Tag Archives: school

Baptismis Interruptus

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Posted: February 19, 2019 at 9:37 pm

When our daughter was an infant, Carol and I wanted to please our Catholic mothers by arranging our child’s baptism. We made an appointment to see Father Holland at our local parish (the same Catholic church in which 52 year old Pierre Trudeau married 23 year old Margaret Sinclair, but I digress). I figured it’d be a meet ’n’ greet, fill out a couple of forms, choose the baptism date, easy-peasy. Father Holland was a soft-spoken, rotund man in his 60s, with that blank expression many priests have which says they’re trying hard not to judge you, but you know it’s in their job description so they’re doing it anyway. We sat across from Father Holland at a scratched table in the Sunday School hall attached to the church offices. Crude, child-drawn pictures of Jesus with blood running from his brow and hands adorned the walls.

“It’s nice to meet you Carol and Bill. Before we get started, I’d like you to watch this short presentation about baptism.” From a cupboard, Father Holland brought a cassette recorder and an ancient slide projector, the kind with a circular carousel on top. I’d last seen this projector in elementary school, in the late ‘60s. He drew the blinds and pulled a string which unrolled a white screen from the ceiling. 

“Every time you hear a beep on the tape recorder,” said the priest, “click on this little button and the next slide will pop in.” He switch off the lights, started the tape, and shuffled out of the room.

 Father Holland left us alone to watch his baptism slide show entitled something like, “Your Child Won’t Rot in Purgatory.” The story was comically outdated, by all evidence produced in 1940. In every scene, the wife wore a dress, high heels, a frilly apron and yellow rubber gloves…because she was always washing dishes. 

Watching those slides, I was taken back in time to Ascension Catholic Elementary School. Each week in religion class, we were entertained by similar slide shows with uplifting titles such as: 

Resist Temptation

Creation: The Real Story

When Man Walked With Dinosaurs

Suppress Those Feelings

Mary’s Special Friend

Your Duty To The Priesthood (striking fear in alter boys everywhere)

We loved those slide shows in the way movie buff hipsters flock to see Plan 9 From Outer Space, a movie so bad it’s great. However, what we liked most about the slide presentations is that they invariably resulted in chaos. This was because class clown Marcel Thibault could perfectly imitate the tape recorded ‘beep,’ the beep that told Sister Theophane to advance to the next slide. Marcel always sat at the back of the darkened classroom, and it was impossible to distinguish where his beep came from…he could throw his beeps, like a ventriloquist. He made untimely beeps, causing the nun to advance the slides at all the wrong times. The slides became hopelessly unsynchronized with the narrator’s voice. Sister Theophane became frustrated and confused, and general hilarity ensued. This happened every week.

Back to Father Holland, who re-entered the hall once the baptism slide show ended. He held a form secured by a clipboard, and asked for some basic information.

“…and where did you two get married?” asked the priest, pen poised.

“In Huatulco, Mexico,” said Carol.

“In which church?”

“We eloped,” I said. “A Justice of the Peace married us on the balcony of our hotel room.”

“Oh. Oh my,” said father Holland. “That will never do. You’re not married then. Okay, well, the first thing is that I will have to marry you in this church.”

“But we’re already married…”

“And before you two can get married here, you will both have to take the marriage preparation course.” Father Holland folded his hands on the desk. “Which I will teach you.”

“Let me get this straight.” I could feel my heat quickly rising. “I’ve been in a monogamous, loving relationship with my girlfriend, now wife, for 11 years. You, single, never married, and celibate, YOU are going to teach ME how to live in a committed relationship with a woman.” 

“The course is only 6 weeks. I’m confident you’ll pass if you have an open mind.”

I calmed myself, and let father Holland drone on about the marriage course he was going to teach to a couple married already a year, and who dated for 10 years before that (don’t judge me, that’s my mother’s job). I didn’t want to cause a scene, in a church, but then the meeting veered on a bizarre tangent. In the middle of nattering about Catholic education and our obligations to our child, Father Holland pronounced that the Harry Potter series was the work of the devil. He forbade any Catholic child to read the books or watch the movies. Now, I am prepared to listen to differing opinions, and suffer some lonely priest devaluing the relationship I have with my wife, but I’ll be damned if I’ll sit quietly while anyone disparages Harry Potter. There’s only so much a guy can take. Our friendly baptism education session took a dark turn at that point.

