On November 10, 1992, I cleaned out my office for the last time. I packed up the dog-earred planning diary, the picture of the kids, the memorabilia, and the other odds and ends accumulated during nearly thirty years as a public servant. I stuffed it all into boxes and bags, carried it down to the car, and drove away.
It was a heavy load. There was a lot more in those boxes and bags than anyone might have actually seen me pack into them. They also contained nearly half a life-time of friendships and enmities, of successes and failures, moments of elation and despair, a lot of laughter and a little sorrow. Those things were now packed away just as surely as the pieces of wood, metal, plastic and paper. An hour earlier they had been part of something organic and on-going. Now they were frozen in time; part of something that had a beginning and an end.
It was dark as I drove home, and the expressway was shrouded in cold rain and mist. The overhead lights and the red and green circles of light from the traffic were blurred and refracted through the wet windshield. There was a finality about the rearward drift of the overhead lights as I passed beneath them; it was a route I had taken countless times before, but would not often be taking again.
I found myself struggling with a very troubling question. Had I set myself free, or merely cut myself adrift? I didn't feel free just then - I felt vaguely unreal. I thought of the signs that my staff had hung on the knob of my office door. There were two signs, each with the same picture of a chubby infant in a diaper, smugly perched on a large over-stuffed chair. One sign informed the passerby that "the boss is in"; the other that "the boss is missing". My staff had insisted that these were needed to help them keep track of me. Now, the boss was definitely missing, fearful that he might be missing even from himself. (Which raised an interesting police station scenario. "Officer, I wish to report a missing person - me.").
There seemed to be no good reason for this kind of angst. It was not as though this was something happening to me overnight, or without warning. For months there had been a reorganization study going on in the department. From the moment of the first preview of the new organization, it seemed obvious that, while I would still have a job, it would not be very much of a job. I explained to my boss that retirement looked like a more desirable option. Eventually, departmental management came to the same conclusion about the job, and decided to eliminate it altogether, thus qualifying me for a considerably more generous severance package. I wouldn't be rich, but I could survive, and I would be free.
I had never much liked working from nine to five. There were always so many other things I wanted to do; so many other things I wanted to think about. But as long as I was working, I took my work seriously and generally produced pretty good results. Without being very ambitious, I found myself with a fairly steady stream of promotions. I always seemed to be making more money than I was willing to sacrifice by trying something different. I was unhappy, but trapped by prosperity. One of the results was that I spent my entire career with the vague conviction that I would retire on the first day that I qualified for a pension that would maintain me above starvation level. I didn't exactly plan for the day, but I did make a point of keeping my lifestyle very modest, so that the option would at least be open when the time came. The magic pensionable day had come and gone two years earlier, on the day of my fiftieth birthday which, thanks to my staff, I spent in an office surrounded by fifty plastic penguins. A great fondness for the people I was working with (plastic penguins notwithstanding) and a certain fear of outright poverty, kept me in place for two more years. But the reorganization, like some special configuration of the stars, seemed to signal that it was time.
I should also admit that, by that time, I was not only advancing toward something, I was escaping from something as well. I had become the Director of Benefits for the entire Canadian Public Service, responsible for hundreds of millions in annual expenditures, and I had run out of steam. The daily crises weren't stimulating any more; they were toxic. I felt like a cartoon character who has run off a cliff, but manages to remain safely suspended in mid-air until he looks down. Somewhere along the line, I looked down. It was a perfect recipe for chronic stress, and I felt an ulcer coming on with all the bleak inevitability of snow in winter.
Why then, after all this, was I now feeling disoriented? I hadn't, I thought, been at all blind in the weeks leading up to the moment of departure. I was well aware that I would soon focus on everything that was good about my job, rather than the many things I could no longer tolerate. I knew that I would miss the people. I knew that I would need to decide what to do with the rest of my life. I was prepared for these things, and ready to come to terms with them. Somehow, they were all converging on me sooner and harder than I expected. I was beginning to sense, from that first night, that, at best, the transition was going to be complicated.
As the first few days and weeks went by, that insight was confirmed. I was not unhappy. I was not regretful. I was, however, a little afraid of wasting something, and I wasn't sure exactly what it was, but I knew I didn't want it to be wasted. It was as though I was suddenly being forced to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I didn't know. It was at that point that it seemed, if I needed to figure out where I was going, it might help me to review where I'd come from. If I was no longer entirely sure who I was, maybe it would be useful if I could figure out who I'd been up to now.
