to such risk and very hesitant to attend, but as usual he bullied me into bowing to his will. Dinner at Jarman’s turned out to be delicious and we were never busted for the hash, but that didn’t excuse the extremely stupid chance Douglas had taken with my freedom and well-being against my will. I was extremely upset about this incident for some time but kept my feelings to myself, essentially because I was afraid of my husband and that’s just how my marriage went.

The Morocco I visited in 1989 was a vibrant and interesting country, but with a palpable undercurrent of violence and anger coursing just beneath the surface. It was also, like many Islamic nations, incredibly misogynistic. I will not visit there again, but I am grateful to have experienced it as a young woman.

Rock the Casbah

Morocco is an ancient and fascinating country situated in the northwest corner of Africa and bordering both the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. It was a protectorate of France from 1912 until 1956 (a fact you already know if you’ve ever seen the movie Casablanca) and many of its inhabitants still speak French to this day. My husband Douglas and I spent a month travelling around Morocco in 1989. We first billeted with a local family in Rabat, the nation’s capital. I previously wrote about our time with this family and my extreme frustration that the eldest son, a whiney dullard, was doted on and preferred to his sister Zahra, who was much more clever and worthy of promotion. We stayed in Rabat for about four days and then took a train to Marrakesh.

Marrakesh is a beautiful city located in central Morocco, just west of the Atlas Mountains. Its fortified walls and most of its buildings are made of red sandstone which casts the entire city in a gorgeous shade of salmon pink, as if it were made of bubble gum which had over time dried and faded in the intense Moroccan sun. At the very centre of the city is Jemaa el-Fnaa, the largest public square in Africa, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1985. The name roughly means “the assembly of trespassers” and it is still the beating heart of the city. Douglas and I stayed in a hotel on the edge of the square so we could witness its comings and goings at all hours.

Jemaa el-Fnaa is lively and loud all day and well into the night. Early in the morning various food carts, tradesmen, and entertainers enter the square and claim their spots. There are musicians, magicians, and story-tellers set up under colourful canopies, drawing people in with their artistry. Next are the many kebab, fruit, and yogurt sellers arranging their food in enticing and fragrant displays. Lastly there are practitioners of more archaic skills – snake charmers squat in front of baskets blowing shrill pipes while their serpents dance, and dentists station themselves next to tables full of human teeth along with various tools which looked better suited for torture than tooth extraction. I found the piles of blackened teeth quite off-putting, but they definitely left no doubt as to the trade of the man sitting beside them.

We visited the square our first afternoon in Marrakesh and were immediately set upon by a very eager boy. He began by introducing himself and saying he would be glad to act as our guide throughout the day. We politely declined his offer to show us around, so he then asked if perhaps one or both of us would be interested in “having” him. It took a few beats for us to understand that he was prostituting himself, and we both vigorously refused when we realized what he was offering. Undeterred, he then went on to suggest that perhaps we would prefer his younger sister. Younger?! This kid looked to be about 10 years old! How sad that this boy, and probably his whole family, was so destitute that such a transaction was even in the realm of possibility. We again told the boy no thank you and wandered off, trying to lose him in the thickening midday crowd.

We walked around for some time with the boy always lurking behind despite our best efforts to shake him off. Eventually we ended up at a table festooned with multi-coloured, handmade beanies. Douglas was interested in buying one for himself and one for my brother Michael (who still wears his to this day). He chose two from the mound and began negotiating a price with the vendor. I always found haggling off-putting, but Douglas absolutely loved it. He and the woman had just begun their lively exchange when the boy physically wedged himself between the two of them. He told Douglas that he could get him a good price and then began talking to the woman in Arabic. She looked down at him for a moment and then turned her attention back to Douglas. They were clearly enjoying the exchange, but the boy kept interrupting and stalling their negotiations. Finally the vendor had had enough. She stopped talking, turned to the boy, wrapped her hand around his face, and pushed hard. The poor boy went flying and landed on his backside with a resounding thump. I was concerned for his wellbeing and went over to help him up, but Douglas and the vendor just laughed and recommenced their bargaining as though nothing had happened. 

The outdoor market in an Arab town is called the souk, although we more commonly refer to it as a bazaar. The souks in Marrakesh are interspersed throughout the medina – the oldest part of the city where no foreigners may live. The streets in Souk Semmarine, among the largest in the city, are separated into sections housing similar wares, much like the departments at Sears or The Bay. There is a street or two of herbs and spices, then a couple which feature rugs, and so on. This allows shoppers to more easily find what they are looking for. There are also smaller souks which specialize in particular items, such as Souk Cherratine which features leatherware, and Souk Sayyaghin which is noted for its fine jewelry. The vendors in these markets are all the same no matter where you shop. They always ask where you are from, then try to entice you in by saying something like, “Ah yes, Canada. So my Canadian friend, come on in. I have a special deal just for you.” One might feel flattered if it weren’t for them saying the exact same thing to every visitor they see, simply changing the nationality to suit the tourist in question. 

One evening Douglas and I were wandering through Souk Semmarine when we got lost. This was a rare occurrence because Douglas had an extraordinarily good sense of direction, but the souk was like a labyrinth with twisting streets that all looked the same. There were no landmarks by which he could get his bearings, and the buildings were so close together that he couldn’t get even a rudimentary sense of direction by checking the position of the sun. It was beginning to get dark when he finally admitted that he had no idea how to get us out, and our guidebook had warned against staying in the souk after dark. We considered asking a vendor for assistance, but we knew they would at least delay us with a sales pitch or perhaps even demand we buy something before helping us out. Eventually we came across an unmarked building with voices coming from inside, and, figuring it was probably someone’s house, we stepped a little way in to ask for directions. We had barely passed the threshold when we realized we had inadvertently entered a mosque.

Some Islamic countries, like Turkey, allowed non-Muslims to enter their mosques provided they do so respectfully, following all the rules and performing whatever rituals are required. Morocco was not one of these countries. It was considered a transgression of the highest order for an infidel to enter their places of worship. We had read about this in our hitchhiker’s guide and therefore immediately backed out of the mosque, repeatedly saying “Sorry!” as we retreated. The men gathered therein were clearly not appeased by our apologies. They immediately started angrily shouting at us and shot to their feet. They began to give chase once they hit the street, so Douglas and I started to run. Before long the men were pitching rocks at us – not little pebbles thrown to make a point, but rather large stones hurled with the clear intention of causing bodily harm. We redoubled our speed (as best we could in sandals) and ran on until finally a saviour appeared in the form of a rug merchant who beckoned us into his shop. He hid us behind a pile of rugs and feigned ignorance when the angry mob asked if he’d seen us.

The vendor invited us into his back room for a cup of calming tea, and we gladly accepted. His English was quite good and we chatted about this and that as we waited for enough time to pass for us to safely be on our way. He kindly drew us a map of how to get out of the souk and back to Jemaa el-Fnaa, then gave us his card as we were leaving. We promised to come back the next day even though we weren’t sure that we would. Douglas and I talked about the afternoon’s events later that evening and realized that buying a rug from this man was the least we could do. At a minimum his kindness had spared us physical harm, and at most he may actually have saved our lives. We went back to his shop the next morning and bought one small and one medium sized run, the latter of which adorns the floor in my guest room.

The next day we rented a car and headed east to visit the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert. We stopped for the night in a beautiful valley in the Atlas foothills, populated largely by Berbers. Berbers are the indigenous people of North Africa. Ten thousand year old cave paintings found in the area are thought to have been created by Berber tribesmen, so they were firmly established in Morocco well before the Muslims came in the 8th Century. Douglas and I booked into a lovely hotel on the edge of the valley. Its courtyard dining room featured several long tables surrounded not by chairs, but rather by lounging couches. This allowed patrons to lie back after their meal, a welcome option we took advantage of after dinner that evening. Our meal began with locally grown green olives – tart, fruity and delicious – freshly picked sweet and juicy figs, and delicious bread still hot from the oven. The main course of tagine (a Moroccan stew served throughout the country) featured grapes bursting with flavour, and the mint used in the tea we drank after the meal was harvested just outside the window. There was a Berber wedding being held somewhere nearby, and the echoing sound of drums and human voices raised in joyous song and ululation washed over us. It was a glorious evening. 

We headed off early the next morning hoping to be in the sand dunes of the Sahara that night. Our guide book informed us that one had to drive through many miles of flat, unmarked terrain before reaching the hostel on the edge of the dunes, and suggested that a local guide should be engaged to navigate the trip. We ended up hiring Abdul, a member of the Tuareg tribe. The Tuaregs are nomadic Berbers scattered throughout the entirety of the Sahara Desert – from Morocco and Algeria in the north to Niger and Mali in the south. They are known for their distinctive indigo blue headwear, and have survived in the desert since prehistoric times. Abdul sat in the passenger seat without a map and relied entirely on his own deep familiarity with the terrain to get us to our destination. He would simply point straight ahead, right or left, and Douglas would follow his lead. There was literally nothing out the window one could use to orient oneself, and yet in less than two hours Abdul had led us to a small building sitting on the edge of the largest sand dunes I have ever seen. They stretched out as far as the eye could see, and many of them were taller than three story buildings. 

The hostel itself was very sparse inside, but we hadn’t expected much. It was also brutally hot, so we spent the rest of that day out on the dunes. We were alarmed to see that there were no beds in the building, but the owner set our minds at ease when he showed us the mattresses on the roof. He explained that most visitors liked sleeping outside because it was cooler, and also so that they could take in the vast expanse of the night sky unsullied by light pollution. Late that evening Douglas and I snuggled under a thick blanket (nights are surprisingly cold in the desert) and admired the starlit canopy overhead. The ever moving sand on the dunes provided a hissing white noise which before long ushered us into a deep sleep. Sometime later that night the wind picked up and we were abruptly awoken by a raging sand storm. All we could do was bury our heads under the covers and wait it out. For hours sand pelted the building and our blanket as we cowered beneath, until finally, just before dawn, the wind calmed. We emerged to see that the dunes had all markedly changed shape, and stayed up to watch the expanding sun rise over this magical, ever-shifting landscape.

We said our goodbyes to the hostel’s staff once the sun had fully risen, and Douglas once again blindly followed Abdul’s directions. Before long he brought us to a Tuareg tent. The family inside greeted us warmly, and the mother offered us a meagre breakfast and some tea. I hesitated to take it as I’d noticed the water she was using had not been fully boiled, but I couldn’t see any way to refuse without being rude. These people had practically nothing and yet they were willing to share with two complete strangers. I drank very little of the tea, but I would soon learn that a few sips were more than enough to cause massive damage. My intestines began to revolt as we reached the edge of the town where we were spending the night, and I was experiencing explosive and extremely painful diarrhea by the time we got into our hotel room. Wave upon wave washed over me, and before long there was blood in the toilet bowl and I was too weak to stand. Douglas looked up the symptoms of dysentery in our guidebook and determined he needed to get to a pharmacy immediately to buy me some antibiotics. Dysentery is nothing to be sneezed at and is still responsible for an estimated 1.1 million deaths per year, almost exclusively in the developing world.

I lay exhausted on the bed after Douglas left, trying my best to sleep or at least ignore the growing urge to defecate because I knew how much it was going to hurt if I gave in. Suddenly there was a loud knock on the door and someone began rattling the doorknob. I startled from my shallow slumber and called out, “Ma marie ce n’est pas ici. J’ai mal. J’ai tres mal.” I figured it was housekeeping trying to bring in fresh towels or something like that, and was baffled when the noise in the hall increased as someone began slamming themselves bodily into the door in an attempt to smash it open. This went on for some time, but luckily the door held and eventually whoever was on the other side gave up. It wasn’t until days later when I was almost fully recovered from my illness that I realized with horror that the person who had tried to break down the door almost certainly meant me harm. Perhaps they had seen Douglas leave and knew I was alone and vulnerable. This was a truly terrible realization, but I couldn’t imagine any other scenario that made sense. 

Douglas was gone for a couple of hours because he stopped for dinner after visiting the pharmacy. I was in such a diminished state that I didn’t even mention the incident at the door when he returned, and also I was just glad that he’d gotten the medication I so desperately needed. Douglas was absolutely terrible at languages – he couldn’t remember foreign words to save his life and his accent was atrocious even when I prompted him. With this in mind I’ve always wondered exactly how he conveyed what he needed to the pharmacist. I assume it must have consisted of a hilarious pantomime of cramping and pooping and then looking in the toilet with alarm. In the end it doesn’t matter how he made the druggist understand because the pills he procured as a result probably saved my life. Still, I wish I could have been there to see his performance. 

I find after all this writing that I’ve still only covered about half of my most noteworthy experiences in Morocco, so I shall continue the tale next week.

Count your Blessings

We all face dark periods in our lives, often for years at a time. In my mid 30s I left my abusive marriage, my husband succumbed to cancer after a mere 10 months, I moved to a strange city for a year with two young children, and my mother died shortly after I started a new career. All of these hardships and life-altering changes happened in a five year span. Some days it felt as if it was more than I could bear, and for a while I repeatedly asked “Why me?” What I came to understand over time, however, is that the real question is “Why not me?” There is no intent, malevolent or otherwise, behind such trials – they are simply part of human existence. 

