On the Nature of Friendship

Friends. One wrote about what it meant, one wrote about it between elves and dwarves. 

Here’s the perspective: in August a friend of mine died. Sadly, this was not the first, and the unique nature of this particular friendship—I was close to sixty years this man’s junior—meant that it wasn’t totally unexpected. But a friend had died, and as is the nature of such times, another friend did exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. He sent me a quote from C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loaves on the nature of friendship.

                It was what I needed and that friend knew because that friend knows me.

                Since that day in August, I’ve been struggling hard with the definition of friendship: what it means to me, how I need it, how it affects me. The loss of one friend and the celebration of another is a complex collection of emotions to unbundle.  

                I am blessed with some great friends. Not many, but enough. I can say that although I had friends growing up, I was nearly two decades old before I learned what friendship is in its purest form.

                To define friendship—that special and intimate bond that Lewis defines as strong as but different from the union with a spouse—is to fall unavoidably into cliché. A friend is someone who loves you for who you are, who you can be yourself with. A friend knows you better than you know yourself. A friend loves you in spite of and because of your faults.

                As I have aged, I have learned to appreciate these Hallmark qualities, because I have so few of these friendships, these of the true, pure variety.

                There’s a group of us, all from Southwest Saskatchewan though none of us still resides there, who manage to get together in some form about once per year. One of these sent me the message this August. Around these magnificent fellas I feel a lightness because we truly can and do say anything and it is accepted. Gently mocked, perhaps, but never judged. Better yet, heard. Even if it is disagreed with, each man is respected be the rest of the group. There is a kind of looking—really looking—at someone using both eyes that I love. With true friends, we listen—really listen—with both ears.

                That group is special because of its equality, its open love between several equals. It’s what each individual brings to the group that makes it the greater whole, and that is a beautiful thing.

                There are a few others of these best friendships, many that I see only once in a very long while as well. I’m lucky enough to even have a handful nearby.

                But I’ve noticed that I’ve started to have trouble making that type of friend. I don’t think I’ve changed much, but of course, marriage changes us, and parenthood. In the best marriages—and I’m in the best marriage—some of our friendship needs are fulfilled.

                Though not entirely. Here I have to agree with Lewis: a marriage will never completely provide what a friendship does. Lewis—in his 1950s, Old World academic, overly-Christian sorta way—said that love between men (he was from a time where you never quibbled about pronouns) is a different thing than the love between a man and a woman (he was also from a time where what I’ve been writing here would not have been read with overt homosexual double entendres to the dispassionate or cynical. Well, that may be a lie . . . ). Although I don’t agree with where he was coming from, I agree with where he went. Real friendship fulfils in way that nothing else can. No other relationship compares.

                It was not until I was nearly twenty that I understood this. Until then, I had never had friend tell me he loved me, or that I loved him, or her. I can’t imagine the void I would have now without such love, and I am saddened to know that there are many people whose greatest foundations are nothing but superficial.

                August has, for whatever reason, caused me to question and wonder about who my friends are, or better, why they are friends with me specifically. What special qualities in me and in them have created this unique thing that we live for? Some things are better left existing unexamined, yet some remain the cause for study and celebration.

                This, then, is the nature of true friendship: it causes us to celebrate the life of another and the life of our self, and to further over-joy in what is created by the bond.  

Why I Wear the Poppy

for Robbie

I wear a poppy over my heart because I have always worn a poppy over my heart. And as with anything good, it starts off as unquestioned habit, is reconsidered for its merits, and is reapplied with greater conviction.

                This year more than ever I remember it also as a symbol of many things that matter to me, one a late friendship with a veteran; it’s a symbol of what brought us to be friends, a symbol of a connection we shared.

                “Sacrifice” and “valour” and “heroes.” “For our country” and “liberty.” Words and phrases people use to justify the wearing of the poppy.

                It doesn’t need justification.

                I am a pacifist. War is atrocious. Like greed and hate, it is one of man’s simplest and greatest evils. Impossible to justify.

                There are men and there are souls that once were boys, and did what they felt was right or what they were told to do. They justified it how they could and how they had to.

                They faced the awful in the world and in themselves. They lay their lives and their innocence on a cold iron slab knowing that they were guaranteed the loss of one or the other. No retaining both.

                For those that survived that insanity, they returned to the world and they lived lives. They went on. They justified and they compensated because they had to find a way to be human again. They never forgot and they never let it go because they couldn’t. Who could? To let that go would be to forfeit their humanity.