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As far as I know, I was born a reasonably bright kid, although I suspect that I began accumulating neuroses fairly early on as well. (Happily, most of them have been relatively harmless, and apt to be put down to eccentricity). It was September 1, 1940, in Saskatchewan, in the farming town of Indian Head, a community of 2000 souls some 40 miles east of Regina.
My father, Leonard, was killed in a highway accident while my mother was carrying me. I cannot write any kind of elaboration around that fact, in any way whatever. I have no means of understanding the enormity of such an event for a young woman pregnant with her first child. I can only record that, to her eternal credit, she seemed to me a perfectly normal mother by the time I was old enough to notice and compare. So far as I know, she firmly resisted what must have been a powerful temptation to over-protect me.
That date, September 1, 1940, has always appealed to me in a totally irrational way, as though it had some peculiar merit in relation to other dates, and as though I had some responsibility for it. Maybe everyone feels that way about their birthdate. Mine just seems to me to have a kind of bold and distinctive roundness to it, something altogether lacking from lesser, non-descript dates like, say, February 17, 1943. I was delighted, earlier this year, to hear a radio piece about a small but growing movement to have the New Year begin on September 1 instead of January 1, on the grounds that the former has more of the sense of new beginnings around it - the start of the school year, the resumption of earnest business activity following the vacation season, and the like. I heartily approve.
Indian Head lies near the heart of what is still sometimes called the breadbasket of the world. In the early part of the century, the town was the largest grain collection center on earth. But the prairie lends itself to remembering that this is also Indian land. The time when the land was theirs is much too recent to be merely historical. The wind in the wild grass, the gentle voice of a stream, the thunder breaking the stillness of a hot prairie afternoon, the sound of the meadowlarks in the afternoon and the night sounds on a pond - I think it is fair to acknowledge that we are not the primary intended audience for these songs. The prairie had its own children. We displaced them, and we've yet to figure out how to set things right.
Still, regardless of race, creed or color, most people born and raised on the prairie tend to love the land as tenaciously as coastal natives love the sea. It is a mystery to me how so many visitors find the endless expanse of prairie "monotonous" when few would react the same way to an endless expanse of ocean. I think it has something to do with accessibility. On the prairie, it is generally easy to get from point A to point B, no matter where the two points sit in relation to one another. The prairie does not issue the same mysterious challenge as the sea. I suspect that those who are bored by the prairie would be just as quickly bored by the sea if they could move freely around on it without getting out of the car.
Otherwise, the prairie and the sea have much in common. Each has its own special shifts of mood, some gentle and gradual, some dramatic and even frightening. There is the same need to learn to see and appreciate more subtle shadings and contrasts in colors and shapes and textures. Especially, there is the sense of openness and freedom that comes from being able to see to the edge of the earth's own curve. It is as though a constraint is suddenly taken from your chest, and breathing becomes easier and more natural, the air as clean as wind after rain.
Even in its places that are universally acknowledged as beautiful, the prairie is perverse. Indian Head lies just a few miles beyond the crest of the Qu'Appelle Valley, celebrated by Pauline Johnson in her poetry. The Qu'Appelle Valley is not a place where the hills rise. Instead, without warning, the floor of the world drops several hundred feet and a long wide river valley opens up beneath you. If the spirits of the plains no longer dwell here, they dwell nowhere. Except for the chain of lakes it creates, there is no longer much left of the river. It is barely a creek where it leaves the valley to the east. The valley was plowed out of the body of the earth after the last ice age, when a pent-up continental sea finally burst its way outward toward the western sea. Here, even the ice age seems not so remote.
They say that, in winter, the prairie can be as hostile as any place where humanity inhabits the earth. If you walk to the edge of town on a cold clear winter night, and look outward, you will be confronted with a vast, simple and uncompromising geometry - the white of frozen fields spread flat below, and the stars themselves transfixed with cold in the great black arc of sky overhead. It can seem as alien as a frozen planet in another galaxy, except for one small difference. Chances are that off near the horizon, you will see the small, steady light of a farmhouse, a tiny symbol of security in all that dark expanse. I felt this way about it, one November afternoon on a visit in 1987:
Grey clouds drift across
the empty fields.
