As the old man reaches further into his
dotage, he experiences many indignities. Unless individuals are unusually
healthy, active and outgoing “People
Persons” they usually do. Unless we are called upon to contribute in some
useful way, the old man and his life partner of some 64 years from the
beginning of that relationship have been happier communicating one on one or
two on two, than in group settings.
In spite of or perhaps because of being a
bit of a loner, I am still surprised at how thoughtful and helpful most total
strangers can be when I suffer some aging indignity. One such incident happened
to me several weeks ago. Having managed to work my way into some minor mobility
improvement for a week or two, I drove to my neighbourhood pharmacy, managed to
cane my way to the high prescription counter to hand the young lady two small
notes of the request but dropped one on the floor below. Thoughtlessly I bent
to pick it up but when I pushed my cane to get up my knees refused and I fell
back instead, injuring tailbone and banging the back of head on the cement
floor. Pharmacist, staff member and another customer rushed around the counter
to help, instructing me to stay down, wanting to get me medical attention and
so on. I did not pass out so refused but after a brief stay on my back levered
my way to a sitting position for a while, then asked for a cushion to put under
my knees and a chair for my arms to lever myself into the chair. They watched
me for a while, prepared my order, offered a painkiller, made me stay seated
for a while, helped guide me through the door, held my car door, handed me my
package of insulin supplies after I was seated and watched me head home. They
even phoned my home an hour later to see if I was OK. I cancelled my intended
further shopping trip and spent much of the next ten days or so recovering and
sleeping a lot. I am still in recovery mode.
During that period my frequent half-awake
mental activity dwelt on such kindness towards my aging indignities and soon found
myself back in the days of 1940, when no such help and kindness was in
evidence. That year I experienced many
similar injuries to my cervical spine, causing neck and head pain I could not
then admit. My
nemesis for most of these youthful indignities that year was a pint-sized
classmate from the city area called Frank Christian. To me he was neither frank
nor a Christian, but a malevolent marauder, often egged on by other city
classmates, who considered me fair game for his brutal pranks.
After all, I was one of the first pupils to
reap the benefits of the new school district system providing local elementary
classes to grade 6, but centrally located Junior High from grades 7 to 9, with
Senior High classes from grades 7 to 12 plus Senior Matriculation classes for
university entrance students in the city centre. The system required a fleet of
school buses to carry pupils from outlying population centres to the central
classrooms in time for classes starting at 9:00 AM with a one hour break for lunch and more classes
until 4:00 PM
for another long ride home. Each pupil had to go prepared for the needs of the
day, including notebooks, texts, lunch and perhaps items of clothing. The image
above shows a long distance blurred view snapped by my sister one misty early
morning in 1939 as she met one of her friends heading for the bus stop,
carrying what was then considered by us at least to be the appropriate school suitcase and I had one like it.
The difference for me, of course, was that
I was part of the contingent from the Village Theocracy of my Youth that I have
mentioned some time ago in this series in a review called Vigilance and Vigilantes. World War 2 began in September of 1939. I
started grade 7 at age 12 in the new centralized bussing program at the same
time. The village had developed from the late 20s as a closed society of
non-violent Russian born Mennonites recently arrived as refugees from the
post-revolutionary problems there, still intent on maintaining there local
independence and German language ways of the old country granted in early
Tsarist days. The result was that our busload of villagers was generally
labelled as German sympathizers, derided as square
heads or conchies, their
belongings labelled with swastikas and worse. On the lighter side, in my first
year in 1939, while waiting for the bus to pick us up for the 10 miles of poorly graded gravel road to home, one of the
“English” boys (to the villagers then, everyone in the surrounding community
was English, be their name Zacharias,
Ludchak, or Waslynchuk), a tough logger’s son from Sardis, swaggered up to
one of my village bus mates, saying, “Wanna fight, squarehead?”. True to his
non-violent creed, my friend answered, “Not today, thank you.”
Today’s age induced pain re-kindled
memories of those early days. In my case the aforesaid school suitcase turned out to be the major cause of the similar pain
and indignities I suffered in that grade 8 room full of male rowdies and
observant but usually quiet girls. At age 13/14 I was among the taller kids so my
desk was the last in a row with a number of empties behind me. That was about
the only place I found to keep my suitcase full of supplies handy. In the
absence of our pretty young home-room teacher, Miss Nancy Raine, likely during
the lunch hour, my half-pint nemesis described above, would sneak surreptitiously
around the room, pick up my loaded suitcase and throw it directly into the back
of my neck and it happened more than once.
My immediate reaction to the pain was to
rise as quickly as I could and chase him around the room. His larger friends
immediately accused me of bullying the kid and told me to “pick on someone my
own size”. Of course I had no other
recourse. Any complaints would only have worsened my position for the rest of
the school year. Poor Miss Raine suffered a good deal of pain herself from
those unruly grade 8’s and once or twice I caught her crying with frustration
in the hall at her inability to maintain discipline. I had health problems
because of the cervical spine injury caused by that prank until I quit school
after grade 9 at age 15 to go farming.
In an epilogue I can say that the enforced
bussing program in our community worked well on that small scale, to begin a
sort of integration between my villagers and the “others” by the time I returned
to the classroom in the fall of 1943, and the preacher’s control of his
theocracy was more or less doomed soon after the war. It had turned out that some
of the first army recruits in our area included youngsters from my village
including one of my neighbours and in general, those earlier settlers found our
villagers to be much like they were. As for my nemesis, Frank Christian, I
never saw him again. Perhaps he had volunteered by then, provided he had grown
some. I ran into Miss Raine again in the fall of 1945 on a crowded campus at
UBC where I had enrolled for first year Arts, strolling hand in hand with a Mr.
Jamieson, who had been one of my teachers at the village elementary school many
years earlier.
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