Overcoming difficulties is what forges our characters and teaches us skills like perseverance and resilience while hopefully increasing our compassion. I realize, when I look back on those trying years, that they are largely responsible for the person I have become – a person I rather like and whom many others seem to like as well. The only thing I would change about that harrowing time is my mindset while going through it. I’m not berating myself for anything I did (as that would be pointless and self-defeating) but due to the perspective I have gained over the past 20 years, I can’t help but wish I had occasionally taken a step back to recognize the many good things in my life even in my darkest hours. Good things, as it turned out, which outnumbered the bad by quite a bit: two wonderful children, a loving family, a wide circle of supportive friends, decent health, a roof over my head, abundant food, and the good fortune to live in a peaceful and orderly society.

I (along with pretty well everyone else on the planet) have found the past 10 months to be scary and trying, but rather than wallowing in sadness and uncertainty I have decided to shift my perspective. Some months ago I came across a quote by the American novelist Annie Dillard which perfectly sums up my thinking, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” One cannot step in and out of one’s life, regardless of what is happening. We all have a limited run here on earth and time only moves in one direction. I can’t get these days back, so why spend them worrying about things I can’t control like the increase in Covid-19 cases, how long it will take to roll out the vaccine, or what life will be like after we reach herd immunity? Surely my time is better spent acknowledging all the wonderful things that are present in my life right now, and fully embracing the joy and gratitude such recognition brings.

The unstinting heroism of front line healthcare workers comes first to mind. Nurses, doctors, EMTs, and LTC facility workers have persevered through PPE shortages, extremely long shifts, and the trauma of watching good people suffer and die alone. These individuals are willing to put their own health and lives at risk to ensure the wellbeing of others, and words cannot express the debt we owe them. Many others have sacrificed to keep society humming along through this crisis as well. Employees of supermarkets and drug stores, everyone manning the lines in food processing and packaging plants, city transit drivers, and those working in education are also worthy of praise and gratitude. I used to get angry when I saw anti-maskers on the news, but now I simply remind myself of the thousands of people diligently working for the greater good through this pandemic and my anger goes away. I know these steadfast individuals far outnumber the selfish people moaning about their right not to wear a mask, and I am comforted. 

There are also countless doctors, scientists, and lab technicians who have worked tirelessly to create vaccines, get them properly tested, and make them available to the public as quickly as possible. It is nothing short of miraculous how rapidly these individuals have attained their goal, with vaccines rolling out a scant year after the virus was first identified. This indicates a massive and diligent sharing of information between labs on an international level, and we are all the beneficiaries of such dedicated and tireless work. The WHO deserves praise as well for orchestrating these efforts, and for continuing to inform the public about how the vaccines were developed and how to best contain the spread of the virus as we all wait for our shots. They are also working hard to ensure that even the poorest and furthest flung regions of the globe will have access to the vaccine in a timely fashion – a very worthy endeavour indeed. 

Our federal government deserves kudos as well. They recognized the extent of the problem with the first lockdown last March and immediately responded with financial aid to Canadians whose livelihoods were threatened. They got the CERB out in an orderly and timely fashion, and have recently made changes to EI requirements so individuals who are temporarily out of work due to the virus still have an income. Theresa Tam, Chief Public Health Officer of Canada, has been calm, informative, and unflagging throughout the crisis. She continues to keep us well informed about the virus, and is willing to make tough decisions for the care and safety of all Canadians.  I’m sure Dr. Tam, Mr. Trudeau, and his cabinet are all exhausted, and I’m endlessly appreciative of their steady leadership in this difficult time.

Many people have posted fabulous things on Facebook, Youtube, and other social media platforms over the past 10 months to help lift our spirits and remind us of all the good in the world. John Krasinski, known for playing Jim on The Office and more recently Jack Ryan in the Amazon series of the same name, presented several instalments on Youtube of a show he called SGN: Some Good News. SGN, which Krasinski hosted from his home office, showed amateur footage of regular people being good and kind to one another. Many of these individuals went above and beyond to cheer up and comfort people in complete isolation at the beginning of the lockdown. Krasinski always made sure to electronically contact and personally thank each one of the caring individuals featured in these clips. He hosted a virtual wedding and a virtual prom, and also facilitated the virtual meeting of several outstanding university students and their heroes. Krasinski’s actions and those of the people he featured on SGN were all tremendously up-lifting.

Various artists have also taken the time to post performances online for people to enjoy for free. Keith Urban hosted an hour long concert from his home studio, with his wife Nicole Kidman dancing in the background. Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood performed together in their studio, and YoYo Ma has filmed himself several times playing various movements from the Bach cello concerti. I’ve seen dancers from The Royal Ballet Company and The New York City Ballet online, and have enjoyed virtual performances by various choral groups. 

Choir! Choir! Choir! is a Toronto-based group made up of two men, Daveed Goldman and Nobu Adilman. In 2011 they began hosting a weekly sing-along at a local bar in Toronto, and it proved so popular that they decided to take the show on the road. They now visit locations all over the world, bringing celebrities and regular folks together in song. My sister and I saw them when they came to Peterborough a few years ago, and we really enjoyed ourselves. Every audience member is given a sheet containing the lyrics to several songs at the beginning of the evening, and then Daveed plays guitar and Nobu conducts while the whole audience sings. Daveed and Nobu (AKA “DaBu”) have hosted numerous virtual sing-alongs since last March, most of which I have attended. There is something enormously cheering about singing with others, and I am grateful to DaBu for their unbridled enthusiasm and willingness to repeatedly lead a virtual choir of strangers.

The board of my choir, The Peterborough Singers, has come up with an ingenious way to allow its members to continue singing through the pandemic. There is no way the entire choir of over 100 people could safely get together, so they’ve arranged for groups of 12 to 18 to meet once a week for a socially distanced sing. These gatherings include music from various genres and time periods ranging from the renaissance to the present day. So far I’ve sung in a jazz ensemble and a jazz Christmas group, and come February I will be singing Broadway tunes. We are all very far apart when we meet, making pitch and tempo a problem, and it is less than ideal to sing wearing a mask, but overall the experience has been very pleasant. This is my seventh year in the choir, and our weekly rehearsals have become a welcome ritual in my life. I am extremely appreciative that good people have organized these choral meetings, providing me with at least some normalcy in an otherwise very uncertain time.

I have noticed that people I encounter in my community are diligently following the Covid-19 precautions: everyone is masked in indoor spaces, people will stop and move to the side or thank me if I do so when passing on the sidewalk, and the outdoor spaces I enjoyed this summer were full of individuals rigidly ensuring they were at least two meters apart. My friends in education tell me that their students, regardless of age, are being cooperative and conscientious about wearing their masks. Sometimes they forget to maintain social distance from one another, but they seem to understand the risk to older people when they forget and gladly separate after a gentle reminder. All of this reminds me that apart from a few yahoos who always seem to make the headlines, the vast majority of people are really good and caring.

Stress and anxiety always manifest physically in my body. I’ll have gastro-intestinal problems, or my sleep will be disrupted, or I’ll feel a squeezing in my chest which makes me hyper aware of my heartbeat and impedes my ability to breath deeply. This past September, as the thought of a long, dark winter of Covid approached, I began to experience some of these problems. I mentioned my increasing symptoms to my son, Max, who is extremely logical and strong willed. He suggested that my physical problems were almost certainly due to pandemic stress and said I needed to exercise more to work out my anxiety. I was already walking every day, so he suggested I add yoga and weightlifting to my regimen, and when I balked he said, “What else do you have to do?” I really don’t have anything else on because I’m retired, so I then countered by saying that I don’t like lifting weights, to which he responded “What’s that got to do with anything?” Sometimes people say things that flip a virtual switch in one’s brain, and these two simple phrases did that for me. I added the extra exercise to my routine the day after our conversation, along with a daily meditation session, and my physical ailments all but disappeared within a few months. I am grateful for my plain speaking son, and that I naturally have a fair bit of will power.

I also greatly appreciate that I am retired and have therefore missed all the stress of teaching in these strange times. I have a good pension, adequate investments, and I own my house and car. I can safely stay home to limit the spread without having to worry about paying my bills. I’m also cognizant that this is a much better time to be isolated than any other in history. There are myriad electronic avenues to occupy my time, and several very good platforms which allow me to see and converse with people I love. Also, this virus is paltry in comparison to the Spanish Flu of 1918. Covid-19 has killed less than 2 million people to date with three viable vaccines already being distributed, while the Spanish Flu killed as many as 50 million by the time herd immunity was achieved some two years after it began. Old people have been by far the worst hit by the current virus, whereas the 1918 flu was particularly deadly in young adults and children. All in all this is a much less scary and lethal illness than any of its worldwide predecessors, and that’s a good thing to remember as well. 

Lots of knowledgable therapists are also posting insightful articles about the emotional and psychological side-effects we are all experiencing right now. I’ve found many of these essays extremely helpful, and I have only to make a simple search on my computer to access this whole world of useful information and advice. I read one article last week which suggested that what we are really feeling right now is grief – we are grieving for the lives we all knew, and lamenting that it is unclear when, if ever, they will return. I have experienced grief many times in my life, and this explanation makes sense to me. Of course we are all sad about losing normal interactions like meeting a friend for coffee, going to see a movie, or attending a baseball game. It is important to remember, however, that grief is an emotion, and emotions are transient. Yes we are facing an unprecedented time in our collective lives, but we will persevere and I am confident we will come out the other end with a new appreciation for everyday life and one another. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” to which I would add, “…and happier and wiser, too.”

What if We Went to Italy

My husband Douglas and I spent a month travelling around Italy in the spring of 1985. We didn’t have any sort of plan other than wanting to visit my maternal grandfather’s grave at some point. He had been a lance corporal in the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and was killed in August of 1944 on the Gothic line – the last major line of defence put up by the German army as they retreated from Italy. We knew his body was in a Canadian cemetery called Montecchio on the east coast of the country, so we made sure our travels took us from west to east so we could pay our respects before heading to our next destination, Turkey.

Douglas and I had flown from Toronto to Paris, spent some time in Provence, and then took a day long train trip from Marseilles into Italy. We arrived in Bologna at about 9:00 in the evening. We hadn’t reserved a place to stay nor did we know anything about the city, but we were young and adventurous and such details were consequently of little concern. There is no way I would be so incautious now, but travelling blind was a welcome adventure when I was 24.

Train stations are usually located in the rough part of a city, and Bologna’s was no exception. We stepped outside the building into an extremely dark, mostly deserted, and downright seedy neighbourhood. There are usually taxis waiting in situations like this, but there were none in Bologna. I pulled out our Hitchhiker’s Guide to Italy to try and find a place to stay, but no sooner had I opened it than a rather scruffy young man approached us. He said his name was Marco, and Douglas introduced us in return. Marco suggested in broken English that we would be hard pressed to find a place to stay at this time of night, and that he was willing to let us bunk at his apartment. At my current age of 59 I would find such a proposal highly suspect, but at the time Douglas and I were young and trusting enough that all we felt was relief.

Marco lived within walking distance of the station, and in short order he led us to his place which turned out to be as disheveled as he was. As soon as we walked in he began frantically picking up dirty laundry from the chairs and couch and clearing garbage and dirty dishes from the coffee table. It turned out he had a separate bedroom, but there was a double mattress in the corner of his living room which he indicated would be our spot for the night. We made up the bed and then Marco invited us to take a seat. He disappeared into his bedroom for a moment and then came back with an enormous bong which he proceeded to fill, light, and then offer around. We accepted his hospitality without question and before long the busyness of the day and the marijuana left Douglas and I extremely tired. Marco took his cue from our drooping eyelids and retreated to his bedroom so we could sleep. We woke to the enticing smell of fresh coffee the following morning, and Marco served us a delicious continental breakfast along with the espresso he’d brewed. We tried to give him some money after the meal as we prepared to leave, but he absolutely refused to take it. He said Bologna had a bad rap as being unwelcoming and unsafe, and he had simply wanted to show us that this was not the case. I will always be grateful to Marco for reminding me that the vast majority of people really are very nice.

We took a train from Bologna to Florence, and ended up liking the city so much that we stayed for a full week. Florence is absolutely magnificent, with architectural delights around every corner and countless piazzas filled with glorious fountains and beautiful sculptures. It is the capital city of the Tuscany region and was a centre of medieval European trade and finance. Florence is considered by many scholars to be the birthplace of the Renaissance, and has been called “the Athens of the Middle Ages.” Much of its beauty resulted from the patronage of the Medici family, an infamous clan which held sway in the city from 1434 to 1737, producing four popes and marrying into several European royal families along the way. The Florentine dialect forms the basis of modern standard Italian due to the influence of famous residents such as Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Dante. The historic centre of Florence became a World Heritage Site in 1982, with the city playing an integral role inEuropean fashion, art, and culture to this day.