The cold smell
of early snow.
The winter is not imposed
on the prairie.
Beginning now
the winter and the prairie
are one.
But then, improbably, it is early summer again. The wind is warm in the tall grass, and the air is as sweet as syrup with the smell of the caragana blossoms that the children pluck off and nibble, to taste the honey at the root of the petals.
It's a land of extremes, reduced to simpler terms than are found in most places, and it stays in your blood. I must confess that, in later years, hills and mountains captured more of my own affections. They seem to make the heart swell, while the prairies somehow make it ache a little. Maybe it's only nostalgia for days of youth that have long since drifted off in time. Still, it remains home and I will always support the spirit of this claim from an early author:
"These are the gardens of the desert -
the fertile fields,
boundless and beautiful,
for which the speech of England
has no name - the prairies."
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Given the death of my father, we were bound to have an unorthodox family configuration, and we did. It had a history of its own. When my grandmother died in childbirth in 1921, my grandfather, a carpenter, was left with three small daughters, and he was ill-equipped to look after them by himself. The girls spent a great deal of time at the farm of their Uncle Charles, with his wife, Erie Etta, and her brother Frank.
By the time I was born, Charles had died and Erie Etta and Frank had lost the farm, packing up and driving away from it in the depression with little to show for their years of effort. My mother now needed help, and so did they, so they joined forces. She was able to go back to work in the local department store. Frank brought in some income from looking after the local livery stable. (Plenty of farmers still came into town, summer and winter, in horse-drawn wagons or dleighs, which they could "park" at the livery stable, where the horses would get food and water). Erie Etta stayed home to look after me.
Erie Etta died when I was five or six. I only have impressions of her, and even those are poorly-focussed. Frank was with us until he died when I was seventeen, and was a major presence in my life until then - quiet, portly, and, once he had to retire from the livery stable, largely unoccupied. Among other things, I remember him sitting by the window for hours, just smoking his pipe and thinking his own private thoughts. But he was supportive - like an elderly friend or godfather. Frank would walk me down to hockey practice when I was small. He could always find a quarter for me when I really needed one. He taught me to play checkers and Snakes and Ladders and nearly always found a way to lose. He made our meals except on weekends and holidays and kept track of all my favorites. We would go through his old trunk full of relics together, and he would tell me stories and the things he had learned about the Boer War, about the Indians and Louis Riel and his rebellion. He was a warm, reliable presence, generous within his means, and I doubt that I ever properly repaid his kindnesses.
We were closer to being poor than to being rich, but I had everything I needed, if not always everything I wanted. I also had all the advantages and disadvantages of being an only child. I had privacy, I had no need to adapt to brothers and sisters, and I learned to be resourceful - to find ways to amuse and occupy myself in solitude. Those were the advantages. On the other hand, I never really got the hang of sharing and I was so successful at entertaining myself that I never really learned how to be relaxed and comfortable with other people. Then (and now), I enjoyed other people, but being by myself always felt like returning to "home base" - like things returning to normal. With others, I always found myself playing confusing roles. In many ways, I was painfully shy, but I was frequently showing off. I didn't especially like individual competition, but if I did compete, I was fiercely competitive - I found it extremely painful to lose. I always found myself wanting to be different in some way than I actually was - bigger, stronger, funnier - whatever I felt was needed to make me more likeable or more impressive.
Strangely, given such a temperament, I never lacked for friends, either close or casual; one circle of friends remained more or less stable from pre-school days until adulthood. At any given time, I had at least one "best friend". I got involved in everything - sports, cub scouts, school plays. School came easy. By any reasonable standard, it was a happy childhood. But, although I didn't know it at the time, I was always going to pay a price, higher as the years went by, for that basic shyness, and the discomfort and confusion in relating to other people.
--<< >>--
One evening, when I must have been four or five years old, we were visiting one of my mother's sisters. While they talked in the kitchen, I went off exploring in the house. I came back dressed in somebody's coat and hat, many sizes too big, and announced with great ceremony that I was Hitler. It must have been an impressive entrance, because the two women ended up laughing pretty hard, probably in spite of themselves.