                Where I live, there’s a man who was amongst the first to hit Juno beach on D-Day. He had signed up, trained, shipped out, and finally attacked with a group of friends from home. He was the only one of that group who returned after the war. For the next sixty years, he established himself as essential to his community. He was involved in everything. He coached, he volunteered, he was a cheerleader and an organizer. Tireless. Just to make his town better. Because he felt an obligation. Because he felt like he was living more lives than his own.

                That is why I wear the poppy.

                It is the symbol of my friend, a man who grew to be the best man in my life, an essential bond, even though it was in his own twilight years. We first bonded when he told me tales of the bloodbath of Ortona. Of depravity and horror and what he had to do to come through it, both alive and as a man. He changed my life, and every Remembrance Day for ten years I called him to tell him I loved him and to hear about the life he had made after he had put his innocence on that slab. Heard of the normal he had made after that brief, altering horror.

                That is why I wear the poppy.

                This year I can’t call him. This year is the first that Remembrance has a double meaning.

                It’s not about death, it’s not about victory, it’s not about intangibles like liberty and way of life. These are the things that those that came after must tell ourselves. In our selfishness to justify why we do it we make it grander, we talk about our way of life saved.

                To me, it’s not about our way of life. It’s about lives: those that were ended, and those that continued, changed.

                That is why I wear the poppy. 

Teaching to the Touch Screens

I came into teaching at a pretty exciting time. The century had just turned, we were comfortably into a full

Who teaches who here?

assimilation of the Internet into daily life, and students were readily using Google and Yahoo to conduct research online. But early Internet nannies weren’t allowing them to view Mars Explorer because the domain name spelled “SEX” in the middle. Still some figuring.

Teachers were seeing that the kids already knew as much or more than they did, and many were resisting all of this “technology”—the term we still use for anything that, y’know, beeps and boops and crashes and freezes and we aren’t quite sure we fully understand and threatens EVERY ASPECT OF DECENT HUMAN EXISTENCE!

                At the time, us fresh-faced educators were being strongly encouraged to embrace these new tools, to learn them because they had awesome potential. The kids were adapting anyway, so may as well stay ahead of the curve. Most of us did. By the late 90s, being tech-savvy was a sure-fire way to get hired in everything from garbage collection to piano tuning.

                Flash forward a bit more than a decade and I’m an educator in the age of smartphones and tablets. High speed this, miniature that. Apps that unlock your car and set the seat warmer to “I just want to have a bottle of wine and cry.” The devices are small and powerful, they stun us with how quickly—daily it feels—the rules change, and there’s no longer a little paperclip to tell you how to do what it looks like you’re doing. Just a cold, greedy, soulless once-bitten apple, and a robot who looks scarily like a psychopathic extra from The Black Hole.

                We the teachers are still being encouraged to embrace, and we try. We are shown methods of bringing every form of device and application into the learning process. Much of this is wonderful and often useful rather than just trendy. Learning and its delivery are changing. I can text my students a reminder of their homework, I can create a website or blog of my lessons, I can chat in online rooms that are dedicated to me communicating with my kids and their parents all day and all night and all week and all year.

                We do it, we do it. We’re such great teachers because we’re teaching on the kids’ terms.

                BUT.

                There are cameras everywhere. In the locker-rooms, in the hallways. Kids are Snapchatting every time I turn my back to refresh my Activeboard. Altercations between staff and students are filmed and posted, out of context and out of control. Two kids can bait a teacher into losing her cool in class and a third can film, edit, and post the ensuing rant to the delight of millions. Zoiks! I didn’t sign up for this. How do we monitor every way we can be viewed and assessed and especially judged?

                Worse, the teachers who are the least savvy of social networks tend to suffer its backlash the most.

                I try to stay current. I Facebook, I Instagram, I blog. I’ve got like three clouds going, two sets of online documents, and a good half-dozen online personas. I don’t Snapchat, I don’t Vine, I don’t tweet. A student told me recently that she was tweeting about my classes—she sort of overblew how much it was all “trending”—and even though she meant it as a compliment to my teaching, I got a little uneasy. When you put it out there, it’s out there, and open to the world.  One of the biggest generational differences is how we view the Internet. I see it as the ocean: huge, sprawling, endlessly flowing. Awesome but potentially dangerous. The kids see it as a glass of water: sure there’s more out there, but I’m only worried about this little bit I have here.  

