In Grade 7, our teacher, Miss McCaffery, was tough, but many of us
stood in fear of the Art teacher, Mr. Charlton. Some called him
Charlie
, though not to his face. When angry, he might shout
at the students. And he did not fear to mete out corporal
punishment.
An early task was to construct a portfolio out of heavy paper, cut out the letters of our surnames, then glue those letters to the front of the portfolio. Then we could store our uncompleted art projects in the portfolio between classes, with no chance of them getting mixed up or lost.
The task of constructing the portfolio took some of us more than
one class. I was one of the laggards. At the beginning of the next
class, Charlie started shouting at us. I shook with fear.
Who did this?
He held up a black portfolio upon which some
wag had pasted the word BEER. I don't remember what he said,
but it was savage.
Minutes passed, nobody owned up, and Charlie passed out the other portfolios. I was so relieved that the scene was done with, but my portfolio was missing. So I asked the teacher where mine might be. What colour was it? Black. No, it couldn't be found. So I started again from scratch. I was slow at art.
This episode stuck in my memory, but it was only years, decades later that I realized that the BEER portfolio was mine. I had mis-spelled my own name. The perfect ingenue, my question did not seem to cause the slightest suspicion on the part of Charlie that I might be the perpetrator of a heinous crime against Art.
With apologies to Leonard Cohen. Before the days of ultra high fidelity, songs were heard on scratchy AM. It was easy to misunderstand the words, though sometimes my gaffes were in themselves hard to figure.
Day destroys the night
Night divides the day
from The Doors' Break On Through
surely isn't too
difficult. It's symmetrical, Taoist-oriental, simple, hip. But for
years I thought the words were:
Day divides the night
Ninety-five today
which is crazy, but it does go well with how the song continues: learn to run, learn to hide, break on through; as if the heat is oppressive and you have to overcome it.
I probably have the dubious honour of featuring in the Obituary section of the Globe and Mail more than any other person. For a long time, my chess column appeared there.
I didn't mind the Obits as a location, because it allowed me to write an up-to-date column, only a couple of days old. Starting August 9, 2003, I am in a section of the paper which must be submitted 12 days in advance. I'd rather be .... A few years later, the lead time became 16 days (though I often manage to cadge it to 15 days).
During the holidays, we had Oysters in the shell, which we prepared "rocky fellas" style. We built a fire in the back yard, using as a "pit" a broken piece of concrete utility well which had been discarded during the street work last summer. We put the "pit" on a bed of four pieces of scrap wood, to provide a good draught. Despite the cold and damp conditions, it worked marvelously.
That night I was restless, and the next day I discovered red rashes on both of my wrists, somewhat worse on the left wrist, with a pale band under the watch strap. A metal allergy would have produced more rather than less effect where the strap stripe was. An oyster or food allergy didn't seem likely, the pale band again. Only more than a day later did it come to me: it was a burn. I had been handling the oysters with gloves on, but the gloves were short ones. Strange that I didn't feel pain at the time (no, I had not been drinking). Maybe wrists are lite in nerve endings. That might go with the area's popularity as a suicide site.
At University I shifted to Math from Physics, in part because of the ennui of the dark afternoons and evenings in the laboratories. In Math, you could go home while it was still light. In a later year, I convinced myself that I wanted to learn about Optics and Acoustics. It had a lab, but oh well, maybe this would be less mind-numbing.
An early experiment consisted of a light, a light sensor, and a stack of plastic squares, each about half a centimeter thick. The experiment was to shine light through a plastic square, measure the light. Then add a square, measure the light through 2 ... a dozen thicknesses of plastic. The result would show how much light was attenuated by the thickness of plastic. We worked in pairs, so I can't tell you for sure who had the idea, but I do think it was me. I noticed that the plastic squares were heavily scratched. So I thought that the scratches would interfere with the experiment. I quickly discovered a liquid whose index of refraction was fairly close to that of plastic, and which would easily fill in the scratches. So we did the experiment with a few drops of water sandwiched between the layers of plastic. Lo and behold, the increase in attenuation with increased thickness of the plastic was unmeasurably small. The experiment was unsound. What it was really measuring was the refraction of light from the plastic-air-plastic interfaces as we increased the number of layers in the pile.
The lab assistants insisted that this experiment had been in "the book" for several years. I quickly dropped the Optics course (the only course I remember having dropped, ever) with permission, although I had to listen to the prof for about an hour, trying to keep me in the class. Too bad, I guess I'll have to use the Internet to learn about Optics and Acoustics!
What follows might be interpreted as bragging. To start, let me say that I am well below average as an athlete. Take 100 people off the street, give them the Canada Fitness Test, or make them play a random sport, and I'll likely in the bottom ten. At school in phys ed, I often got C- or D. I was so bad, sometimes they thought I wasn't trying. In high school, that was reflected in coming last (or second last, I remember that JR was sometimes slower than me) in running, be it sprinting or cross-country. My upper body strength has never been able to support my weight, so I could never climb rope (not even a decimeter), zero or one chin-up, rarely more than three push-up.
I haven't started bragging. As a youngster, I was enthusiastic about sports, from NHL hockey to CFC football to major league baseball which I would follow in the newspaper and watch on our old Black and White TV. Those were the days before the outfield camera. I would also throw a tennis ball against our stone chimney for hours on end, and invent fantasy sports leagues.
I haven't started bragging yet. My parents and siblings were uninterested in sports, except my mom (who sometimes liked les Habitants "Best of All of Montreal") and my dad (who as a youth had played golf and football) and a brother who was fond of motor sports and another brother who liked badminton, cycling and sailing--but not competitively.
I still haven't started bragging. There really isn't anything to brag about, but let's do this in detail.
It started when we were living in Ottawa. I must have been 7 or 8 and they were having a tryout at Lansdowne Park, just a few (5?) blocks from where we lived. I borrowed a mitt from the elder brothers and walked over. Part of the tryout consisted of picking the ball up (perhaps that means catching it and then throwing it. But nothing. The ball kind of went nowhere. It was as if I was throwing like a girl--or Barack Obama. This latter may be a clue to what happened. There was something funny about the mitt. It was oddly symmetrical. Could it have been used in either hand? Did I put the mitt on the wrong hand?
A brief distraction to talk about handedness. Stanley Coren wrote a great book The Left-Hander Syndrome. It turns out that, like US President Gerald Ford, I am left-handed sitting but right-handed standing. I write left but throw right. Frisbee or ping-pong ambidextrous (maybe adextrous is the better word).
I don't remember what happened, but maybe it was this: I put the mitt on my right hand, leaving only the left arm (not the one I properly use to throw) available. I still haven't started bragging yet. Understandably, I wasn't picked for any team.
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Last modified July 20, 2011