I could not have had any really sensible idea who Adolf Hitler was - only that, whoever he was, he was bad and would do us harm if he got a chance. I knew that "we" were fighting him somewhere far away, and although I wasn't exactly sure who "we" were, I was sure that "we" would win.
Without any real understanding, children my age absorbed the feel and texture of a wartime society as naturally and unthinkingly as we breathed the air. We saw nothing unusual in the absence of a whole segment of the male portion of society - they were "the boys" and they had gone to fight the war. It was only normal if we had a rationing book, and that it had something to do with how much butter we could buy. It was natural if Sunday meant that all the young mothers would get dressed up, scrub and dress their children and converge downtown for ice cream. All the songs on the radio (when they were not about cowboys) were about the brave boys who were winning the war.
Finally, there was a day of celebration. Everyone in town must have been out in the general melee. There were flags and cheering everywhere, people hugging each other, laughing and crying, and finally joining in a march down to the World War I memorial in the park, where Hitler was burned in effigy. We had won the war as promised, and the boys (by now mysterious and almost mythical) would be coming home. And in due course, come home they did. I don't know if we were pleased or disappointed to learn that they were only men, good men by and large, who turned out to be husbands, fathers, brothers, clerks and farmers, teachers and mechanics.
As in so many other areas, Canadians are divided in the way they think about war. In large measure, the dividing line may be a line in time, drawn between those born before, and those born after World War II. Many of those born in the fifties and sixties can say flatly and without qualification that "war is wrong", or that "killing can never be justified". For many, "war" now means Vietnam, probably history's most unpopular war. To Canadians on the other side of that line in time, and not just to the veterans who fought, "war" means, quintessentially, World War II. Even in the case of my generation, born during the war, the war was simply part of the world we entered. And just as we absorbed our sense of the war's existence from everything going on around us, we also absorbed a sense of its rightness. Something was threatening us and it had to be stopped, regardless of the cost.
The point is that we had, built-in as part of our view of the world, the clear acceptance that there are such things as justified wars. In the same way, I suspect that the Vietnam generation has a ready-made psychological foundation for the opposite view.
Along with our belief in the possibility of justifiable war, we inherited from the times a certain fascination with the trappings of war. Most of those who actually fought the war were long since beyond fascination, but as children back home, we somehow absorbed the sense of drama, the sense of heroism and glory, without any of the blood-drenched details. They were complicated times. Part of the reason that the war was so destructive was that men had truly harnessed, for the first time, the full power of iron and steel, of steam and petroleum. (We saw and felt some of that power every time we went to play by the railroad tracks and our games were punctuated by the arrival of another of the endless stream of steam locomotives). The first all-out exploitation of those powers was in the machines of war, and the machines that support war. To have harnessed the power was marvelous - to have used it in that way was tragic. But for us, it was difficult to separate the former from the latter. We could see the sleek, utterly functional beauty of the Spitfire and the Messerschmidt, we could admire the awesome destructive power of a destroyer or a tank. To have controlled such machines in combat, bravely and honorably, to the acclaim and admiration of your country, had become a standard of manhood. No one ever expressed this notion so baldly, but I'm sure that, from our peculiar, childish vantage point, it would have been nearly impossible to form any other conviction. I'm equally sure that, disavow them as we might, many of us will always feel, and be influenced by, the echos of that conviction.
*************************************************
Retiring in November meant that I was falling headlong into an Ottawa winter. In Ottawa, in winter, nature is mischievous and erratic. A typical week can see a heavy snowfall, followed in rapid daily succession by: rain, which transforms the snow into an uneven landscape of grey slush; bitter cold that freezes the slush where it lies; more snow which turns the frozen slush into a well-camouflaged hazard for everything that moves.
These themes recur in an endless variety of combinations. Sometimes, after delivering a particularly brutal flurry of meteorological punches, nature consoles us with a world that seems clean and new and inviting. For days the sun moves through a cloudless sky over soft mounds of new snow. These are days for cross-country skiing - skiing to a point of fatigue that, in my opinion, is the second most pleasant fatigue in human experience. Other, more bizarre weather sequences can also yield unexpected dividends, as reflected in this entry from the journal I had started to keep (I start keeping a journal about once a year - the spell lasts for about two weeks, on average.