Suffice to say, we weren’t remarried, neither of our children are baptized, and except for weddings and funerals, I haven’t darkened a church door since.

Rip Van Winkle

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Posted: September 20, 2018 at 10:01 pm

As the story goes, Rip Van Winkle fell asleep for 20 years and awoke to discover he missed the American Revolution. I felt like Rip last weekend when I visited my alma mater, Western University, in London Ontario, with my buddy Mark. SO much has changed while I slept through the last 40 years. Here are a few of the differences on campus from 1978 to 2018: 

In 1978, I ogled the lithe and nubile cheerleaders at the football games. They wore short, SHORT skirts, and I was glued to their every move, waiting for their skirts to flare up so I could see their underwear. In 2018, it’s almost the same, except they’ve saved me time and effort by just wearing the underwear, without the skirts.

About to enter the washroom at the campus Spoke ’n’ Rim bar (an action I completed about 9,000 times in the ’70s), I read a notice on the door: “Western respects everyone’s right to choose a washroom appropriate for them. Trust the person using this space belongs here.” We didn’t have that in 1978, but I think it’s a good thing.

It’s not polite to look at another dude at an adjacent urinal, but I spied a young man in the Spoke’s washroom, two-thumb texting while he peed (look Ma, no hands). There are a bunch of reasons why that never happened in 1978.

When I was at Western, there was a bar in the basement of the student centre called the Elbow Room. It was a chill oasis of calm where I drank beer in-between classes. Alas, the Elbow Room is no more, but there’s still a bar at the same location. Only it doesn’t sell alcohol and it’s called Wax Bar. Their corporate slogan is, “There’s a Brazilian number of reasons to get waxed.”

My old dorm, Saugeen, was a co-ed, 1200 student, hormone-bursting apartment block of debauchery. From its inception, it was deservedly called the “Zoo,” owing to its collection of uninhibited animals. The residence symbol was a monkey, which I designed as a student and which graced the cover of the Saugeen yearbook. At Saugeen last week, the residence proctor (kind of like the president of the residence) gave me a tour of my old haunt. She brought out the 1978 yearbook to jog my memories, but then balked. “Oh no,” she said. “Does that say ‘Zoo’ on the cover? We can’t say ‘Zoo’ anymore. In fact, we’ve forbidden anyone in this residence to ever say ‘Zoo.’” I assume they were in the middle of a failed attempt of rebranding, trying to convince parents their children’s residence wasn’t wild. The Zoo: “The Nickname That Shall Not Be Named.”

My dorm room in 1978 accommodated two guys, on a floor of 30 young men, bent on mayhem. Saugeen has long since integrated every floor with boys and girls, a calming influence on the drunken idiots. The proctor used her skeleton key to let me into my old room, now decorated with ruffled pillows and darling stuffed animals. The current inhabitants of Room 754 are two gals named Balpreet and Jordynne.  There was no one named Balpreet or Jordynne at Western in 1978, but there probably should have been.

I visited Saugeen’s cafeteria. It’s now a beautiful, distressed-wood-and-planters ashram with organic quinoa salads and an Asian stir fry bar. When I lived in Saugeen, the cafeteria was a cement-block hangar that held pub nights with drugged-out rock bands, always ending with a wet t-shirt contest. The food was boiled until it was grey, or fried until the batter calcified. A mainstay was what we called Mystery Meat.  We dubbed the Swiss Steak “Swiss Mistake.” Once a week they served fried chicken and fries in a little red plastic basket, lined with a red and white checkered paper, called Chicken-in-a-Basket. It was greasy and disgusting, renamed by the students as Chicken-in-a-Casket. Those were the three best entrées.

Near Saugeen’s cafeteria, there was a photocopier where our drunken selves photocopied our bare butts so we could give pictures to girls. Hilarity ensued. For some reason, probably linked to hygiene and the #MeToo movement, the photocopier has been removed.

One thing hasn’t changed since 1978. The Western football team, once again National Champions, won Saturday’s game 77-3.

The Scars of Childhood

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Posted: August 4, 2016 at 3:07 pm

Billy boy2

A thin line of blood and drool connected my mouth to the floor as I sat on the desk in Doctor Redekop’s office. The doctor leaned forward in his chair, his prodigious belly resting on his knees, straining the buttons of his white lab coat. Stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, he said, “It’s not too bad, Billy. You won’t need stitches.”