Florence is one of those cities where you can simply walk for hours and never be bored. Aside from the glorious architecture, it’s also home to several world class museums, the best known being the Uffizi Gallery and the Pitti Palace. The most famous single work of art in Florence, however, lives in the much lesser known Accademia Gallery. Michelangelo’s masterwork David graces this small gallery, and at just over 13 feet tall literally stands head and shoulders above the rest of the sculpture collection. Most other statues of King David depict him after defeating Goliath, often with the giant’s head at his feet. Michelangelo broke the mould by depicting the young king before battle, with a slingshot in one hand and a stone in the other.

It’s hard to say why some works of art become so incredibly famous. The Mona Lisa, for example, portrays a rather unexceptional woman, but somehow her smile has entranced generations of art lovers. I saw The Mona Lisa at The Louvre, having waited in line for ages to catch a brief glimpse of her famous visage staring back from behind bulletproof glass. I don’t mind saying that I was deeply disappointed. The painting itself is surprisingly small, and I found the image totally bland. Michelangelo’s David, on the other had, is well deserving of its notoriety. The subject is heroic, the execution is flawless, and the finished product is too large to ignore. It is altogether a masterpiece worthy of the name.

David was originally commissioned by the Florence wool guild to adorn the local cathedral, known as Il Duomo in honour of its huge and distinctive octagonal dome. Il Duomo is a massive Gothic cathedral which dominates the Florentine skyline and stands well above any other building. Its basilica is one of Italy’s most spacious churches, and the dome was the biggest in the world until the invention of new structural materials in the modern era allowed for even more massive ones to be built. It remains the largest brick dome ever constructed, and is instantly recognizable due to its peculiar red-orange hue. This beautiful cathedral along with all the other breathtaking art and architecture scattered throughout the city make Florence a truly must see experience.

Pisa is about halfway between Florence and the port city of Pesaro where my grandfather’s grave lies, so Douglas and I decided to stop over for the afternoon to catch a glimpse of its famous leaning tower. I must say that seeing the pitch of the building in person is quite breathtaking. The fact that it has remained standing at such a precarious angle for centuries is truly mind boggling. Douglas, ever the ham, placed himself in front and to the side of the tower with his hands firmly stuffed in the pockets of his jacket so that his shape mirrored that of the structure behind him. He then began to tilt sideways and I took a picture when I reckoned he was on exactly the same slant as the tower. He scrambled to get his hands out immediately after the photo was taken, luckily doing so in time to break his fall. I still have that photo in an album downstairs, and I have to admit that it is quite brilliant. Douglas and the tower lean at precisely the same angle, creating the impression that both are being held in place by some mysterious gravity defying force.  

The basilica at Pisa is noteworthy as well. Douglas and I usually simply glommed on for free at the back of tour groups when we visited famous buildings, but our trusty hitchhiker’s guide suggested it was worth the money to actually pay at the basilica. This turned out to be good advice. The guide himself was an amiable man with very good English, and his spiel about the tower and the building was highly entertaining and very enlightening. The highlight of the tour came when he moved to the very centre of the basilica and asked us to form a ring around him. He then instructed us to remain perfectly silent and clapped his hands. The echoing response made it seem as though several people, one after the other, were answering his clap with ones of their own. We all marvelled at the amazing acoustics of the place, and then the guide motioned us once again to silence. He then sang out three notes in quick succession which shortly echoed back from the basilica’s domed ceiling, hanging in the air and forming a perfect major cord. He did this several more times, creating cords of every type, and the overall effect was truly magical. Douglas and I were more than happy to tip the guide when we eventually left the basilica. 

We got back on the train later that afternoon and arrived in Pesaro before nightfall. The next day I bought a small bouquet of flowers and we hitched a ride to Montecchio to visit my grandfather’s grave. Our driver let us off just before the cemetery and we had to climb a small rise to reach our destination. I’ll never forget cresting that hill and seeing a vista of white crosses marching off, row on row, as far as the eye could see. I knew that this was just one of myriad sites of this kind scattered throughout Europe and the south Pacific that held the markers of the thousands upon thousands of allied soldiers killed in battle. The enormity of this loss grew in my mind the closer I came to the site, until I was almost out of breathe from the shear scale of it by the time I reached the perimeter fence. So many young lives cut short. What an unspeakable tragedy.

There was a small hut at the entrance to the cemetery which contained a map of the grave sites along with a visitors’ book for leaving a message if one felt so inclined. Douglas and I found the location of my grandfather’s grave and headed off to lay my flowers. We stopped to look at other crosses along the way, reflecting sadly on the proximity of the birth and death dates of the fallen soldiers whose graves they marked. All of these young men had died at around the same time, so clearly they had fought along with my grandfather on the Gothic line in the summer of 1944. Finally we came to our destination and Douglas read aloud, “Cameron, Lance Corporal David Hugh. Loyal Edmonton Regiment. August  26, 1944. Age 35. Son of Herman McLean Cameron and Edith Cameron; husband of Margaret Jean Cameron of Ottawa, Ontario.” 

Somehow those words made the whole thing very real for me. This wasn’t just a man I’d heard about in stories; this was Nana’s husband, and Mum and Aunt Carolyn’s father. This was a man whose life and death had a lasting impact on people I loved. The enormity of this thought, and of their loss, overwhelmed me at that moment and I began to cry. I cried for my grandmother who was left to raise two young girls on her own, for my aunt who became emotionally withdrawn in response to her father’s death, and mostly for my mother who never fully got over the loss. As a girl she had been very close to her father and had drawn much of her self esteem from his attention and approval. Then the person who cared for her most in the world voluntarily put himself in harms way and lost his life as a result. This must have forced into the forefront of her young mind the question of how much she was really worth. His death hobbled her burgeoning ego and it would never recover. I saw firsthand how destabilizing the death of a parent can be when my own young children lost their father to cancer. They both suffered for years as a result, but eventually managed to work through their trauma by facing it and adopting coping mechanisms. My mother, on the other hand, refused to talk about her father to her dying day, let alone discuss or acknowledge how his loss had affected her. No wonder she was so screwed up about it.

All of these thoughts and realizations were swirling in my mind when we returned to the hut at the entrance to the cemetery. I hadn’t felt the least bit interested in leaving a message in the guestbook when I’d entered a short time earlier, but now I felt compelled to write something. I firstly thanked the keepers of the cemetery for their diligence and hard work – the crosses were immaculately clean and upright, and the grounds were scrupulously well kept. I then went on to write a short note to my grandfather. I told him who I was and that his widow and two daughters were thriving but all still missed him. It sounds silly and kind of cheesy now, but it was absolutely the right thing to do at that moment. I felt better as soon as I’d put the words to paper. Ghosts and spirits don’t exist, and I’m well aware my grandfather never received my message, but I didn’t write it for him. I wrote it on behalf of three ladies I dearly love.

Overall Italy is an incredible, beautiful country full of glorious landscapes and boasting a rich and important history. The food is excellent, the people are welcoming, and the climate is very near perfect. I would highly recommend everyone spend some time there, and very much look forward to returning one day myself. I’ve yet to see Rome, I hear Sicily is well worth a visit, and I’d like to experience Venice before it drowns in the rising Adriatic Sea. Viva Italia!

My Old School – The Continuing Saga

I taught at Dr. Ross Tilley Public School in Bowmanville for the first five years of my career, and last week I touched on how difficult and confrontational the school community could be. This sort of environment had its upside, however, in that it created an us vs. them mindset which forced the staff to become very close. Our principal Rob, for example, was a wonderful person (I’ve given him a false name as I will everyone in this article). Rob was a fun-loving guy who often joked around with the teachers, but he was scrupulously professional and always had our backs when brokering disputes with parents. He clearly respected us and the job we did. The board regularly put out thick binders full of new procedures which they expected principals to review with their teachers. I remember more than one occasion where Rob walked into a staff meeting, threw one such binder on the table and said, “I was told to bring this to your attention. Does everyone see it? Good – now let’s get on with the meeting.” He’d been in the game long enough to know that most people at the board office have no idea what actually goes on in the classroom and therefore tend to generate new material solely to justify their own positions. This remained true throughout the entirety of my 19 years in education.

I genuinely liked and respected almost all of my colleagues at Tilley, but there were a few I tried to avoid. I mentioned a grade 5 teacher named Gus in my last article. Gus was married to a Kindergarten teacher on staff named Cathy. Gus was a straight shooting guy and also, I suspect, a very good teacher. He and I got along well, but his wife was another matter. There were two things about Cathy which I really didn’t like. Firstly, she constantly referred to her son as “my Alan.” She’d say things like “My Alan won a scholarship, “ or, “The team wouldn’t have won if my Alan wasn’t playing.” This proprietorial phrasing ensured that anything her son did well always reflected positively on Cathy – as if she was responsible for his efforts and accomplishments.

Secondly, Cathy insisted on reciting the Lord’s prayer with her class every morning, a practice which had been legally banned from Ontario public schools in 1988 because it is a clear infringement of the Charter rights of non-Christians. I don’t even like it when parents indoctrinate their own children into a particular faith, so you can imagine how distasteful I found Cathy’s behaviour. She and I had several heated discussions about the illegality and unprofessionalism of what she was doing, not to mention how presumptuous it was. She always insisted, in that high-handed way so many people of faith have, that she was in the right and her actions were in the best interests of the children. There were several times I almost reported her to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, but I refrained for Gus’s sake.

One day I came into the staffroom for lunch and sat down opposite Gus and Cathy at the table. Cathy always dressed up for school, and on this occasion wore a lovely yellow floral-print dress with matching earrings and shoes, with her make-up and hair done to a tee. She was clearly getting frustrated with a mustard squeeze bottle which refused to cooperate, so I offered to help, saying I had pretty good luck with such things. Cathy willingly handed the bottle over, and after shaking it vigorously several times I gave it a hard squeeze. I didn’t realize that she had slightly unscrewed the top in her effort to make the mustard flow, and the pressure I exerted on the bottle forced the lid clean off. 

A spray of mustard arched through the air and landed on Cathy’s carefully coiffed hair, made up face, and the bodice of her pretty dress. The whole room went silent for a moment, and then Gus started laughing uproariously. I of course immediately put the bottle down and ran to get a cloth from the sink, apologizing profusely the whole time and saying the mustard might not show up too much on her yellow dress. Meanwhile, Cathy simply stood up and, ignoring me completely, silently went into the bathroom. I cleaned off the table while she was gone, rinsed out the cloth, and then sat back down. A minute or two passed with Cathy still out of the room, and the whole time Gus continued laughing so hard that he had tears running down his face and could hardly catch his breath. Finally I looked at him and said, “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen when your wife returns from the bathroom, but I do know that things are going to go very badly for you if you’re still laughing when she does.” I could see the truth of what I’d said burgeoning in Gus’s eyes, and just like that he stopped laughing, wiped his face with his sleeve, and began eating what was left of his lunch. It was clear Cathy was furious with me when she eventually returned to the table, and Gus gave me a surreptitious nod of thanks for sparing him any part in her rage. I swear that this entire incident was an accident and had nothing to do with my antipathy for Cathy. Honest!

The other Tilley staff member I didn’t like was our French teacher Colette. She taught in a portable which was set up like a store. She brought in all kinds of junk – things she’d picked up at garage sales, her own kids’ used clothing, etc. – and literally sold it to students when they came in for French class. Colette insisted that all the proceeds went to charity, but that didn’t justify what she was doing. She was selling crap to a gullible, captive audience, and that should not have been happening. I aired my objections to her business at more than one staff meeting, but it was some time before her little enterprise was finally shut down.

As bad as Colette’s “store” was, her behaviour towards intermediate boys was far worse. She regularly ogled them, stroked their arms and heads in a most off-putting manner, and pressed herself up against them at intermediate dances. The worst example of her creepiness surfaced every Hallowe’en. Colette perennially dressed up as a vampire with bright red lipstick, and throughout the day she would kiss as many intermediate boys on the neck as she could get her grubby hands on, leaving a scarlet outline on their skin. She claimed she was only playing a character, pretending to bite them as a vampire would, but we all knew better. A former colleague of mine became vice principal at Tilley some years after I left, and I made a point of alerting her to Colette’s inappropriate fascination with teenage boys before she had even started the job. Colette finally faced disciplinary action that year when she pulled her usual Hallowe’en stunt, and was suspended for three days as a consequence. Frankly, I would have felt better if she’d been dismissed. She clearly had an unhealthy attraction to teenage boys and should have been fired for their sake. The teachers’ federation defended Colette in this case, making it one of many instances wherein my union defended a teacher who clearly wasn’t fit for the job.

Tragedy struck Tilley my second year there. I came into the staff room one morning to find everyone gathered and looking anxious. I asked a colleague what was going on and she said that they had all been called in over the PA system, which usually meant bad news. The principal, Rob, came in and informed us that a grade eight girl named Jori had killed herself. A collective gasp went up around the room as he went on to say that her mother had found her hanging body the previous evening, and that a board councillor was coming in to speak to the grade eights and to offer support to the teachers.

