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...

Beer and loathing in the twilight of Western civilization

Spent the last few days consuming the weekend papers, celebrating Canada's birthday, and driving six hundred kilometres to attend a wedding.

First things first. Canada's birthday. This is, all things considered, a pretty cool country to be a part of. I'm an immigrant, and even though I'm male and white and European, it wasn't always an easy gig blending in. There were play pals at Elora Public School who could not let me play at their place because I was German.

After all, in those days we still had guys with no legs sitting on mechanic's creepers outside the Iroquois Hotel. Yup, it was the Germans who made their legs go away..

That hatred is understandable when you're sixty; not so much when you're six.

But I survived, and I might add that I survived without sensitivity counselling and all that other fashionable politically correct bullshit that hogs the airwaves today.

Back in the day, it was suck it up and ride it out.

Or die.

Now it's let's see who we can sue for the latest assault on your dignity. And damned near everything can be construed as an assault on your dignity these days. Even though nobody anywhere at anytime has ever insulted you about anything, you could very well be the victim of "micro-aggression."

We all knew instinctively that when "micro-aggression" was invented, the pendulum had swung too far.

The weekend papers were of course trumpeting the 149th birthday of our nation, and also bemoaning the triumph of something called "populism." Apparently that is where your lesser educated and therefore stupid white folks embrace the siren song of a Trump or a Brexit campaign. Yup, those stupid white folks are a problem alright...

No, it couldn't possibly be the education system that has manifestly short-changed them, it couldn't be the "free trade" agreements that have off-shored their jobs... they're just really stupid, and, of course, racist to the core. This so-called working class, which has destroyed itself with its addictions to indolence and video games and beer, now wants to engage the democratic process by shaking off it's beer-induced stupor to vote for Trump, vote for Brexit, vote for... change?

What the fuck is wrong with those people?

One thing I never could figure out was how all this working class discontent was in any way "racist." When I worked at Budd Automotive in Kitchener a vast swath of the union brothers were black. Same at Frankel Steel. When NAFTA took our jobs away, it wasn't just white working class jobs. It was ALL working class jobs.

Period.

But the mainstream media fucks who only ever meet the "working class" when they stop off at Timmies on the drive to work wouldn't know anything about that, would they?

Then there was that wedding. It was a classic Italian deal, but judging from the abundance of Audi and BMW and Mercedes vehicles in the parking lot you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The Italians know how to put on a wedding, that's for sure!

And they know who makes the best cars.

The German victory over Italy at the Euro Cup hung over the festivities like a wet blanket.

But all of us were immigrants not that long ago.

Let's go Blue Jays; let's play ball!

Have to admit the magic of baseball pretty much eluded me from the get go.

Ya, back in my Elora Public School days we used to rush out to the playground at recess and play something called "scrub."

A little later in life I was the pitcher for my slo-pitch team in Saint John New Brunswick. We were sponsored by the brewery up the road. Man, did I ever pitch extra slow just for them!

I remember that shit like it happened yesterday!

We have a happy summer of beer and baseball... well, slo-pitch.

We get in the playoffs!

Holy shit! That means we'll probably get more beer from our sponsor!

And at this point you'll actually get a few friends and family members, so on a typical game-day it looks like there's at least a couple dozen folks in the stands.

And suddenly the guy who has been throwing the ball all year just fucking chokes!

Ya, that was me.

How you can fuck up pitching in a slo-pitch game is something I cannot understand to this day.

But I did it!

So it can happen to anybody...

Hasso and Bobby

Here's a blast from the past.

Back in the day when I was DP trash coming up, we lived on the wrong side of the tracks in the tidy puritan village of Elora.

I remember this shit like it went down last week.

Charlie Hill lived on the wrong side of the tracks too. Not that Charlie was the sort to give a shit.

I enjoyed the celebrity that went along with being the only kid in grade one who couldn't speak the english language.

Try that in a puritan english-speaking village.

Celebrity may not be the right word.

But Charlie's daughter Donna didn't seem to mind walking me to school every day.

I got beat up later.

By grade three or so I'd got a bit bigger and was able to turn the tables on some of the local boys who thought kicking the shit out of a DP was the honourable thing to do. After all, their Daddys had too often come home missing a limb or two, and would spend the rest of their truncated lives selling pencils and apples from their perch on a mechanic's creeper in front of the Iroquois Hotel.

