Remembering the great teachers I had coming up

If you think you're going to read about my years at the feet of Wittgenstein, turn the page... this is about my grade one teacher etc.

Grade one was Ms. Farquhar, if I'm not mistaken. My first year of formal education. I still remember my very first day of my first year. My father dropped me off at Elora Public School, said a few words to the teacher, and off he went. I remember waving bye-bye.

Those were the days before Kindergarten and pre-Kindergarten and so forth. They're putting two year olds on the school bus these days, for fucks sakes.

By that time he'd picked up a few words of English. He'd been working at Omark for a few years. When you're on the job I guess you're kinda forced to pick up a few words. Unfortunately, once he got home from work everything was in my native tongue. Don't think I had more than three words of the English language by the time he dropped me off that day.

So it was sink or swim.

I don't know about swimming, but I must have at least floated, because by the end of that first year I was in the back row with the bunnies instead of in the front row with the turtles. Ya, there was a bunnies-turtles continuum in play even back then. Everybody knew who was slow and who wasn't.

Having a blackout about who the grade two teacher was, but I remember her car; a '59 Buick with fins and angled headlights.

Grade three, it was Ms. Plyly. And by the way, back in the day these "Ms." folks were always Miss or Mrs. It was to be another quarter century before the honorific "Ms." was invented.

Grade four was at a new school, Ponsonby Public. That's where I first crossed paths with David Card. Ya, long before he was a famous economist he was a simple farm lad from southern Ontario. Our teacher was Ms. Prickett. My one memory of her was when she freaked out at my misbehaviour the day the itinerant music teacher, a Mr. Bennett, visited our class. Apparently I was the first one in the cloak room when the bell went, and Mr. Bennett was not yet finished his accordion solo for our class.

In hindsight, I figure she may have had some designs on Mr. Bennett and my rude snub of him may have dimmed her chances. Hope not.

Grade five was Ms. Moore. I remember her telling me I'd buy her a grand piano when I got rich. Hey Ms. Moore, I'm not quite there yet, but after I syndicate this blog into e-zines, that piano could still be coming your way... but at 150 years old your arthritis may make it difficult to play...

Grade six saw me at Marden Public School under the tutelage of a Ms. Tawse. Overall, I'd have to say she was kind to me, even though I recall getting strapped for something that really belonged to Bill Bailey. Bill was one of those guys born to be a pirate and lived the pirate life, although I do recall an exchange with him when I ran into him at a gas bar many years later... "well, you can't just loot and pillage your whole life..."

You couldn't?

Fuck! What a bummer it was hearing that news come out of Bill's mouth. He could have saved me a whack of grief had he shared that insight in grade six.

By grade eight I was in the hands of Ms. McCall. She had the keener class at Willow Road, and I was bumped into it after the first month of the school year because the two English twats in charge of the dummy class thought I was misplaced.

Ha ha ha!!!

Then there was high school. GCVI.

A whole 'nother chapter...

When the wheel of karma gets stuck in the mud

Finally culled enough of the crap in the garage to make room for the Mustang Fifty. She's going to be sleeping there till spring.

There's guys who go all out when they park a car for the winter. Take the wheels off, put it on blocks, drain the fluids.

Bit excessive if you ask me. Besides, thanks to the benefits of global warming, I might be able to take her out for a rip in the middle of January.

My buddy Jimmy Lippert, may he rest in peace, always took the battery out of anything he stored. Claimed that was the only way to ensure that there was no chance of a barn fire. Just disconnecting the battery cables wasn't good enough for him. You take the battery out and store it in another room.

I don't know. If batteries can start fires, wouldn't the fire just start in the other room? Maybe that was a bit excessive too.

Back when I stored the SD 455 Trans Am for the only winter I owned her, I didn't disconnect or remove anything. When it came time to pull her out she fired up and I drove away. Simple as that. Kurtz's barn didn't burn down.

Kurtz's barn was just by Ariss Ontario, which was up the road from me. At the time Ariss had two variety stores and four houses. And Bill Bailey.

I met Billy at Marden Public School. He was the first guy I met my age who bragged about feeling up girls boobs. That was on the school bus in grade six, a point in time at which it hadn't occurred to me yet that I would want to touch boobs.

Funny how things change.

So old man Kurtz had a farm outside Ariss and I agreed to pay a hundred bucks to park the Super Duty there for the winter. There were a couple of camping trailers stored there as well. I knew him because I knew a couple of his youngsters, who were more or less my age.

Five years later I was on the ferry between Vancouver Island and the mainland, and I'm sitting there, and I'm thinking I'm seeing a couple of the Kurtz boys, but I can't be, because they live on a farm by Ariss and I'm on a boat in the Pacific Ocean.

So I'm sitting there staring at them and they're sitting there staring at me and finally somebody says "hey man, you look just like....  "

Sure enough. It was them.

The Super Duty was one hell of a piece of machinery. She'd break the tires loose in every gear if you wanted. If the road was a little damp she had a tendency to do that even when you didn't want it.

For me, it was the right car at the wrong time.

Life does that to you. Right car at the wrong time. Right woman at the wrong time. Great job but I just gotta follow the call of the wild...

Finest shoes you've ever owned but they don't go with your suit. Finest suit you ever owned and you've never looked better but by God here comes a hemroid flare-up... The hemroids fade away and the job's working out and the suit and the shoes are working out and the woman is working out and everything is A-plus and then the cops show up while you've got the mother-in-law over with a warrant from five years ago.

Fuck me!

So I get to talking to the Kurtz boys and they've been in the Okanogan for the last month picking cherries, and they did the math and realized that compared to a shit-level job back in Ariss, home base of the Hasenfratz Linamar empire, it was actually costing them money to pick cherries.

So they buggered off and decided to see a few sights.

I knew a variety of Kurtz's back in the day. Even dated one once. One of the girls. That didn't go anywhere. Right woman at the wrong time.

Bill I ran into years later at a gas station in Guelph. He was back for a visit from a job in the Yukon. He'd settled down.

"Ya can't just loot and pillage yer whole life" he said.

He's right.

But it gets me thinking about how what goes around comes around.

Karma.

It wasn't till I got to Falling Downs that things seemed to work in harmony. The shoes, the suit, the woman, the job, the friends, the life...

The vehicles tend to be older and rusting, but they start up every day and they're paid for.

For a long time everybody I knew eventually got stuck in the mud. You'd get the dream house with the dream kitchen and your husband would leave.

Or the best job ever and a shop out back and your wife would leave.

And hemroids can rear up any time.

So there's something comforting about finding everything fitting into place when you're well past ever hoping that's gonna happen.

Unfortunately this place is called Falling Downs because it's falling down.

It ain't gonna last forever.