I tried to block the pain by replaying in my head the circumstances which brought me to Doctor Redekop’s office one winter morning of my tenth year. It was recess, and the schoolyard was a frigid expanse of asphalt. The recent snowfall had melted, collecting in shallow pools. Flash-frozen overnight, these pools became zamboni-quality ice sheets. Children took turns running on asphalt, then leaping to the ice for long, two-footed slides. The end of the slide required a casual hop onto the asphalt, like stepping off of a speeding escalator. An orderly, if crooked line snaked through the schoolyard as each child waited his chance on the longest of the ice sheets.

Running at supersonic speed, I landed my Kodiak winter boots on the ice and careened along the glassy expanse. Without warning, I became victim to slide-us interruptus when an unidentified, snowsuited leg blocked my path (I have always expected Johnny Constantino, but this has never been verified and since Johnny turned out such a likeable adult, I feel it’s not worth investigating 48 years after the fact). Airborne, I didn’t have time to think, “boy, this is going to hurt,” when I splatted face first onto the ice, my teeth slicing through my bottom lip. Crying, covered in blood, I stood and took my crimson mitten from my mouth. No longer held in place, my almost completely severed lip swung free like the head of Nearly Headless Nick. This was the lip Doctor Redekop felt would heal without stitches. I have always been self-conscious of, and carry to this day a large bump and scar on my bottom lip. Something to remember Doctor Redekop by.

Not learning my lesson, I went again to Doctor Redekop when I was 14. Like many teenage boys, I had embarrassing, painful, non-chick-digging acne across my back and shoulders. “Go in your backyard, take off your shirt and get the worst sunburn you can possibly stand,” advised Doctor Redekop with 1968 sensibility. “That’ll dry it up and you’ll be fine.” What followed were a painful couple of days, but my acne took years to clear. I’m still waiting to see what the legacy of Doctor Redekop’s advice will be. You know, like skin cancer.

Ahmed is Punished

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Posted: February 23, 2015 at 9:00 am

 

A story of punishment from Aix-en-Provence:

At 4:30 p.m. I was parked on the sidewalk, as usual. I watched the parents milling around the school gate, kissing cheeks and dragging on cigarettes. I would have left my car and joined them, but I knew from experience that crowd didn’t want to chitchat with anyone they hadn’t known since kindergarden. The bell rang and a few minutes later the wire gate swung open. Madame Aubin stood at the gate, saying goodbye to each child as they passed her, touching most of them affectionately on the arm or shoulder. She looked like she had already dressed for that night’s hot date. With a father’s laser focus, I zeroed in on Sophie’s face among the crowd, as if everyone else was in black and white and she was in Technicolor. She caught my eye and broke into a radiant smile.

Sophie got into the backseat with Devon. Without saying hello Sophie said, “I’ve got a new story for you today, dad. Obviously, it’s about Ahmed.”

Each day after school, Sophie had a story about her classmate Ahmed. He was a troubled, 11-year-old bully, thirsting for attention. The son of Algerian immigrants, he had several strikes against him: he bordered on obesity, caused classroom havoc to divert attention from his dimwittedness, and came from a culture not embraced by mainstream France. With hooded eyes, a thick shock of hair in a demi-Mohawk, shirttails untuckable, Ahmed shuffled around the schoolyard looking for younger children to abuse. He looked like a kid who would intentionally step on a crack to break his mother’s back.

“So we were in class and Titi was bored and looking for some entertainment,” said Sophie. Titi (Timothée) was Ahmed’s undersized toady. I eased the car down Chemin du Four, and by coincidence I could see Ahmed’s mohawk bobbing above the heads of his flunkies walking to the bus stop.

“So Titi whispered, ‘Hey Ahmed, I’m dying. Do something, OK?’ Ahmed got ready by taking big gulps of air, and waited for Madame to pause her lesson.”

I knew what was coming next, as this was not the first time I heard of Ahmed’s prodigious skills. Calculating the time of maximum disruption, he sometimes unleashed a deep and malodorous, Olympian burp to bring the class to hysterics.

“So he let out this enormous burp, but it was really weird because normally Madame would scream at him. But she didn’t this time.”

I knew that the established procedure, from the French teachers’ handbook, was: (1) scream at the child, (2) belittle the child to the maximum extent possible, and (3) banish the child to another classroom. This was a quotidian punishment for Ahmed, upon whom such embarrassment had a diminishing effect.