"January 3, 1993 - Spent most of the week skating on the river. This is possible only once or twice, if at all, each winter. We need a spell in which days of rain alternate with days of sub-zero temperatures. By Friday, the sky had cleared and the sun was strong, despite the extreme cold. The reeds, rushes and bushes that edge the river, and the tall bare maples that rise behind them, were coated with thick layers of shining ice. Along the whole quiet, winding corridor, there were only a handful of colors. Silver river against ivory and blue, and vegetation of gold and copper, laced with crystal. And only two sounds - skates, and the songs of birds."
Still, a lot of the Ottawa winter is "hunkering-down" weather - days when it is pointless to go outside if there is any way of avoiding it.
I needed an indoor project and I had one in mind. Finally, I now had the time to do something I had always wanted to do - to learn something about my family origins. I didn't even know the names of my paternal grandparents. My mother had not had much contact with my father's family after his death. She had a vague notion that her own father had come from somewhere in Ontario, and her mother from England. That was the extent of the family history. I had no reason to think that any of my ancestors were illustrious, but I wanted to know something about them. It seemed very logical and appropriate - I was in the course of reviewing "who and where I'd been" and to find out something about my roots seemed like a natural extension.
It was a good winter project. After six months, I knew who my grandparents were. I knew who my great-grandparents were, and some of the families were traced back even further. I knew where they had lived and how they had earned their livings. My father's ancestors, it turned out, were rooted for generations in Cornwall, England, an excuse for an armchair side-trip into the mysterious Celtic and pre-Celtic lore of Cornwall.
Learning about my ancestors changed my outlook, but I found it difficult to identify the exact nature of the change. The men had been labourers, more rarely farmers and carpenters. The women had borne children and made homes. There were no remarkable public achievements and, even if there had been, how would that have reflected on me in any way? What difference did it make that I knew a long list of names and dates and locations, supplemented by a few scraps of personal history and a few old photographs.
One difference began to occur to me part way through the project. Neither my daughter, Penny, nor my son, Stephen, had children, nor did they seem likely to be having any in the immediate future. I found myself becoming more definite in my hope that they would have some, and sooner rather than later. It's not that the idea of grandchildren had never occurred to me before. I just hadn't thought of it very often or very seriously and, in some vague way, I had considered that it was basically their business, one way or the other. But now I had pieced together something new. I had reached back in time and discovered the shape and parameters of a human stream - a continuity of human investment in the future as well as the passing present. It wasn't just that I wanted to see a little bit of me carried on - there was the whole continuum, previously largely unknown, but now stretching back visibly for two hundred years. It would either flow on - or not.
Every child who is an only child is a little bit like the Last of the Mohicans. This never seemed like much of an issue until I learned who my particular equivalent of the Mohicans were, until I knew their names, some of their faces, and something about their lives. True, no way of life, no unique tribal culture was at stake, but it still seemed to me that, in the vast network of ordinary human history, here was another small, and now identified tributary - not a great one by any standard, but unique in itself, and entitled to its own tiny trace on the map. I was hoping it wouldn't just evaporate.
We know that large segments of humanity, past and present, attach great importance to their ancestry. Ancestors, among such groups, have always been revered, and sometimes even worshipped. I have a distinct, if undocumented, impression that the cultures who believe in the careful remembrance of their ancestry also tend to be ones in which there is also an attitude of reverence for nature. North American native people, close to nature by the very essence of their culture, attached great importance to the respect for ancestry. People in many Oriental cultures, which knowingly cultivate a reverence for nature, do the same. Perhaps the two impulses are somehow linked, deep in the human psyche. Perhaps it's no coincidence that genealogy is said to be the fastest-growing hobby in North America, at the same time as our environmental awareness has been raised, and people are seeking ways to renew their sense of kinship with the natural world.
Certainly a family tree is a microcosm of some of nature's more curious yet universal processes. At the level of the individuals, it is a series of sharp discontinuities - of births and deaths. On a broader level, it is a process of cycles, as each generation gives rise to the next, before it passes away. On a third level, it is one continuous stream - something is carried forward in one unbroken flow from the past toward the future.
I encountered another, even more elusive kind of continuity in the course of my project. Towards the end (or rather, towards the end of the first phase, in which it is possible to make a lot of progress in a relatively short time) I went home to Indian Head for a visit. On one sunny spring prairie afternoon, armed with maps, and with my mother and her sister as navigators, we went in search of a farm - the farm of their Uncle Charles and Erie Etta and Frank, a refuge when they were children, and the locale for many of their happier childhood memories. It had been sixty years since they had last seen it.