                We have entered an age where Millennials are now teachers. They are pretty darn good at keeping up with the kids, but they also appear to have the greatest issues with seeing the lines of the public and the personal. That’s the double-edged sword. The person who uses all these advancements in how we can interact with our learners appears to be the most susceptible to having issues removing the public from the private.

                Take Facebook. Let us just for a moment ignore the fact that this website has the most porous security system in the world, subject to retroactive and inane changes at the drop of a hat. Most teachers I know have a Facebook identity. Some of them are friends with students: former, current or both. Perhaps you can see the issues.

                -Make friends with a kid, you are communicating with a minor on a website where that kid will post and say anything, no matter how inappropriate. Even if you’re not being inappropriate, you’re still linked to that.

                -If you have a policy of only adding kids as friends once they’re adults, they are friends with minors still, and you’re connected to those minors via that newly-minted adult.

                -You don’t add any kids or their parents or their family dog as friends, but then a friend of yours takes a photo of you sucking the hose from a keg, tags you, and because you are—forgivably—unaware of the latest change of Facebook’s infamous opt-out security re-do (the one from five minutes ago), everyone with a pair of fingers and a search engine can see that friendship-ending Instagram share.

                Many teachers avoid Facebook, and then are told by tech-loving administration that it’s good to keep up with the kids. Others (guilty) create two Facebook profiles: public and private, but that doesn’t allow you to break the law, nor does it give you complete anonymity. Especially if you have the same friend on both.

                Point: we, your kids’ educators, are trying really hard to keep up with the world Steve Jobs put in fast forward. Our bosses and professional counsellors encourage us to learn about the newest website or networking site or whatever that sounds like it’s been named by a two year old. I’m really keen on it.

                BUT #2. A teacher has to be extremely careful about keeping private and public separate. This is difficult when you are “out there” in so many rapidly-changing ways. It’s worse when you’re being drawn, blinking and scared, from your deep, dark cave in which you have sworn you will remain forever oblivious, forever lost in a time when Christian Slater was a bankable actor.       

                Who we are and what we do are becoming one, and there are few professions where that may have as resounding an effect. 

Five Rules to Help You Keep Your Soul in November

1. Candy is not breakfast. 

Hand-picked for the Senate by the PM

2. If you're growing a moustache but doing nothing for charity, you're a Grade 11 hockey player. Congrats, A-hole.

3. Christmas is in late December. You're not Wal-Mart. Have some class and shaddup about it for at LEAST a month. You're making it impossible for those of us trying to find a reason not to hate it.

4. Of the major holidays/events of October through December, Remembrance Day is the most important. (Then Grey Cup, this year only). Show some respect for the only one of these not whored-over by capitalism, wouldja?

5. Winter is going to happen now. Go outside and enjoy it because it's awesome. 

In Texas drawl, "Saskatchewan" takes two minutes to say . . .

Minute Maid Stadium and the Damn Yankees

The best reason to go to South Texas when your home is starting the dry, windy spiral into fall and then winter is the heat. Sure. But as Dad and I made our transfer in Dallas Fort/Worth International and started looking for a place to eat as we awaited our connecting flight to Houston, what struck me was the humidity.     

                Ah yes, that. I’ve lived in the tropics and beside the ocean, but I’m still reminded about how I can’t really remember it until I feel it again when my skin does a little happy dance.

                Dad and I were flying to Houston today, t

o meet Adam and indulge ourselves in a man weekend entirely dedicated to the excesses that are the celebration of American sports. Two ball games, one football game. Texas. Big, loud, unapologetic.

                It was my Dad’s sixtieth birthday present from us boys, though I’m embarrassed to tell you that we were only making good on it five days before his sixty-first. See, the problem was the NFL season, which takes so damn long to release its schedule. The other problem is very few US cities host an MLB game and an NFL game the same weekend. S’pose that makes sense. We came close to having it figured in Minneapolis, but then I discovered that that little Viking “home game” was actually taking place in Wimbley Stadium.

                So, Houston, Texas, then. No worries. My wife simply told me I was not allowed to discuss politics with the locals under any circumstances. I nearly kept that promise, too.

                The Houston Astros play at the gorgeous downtown Minute Maid Park. They are one of baseball’s truly terrible teams, so we got impressive lower-tier seats for the two games (12 and 21 rows from right field, respectively) for a good price. Would’ve been a great price but they were playing the dastardly New York Yankees, they of the bloated payroll who have fans in every city they go to. Like the Toronto Maple Leafs of baseball only with, like, the odd championship every decade or two.