Intermediates at Tilley stayed in their homerooms for the morning to learn language and math, and then circulated from room to room in the afternoon to be taught all of the other subjects by specialist teachers. This was called the rotary system. Jori’s last class the previous day had been science, and the teacher, Jack, spoke up with a look of horror on his face. Evidently he had been quite stern with Jori at the end of the period because she was falling behind in her work, and he was clearly worried that her suicide may have been in response to his harsh words. Rob promptly cut Jack off at this point. He said the councillor had warned him that teachers often blamed themselves when such tragedies occurred, but the fact was that almost all teenage suicide attempts are cries for help and/or attention which are ultimately meant to fail. It was simply bad luck that Jori’s mother had been delayed at work the previous day and had therefore discovered her daughter too late to save her.

Jori’s homeroom teacher, Bob, was the hardest hit of anyone. He immediately put his head in his hands and broke down in silent sobs when he heard the news. The bell was about to ring and it was clear that Bob was in no shape to teach, so Rob told him that he’d arranged for Mark, our vice principal, to step in on his behalf. I did not start my work day until after first period, so when the bell rang Rob pulled me aside and quietly asked me to stay with Bob until he came through the worst of his initial shock. I sat down next to Bob on the couch and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder as everyone else filtered out of the room. As soon as they had all gone Bob, as if no longer constrained by having an audience, let out his full grief. He clutched his stomach and started rocking back and forth while a low and persistent moan forced itself out of his mouth. He kept this up for some time as I rather feebly stroked his back. Eventually Bob became still and silent, and I handed him a kleenex. He wiped off his face, took a few shuttering breathes, and then stood up and started to leave. I asked him if he thought it was wise to face his students in such a state, and he said, “Thank you for your kindness, but I think my kids need me.” This is just what teachers do – we stuff down our personal sorrows and traumas so we can be present for our students. That’s the job.

We also had times of great joy at Tilley. Dr. Ross Tilley, after whom the school was named, was a Canadian plastic surgeon stationed in Europe during WWII. He pioneered many new techniques on soldiers whose faces were disfigured during battle – a group of volunteers he proudly called his guinea pigs. 2005 marked the 60th anniversary of the end of the war, and one of my colleagues, in a Herculean feat of organization, arranged for the surviving guinea pigs to come to the school on Remembrance Day along with Dr. Tilley’s widow. The plan was for the veterans to join the whole school in the gym for our annual assembly, and then to individually visit various classes to take questions from the kids and speak to them one-on-one. 

Several teachers greeted the guinea pigs as they arrived on the big day, while the rest of us maintained order in the gym. The principal called the assembly to order and reminded the kids that this was a solemn occasion. The veterans who had been kind enough to come to the school had been through horrors we couldn’t even begin to imagine, and a respectful silence was expected from everyone as our guests entered the gym. The room was completely still and quiet as the guinea pigs filed in moments later – a few under their own steam, a few in wheelchairs, and several leaning on canes. All of them had huge smiles on their still noticeably scarred faces. One of them spontaneously waved as he entered the room, and this simple act of greeting broke the tension and the kids began to clap. Soon their applause redoubled and they all stood, hooting and hollering for the heroes facing them from the far wall. It turned out that this joyous celebration by the whole school was the appropriate response to our guests, not the restrained greeting we’d all anticipated. The guinea pigs clearly relished the ovation, and we were all filled with feelings of gratitude and kinship. This moment remains one of the most memorable of my career.

As wonderful as the experience in the gym was, things got even better when the guinea pigs visited our classes. My students and another grade five class all crammed into one room to meet with our assigned veteran, a wizened old man with a profoundly disfigured face belied by a sunny disposition. He patiently answered all the kids’ questions, and my grade alike colleague and I were impressed by the reverence and relevance of our students’ queries. They were quiet and attentive the whole time our guest was in the room, and I felt sure he got as much from the exchange as the kids did. It is always good to bring history alive for children whenever possible, especially those with relatively affluent and peaceful lives. I have no doubt that the kids at Tilley who met the guinea pigs learned lessons they carry with them to this day – lessons of duty and perseverance, and gratitude for the sacrifice of others. I know that I did.

I took a position in 2006 as teacher/librarian of a school much closer to my home, but to this day I maintain friendships with many people I worked with at Tilley. I attended their staff Christmas parties for several years after I left, and mourned with them at the untimely deaths of two of our colleagues over the past 12 years. Just this past summer a group of us got together in a colleague’s backyard for a socially distanced get together. We talked for several hours, and none of us really wanted to leave even as the dinner hour approached. Sometimes you hit the jackpot at a job and wind up with coworkers who all get along and have genuine affection for one another. I was one such winner when I landed the job at Dr. Ross Tilley P.S. all those years ago.

My Old School – In the Beginning

In July of 1997 I moved out of my husband’s house. He had been diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia about three weeks prior to this, and while I had offered to stay and help him through the illness despite our marriage being over, he’d insisted that I go. This was just as well because it meant our kids had another home to go to when their dad’s white cell count was so low that they couldn’t safely be with him. Douglas died in early May of the following year, and I was left with the daunting prospect of raising two young children on my own. I was working part-time  in the library of a provincial correctional centre, so I wasn’t earning nearly enough to support my family and had no idea what I would do with my kids during school breaks.

I had always wanted to be a teacher, so I applied to several faculties of education and was accepted by two. York University is in Toronto, and the cost of renting an apartment near the campus was simply beyond my reach. The University of Ottawa, on the other hand, had lots of affordable student housing, and I liked the idea of moving to a new city. I lived in the small village of Millbrook at the time, and although it was nice to have friends around to support me after Douglas’s death, I didn’t like the number of complete strangers who were offering me condolences. I had no doubt they were well intentioned, but their words indicated that I was the latest topic of the local rumour mill, so I wanted to get away until my notoriety died down.

Needless to say, I had great trepidation about moving to Ottawa with my children. I didn’t know anyone in the city and had not been a full-time student for over ten years. Everything was new and a little scary, and on top of that one of the associate teachers I worked under during my practicum was an absolute nightmare. She complained to my faculty liaison when I was away for one day with the flu, and once when I stayed late to help set up an activity for the next day’s class, she berated me when I asked to leave at 3:45 because my kids’ daycare closed at 4:00. “What will happen if you arrive late?” she asked, “Will your kids shrivel up and blow away?” What a heartless cow.

I moved back to Millbrook after that arduous year and sent out resumes and cover letters to numerous principals in the area in mid August. Luckily, a position in a grade 4/5 class had just opened up at Dr. Ross Tilley Public School in Bowmanville, and I was called in for an interview. I spent about 15 minutes talking to the principal and vice principal about my work and educational experiences and abilities. The principal thew a key to me at the end of this brief discussion and said, “You’ve got the job. Room 206 is at the far end of the upstairs hall on the left. Good luck.” That was it. No orientation, no introductions to other staff members, and no discussion about kids or parents or school culture. Just “good luck.” At that moment, I felt I would really need it.

The early days of teaching are simultaneously tremendously exciting and absolutely terrifying. I had no clear idea of what to do or how to begin, but the other teachers in the school were incredibly generous and supportive. Two colleagues in the junior division ran off extra copies of their first week activities for me, and several others assured me I would be fine and that they had my back. September was a frenetic blur, but knew at least that I had landed in a good professional environment with an excellent team. I will always be grateful to my colleagues at Tilley, and my experience at the school was so seminal that I feel compelled to write about it. Many of the people involved are still teaching, and as usual I haven’t asked anyone for permission to write about them, so I will be using pseudonyms from here on out.

I knew virtually nothing about Bowmanville when I began my tenure at Tilley, but it became clear in short order that it was a working class town. Many of the parents manned the line at GM in Oshawa, so a rather roughshod blue-collar ethos pervaded the school community. I had a boy in my class who regularly brought very suspect lunches to school, like two cans of cola and a whack of Oreos, or 3 Sunny D’s with a container of Dunkaroos. I raised my concerns to his father in our December interview, and he unabashedly responded “Yeah, I work a lot so my kids are basically raising themselves.” He clearly had no problem with the arrangement, nor with the appalling nutritional make-up of his son’s lunches, so we simply moved on from there.

We had parents who were so verbally abusive to staff members that they were banned from the school. Not just in practice, but by law. I had a colleague, Sharon, who taught the son of a woman who was not allowed on school property. One gym period another kid bumped into this boy, and he promptly responded with a swift punch the face. When Sharon called home to explain why her son was being suspended, the mother responded “Why would you suspend him for that? He was only doing what I tell him to do.” The parents were so tough that one time several of them had a dust-up in the back of the gym during our Christmas concert! If you can’t get along with your neighbours at that time of year and in that sort of environment, then you never can. Nor, I would argue, do you want to.

One year I had an extremely bright but clearly very unhappy boy in my class. When parent interview time came around, colleagues who’d previously taught him warned me to have administration on alert in case something bad went down. Evidently the dad was unstable, and it was prudent to ensure there was someone in the office to help defuse the situation if he became testy. I was very tense when the boy came into the room at the appointed time along with his younger brother, nervous mom, and enormous dad. 

Things were going fairly well until I made a less than glowing comment about the student and his dad exploded. He charged up from his chair and came aggressively towards me. His wife and I both immediately stood in response, and she placed herself in front of me before he could bridge the distance between us. He had his hand raised as if to strike, and his wife stood rigidly in front of me with her arms outstretched in a protective gesture. The dad lowered his hand in response to his wife’s posture as I simultaneously raised both of mine until they were in front of my shoulders with the palms facing forward. “This interview is over,” I said as calmly as possible, “You can either leave now or I’ll call the office and have someone escort you out.” The dad said ,“All right, I’m going,” and then he loudly and derisively spat the word “teacher” at me before turning towards the door. The mother told her boys it was time to go. I had completely forgotten that they were in the room, but the looks on their faces reminded me that they had witnessed the whole sordid interaction. I now understood that they lived with this aggression every day, and had likely seen even worse manifestations of it in the privacy of their home. My attitude and behaviour towards that boy softened with this sad realization. 

The student population in the school was, unsurprisingly, fairly violent and explosive as well. We had a group of unusually thuggish boys in grade 8 that same year, and they often acted up during assemblies. One time a few of them were being particularly rude and disruptive. A grade 5 teacher named Gus finally had enough of their foolishness and went over to deal with the situation. It was clear the boys were not going to stop, so Gus told them they needed to follow him to the office. They all stood up, but one of them continued to resist leaving. Gus simply put his hand on the boy’s shoulder to escort him out of the room, and the boy punched him in the face. Gus raised his hand as if to strike back, a perfectly natural response to being hit, but then, remembering who and where he was, he took a deep breath and put his hand down. I had seen the whole thing, so I went in to describe the incident to the vice principal. I told him exactly what had happened, at the end of which he asked, “Was the hit with an open or closed fist?” I remember wondering what the hell that had to do with anything, but calmly responded that the fist was closed. Surely the only salient point here was that a student had hit a teacher, not how the blow had been delivered!

I had an autistic student named Lizzie my first year at Tilley. A very kind girl in my class, Bethany, befriended Lizzie without being asked. Bethany sat with her, ate with her, and played with her at every recess. Lizzie could be unpredictable and sometimes violent, and one day she attacked Bethany for absolutely no reason. They were calmly eating lunch when Lizzie suddenly launched herself at Bethany and bit her deep enough on the cheek that the wound required stitches and would certainly leave a scar. Bethany and Lizzie’s mothers came in for a meeting a few days after the incident and Bethany’s mother, who turned out to be as kind as her daughter, fully accepted the other’s apology. Lizzie’s mom stayed afterwards to talk to me privately. She had tears in her eyes as she described how loving and affectionate her daughter had been as a toddler, but how at 3 she had slowly withdrawn into her own autistic world. I had nothing but sympathy for this poor women, and could only guess at how horrible it must have been to lose Lizzie in that way. I can’t imagine the heartbreak of living with your child but never being able to hug them or have a two-way conversation, or to have to abandon all hope of seeing them live a normal life and grow into independent adults.

I worked for about 90% of the day that first year, and the other 10% was covered by the vice principal, Mark. He taught them social studies, and I handled the rest of the curriculum. I came in a bit early one day during the second week of school and went straight up to class. The kids were still writing down notes from the board as I walked in, so I quietly sat behind my desk while they finished their work. My eyes eventually wandered up to the board and I was shocked by what I saw because Mark’s notes were riddled with grammar and spelling errors. I wasn’t sure how to handle the situation, but eventually screwed up the courage to speak to him about it in his office at the end of the day. Mark laughed at my trepidation and freely admitted that he had always been terrible at writing, to which I responded that I was pretty bad at math. He then went on to suggest we make a a deal – if I’d correct his blackboard notes every morning, he’d help me stay on top of the math curriculum. And so it went for the rest of the school year.