Surprisingly, we found the farm without much difficulty. The buildings were abandoned and boarded up, but otherwise, the house and barn stood pretty much the way the sisters remembered them.
Normally, neither my mother nor my aunt can get around without difficulty, even in the best of circumstances. Nevertheless, while I took a few minutes to explain to a neighbor what we were doing on the old property, the two of them wandered off, arm in arm to steady one another over the uneven ground, surveying the places where they'd had so many good times so long ago, recalling details, remarking on what had changed and what hadn't. In due course, I caught up with them, a little concerned for their physical safety. For a while I only listened as they talked. I could not fully recognize the two elderly women that had left me at the car just a few minutes earlier. For them, sixty years of time had looped back on itself. I insist, in fact I swear, that for that brief moment, they were neither old nor frail. In the only sense that mattered, they had become again those two little girls, running free through the hayfields and the trees, when they and the west were young and there were as many tomorrows as leaves on the trees.
After a while, they seemed to just let something go, without any struggle or regret. The present reasserted itself and they slipped easily into debating where to have coffee on the way home.
As for me, well, as I said, I hope my children have children.
******************************************************
--<< >>--
My first love was hockey. As the prairie lay prostrate under the icy weight of winter, the dark was sprinkled with points of light from backyard rinks, and the air crackled with the sound of competing sticks, and skate blades etching the ice.
These were as much a part of winter as the snow and the cold. For us as small boys, the unfolding of the hockey season seemed as full of rhythms and mysteries as the planting, growth and harvesting of the grain. It began around late November, when the daily swing of temperature no longer sent the mercury above freezing. In back yards all over town, fathers surveyed frozen gardens and, like oracles, selected sites for the rinks-to-be, using mystical criteria known only to themselves.
Work began with troops of small boys armed with rakes and hoes, scraping and levelling the worst of the lumps and clods of earth that defiled the chosen spot. In time, the fathers re-emerged from their houses and, trailing long loops of garden hose, applied the first of many floodings. It was marvelous, the sight and sound of clear liquid water, in stark but short-lived defiance of the cold. Days passed. If the weather stayed clear, the site could be flooded once or twice each night. Slowly, the valleys and ravines were filled with patches of ice, flat, smooth and promising. Stubborn peaks of sod were chopped off. Snow was packed into troublesome holes. Eventually, a day arrived when the whole area was recognizably an ice surface, marred by only a few uneven spots and a few lingering islands of protruding earth.
And we put on our skates and played hockey. And played, and played, and played. The hockey only rarely consisted of an actual game with a beginning, a middle and an end. It was the substance of hockey without much of the form, like an abstract painting. It was learning how to skate, and then how to skate and carry the puck at the same time. It was the fluid physics of motion - watching the gliding puck and a moving player converge (or not) at a predestined point in space and time. Goals were scored, but they were not important for their effect on the score. When they were important at all, they were important simply for the moment in time they created - a tableau that lingered awhile in the memory because the whole configuration was somehow "right". It mattered not in the least that we couldn't skate, or shoot or pass very well. Like boys all over Canada, we were all Maple Leafs and Black Hawks, Bruins and Red Wings. We knew we were participating in a deep and timeless ritual. Like the parishioners of some small country church who can feel the invisible link with bright cathedrals in far-off cities, we were sure we were somehow part of what was happening in great crowd-filled arenas in places with magical names like Detroit, Chicago and Montreal.
Lacking television, lacking exposure to any city larger than Regina, we were free to weave our own images of those legendary places. In the imaginations of small boys, they might just as well have been golden spired cities in the clouds. Such constructions seemed almost necessary to provide the proper frame for our heros and their exploits. We would not have been surprised to be told that the cities had been built solely to house and support the teams of the NHL.
And that was a lot of what growing up, in winter, was about. When we were not playing hockey, we were watching it in the local arena, listening to it on the radio, playing miniature versions of it on boards with strange mechanical contraptions underneath, making scrapbooks from newspaper photos, or collecting and trading gum cards. It wasn't religion, but it was somehow close.