                Anyway, I love baseball. My brother had made this an NFL trip—and there’s nothing like an NFL game—but I enjoy the relaxed atmosphere of a ballpark. It was my best sport as a kid, so I can sit back in a live setting and watch nine innings. I can do this on a steady stream of ballpark nachos, popcorn, hotdogs, and of course clichéd Texas beer in two-pint cans. Texas. . .

                The second game, Saturday night, was Hispanic Appreciation Night (the football game would do the same on Sunday), so there were many families of Hispanic descent at the game. It was cool to see the power this old sport still has over people.

                Sadly, the Yankees won both games, and the cheers to support them showed that Minute Maid Stadium was about fifty/fifty on its allegiances that night, sort of like McMahon when the Riders are in town. Seriously, though, it took me from apathetic to emphatic anti-Yankee. Not that I’m an Astros fan, mind; I’ll stick to the Jays.

               

                I’m a culture-hunter, but I was on a sports trip with sports nuts. I wouldn’t say we experienced much of Houston aside from its food, sports, and people associated with same. I enjoyed all three. I search my mind for a memory of one Texan who was not ridiculously friendly and helpful and I can’t think of one.

                Near our hotel, though, was a convention floor hosting an immense guns and ammunition show. This in the wake of another mass shooting last week in Washington, at a place where everyone was armed even though the NRA tells us that more guns would keep people safer. Watching a ninety pound mullet-wearing man with a mustache and a rat face and a wild look in his eyes exit the convention centre with a long cardboard box and an expression of righteous indignation reminded me of where I was.

                Oh, that and the Impeach Obama booth outside the Gun Show. Friendly Texans there too.

                “Hey, sir, will you sign our petition to impeach Obama?”

                “I’m Canadian.”

                “So be a good neighbor.”

                “I’d rather impeach our guy.”

                See, just the one time I broke that promise to my wife.

                Sunday was the Houston Texans game at Reliant Stadium, a half hour train ride south of our hotel.

The game was at noon. We got there at nine. Not because of lines, not because of tickets, but because of that most celebrated American football pastime: the tailgate party.

                Lordy, them Texans.

                It’s an institution, and to hear the locals brag over churning cast iron briquette flame, Houston hosts one of the NFL’s finest. How do you get inside a tailgate party? You say hello.

                Soon, you’re being handed beer, a plate with four shades of brown food, and you’re making new friends with anyone and everyone. One of the things the three of us had done to get involved in discussions was wear our Roughriders hats to each of the games, and the locals loved to hear about our own passion for our own team.

                These were fun people celebrating the South’s true religion: football and fried meat.

               

                As for the game (oh, yeah, there’s football today!) after the two baseball games, the intensity of domed Reliant Stadium and its rabid fans was over-stimulation. It was as deafening and as manic as a rock show, and after the Texans started to blow things in the second half, the fans quickly turned on quarterback Matt Shaub. The Seattle Seahawks went to 4-0 with the overtime win and them nice Texans were calling for their pivot’s blood. At least they had the post-game tailgate to drown their sorrows and a Sunday evening in Houston’s sports bars to watch the remaining evening games on TV.

                I climbed the Chase building to the observation deck. I saw the historic part of Houston’s downtown. I was in the tunnels. I walked past where the Symphony Orchestra plays. I did not get much culture in Houston. I got sports, I got my Dad and brother. I got to worship at the true temples of American faith.

They play "Bulls on Parade" on offensive drives in this military-mad town. Anyone even read the lyrics?

Love of Municipal Politics

                 I do believe that municipal is my favorite kind of politics.

                Unlike federal and provincial, it’s easier to view the politicians as human leaders, rather than superstar media creations. In municipal politics, you truly can see your own effect on community involvement. But the best—the best—part about municipal politics is its lack of party affiliation. There are those who seek to change this, but they appear to be the type who vote for the same party in every election at every level, with some vague dedication to textbook ideologies.

                This fall we vote in the big town I live in. We have two choices for mayor—a sign that this past term was met with greater approval after six names for the top job in 2010—and some thirteen going for councilor, four of whom are incumbents.

                Of these councilors I know of only two who won’t get one of my six votes, and it has almost nothing to do with party politics. I just don’t support what they want us to pay attention to, nor do I feel their fiscal and environmental priorities line up with my own. I will admit that, sadly, a third’s affiliation with the Wildrose Party makes me suspicious of his motivations. I won’t say that I’m not voting for him, but he would have to do a lot to convince me to do so.