I had the worst class of my career in my second year at Tilley. There were three boys all named Mike in the room, and two of them were enormous problems. Mike 1 was the boy who brought in the terrible lunches and whose dad had washed his hands of parenting. Mike 1 definitely had a good heart, but he was clearly neglected by his father and was therefore determined in the classroom to get the attention he was denied at home. He constantly interrupted lessons and discussions, and goaded other kids just for the sake of eliciting a reaction. Even negative attention is better than none at all. One time when I had finally had enough of his outrageous behaviour I told him to go to the office. He climbed up on top of his desk and began stamping his feet in defiance of my directive. It was at least 10 minutes before anyone could come from the office to escort him out, and Mike 1 kept up his loud, raucous refusal the entire time.

Mike 2 was a different story entirely. I’m pretty sure he was a sociopath. He clearly delighted in making others feel bad, never showed remorse, and did everything in his power to bother and intimidate those around him. That year the kids in my class had math workbooks. I would teach a new concept in class, and then they would complete as much of the related assignment as possible during the math period and take whatever wasn’t completed with them as homework. The kids were working quietly at their desks one day as I marked the previous day’s probability assignment. I was pulled up short by something in Mike 2’s workbook. He had written that it was possible that he would blow up the school and probable that he would kill Ms. Monis. I looked up from the book to see Mike 2 leering at me with a diabolical smile on his face, clearly revelling in my shocked reaction. I took the book down to the vice principal at recess so he could call the mom, and when I returned to class I found a huge slash in the fabric on the back of my chair. I suspected this was Mike 2’s handiwork as well so immediately went back down to the office to report the incident. Mark was sitting behind his desk with a stunned look on his face. When he’d told Mike 2’s mom what her son had written she’d responded by saying, “I don’t see why he’s being suspended – he would never actually do it.” She wasn’t shocked by, nor did she apologize for, her son’s behaviour – she simply made excuses for it. Just one of many occasions during my career when the old adage “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” proved to be true.

The rest of my class that year other than these two rabble rousers was just lovely, as are, in my experience, the vast majority of children. I encouraged the kids to bring in board games whenever we had class holiday parties, and at Christmas Brian, a very studious and hardworking lad, brought in the home version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. He was extremely keen on playing me, so I suggested he get anyone else who was interested to be on his team in an attempt to even up the odds a little. There ended up being eight kids on his side, with Brian acting as their captain. At one point they were stymied by a question concerning the capital of Greece, so Brian decided to use the “call a friend” lifeline. He curled the three middle fingers of his right hand and then brought it up beside his head to stand in for a phone receiver. He then said “Brring. Brring. Hello. Ms. Monis?” The other kids all gasped at his temerity, but I just laughed, mimed picking up my own phone, and simply said “Athens.” Smart kid!

Students are first taught long division in grade 4, and I had a girl in my class, Maggie, who simply couldn’t get it. I explained it to her in as many ways as I possibly could, then called on my colleagues for advice, then asked the kids around her to help, but even after all this she still didn’t understand how it worked. Maggie was so frustrated after several days of trying that she burst into tears and ran out into the hall. I followed her from the room with her math workbook in hand and sat down next to her on the floor. She cried a bit longer as I stroked her back and said soothing words, and once she had calmed down I began building her up by saying I knew that if she persevered she could get this. Maggie was a very good gymnast, so I asked her if she had been able to perform a back flip on her first go. “No,” she said, “it was a disaster.” I then said, “Well, I’ve seen you do back flips in your routine and they are flawless. How did that happen?” She finally looked up at me and said, “I just practiced until I got it right.” I nodded and opened up her math book to the long division page, slowly solving two problems while she intently watched every step. Maggie turned to me after I’d finished and, I swear, I saw her figure the process out right in front of my eyes. The penny finally dropped. She eagerly took the book and pencil from my hands and solved the next equation perfectly on her own. 

This is just one example of many from my years of teaching wherein I experienced the extreme pleasure of knowing that I had taught a student something important. Some of these lessons were purely academic, but an equal number related to skills like empathy, discernment, and cooperation. Seeing a child awaken to new knowledge (or, to use common parlance, to witness them having an “ah ha” moment) is about the most satisfying and gratifying experience an educator can have. I remember and treasure each and every one I had when I look back over my teaching career.

Work to Do

I am in my second year of retirement and have lately been looking back over my 40 years of work with a curious eye. Library positions made up almost the entirety of my working life, although I did try my hand at some other jobs before settling into my career as a teacher/librarian. I got my first job at age 16 in the office of my Uncle Bob. Bob Meiklejohn was not my uncle by blood, but rather was a good friend of my grandmother and mother, and had therefore been given the honorific of “uncle”. 

Uncle Bob was an interior designer, and his firm, Robert Meiklejohn Design Associates, occupied a detached brick house on Lowther Avenue in Toronto’s Annex district. The Annex is an affluent neighbourhood close to the downtown campus of the University of Toronto, and features large, beautifully maintained Victorian homes. Uncle Bob’s company was well known and respected, and counted Cara Gift Shops, various upscale Four Seasons hotels like The Inn on the Park, and stores such as Harry Rosen, Tip Top Tailors, Fairweather, and Big Steel amongst its clients. This was a thriving and lucrative enterprise.

During work days Uncle Bob’s employees occupied the entirety of the house. The basement housed the two women who made decisions regarding colour schemes, accessories, and works of art. The first floor housed the front office, Uncle Bob’s office, and the lunch room, the second contained the draughtsmen, and the third floor was used for storage. I was hired for the summer to give additional help where needed, like filing and running errands. I must admit to occasionally spending some time hiding in the break room when there was nothing for me to do, but I was usually occupied.

Most of my time was spent in the front office with the two secretaries, Elizabeth and Jenny. Elizabeth was very prim and proper – her jewelry and shoes scrupulously matched her outfits, and her hair was always just so. Her desk was neurotically tidy, and she worked punctually from 9 to 5 every weekday. She mostly went about her work silently, and altogether seemed like a lady who knew her place. Uncle Bob was in charge, and she never spoke ill of him or joked behind his back. 

Jenny, on the other hand, was a real live wire. She was easily as competent as Elizabeth, but she was much more informal and had an excellent sense of humour. Jenny spoke with a thick Scottish brogue, and delighted in making fun of my uncle, who was, as it turned out, prone to rather dramatic mood swings. One morning he came storming into the office, clearly angry and upset about something. Jenny offered him his coffee, as was the routine, and he impatiently grabbed the cup from her hand, spilling much of its contents onto the floor. He briefly looked down at the mess he’d just made, then turned on his heel and stormed into his office, slamming the door behind him. Elizabeth immediately scurried into the kitchen to get a cloth, but Jenny turned to me and said, “Did you know Morris the Cat died last night? Yeah, he’s clearly very broken up about it.” We laughed at the absurdity of the thought while Elizabeth meekly wiped up the mess.

The office manager was a man named Gordon. Gordon spoke with the accent typical of rural Ontario – very flat and unaffected. He only deviated from this speech pattern on two words, something and nothing. For some reason, Gordon pronounced these as “summink” and “nuffink” respectively. It was as though he had a little Cockney in him which only surfaced with these two particular words. This was so noteworthy and out of keeping with the rest of his syntax that I remember it to this day. 

The second floor of the house held Gordon’s office along with a large communal space where the draughtsmen worked. Whenever Uncle Bob came up with new designs, these three men were tasked with drawing them by hand into workable blueprints. The youngest of these was a breathtakingly handsome man named Richard on whom I had a killer crush. I don’t remember exactly what he looked like, but he was in a class with Jon Hamm – perfect features, hair and body, and a thrillingly deep voice. One time Richard asked me to move his car for him, and as it was only about the third time he’d ever spoken directly to me, I immediately acquiesced. When I gave him back his keys afterwards he said, “You didn’t have to do that, you know. Next time I asked you to do something that’s not in your job description, just tell me to fuck off.” As if! I thought I had hidden my infatuation pretty well, but at the end of the summer one of the senior draughtsmen gave me a drawing he had done of Richard as a keepsake. Clearly I was not as good at hiding my feelings as I thought.

About once every two weeks Uncle Bob would send me to his apartment to help his wife, my Aunt Phyllis. Their apartment was located in a rich part of town, and was beautifully decorated (no surprise there). Aunt Phyllis was a therapist with a thriving practice. She specialized in family conflicts and had written a few books on the subject as well. I think she was well respected in her field, and I know she was one of the smartest women I have ever met, at least most of the time. For some reason she turned into a saccharine pile of babbling goo whenever her cat came in the room – it was puzzling and somewhat disconcerting just how fawning she became. My mum told me Aunt Phyllis had very much wanted to have children but had been unable to do so. I guess the cat was her baby substitute.

Aunt Phyllis had contracted polio as a child and needed Canadian crutches to get around. She couldn’t drive a regular car, and thus Uncle Bob had one retrofitted with hand controls so she could get around. One time when I was at their place Aunt Phyllis asked me to accompany her to the grocery store. We went down to the underground parking lot together and she led me to an absolutely beautiful chocolate brown Jaguar sedan. It had plush leather seats and when the engine was engaged, it purred like its namesake. Aunt Phyllis explained how the hand operated accelerator and breaks worked, and off we went. She was an impatient driver and often swerved around slower cars, but I felt completely safe. The car was so perfectly engineered and luxurious that these short trips to and from the grocery store remain amongst the best driving experiences I have ever had. 

I turned 18 two months after graduating from high school, and immediately got a job so I could save up and move out the following year. My brother had just given up his position as a clerk at a downtown store called India Food House, and the owners readily hired me to take his place. The store was run by two brothers, Hareesh and Nareesh Damar. Hareesh was the older brother and was very sociable. He manned the front of the store and, fancying himself a ladies man, shamelessly chatted up all of the female clientele. He was an excellent salesman and very outgoing, but I don’t think he was the Don Juan he thought he was. Nareesh, on the other hand, was very quiet, studious, and sober. He kept the books and managed inventory while his older brother provided the friendly and inviting face of the partnership.

I worked out front with Hareesh, so when I was hired he trained me to operate the cash register and taught me about the merchandise. I had a lot to learn since I hadn’t grown up eating Indian food. I had some preexisting knowledge of the most well known elements of Indian cuisine such as samosas and curry, but had never even heard of naan, poppadoms, or turmeric. There was a large open cooler in the shop which contained various tropical fruits and exotic chilis. I was intrigued by a small green chili which had a hand drawn skull and crossbones above it. Hareesh told me the sign was to warn people that it was extremely hot, although he immediately added that Canadians were notorious wimps when it came to spicy food and that he didn’t find it to be very hot at all. I asked if he thought I could handle it and he assured me that I could, so I picked one up and took a small bite. My mouth immediately exploded with pain, my eyes and nose began to water, and I found it hard to breathe. Hareesh collapsed in loud peels of laughter at my distress, and his brother emerged from the back office to see what was so funny. After a quick exchange in Hindi, Nareesh grabbed a bottle of milk from the fridge and had me drink some. The cool liquid immediately began to quench the inferno in my mouth, and slowly my breath and heartbeat returned to normal. I was rightly wary of Hareesh after that stunt.

The job at the store was okay, but I really wanted to work in theatre. I had loved my experience with the drama club in high school, and my older sister Susan adored working as a professional stage manager. Eventually I landed a job as administrator for a small touring children’s theatre troupe called Inner Stage. Elizabeth Szathmary was the founder and artistic director of the company. She lived on the second floor of a large industrial building and the space encompassed not only her living quarters, but also the company’s office and rehearsal studio. Elizabeth was born and raised in New York City, and her father, Irving, wrote the opening theme of Get Smart, one of my favourite shows as a child.

Elizabeth was extremely creative and talented but she had no head for business whatsoever. That was where I came in. I booked the tours, managed the finances, and completed various government grant applications. Looking back I’m amazed she gave a 19 year old so much responsibility, but I was quite good at the job so I guess her faith in me was well founded. I was working at this job when the movie Fame hit the theatres. Elizabeth had gone to the school featured in the film and was excited to take me to see it when it opened in Toronto. There is a scene in the movie wherein Irene Cara’s character goes to a photo shoot thinking she is simply going to get an 8×10 headshot for her resume. The photographer pressures her into lowering her shirt, and the character cries as she reluctantly gives in to his wheedling. I noticed Elizabeth was silently sobbing as the scene progressed, and when I asked her what was wrong, she said that the exact same thing had happened to her. Some men are such sleaze balls.

I enjoyed my time at Inner Stage, but really wanted to get into a theatre with an established performance space. My chance came when Toronto Workshop Productions, better know as TWP, advertised for an administrative assistant. TWP was a stalwart of the Toronto theatre scene, and had been founded in 1959 by its artistic director George Luscombe. Luscombe was a caricature of a domineering director, with crazy grey hair, flyaway eyebrows, and a booming voice. He was known for creating politically charged theatre with minimal props and set pieces. 