--<< >>--
As much as I loved hockey, my career in organized hockey was short and undistinguished. The reason points, in part, to a problem that would plague me until I had left high school. I was always annoyingly small for my age and this affliction had its most devastating effect (at least until the discovery of girls) in the world of organized, little league sport. I loved, and had a good "feel" for every sport but was never talented enough to make up for my size.
In hockey, for example, I quickly donned what have always been called "the tools of ignorance" - I opted to play goal. At least for awhile, size mattered less in goal. There was a certain logic to it as well. The goaltender for the local senior team, the Chiefs, was my Uncle Stan - like all members of the Chiefs, Uncle Stan was a local hero. He was known by everyone as "Wifty". The meaning of this name was always unknown to me, but it evoked "Nifty" in my mind and I took it to be complimentary. "Wifty" stood out among goaltenders in that he invariably played with a kind of trucker's cap perched on his head, with the peak tilted up. The cap never left his head except in the most heated action around the net. In any event, whenever one of Uncle Stan's sticks would become cracked, but not too badly, he would turn it over to me. It must have given me some misguided sense of destiny.
Actually, I was not too bad in nets until about the time that others my age became capable, not only of shooting hard, but actually raising the puck. Equipment was primitive, masks were years in the future, and this development on the part of my peers had an increasingly unsettling effect on me. Given time, my own development might have enabled me to prevail. However, Mutt Boulding intervened. At the age of 12, Mutt Boulding was roughly the size of a buffalo and he was just as strong and out of control. And he was not on my team. If Mutt got away a good shot (and not many of my teammates were inclined to interfere with him when he had his mind set on something) and if I couldn't get out of the way, it connected with approximately the force of a flying piano. My interest in playing goal rapidly waned.
Then, there was what I tend to think of as the "The Year Baseball Came to Indian Head". Senior baseball was popular in the west. Centers like Regina, Saskatoon, and Edmonton had teams that drew good crowds. A good many well-known athletes kept in shape during the summer by playing on these teams. Regina boasted several pro football players, and Gordie Howe played for the Saskatoon entry. Unfortunately, all of this was beyond Indian Head's reach, and baseball was restricted to a hap-hazard, pick-up affair. But that was before the year that baseball came to Indian Head. In that year, when I was probably about ten, one of the town's prominent businessmen organized his colleagues and, with help from the town, imported an entire baseball team, lock, stock and barrel, from Jacksonville, Florida. They became, for the summer, the Indian Head Rockets. They went head to head with the teams from cities fifty times the size of the town, and they won more than their share of games, becoming local heros in the process. (Every player on the team was black, in a town where most people had probably never laid eyes on a black person before. This had quite an impact on ethnicity in Indian Head).
In any event, baseball was on everyone's mind and, quite naturally, a decision was made to organize some proper, little-league baseball, complete with uniforms, umpires, and a schedule. Here was my chance - size would surely be irrelevant in baseball! Unfortunately, history repeated itself. One of the teams had a pitcher who was more than six feet tall before the age of puberty. His pitch was fearsome. He was absurdly thin, but this only seemed to give his wind-up a kind of whip-like motion that imparted ferocious velocity to the ball. He pitched for the Imperials. We must have played twenty scheduled games that summer and I am convinced to this day that at least seventeen of them were against the Imperials.
I was not a strong hitter under the best of circumstances but, when playing the Imperials, I found that hitting was not even an issue for me. The issue was getting through each at-bat without having my head split open like an over-ripe pea. I could barely see the ball, let alone hit it. And I quickly concluded that the whole business of drawing back the bat and taking a credible swing was too complicated. It was a distraction, at a moment when I knew that I needed to have every nerve fibre in my brain focussed completely on self-preservation. In desperation, I became a strong and vocal advocate of the bunt. It was a defensive measure. I could hold the bat out over the plate and still be ready to duck in a split second. Yet it still looked (I hoped) as though I was standing right in there and trying to do something useful. This strategy got me through the summer, although it must have quickly become transparent to the other players, once it became obvious that I would attempt a bunt every time I came to the plate.
There was one saving grace. It stood to reason, with the ball moving at such incredible speed, that if the damn thing ever happened to hit the bat, there was a good chance that the sheer rebound would carry it back out past the infield, and I did get a couple of memorable hits against the Imperials that way.