                Pierre Trudeau said you judge the policies, not the person. I try to follow that as a rule in politics, and as much as I disparage Stephen Harper’s despicable methods and “leadership,” I try to avoid commenting on him as a human. It’s simply his political behavior that’s, y’know, evil.

                This is harder at the municipal level.

                Depending on the size of your town, and your own drive, you can have a lot of interaction with your municipal politicians. At the municipal level, you might talk to your mayor and councilors often; at least you’ll see them at town events, eat burgers they’ve flipped, or read them interviewed in the newspaper. It can be easy to form opinions on their characters, rather than on their qualities as leaders. There are people who, perhaps, are less proactive about judging person rather than policy. It’s common in our partisan-mad world.

                What we see creeping into our newsfeeds lately are descriptors of municipal politicians who stand for Party X. Every so often you see a letter demanding party politics in city hall because then—if I may summarize cynically—people will know who to hate.

                That’s the joy of this forum, though. Truly, you can represent your constituents because you aren’t toeing a line, although I will admit there are those with aspirations on the next level and perhaps they have a little trouble hiding that big ugly C tattoo.

                What I find most enchanting about municipal government is that it’s a small group made up of individuals—this is the key—working together because they have to, even though they would likely sit across from each other in Edmonton or Ottawa. Issues get addressed, work gets done.

                I have found the partisanship in our Legislature and Parliament to be poisonous, possibly in parallel to the near-religious team mentality you see in the States. I am excited for the fall elections because it allows me to act on issues I see directly, by voting for the people whose policies I approve of, who must work with those whose policies I don’t.

                You know, like democracy? 

Miley and the Counter-Revolution

High Culture

There were seven of us sitting around a fire at the lake, late August. Three couples, and one dear friend, recently single. Talking relationships. Two of us joked—but seriously, folks—that our wives were the men in our relationships, that we are the emotional and evolved modern men wanting to talk about our feelings and needing affection. It’s a constant joke-not-joke for many of us, men raised in the “I feel” era, men raised by women who were liberated. Men raised to respect women as our equals, but not on our terms. Vive and all that. We are the sons of a revolution, but is it a failed revolution? Is the cause lost? Have equality and liberty for women and enlightenment for men failed to take?

There is a counter-revolution going on beneath us, in the younger masses. Too many of the men/boys are embracing a mentality more befitting our great-grandfathers towards women, only minus the blind faith and work ethic, instead adding utter narcissism and access to reams of pornography. And as for these liberated women/girls, too many of them seem to feel they must pander to this objectification rather than fight the good fight of their grandmothers against it.

                For a week the entire social media and regular media world has been abuzz with the performatory pornography antics of Miley Cyrus at this year’s MTV Awards. Women’s Lib has worked hard for a half-century to create equality. Yet, here is a female entertainer who intends to show her maturity (her break from Disney, is it?) by debasing herself before the slathering masses, by showing that the only creative re-imagining she and her handlers have of her is as a tramp. It even works to endorse Robin Thicke’s much-debated misogyny, as her grinding and twerking (sigh) up against him are apparently the modern musical endorsement.

“I’d like to show my support for this artist with a good old-fashioned dry hump.”

Lady Gaga chooses to perform in a thong and the defence from many women is “I would too if I had that ass.”

That would show your creativity, would it? Your maturity as an artist, your growth as a performer? Turning yourself into just another chunk of meat to satisfy our sex-mad entertainment industry? Sad.

I’ve written before about the male side of this counter-revolution, of the Robin Thickes, the Kid Rocks, the Chris Browns. Of men who, amidst all this feeling-talk and female empowerment, choose to respond by taking two full backwards steps on the evolutionary road. They slap asses, soup up hot rods, buy guns. And where I live, they’re becoming the norm in the younger generation. Men who are not secure enough to see women as people, because they're so confused by what they're shown conflicting with what they're told.

It’s the fault of too many to isolate with a pointed finger. Men, women, young, old, you, me—we’re all to blame for this culture where an artist feels she must compete with pornography and video games on their own terms. Surely we’re better than this. And, yes, it is a far stretch to refer to Miley Cyrus as an artist, but at twenty she still stands the chance to amount to something greater than another pathetic self-degrading boy-toy. 
In writing this I know that I'm showing that the stunt worked, that the publicists who created that farce where a barely-legal in her underwear lap-danced on a man in a full (if awful) suit. I didn't see the show live, but here I am talking about it. Yep, good on ya. The shock shocked.
Fellas, young fellas, are you that stupid? Have you fallen for it, the characterization of women given by this vaudeville? C'mon boys, look at your mothers and sisters, your grandmothers. If that makes you squirm, then you need to take a good long consideration of what your idea of a woman is. Because if the image above arouses anything but bile in you, you sure as hell better need to ask what you're contributing to our forward progress. 