I worked in the front office assisting the PR director as well as the general manager, Jack Marigold. Jack was a real character as well, with his flaming homosexuality acting as a counter-balance to George’s strident masculinity. Jack had the most outrageous combover I’d ever seen, spanning his entire pate from just above one ear to the other. The whole precarious mass was held in place by copious amounts of hairspray and sat like a warped cotton candy shelf atop his head. One day there was a ferocious windstorm, and when Jack came into the office the combed over portion of his hair had been blown to the side so that his head now resembled a can with the lid hanging open. Clearly Jack had no idea what had happened, because he breezed in as usual and immediately got to work. None of us had the heart to tell him how ridiculous he looked, even though it was difficult not to laugh, or at least to stare, at his hanging hairdo. We all just continued as if everything were normal, proving that theatre office workers possess performative abilities on par with theatre actors. Jack used the washroom at some point during the morning and re-entered the office with his combover firmly back in place. He never mentioned what had happened, and neither did we.

Toronto hosted an international theatre festival while I was working at TWP, and George’s production of Ten Lost Years was included in the lineup. The theatre itself would also play host to various companies from all over the world. My friend Vera and I volunteered to stuff envelopes for the event in exchange for free tickets to three performances of our choosing. We saw a strange performance art piece by an experimental group from Sweden, a very good magic show by a British sleight-of-hand artist, and my personal favourite, a rousing show staged by a flamenco troupe from Spain. Mum and Nana came to that performance as well because they both loved flamenco, and who can blame them – male flamenco dancers are unbelievably sexy.

I worked in the TWP office for several months, and although I liked it well enough, my deep desire was to be a part of the production team. Theatre administration is integral to a thriving company, but it felt peripheral to me. The magical part of theatre happens in and around the stage, and that was where I wanted to be. I finally asked the production manager if there was any way I could make a move onto the crew, and he said that while there were no positions currently open, he would keep me in mind. 

It was just then that my eldest brother’s girlfriend told me that the Toronto Public Library was hiring. The pay was much better than what I was making, the hours were regular, and benefits were included. I was struggling to pay my bills on the paltry salary I was making at TWP, and now that I knew there would be no production jobs for the foreseeable future, I decided to work at the library. I figured I could always go back to the theatre if a suitable position came up, but I ended up liking library work so much that I never looked back. I had embarked on this path only for the sake of expedience, but it quickly revealing itself to be the one I should have been walking all along. It’s wonderful when life works out like that.

Havin’ My Baby

I recently watched a 3-part HBO documentary called Expecting Amy. The series chronicles the comedian Amy Schumer’s pregnancy and delivery. Schumer experienced a condition known as hyperemesis gravidarum, or HG, which is a complication in pregnancy characterized by severe nausea, vomiting, weight loss, and possibly malnutrition. In the olden days women often died from this condition, including Charlotte Bronte, who was four months pregnant when her inability to keep down food or water ended her life. Most modern women with this condition, Schumer included, end up being repeatedly admitted to hospital for intravenous drips which stave off electrolyte imbalances, starvation, and dehydration. It was a harrowing series to watch, but got me thinking about how difficult pregnancy and delivery are at the best of times, and how little credit women often get for the extreme effort involved in this endeavour.

I had a miscarriage the first time I got pregnant. I was about 12 weeks along and had told family and friends the good news when I suddenly started spotting. My husband Douglas and I had just returned to Canada after a three month sojourn in Morocco, Spain, and Portugal. We couldn’t go to our house as it was sublet for another week, so we decided to visit our friends on Manitoulin Island to pass the time. I first noticed the blood when I used the bathroom on the ferry taking us to the island, and we stopped at a drugstore when we landed so I could get some pads. Douglas suggested it was probably nothing, but I was already alarmed.

The blood flow increased the next day and I asked Douglas if we couldn’t please go back to Toronto so I could see my doctor. He again assured me that there was nothing wrong, but even if I did lose this baby, it was just nature’s way and we could simply try again. I’m sure not all men would have responded this casually, but I’m pretty sure most men can’t understand the immediate love and protectiveness which blooms in a woman when a wanted pregnancy is confirmed. I felt connected to that little ball of incipient life, and the thought of losing it made me immeasurably sad.

The third day came with still more blood, and when everyone else went for a walk, I stayed behind. I sat on a large rock beside the water and talked to my would-be child, willing it to hang in there. This is the point where I would have prayed if I believed in God. Later that afternoon Douglas and I went into town to get dinner makings. We stopped at an ice cream parlour on our way, and while Douglas got in line I went to use the bathroom. No sooner had I sat down when I felt a great surge of blood and heard a splash in the toilet. I knew immediately that I had just lost the fetus, but I couldn’t bear the thought of just flushing it away. I reached my hand into the bloody water and fished it out. It looked like an ill-formed alien and was small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. I put it down beside the sink, washed my hands, and then carefully wrapped it in toilet paper and put it in my pocket.

Douglas had just reached the front of the line when I joined him. He asked if I wanted anything, but could tell by the look on my face that I didn’t. I told him what had happened as soon as we got back to the car, and he said again that this sort of thing is common and we would be successful next time. He clearly didn’t understand why I was so upset or why I didn’t just flush the fetus away, but humoured me when I asked if we could please bury it in the wildflowers beside our friends’ farmhouse. Douglas stopped the car when we got to the edge of the field and pulled out a small spade he always kept in the trunk. He dug a fairly deep hole, I put the little package in the bottom, and he covered it with dirt. I began to cry, and Douglas, while not sad himself, put his arm around my shoulders. We stayed like that until I said I was ready to go, then I wiped my eyes and nose and we proceeded to the house.

Miscarriages are relatively common, effecting as many as 20% of pregnant women, and yet they are rarely acknowledged. I do remember feeling guilt along with grief when I had mine. I felt that I was responsible for what had happened – that there must be some flaw in me which explained why the pregnancy had failed. It didn’t help that my husband felt no sorrow at the loss, but I think I would still have felt culpable even if he had assured me I wasn’t. I never talked to anyone about how I was feeling at the time because the whole experience was very isolating and shameful. There is still a stigma attached to miscarriages, but I am heartened to see that some famous women, most recently Meghan Merkle, have begun to speak publicly about the trauma of spontaneous abortion. Shedding light on the subject can only help women who mostly suffer this heartbreaking misfortune alone.

Five months after this sorrowful event I became pregnant with my son. I was understandably anxious throughout the pregnancy, fearing that I would again miscarry, but Douglas said I was being silly. Once again I had to face all of my mixed emotions alone, but luckily I was healthy as  a horse the entire nine months and had a very good and reassuring doctor. Douglas and I had decided to move out of downtown Toronto to raise our kids and, after several forays outside the city, had settled on moving to the hamlet of Millbrook (located about an hour and a half north-east of Toronto). I wanted to stay put until after I had the baby because I really liked my doctor – we had similar ideas about childbirth and I trusted her completely. Douglas ignored what I wanted, as usual, and determined we should leave as soon as possible.

He put our Toronto house up for sale before we had found one to move into, and when it sold we had to scramble to find a place to live and to figure out what to do with all of our possessions. We eventually put our furnishings into the back of a large truck and arranged to have them stored in a container yard just outside Millbrook. We then rented a cottage on Lake Scugog until the end of October. If we still hadn’t landed a permanent home by then, we intended to move into my in-laws’ place in Lindsay while they wintered in Florida. I was seven months along and really big when we packed up what we needed for the summer and moved to the cottage. I was also very unhappy at having to leave everyone and everything I knew behind at a time when I really needed consistency. Having a child is a scary, life-changing business, and having everything else in your life change at the same time is very disorienting. I was especially sad to leave my mother and my wonderful doctor behind because I really needed both of them.

I went into labour on a very hot and muggy day in July. Douglas drove me to the hospital in Lindsay where I had never been before, and I was assigned a doctor I had never met before. All of this made a novel and scary situation infinitely more difficult for me. I knew from experience that I couldn’t turn to my husband for support in this situation, so I turned inward. I was completely silent during labour despite the bone-jarring pain. I was wearing only a hospital gown and a pair of clogs, and felt more comfortable walking up and down the hall outside my room than lying in the bed. There was a rocking chair at one end of the corridor, and every time I had a contraction I would sit in the chair and furiously rock in time with my deep breaths. 

I did this for several hours after my initial visit with the doctor before he finally came back and insisted I lie in bed so they could put a fetal heart monitor on my belly. He checked my dilation and decided I was big enough to allow for a forceps delivery. I really didn’t want any interference in my birth, and my doctor in Toronto knew that, but this doctor kept going on about how his kid was giving a recital at 1:00 that afternoon that he’d promise to attend. In other words, he was determined to deliver my baby as soon as possible to ensure he didn’t miss his child’s performance. The doctor slid the forceps in and immediately the baby’s heart rate dropped. This was, I think in retrospect, exactly what he wanted to happen. Now he could claim concern for the baby’s welfare as an excuse to give me a C-section. I was utterly exhausted at this point and in no state to disagree, and Douglas bought his line about the baby being at risk. Next thing I knew I was given an epidural and Max was pulled out of my stomach. 

We were settled in Millbrook and I had an excellent doctor when I got pregnant with my daughter almost two years later. Peterborough is the closest city to Millbrook, and my doctor, Joyce Barrett, was well known throughout the community. Doctors (male ObGyn’s in particular) didn’t like her – she insisted on letting women follow their own birthing plans and often facilitated, and championed, tricky vaginal births that other docs refused to have any part of. Her strong advocacy for the rights of moms made her a persistent thorn in the established medical community’s side, and an absolute hero to pregnant women. I felt so lucky to have her because unlike my first pregnancy, this one was harrowing.

I began having overwhelming nausea and persistent vomiting almost as soon as I got pregnant. I lost 15 lbs in my first three months because I simply couldn’t keep anything of substance down. Trial and error taught me that there were only three foods I could tolerate during my first trimester: mashed potatoes, green olives, and Coffee Crisps. A strange trio to say the least, but these foods at least allowed me to get something in my stomach. Just opening the fridge or smelling an unwelcome food would make me throw up. There was one time when I was helping a patron in the culinary section of the library when the cover of a cookbook sent me scurrying for the bathroom. Douglas had a friend named Alan who sometimes visited us from the city. One day he decided to surprise me with dinner because he knew how difficult it was for me to cook. I walked in the door after work and was greeted by a beaming Alan, and the unmistakeable smells of lamb and broccoli co-mingling in a noxious funk. Can you imagine being so thick headed as to make those two foods for a nauseous person?! He meant well, but what a dope.

The vomiting stopped in the fourth month, although I had low-grade nausea for the rest of my pregnancy. I was due on January 28th, which was a Thursday, and was horrified when Dr. Barrett informed me that she was going on a ski trip that week and wouldn’t be back until the 31st. I had visions of ending up with someone I didn’t know again, and determined to hold on until she returned. I clenched my legs together and made it all the way to the 31st before I simply had to go to the hospital. We got there about 3:00 in the afternoon, and Dr. Barrett had still not returned from her trip. I was distraught to say the least.

The nurses got me comfortable and said they had left a message on Dr. Barrett’s service, so she would certainly show up if she got back in time. This labour was turning out to be completely different than the last, because whereas with Max I had been silent and stoic, this time I found noises erupting unbidden from my mouth with every contraction. Douglas suggested that I try to be quiet as my loud groans might scare other women on the ward, so I did my best to keep the volume down.

It was about 7:00 and I was lying on the bed with my back to the door when suddenly the lights lowered, classical music filled the air, and I felt Dr. Barrett’s warm and soothing hand on the small of my back. I rolled over to look at her just as a contraction hit, and when the inevitable, unearthly sound rose up in my throat, Dr. Barrett said, “Let it out. Those sounds are good. They let me know where you are in your labour.” So I did, and it was such a tremendous relief to finally give voice to my pain that I started to cry. It went on like that until about 9:30 when the doctor determined I was fully dilated, so I got off the bed to squat on the birthing stool. If you have never seen one, a birthing stool looks like a toilet seat with three legs – it provides support for the mother as she pushes, and has an open front so the doctor can access the emerging baby.

It is almost impossible to put into words the experience of pushing. Imagine the worst pain you have ever had, then double it. Now, add to that torturous pain the need to exert sufficient pressure with your muscles to push a large foreign object out of your body. Then, imagine doing that over and over again. I remember at one point in this process I looked at Dr. Barrett and said that I couldn’t believe how much work this was, to which she replied, “That’s why they call it labour.” On the final big push when Hannah’s head came out, I felt like I was actually going to split in half. I screamed “Noooo!” as the final wave overtook me, fearing that I was literally going to die. It was absolutely terrifying, but luckily also fairly fleeting. The rest of her body followed easily once her head was out. 

Dr. Barrett immediately cleared Hannah’s mouth and nose, wrapped her in a towel, and, assessing her weight like a bag of apples, confidently said, “7 pounds.” She then took my lovely little daughter over to the scale, while the nurse behind her peeked over her shoulder at the gauge and then turned to me and said, “Right on the nose, as usual.” They then let me hold my baby girl as they sewed up the damage she had wrought on her way into the world. This procedure was plenty painful, but it paled in comparison to what I had just gone through. I required so many stitches that when the maternity nurse came into my room later that night to change my dressing she said, “Glad I’m not in your shoes.” Thanks a lot!