There came a point where I never got beat up again, and in fact I can't even remember the last whuppin.

So the years rolled by, and Charlie Hill, the one-legged well-driller, became one of the earliest and most loyal clients when my dear DP daddy got out of the factory and into the real estate business.

Ya, sounds crazy now, but that kind of mobility was possible back in the day.

Donna Hill married a guy named Modesto, who came from another branch of the extended DP family. Me and Modesto actually made the front page of the Guelph Daily Mercury, all smiles as we were tinkering under the hood of an Edsel that was destined for a charity auction.

It was auctioned off to raise funds for our high school shop.

As it turned out, our shop teacher's brother won that Edsel in the auction that followed our restoration.

That's the sort of coincidence that would raise eyebrows today, if not make headlines.

But back to Hasso and Bobby.

We had that big yellow brick house just south of where the Gorge Family Restaurant is today in Elora. That, by the way, is another DP success story, but not one I'll get into now.

My family lived in the downstairs. My uncle Horst and his family lived in the upstairs. Horst had a millwright ticket that he'd earned in Switzerland. That made him a shoe-in for a welding inspector job at the General Electric plant that opened up in Guelph in the middle fifties.

Horst's family had a dog named Bobby. It was almost always chained to a tree between the chicken houses and the barn.

Bobby's tree.

Our family had a dog named Hasso that almost always ran free.

Times changed, and the dogs had to go. Horst gave Bobby to a work mate who lived a few miles away, and we never saw him again.

Our free-range Hasso was fobbed off on a work-mate of my Daddy who lived 50 miles away.

A few days later, Hasso had found his way back home.

Racism then and now

A few years before anyone had heard of Selma and Martin Luther King I was dropped off at Elora Public School to begin my formal education. I was the only kid in the school who didn't speak English. The language that I did speak wasn't always welcome in the homes of my schoolmates barely a decade after the war, so those were lonely years.

Elora was a white-bread tight-assed Presbyterian town at the time. There wasn't a unwhite family in the place, let alone a black kid in the school, so it's no surprise that when my little pure white perfect princess girl classmates went out to skip rope at recess, one of the more popular skipping ditties went like this:

way up north 
where the niggers shovel snow
one shoved a shovel
up the other niggers hole
one called the doctor 
but the doctor couldn't come
so the poor nigger died
with a shovel up his bum


This rhyme today can be neither written or spoken, so read it aloud a few times, and you'll be helping bust  two taboos at once. When the girls went double dutch they'd have to say it twice as fast. Even at the time it was considered somewhat naughty. I recall there were certain stern-faced playground monitors who'd call the children on that one.

Like I said, Elora was all white. White people even ran the corner store. Bird's Variety. One day some catholic kids jumped me on the way to the store and relieved me of my candy money. That was the big cultural divide, catholic vs. protestant. I didn't get it then and I don't get it now. We're all white and we all love Jesus. The only way we knew who was catholic was because the catholic kids went to the catholic school. But it's fucked up Ireland for five hundred years. I'm happy to report that when I got a little bigger I extracted more than an equal share of payback.

In those days you still had guys with no legs nicked-named Stumpy pushing themselves along the sidewalk on mechanic's creepers. War vets. There'd always be a guy like that outside the Iroquois Hotel, sometimes selling pencils, sometimes just with his hat out, sometimes just passed out. Don't know why it was called the Iroquois. They'd got rid of those people a long time before.

We don't see our no-legs war vets sitting on the sidewalk selling pencils anymore. The little girls who sang way up north grew up to be liberals and activists and hippies and feminists. There's even (almost) peace in Ireland, for Christ's sake. We've come a long way baby.

There's a lot of self congratulation going on in America these days. MLK's anniversary and all that, and haven't we come a long way and aren't we great. Why lookie here, we've got a black president don't you know!?

The first black president has become the lame duck president of all time. Why? Because there's a great big slice of middle America that is determined to cut him off at the knees no matter what he does. When Reagan raised taxes or H.W. raised taxes or Clinton raised taxes or when any of those white presidents raised the debt ceiling, middle America might not have been happy about it but life went on.

Not any more. We've got the first black president, don't you know, and there's a great big slice of middle America that just wants to see the nigger fail.