Work Day in High River

Photo by Kris Moen

On August 1^st, I repented—I paid my penance.

                It was my High River day. In June, I left for Edmonton on the very day the disaster swept into Calgary, the day after it had destroyed High River. Canmore had been the day before, Siksika would be the day after. I recall watching those military vehicles charging south as I drove north and I said to myself, “This is wrong. I should be doing something.” The defining moment for us as Albertans and I was going the wrong way. How many of the kids whose exams I marked that week had lost their house in the time between their writing and my reading?

                Many, I guessed.

                So August 1^st, I tried to make good. Oh sure, my band had raised money on Canada Day, and my family had made donations—money and goods—but I’m a farm boy. I have arms, I have muscles, I have a work ethic. Hell, I’m a teacher and it’s summer. I have time.

                Deliver Good organized the day, and most of the people I worked with on Thursday were employees with Devon Petroleum. But I made a friend before 8am, a fellow Sasky, in this case a fellow named Kris who works for the Roughriders. Love at first sight.

                The bus drive from Calgary to High River was just another bus trip, the vibrancy of excited young people (sure, engineers, but kids to my eyes) all around me. Then suddenly we were reminded of where we were going, when we passed the field with dozens of temporary trailers housing displaced residents. It had been a month and a week, and the worst hit part of town was the east, where they were mostly young families. Now they were confined to a grid life in a block of trailers in a field for who knows how long.

                The bus delivered us to Highwood Golf Course. We were supplied with masks, gloves, safety glasses, and PPE suits. My wife had already provided me four of the good masks—a respiratory therapist is acutely aware of the risks of working around all that mold. It’s not water that went through, but a cool slurry.

                In Strathmore it’s been a wet summer, but still it passes; the only indication of the previous night’s rain was a few stains on the pavement. In High River there are mounds of mud and silt everywhere, dried but in other places still wet. This is a month later. Mud is a way of life here.

                We were briefed and broken into groups. I joined a crew washing and scraping eight inches of silt off a golf green. Sensing some trepidation from a group of volunteers that had come to help people and were now put to work on a summer fancy, Bill, a representative from the irrigation district who showed us how to work fire hoses on the silt, told us that the people of this town needed some symbols that they were moving on. The golf course was one. He likened it to Calgary still rolling Stampede in the wake.

                I accepted this and set to work. I didn’t like it, but I don’t like golf. I resolved to simply do as I was told, not to judge what I worked on. They needed it done, and forty able bodies could do a lot in a morning to wash a symbol.

                Filthy and wiped, we were given a BBQ lunch and then a choice for the afternoon: more golf courses or work some residences. I was in the group of thirty or so that chose the latter.

                We had seen a little of the devastation driving in. We walked past apartments with a high water mark far past the tops of the first floor windows. Dried weed petrified to chain link fences, flotsam, and everywhere the silt.

                The neighborhood they took us to was on the east edge of town, mostly seniors. Yards washed away, sidewalks ruined, foundations damaged.

                One half of the group set to work on a thick silt layer on a corner lot. There was an initial silence as we watched the Haz Mat crew working on the house, likely to prove it condemned. In High River, where everyone is a victim, the Haz Mat house is like the Stage 4 leukemia patient in a cancer ward.

                My own half crew was taken around the block to the yard of an elderly couple who had requested some help with their yard. We removed some damaged brickwork, then tore free some filth-encrusted link fencing that had been felled by the water, dug out the posts. Done, we paused a moment to look at the river that bent just fifty feet from this yard. That little thing, nothing but a trickle flowing lazily through its rock bed, had done this? Had wiped out this town where I had coached basketball, run races, shopped at the UFA?

                We broke into pairs, and began going door to door to offer any help. Kris and I moved some bricks for an old fellow who didn’t “have a damn clue how to start.” The grade of his entire yard had been shifted, he asked us what we thought. He wasn’t angry or evidently hurt. Honestly confused. He told us how the front door had done a surprisingly good job of holding the water back until he and his wife had been forced to evacuate. His power had been restored on the 25^th of July. The flood hit High River on June 19^th.

                Kris and I offered help at about a half dozen other houses. We did what little we could, even if it was just listening. By now, weeks into rebuilding, folks were past shock and numbness. Now they even had a bit of humour. Complete acceptance. Some of those old boys were taking well to having a task, a project. They told us about their evacuation, of coming back to assess the damage. Gutted basements, high water marks, ten foot high piles of garbage on the lawn. But always someone else was worse off.