A few years after this a good friend of mine, Sarah, was pregnant with her first child. She had great trepidation about the pain of delivery, and I told her that although it was extreme, she would bear it like women do. What’s more, she would immediately forget it once she had her new babe in her arms. Douglas and I went to visit Sarah and her husband Eric about a month after their son Henry was born. At one point Sarah and I were alone in the kitchen when she suddenly turned on me. She was furious that I hadn’t adequately described just how painful labour was going to be. I reminded her that I had said that it was going to be more pain that she had ever experienced before, and she yelled at me, “Yeah. But you didn’t tell me it would make me feel like my fucking head was going to explode!” I then asked her if any words could possibly have prepared her for how bad it was, and she instantly calmed down and said, “No. I suppose there is no way to express how truly awful it is.”

Even though this is undoubtedly true, women keep popping out babies and, amazingly, many do so more than once. Despite the discomfort, inconvenience, and seemingly infinite health related side effects of pregnancy, despite the horrific pain and trauma of childbirth, and despite the often irreparable changes it makes to their once taut bodies, women continue to reproduce. Yet for time immemorial we have been called “the weaker sex.” Talk about male propaganda bullshit!

You’re my Best Friend

Senior public schools came into vogue in the early 70s, landing me in the inaugural class of the newly opened Henry Hudson Senior Public School. The first floor of the building contained regular classrooms designated for art, music, and science. It also housed the office, two gyms, a library, all the lockers, and a large cafeteria. The second floor was open concept, with a common area in the middle and classes ringing the perimeter. There were walls jutting into the room from between the windows, spaced far enough apart to accommodate two classes between them. These two classes would sit back to back, each facing a wall with one side of the room completely open to the large central space and the other housing windows.

I was in Mr. Gidlow’s class, which was comprised entirely of kids taking music and which therefore doubled as the school band. We sat with our backs to Mr. Garber’s class. Mr. Gidlow was an adequate teacher, although a bit dull. Mr. Garber, on the other hand, was a draft-dodger from the Vietnam War, was full of life, and told wonderful stories in a tremendously engaging fashion. I sat in the back row of my class and was regularly distracted from whatever Mr. Gidlow was saying by whatever Mr. Garber was saying. As far as I remember, Vera was in Mr. Garber’s class and that is how I first met her.

Vera and I clicked immediately. We were very different people from very different backgrounds, but somehow we just worked. My home life was fairly calm, other than the occasional dust-up between my eldest sister and either my mum or my other sister, while Vera’s was quite chaotic. In my house we all had dinner together at the same time every night, but I never saw Vera’s whole family sit down to a meal and certainly not on a regular basis. I had to ask for parental permission, had a curfew, and was grounded from time to time. Vera didn’t seem to have any of these strictures on her freedom.

I envied her lack of confines, but sensed as soon as she started coming to my place regularly that she would have preferred to have the stability of my home life. She came over after school most days and still fondly remembers scarfing down pepperettes and Kraft singles, amazed that they were always in plentiful supply. Eating at Vera’s place was more of a catch as catch can situation – sometimes there would be a pot of stew or spaghetti with sauce on the stove, and other times there wouldn’t be anything to eat at all except the homemade pickled vegetables and hot sauce her mother stored in their pantry. They did enjoy having barbecues in the summer though, so much so that Vera wrote the following haiku for a school assignment,

Love the meaty smell, of the meaty barbecue, cooking in my yard.

I may not have got the words exactly right, but that was definitely the gist. One time when we were teenagers and on acid we entered her kitchen to be greeted by an entire dead pig laid out on the table. It was freaky and fascinating at the same time, and kind of emblematic of Vera’s kitchen in general.

Steve and Luba, Vera’s parents, were immigrants from the part of Yugoslavia which is now called Serbia. Steve was a typical old-world chauvinist who mistreated his wife and hardly gave Vera a second look. His three sons got all of his parental attention. Steve’s father had backed the Yugoslavian king in his fight with Tito and had been exiled to Egypt after the monarchists were defeated, leaving his wife to raise four children on her own. Steve and Luba met when they were still teenagers, and fled Yugoslavia for Austria. They were placed in separate displaced persons’ camps, but when it became clear that the 17-year-old Luba was pregnant, they were reunited and came to Canada shortly after their son was born. Steve loved to complain about how shitty Canada was in comparison to Yugoslavia. One time as an emboldened teenager I got so tired of his carping that I asked him, “If Yugoslavia is so great, then why don’t you go back?” That was the last time he ragged on Canada in my presence.

Luba was a very sad woman. She was caught in an unpleasant and unhappy marriage in a strange country with no options for escape. She often worked two jobs while also doing the lion’s share of raising her four kids and managing the house. Luba was extremely bright, spoke several languages, and had a natural talent in the sciences. Unfortunately, she was also cowed by her domineering husband and generally had little confidence in her own abilities. By the time I met her she was clearly depressed and heavily into prescription drugs (my mother was a nurse and told me that Luba’s doctor was well known for over-prescribing). She tried desperately to be happy and welcoming whenever our crowd came to the house, offering us booze at much too young an age and doing whatever she could to endear herself to us. I think she was just really lonely and didn’t recognize how embarrassing her behaviour was to her daughter. 

Vera had one older brother, John, and two younger brothers, Sasha and George. John was fairly erratic as a teenager, and Vera and I suspected that there was mental illness involved. Just as John was starting to straighten out, Sasha began to act very oddly. Sasha was by far my favourite of Vera’s brothers – John was off in his own teenage world, and George seemed like a brat. Sasha was a kind and gentle soul, and very handsome. I’ll never forget the time when he came rushing into the basement and ran up to Vera and me saying, “Did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?!” He was so proud of knowing something we didn’t that neither of us had the heart to tell him about the Beatles, and instead feigned incredulity at the news.

It became clear as Sasha headed into his mid-teens that he was mentally ill. At one point Vera and I spoke to my mum about it, and she suggested that he might be schizophrenic and needed to go to the hospital for a proper diagnosis. Vera and I then went to her father with my mum’s advice, and he immediately shut us down. He wasn’t willing to admit that there was a problem because it would reflect badly on him. I can still remember how amazed I was by his response, and how angry both of us were at his lack of concern for his son’s welfare. Sasha did eventually end up hospitalized despite his father’s objections, but the drug they gave him exacerbated the problem and he left before they could find the proper medication. Mental illness is still very hard to properly diagnose and treat, and schizophrenia remains one of the most difficult conditions to control. 

Sasha seemed even worse when he came home from the hospital. One day when just he and his younger brother were home, he calmly gave his watch to George, walked to a nearby bridge, and jumped to his death. I don’t know a lot about schizophrenia, but I have heard that those suffering from it often hear voices urging them to kill themselves. Perhaps that’s what motivated Sasha, or perhaps he was just tired of feeling ill and couldn’t see any other way out. Whatever the reason, he was still just a teenager and a really lovely guy, making his death tremendously tragic.

As awful as Sasha’s suicide was, his funeral was just as bad. Vera was furious with her father for obvious reasons, and told me as soon as I got to the church that she would never speak to him again. She also pointed out a videographer her dad had hired to film the event. Steve had spent a lot of money on the funeral and wanted a record of what a good and caring father he was. Despicable. During the service the priest droned on and on in Serbian about Stefan, a name I didn’t recognize until Vera told me it was Sasha’s given name. This made her even angrier because Sasha had never liked the name Stefan, and the fact that the priest kept using it confirmed her suspicion that the service was more about Steve than his son.

People were invited to visit Sasha’s open coffin at the front of the church after the priest had finished. Luba was off her head on tranquillizers – understandable given the circumstances – and fell over on her heels several times as she made her way up the aisle. It was unutterably sad. I don’t remember if Vera went to the coffin, but I do remember that at one point the camera came in for a close-up of the dearly departed’s sister. She forcefully pushed the lens away, causing the videographer to stumble backwards. He took the camera away from his face and Vera went right up to him, quietly hissing in a menacing tone, “Don’t you dare take my fucking picture!” I don’t recall seeing him anywhere near her after that. I was unsurprisingly very upset when I got home after this harrowing event, so much so that my usually oblivious father hugged me without being asked. It was just a terrible day.

Vera and I had a lot of fun together as well, and we were sometimes naughty. On one occasion we were repeatedly falling backwards on my bed, laughing as we landed and immediately regaining our feet to fall yet again. Finally, after I don’t know how long, we landed at the same time and the bed frame simply split. A shocked silence ensued, and then we looked at each other and broke into peels of laughter. Just then we heard the front door open and close, and realized that my mum was home from work. We had no idea how we would explain the situation to her, all we knew was that we couldn’t tell her the truth. Neither of us wanted to face her famous temper, so when she came down the hall I lied and I said we’d simply sat on the bed and it had, for whatever reason, just given way. Mum came in the room, looked at the damage, and then waved it off. The frame was very old and clearly needed replacing. When she left Vera and I shut the door and collapsed into gales of relieved giggles. We’d gotten away with it!

This was during the 70s when there was lots of marijuana and acid around, and Vera, our friends, and I all regularly indulged. She and I went to see the first Star Wars movie high on acid, which is why to this day I don’t know what happens in that film. We got into a laughing fit on the bus ride home from the theatre and were so loud and obnoxious that the driver kicked us off. I’m not sure how we got home after that, but that marks the only time in my life I’ve ever been asked to leave a public vehicle or space. 

Vera and I took acid before most concerts we saw as well. We had tickets to see The Doobie Brothers downtown and my mum kindly let me borrow her sporty little red VW Rabbit to get us there. I now know how stupid it was to drive in that state, but at the time it was just a gas. We were typical teenagers and assumed we were going to live forever, so driving stoned was not a concern. I had just merged onto the 401 when Vera spied an airstream camper up ahead. Those are the silver ones that look like giant cigar humidors. It was sparkly and mesmerizing, and we ended up following it in a trance right past our exit. Eventually we came to our senses and got off the highway, but by then we knew we were going to be late.

The opening act was well underway when we finally gained our seats. The place reeked of marijuana and Vera immediately lit up one of the joints she’d brought so we could join in the fun. No sooner had she handed it to me then a man behind us sat forward and announced, “Sorry ladies, but you’re under arrest.” We turned around to see two guys who certainly looked like narcs. We both just sat their wide-eyed with our hearts in our throats until one of them said, “Nah, we’re just kidding. Could we have a toke?” Vera responded, “Are you fucking kidding me?!” and turned around without offering them the joint. Talk about your stupid pick-up lines!

Vera had a very nice figure and guys were always hitting on her. One night we were at a disco, just looking to have fun and dance, when three guys came over. They all had their shirts open to show off their hairy chests and gold chains. I know this is not politically correct nowadays, but at the time we called guys like that “Ginos.” We tried as politely as possible to make them understand that we weren’t interested, but one of them was particularly insistent. He said he could knock back eight shot glasses in a row without taking a breath in between – it was like a magic trick. Would we like to see it? We kept saying no thanks, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He forced himself between Vera and me in our cubicle as his friends went to the bar. Before long they came back with a whole row of shot glasses filled to the rim with various types of booze. We sensed that the one guy was hellbent on performing for us, so eventually we just sat back and said go ahead. He proceeded to knock back the first shot but must have mistakenly poured some in his trachea because no sooner had he slammed the glass down on the table then he heaved and the entire drink came shooting out his nose. I think it was Bailey’s or something like that because it made milky tan stains all over the front of his pristine white shirt and left brown, gelatinous strings hanging from his nose. Vera and I broke into uproarious laughter as the poor guy slid under the table and slunk away without looking back. We both agreed that we were glad we had relented – that trick really made our night.

In grade 13 we went on a school trip to Greece. Vera and I shared a room with a girl named Susan whose sole claim to fame was that she could sleep anywhere and at any time. I have yet to meet a better sleeper than Susan. Being able to sleep well, however, hardly makes one a lively roommate on a high school trip. Our whole entourage, along with our teacher chaperone Mr. Wood, went out sight-seeing the very night we arrived in Athens. I don’t remember exactly where we were, but at some point Susan, Vera, and I looked around and realized that we had become separated from the group.

We searched with growing panic until realizing that they were simply gone and we would have to make our own way back. I remembered the name of the square our hotel was in and began asking people which way to go. At one point we were directed down a rather narrow street, and when we were about halfway along someone suddenly reached out from a darkened doorway, grabbed Vera’s arm, and started pulling her into the building. She cried out in alarm, and Susan and I immediately grasped her free arm and started hauling her in the opposite direction. This went on for a bit until our opponent finally gave up the battle and let go. The three of us tumbled into the street and, gaining our feet, ran away as fast as we could. We told Mr. Wood what had happened when we finally got back to the hotel, and all three of us lit into him for being so irresponsible as to leave us behind like that. He said he had assumed we would find our own way back, but apologized for his lapse in judgement and became more vigilant after that. 