“Dad, can we stop at Banette?” I made a right turn from the left lane onto Fontenaille and parked the front half of the car on the sidewalk, the back half remaining in the street. I gave Sophie two euros, and the children were soon back in the car with a pain au chocolate and a ficelle.

“Where was I?” Sophie asked. “Oh, yeah, Madame was acting weird. She just looked at Ahmed in a really cold way and everyone was quiet. She didn’t move a muscle on her face and walked slowly to Ahmed’s desk. She got close to him, really close, so her nose was about an inch away from his nose. That was gross because he kind of smells. Then in a quiet voice, kind of whispering, she said, ‘Hey, look, the door’s open.’ Then she paused a bit, and then shouted, ‘GET OUT!!!’ Then Madame chose me to take Ahmed from the room.”

It was Sophie’s job to find another class, explain to the teacher that Ahmed was being punished, and request he be allowed to sit at the back of the classroom, staring at the wall for the day.

“It sounds like you should have taken Ahmed straight to the psychologist,” I said. I wheeled the Peugeot into traffic and headed home. “You know what a psychologist is, don’t you?”

“I think so. But tell me.”

“It’s someone who helps people with their emotional and mental health,” I said.

“Do I need a psychologist?” asked Devon.

“I don’t know. Why do you ask, Dev?”

“Well, you just said Ahmed should go see a psychologist and some of the kids have to see a psychologist during school.”

“That’s okay, maybe they’re having some trouble in class.”

“Yeah, the teachers keep screaming at them,” said Devon.

“Do you know how to say ‘psychologist’ in French?” I asked.

“I forget.”

“It’s pronounced ‘puh-seek-o-log.’ That makes me laugh every time.”

“You’re a ‘puh-seeko,’ ” said Devon.

“Oh, nice one.” I turned onto Repentence to make the long climb on the narrow, curved road, knowing I would lose the inevitable game of chicken with a city bus.

“Anyway,” said Sophie, “can we get back to my story? So I first tried Madame Lamont’s class, which I knew was a mistake when I saw Madame Lamont’s crazy look.

‘Not you again!’ she screamed at Ahmed. ‘You’ve destroyed your own class, and now you expect to join my class again and annoy us too? Don’t you dare come in here!’ All the kids in Madame Lamont’s class jumped from their seats to get a better look at what was happening.”

“We did too,” said Devon. “In our class we could hear her screaming from way down the hall, so everyone got up and tried to look out the door.”

Previous Ahmed stories had taught me that while leaving your seat was usually forbidden, an unwritten school rule allowed every student the equal opportunity to see someone else get in trouble. No one should be deprived a ring side seat. The ‘equality’ portion of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.’

“I had to walk Ahmed back to our class,” said Sophie.

“Were you holding hands?” I asked, passing the “you are now leaving Aix” sign.

“Ewwwww, dad. Stop it. So Madame asked me to try Madame Tremblay. Madame Tremblay knows Ahmed really well. It was like she already had her speech ready. Before I could say anything, Madame Tremblay poked her finger in Ahmed’s chest and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘I see you in the schoolyard walking, so cool with your friends. Right now you have the time to smarten up but when you’re a grownup, you don’t. So if you don’t smarten up now, you’re not going to get married, you’re not going to have kids, and you’re going to end up living on the street. I won’t waste my time on you.’

I told this to Madame and Madame made me go see the substitute teacher, Madame Leclaire, who asked me who this boy was and why did he want to sit in her class.

I said, ‘This is Ahmed, and he is always being punished. He has already been rejected by three other teachers today.’ So of course Madame Leclaire said no and we had to come back to our class and see Madame. Madame did this really big sigh and told me to go see Madame Barizeau. Madame Barizeau had to accept Ahmed because she was the last available teacher. I went back to our classroom really happy.”

“Happy and Ahmed-less,” I said. While Sophie roamed the halls for 30 minutes trying to secure refugee status for Ahmed, her class sat patiently, doing nothing. It was widely accepted that all educational activities would stop while a misbehaving student was re-assigned to another teacher, regardless of the time elapsed; it wouldn’t be fair to the student chaperone, the good kid, to miss out on any instruction. I slowed the car, took a deep breath, and raced up the four switchbacks leading to La Pistache. I wanted to see how fast I could do it this time.