                “Eighteen of us living on my daughter’s ranch. The well went dry, but we were lucky.”

                Our last task of the day was to rake up a cake of silt and garbage that was the footprint of one of those horrendous garbage piles. Broken drywall, tools, canned food, porcelain, scissors, keys, clothing, and mold. In an hour four of us cleaned one lawn. One.

                That was it, that was our day. We boarded the bus back to the golf course for pizza and beer.

                I felt like my day had been meaningless. What had I done? Cleaned a golf green, moved some bricks, raked a lawn. Lifted some things. Listened.

                As the bus drove through those savaged neighborhoods, as we passed homes that had tarps for garage doors, or had been abandoned altogether, front windows smashed exposing a muddy skeleton of a place that had housed Christmas dinners and family games nights, we passed people as well. Every one of them waved, nodded, gave a thumbs up.

                High River (and Canmore, and Siksika, and Calgary) remains. Its people are finding simple joys. A beer on a clean patio, a golf green. They are surviving the clean-up as they survived the flood. That was what I saw on my way out. Looking at the empty houses, listening to the silence, broken only by bobcats and dump trucks, watching the Haz Mat hearses move about, seeing sheds too heavy to move without a tractor shifted from back to front yards, there was also laughter, stoicism, hope.

                I do not know what I learned that day because I do not understand yet what I saw. I was in the heart of disaster, seeing a broken town, and its people who refused to be the worst story, the worst off. I do not write this to brag. I feel I have done so little, not near enough. And far too late. I write this to show us that there is so much to learn, and so much work to be done.

                High River and Siksika are still desperate for volunteers to aid with the clean-up.

Leaving Home: The Farm and Shaunavon

Shauanavon, Saskatchewan

     It was over a year ago that my dad told us that he was selling the farm. We have all wanted him to retire--his body is showing its fifty years of taxing physical labour--but there was some trepidation and surprise. I had always joked that we would one day pull his corpse from a tractor cab, and was a little stunned at the prospect of my dad being a farmer no more. There has never been a time in known history that someone on his side of the family hasn't farmed.
     Five sections of land, two home farms (one for living and one for working) that have been in my family for 99 years. Depending on who I told over the years, there was anything from mild curiosity to indignant shock over the years in response to hearing that the line ended there: not one of my father's three sons or any of our cousins would take the farm over. Our Norwegian family was flabbergasted that we would let the family farm go. (Those pieces of precious land were the reason my great grandsires had left the Old Country, after all)
     Within a year it was all taken care of, the auction set for July 22, they purchased a gorgeous acreage outside of Medicine Hat ("Where Saskatchewan Farmers Go To Die"), halving the drive required for my family to see them.
     That weekend was the last days of hard labour in 30 degree heat, in dust and dirt and thirst, with your head down and your shoulders hunkered and your hat pulled down low. Those days were spent organizing tools, lining up machinery, fixing wiring. Getting it all just so. Whoring up the farm. The last days of hard farm work were there to end it.
     Serendipitously, that very same weekend was the Centennial of my hometown of Shaunavon. My mother's side has taken to having an informal family reunion (a "Hoo-Ha" in Audette-speak), and this weekend was aptly chosen. Celebrations and emotions.
     I can easily recall the 75th celebrations in 1988. I was just entering Grade 6. It felt like the biggest thing to happen to my life at the time. Back then, I told myself that I would still be here for the big party in 2013 (a number that felt like science fiction then; so did the age of 35, mind), and little did I realize just how significant that celebration would be for me. It was an ending.
     Shaunavon is a wonderful community. A lot of larger centres could benefit from a lesson in its civic pride, in its rare balance of culture with the pervasive religion of hockey (although, yes, the finest building in town is a rink). When Shaunavon has an event it is big, and its Centennial was huge. I was happy to bring my wife and kids to it. Seeing friends from high school, keeping pace with family. Working at the farm.
     Sunday night, when we got back to Alberta, it came to me that that was my last trip home, at least home as I knew it. The farm would be gone soon, and visits to Shaunavon would become quite rare without Mom and Dad living there. It turned out to be a fantastic weekend of celebration but also of farewell.
     In my ten years as an Albertan, I have never not been from Saskatchewan, and that's not ever going to change. It's also always been my goal to find a balance between where I'm from and where I'm at. When we got married, I told my wife that "home" would be wherever she was. But she has always known that whenever I have suggested going "home," I have meant a farm and a small lovely town in southwest Saskatchewan.
     Good-bye, Home.