In 1985 my husband Douglas and I met up with Vera in Yugoslavia. We stayed with her paternal grandmother, or Baba, and met her Aunt Evga and her two cousins, Bonay and Lalay  (I’ve written their name phonetically as I’m not sure how they are actually spelled). The brothers took us out to a club one night and gave us strict instructions not to speak. Foreigners were not welcome, and even Vera’s accented Serbian would give us away. Vera had way too much to drink, and on our way home she started shouting, “Wake up Yugoslavians. Tito is dead!” and other things of that nature. Douglas and I, remembering her cousins’ admonition, were fearful of what might happen if we let her continue, so we did our best to keep either his hands or mine clamped firmly over her mouth until we had safely made it back to her Baba’s apartment. Vera woke up with a terrible headache the next morning and her Baba insisted she have a little drink of a homemade plum brandy called slivovitz to take care of it. Vera resisted for a bit, but eventually relented and drank it down. Almost immediately she began to feel better – there is a lot of wisdom in old remedies. We stayed in Yugoslavia for less than a week because both Douglas and I could feel a palpable tension in the air. The country was already falling apart and in six years time would finally erupted into a bloody and protracted civil war.  

Vera and I were friends for 15 of the most formative years of our lives. We lost touch when I moved away from Toronto in my late twenties, but just last year, after a 23 year gap, we finally reconnected. We met over lunch and ended up talking so long that they were handing out dinner menus when we left. She and her husband John also came to hear my choir’s yuletide concert last November, and we had a lovely dinner together before the show. I feel sure that we will remain in touch for the rest of our lives now that we have reawakened our friendship. Some things are just meant to be.

Children Say

I was born on August 10, 1961, at the tail end of the population tsunami that was the baby boom. Women were popping out an average of 3.7 kids every year during this period, as opposed to an average of 1.7 in the ensuing years. Needless to say, this meant there were a lot of kids in my neighbourhood. So many, in fact, that every little street and boulevard had its own road hockey team, with subs and everything. There was a tournament held every fall to choose the neighbourhood champion, although I can’t for the life of me imagine who organized it. Either kids were more on the ball in those days or someone’s dad was very gung-ho on hockey.

Every day after school, on weekends, and during breaks, hordes of us would hit the streets for games of British bulldog, red rover, tag, mother may I, and my favourite, hide-and-seek. For me there was nothing quite so thrilling as being hidden, poking my head out, and seeing whoever was it getting closer and closer. I’d try to stay perfectly still and breathe as quietly as possible, and once they got really close I’d quickly calculate all the variables that would determine whether I could get home before them. Am I a faster runner than them, and if not, would the element of surprise be enough to get me there first? Is there a shortcut I could take that would give me an advantage, for example could I really jump over that hedge and land on my feet? I revelled in the excitement of going over these scenarios in my mind, even though deep down I always knew where I would end up. “Who am I kidding? I’m a terrible athlete. I’ll just hide here until he is far enough past me that I’ll have an enormous lead.” And that’s inevitably what I would do: make a beeline for home as soon as it was feasible, and yell “home free” before my pursuer even knew I was on my way there. And don’t get me started on playing hide-and-seek at dusk – pure heaven!

I was the youngest of five children and remember being taken aback at the strangeness of my friend Andrea having only one sibling. Weird. We lived in Scarborough, a sleeper suburb of Toronto, packed with new houses occupied by even newer families. It was a time of plenty, with moms at home and dads working 9 to 5. At least that was the norm – my parents were anomalies. My father was a musician who worked all hours of the day and night – jingles, recordings, and lessons during the day, then gigs in the evening. I remember kids asking me what my dad did for a living, and I would tell them he was a musician. Then they would kindly ask again, as though I had not understood their initial question, and I would repeat, “He’s a musician.” “No,” they’d say, taking on the tone one adopts with a small child or a mentally challenged adult, “what does he do for money?” At which point I would assume that maybe they were a little slow, and therefore would match their plodding and precise tone as I again responded, “He is a musician,” miming the action of strumming a guitar to doubly ensure that they understood. There was no place in their universe where a man could support a family if he didn’t work in an office or a factory. 

My mother was even more atypical. She would be the first to admit that hanging out with children was not her bag, so you can imagine how discontented she was staying at home with the five of us and all our annoying little friends. It’s consequently no great surprise that she got her license and went to nursing school as soon as I was in kindergarten, having spent 15 long years breeding and rearing children while surrounded by women with whom she had nothing in common. Finally, some adult conversation and professional stimulation! My dad hired a housekeeper and my peers couldn’t understand why a woman who was not my mother was cleaning my house and serving me lunch every day. A woman who worked was abnormal, but a mother who worked was downright scandalous.

My parents’ jobs made them unlike the adults around them, but they were completely in step with our neighbours when it came to their philosophy and practice of child rearing. Everyone’s kids were allowed to play outside without adult supervision. I wore dresses and tights to school, but as soon as I got home I would put on my “hack” clothes and go outside until it was time to eat. After dinner I’d immediately head out again and stay out until the streetlights came on. Sometimes everyone who was out would play a massive game all together, and at other times we would split up into smaller groups. There were myriad possible combinations because there were so many of us, and I don’t remember ever being bored. Being outside was endlessly diverting, and we had all kinds of toys, board games, and jigsaw puzzles to play with inside when the weather was bad. 

One of my earliest memories of playing with friends involves an accident I had when I was 6 years old. I was with several other kids in a driveway just around the corner from my house. We decided to play Red Light, Green Light. One of the times that the person who was it turned around and said “Green Light”, I lunged forward. I was a less than graceful kid, and somehow in my haste I tripped over my own foot and fell forward. My hands were in my pockets and I couldn’t get them out fast enough, so my face broke my fall when it hit the bumper of the car parked in the driveway. I blacked out for a bit, and when I came to I had blood and pieces of tooth in my mouth. All the other kids were standing over me, staring down with their mouths agape and eyes wide. I realized I needed my mother, and as no one standing over me seemed inclined to move I yelled out, “Get my mum!”

I had chipped a few baby teeth and broken my nose in the fall, and both of my eyes blackened over the next couple days. Mum decided I should see the doctor just to make sure I wasn’t concussed, and we had to take the bus since she had not yet received her license at the time. She told me years later that all the adults on the bus would first look at my bruised and tender face, and then look at her with scorn in their eyes. She wanted to tell them that she hadn’t hurt me, but realized that protesting her innocence might well make her seem more guilty. 

Luckily I wasn’t concussed, but something was put awry in my nose which led to me having periodic nosebleeds for the next several years. I once had a gusher in the middle of the night and woke up with the whole left side of my face encased in dried blood. I had slept through the entire thing and was very alarmed when I awoke and couldn’t get my left eye open. I ran into the hall screaming and my dad came running to see what was the matter. I must have interrupted him while he was dressing because all he had on were his boxers and a partially buttoned shirt. Imagine his alarm when he saw me standing there in hysterics with a hand partially covering my blood-encrusted face. 

He pulled me into the bathroom and began washing the blood off with a facecloth. It wasn’t long before it was all gone and it became clear that neither my eye, nor anything else for that matter, was bleeding. My dad brought me into the living room and sat me on the couch to calm down. He then called my mum at the hospital. He explained what had happened and Mum told him that it was probably just one of my regular nosebleeds, to which dad replied, “What nosebleeds?” It’s a testament to how rarely my dad was home, and how little he was involved in the day-to-day of his children’s lives, that he didn’t know anything about my condition until he found out that morning in the most traumatic of ways.

The way I incurred that injury has stayed with me, and I am always very careful to keep my hands out of my pockets while walking. One of my duties as an elementary school teacher/librarian was to escort classes to and from the library, and I always reminded them to take their hands out of their pockets before we began. For several years I taught a cadre of boys that delighted in flouting this rule. They would jam their hands as deeply as possible into their pockets whenever we walked, and then revel in bringing their defiance to my attention. I tried to remain cool, but it did freak me out a bit that their hands weren’t free, especially if we were taking stairs. I wish one of those little shits had fallen just once and gotten injured. Not badly, but just enough that I could smugly walk past them with a “told ya so!” look on my face. 

There are so many things which are unclear when you are a child. Names, for instance. When I was about 11 a new family with three kids moved in up the street. Attila was my nearest brother’s age, Elizabeth was my age, and then there was a baby whose name I didn’t know. I wasn’t told their last name, but assumed that it must be Thehun because I’d only ever heard of one Attila. As I got older I realized my mistake, but it wasn’t until years later that I learned their actual surname. My mum and I were watching figure skating when Elvis Stoyko took to the ice. Mum asked me if I remembered the Stoykos, and I said I didn’t. She then said, “Sure you do. I’m sure you and Elizabeth were friends.” So she was Elizabeth Stoyko and her baby brother was Elvis. I still like Elizabeth Thehun better.

We also lived near a family named the Hazels. Clint Hazel was a very tough guy. He was about 3 years older than me and seemed to constantly be in fights which he invariably won. I had his younger brother Witter in my class. Witter was an unbelievable brat. He knew that he could get away with anything he wanted on the schoolyard because kids were terrified of his older brother. The Hazel boys also had a younger sister. I never learned her first name but always referred to her as “Witch”. Witch hazel was the astringent my father used after shaving, and witches are female, so it made sense in my young mind that the little sister’s name had to be Witch Hazel. I never did learn her real name.

Allowing kids to roam freely leaves room for lots of injuries. My future brother-in-law Robert was hyperactive, and on two separate occasions his rash actions resulted in a kid getting his arm broken. We had a wire fence in our backyard, and a friend of my eldest sister’s named Lou Bartoni once sliced open his calf while trying to leap over it. The gash was long and deep enough that we could see the bone, and Lou needed numerous stitches. Parents regularly came to our school in the winter to flood the ice rink in the yard and then would spray water down the hill in the playground to make it extra slippery. Kids fell all the time, cracking their heads and breaking bones, yet in none of these cases was anyone sued. Everyone understood that not only do accidents happen, but they also happen most often to children. It was all just part of growing up.

I remember one winter when we had several large storms in a row. The snow which had been shovelled off the driveway formed a huge mound beside our front porch. One day my brother Michael and I had the bright idea of somersaulting off the porch railing into the snow pile, figuring it would make a soft landing pad. We did this for a bit but realized before too long that we needed to jump from a greater height to make the experience really fun. At first we considered the roof, but figured it would be too difficult to get up there. Eventually one of us had the bright idea of setting up Dad’s ladder on the porch, so that’s what we did. We were now high enough that we could fully rotate in the air after take-off before landing perfectly on our backs. We were blithely doing this when our mother arrived home from work. She’d barely turned the car off before quickly getting out and yelling “What the hell are you doing? Are you trying to break your backs?!” So that was the end of that game. Mums can be such a bummer!

My mother worked in emergency and regularly told us that they saw as many serious injuries from sledding as from skiing. She therefore banned us from tobogganing, meaning we only did it when she wasn’t around. On one occasion Michael, his friend Brent and I decided to go sledding. Mum wouldn’t be home from work for a couple of hours and that gave us plenty of time. We took our long wooden sled to a really good hill about a fifteen minute walk away, and hadn’t been sledding for long when Michael was thrown off. He landed awkwardly on his neck and was crying out in pain when Brent and I went over to see if we could help. It was clear from the look on Michael’s face that he was badly injured and couldn’t possibly walk all the way home. Brent suggested we leave him and run for help, but both Michael and I immediately dismissed that idea. Mum would find out if another adult was involved, and neither of us wanted to face her anger.

We finally decided to put Michael on the sled and pull him home. I’ll never forget the piteous noise he made every time we hit a bump. We got to the house just before Mum came home from work. I didn’t see how we could keep the injury from her, fearing Michael wouldn’t be able to hide his extreme pain, but he admirably managed to act normal whenever Mum was around even though he may very well have broken his collar bone. He only showed his considerable discomfort when securely out of her sight. It’s amazing what a powerful motivator fear is. I will be forever grateful for his inspiring stoicism.

My childhood was markedly different from those of children today. I had absolute freedom to do as I wished in my many hours of unsupervised play, as did all of my peers. We learned important life skills in the process, such as how to negotiate, conciliate, share, and compromise. We took chances, tested our skills, and learned when to pull back. Children now are highly scheduled and almost constantly scrutinized by adults. We used to talk about “helicopter parents” in education – individuals who hovered and swooped in to save their children from every problem or difficulty, no matter how small. About five years ago the term morphed into “bulldozer parents” because they had become much more aggressive in the constant coddling of their kids and general interference in their lives. Most recently educators coined the phrase “concierge parents” to fit a new cohort who are not only ridiculously involved in the minutia of their children’s lives, but also anticipate obstacles they might have to face in the future and pre-emptively move them out of their way. 

I fear that this model of parenting is leaving an entire generation woefully unprepared for adulthood in the real world, as do many experts. I also know that I had a lot more fun than these kids are having and was much less anxious than they are. I recently read about a mom in New York City who has started a group called “Free Range Children.” The aim of her organization is to get parents to lighten up and let their children have more freedom. Many people have joined so far, and their numbers continue to grow. I wish them luck and hope that their cause spurs a resurgence of old-fashioned, hands-off parenting. Everyone – parents, children, and society in general – would benefit from such an outcome.