On the Passing of Mr. Maloney

Recently I learned that Mervin “Ed” Maloney, one of my favorite high school teachers, passed away. He retired when I finished Grade 11, and I hadn’t heard from him in over fifteen years, knowing only that he had left Shauanvon for Mossbank. However, on hearing of his passing, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, because the man was one of the greatest teachers I ever had, first in a line of the very great who I had at SHS. A teacher of twelve years myself, I was moved by it all the more.

                When I think back to what those of us who had him appreciated about him, it’s easy to dwell on the idiosyncrasies first. The smoking, the same outfit for days on end, the rumour of a bottle hidden in the school’s furnace room. But these are all just touches that add to the overall story, make him that much endearing a figure.

Because Ed Maloney was first thing in life a truly great educator.

His last three years of teaching were my 9^th, 10^th and 11^th of school. I’ve been in this job long enough to know that here are some teachers who retire ten years after they should have. Mr. Maloney, though, remained inspirational up until the end. I had him first for English classes, and I remembered days where we were “forced” to read for pleasure, logging the books and pages as the year went by. In the end I came to treasure those accounts of what I’d read when. Through his classes I began a love affair with grammar and philology, two things that are essential in my daily grind as an ESL and Creative Writing teacher. Also, I recall from him the first ever positive yet constructive criticism—written and verbal—on my creative writing, on a short story I had written in Grade 9 as a sequel to “The Sniper.”

In Grades 10 and 11 he taught me History, and ignited in me a lifelong love for the story of humanity. I recall writing an essay on Napoleon’s march to Moscow, and asking Mr. Maloney what a Cossack was. “Okay,” he said, and sat in the desk next to mine to recall every considerable detail he knew about these mounted Russian warriors, for me and me alone while my classmates sat captivated by his storytelling; I felt like I was being given a private lecture.

It was after studying World War II that he brought in a group of veterans to speak to our class about their service. This included my uncle Len Illebrun and Robbie Norton. Mr. Maloney encouraged those of us he knew that were passionate about the subject to ignore our teenage reticence and ask these guests what we could, and at the end of the afternoon Mr. Norton asked me to chat with him again sometime. A friendship began that day that would see Robbie stand as my best man at my wedding in 2006.

All in Mr. Maloney’s class.

Now, there’s no doubt I’m glossing this. I know many of the girls didn’t like him, saying that he favoured football and hockey players (though I was neither by high school), and more than once he punched me quite hard in the arm for a wrong answer. And, anyone who would be a Leafs fan has to have something off. But the man was a great teacher.

When I was in my second or third year of university, he sent me a Canadian History Quiz he’d copied from a magazine, scrawling atop it in that familiar hand the fourteen year old in me still recognized: “Paul, this is so easy!” I completed it and sent it back. At the King’s one night the following summer, he bought me a beer and told me the two answers I’d got wrong and why. Four years he was retired by then, and there were three or four of us at that table that night, still being taught.

I keep a photo of a man named Samuel Crowther in my classroom. He was an iconic teacher here in Strathmore, a dedicated and self-sacrificing educator. I keep the photo to remind me of what I need to strive for. Mervin “Ed” Maloney was another true teacher, igniting a fire in me that was fanned by other greats at SHS such as Penny Selvig, Tim Miller, John Cazakoff, Audrey Carleton, and Mark Benesh. On the other side of my first decade as an educator and a writer, I have seen what a thing it is to be the right person for the right kid at the right time.

His passing has reminded me why I teach. It is my hope to do half the job he did and be content.

What Do You Celebrate on Canada Day After the Flood?

I stole this from a Dave Rutherford tweet, but am pretty sure it's going viral, so that should be okay. 

On 11 September 2001, we were told by those who could remember days of similar impact—Hiroshima, Kennedy’s assassination—that there are days we remember every detail of. Forever after, we tell people where we were when, what we were doing when, how we heard that. We define our life by before that day and after it.

                Forever our days are the pre and the post.

                For many in Canmore and High River, those days will be the days before and the days after Thursday, 20 June 2013. A day later for the people of Calgary and Siksika Nation. Over the course of the weekend, breath was held and then released in Red Deer, Drumheller, Medicine Hat. After the devastation upriver, their fear was understandable.

                June 20 and 21, and the days which followed. The longest days of the year twice over in 2013.

                This is my tenth year in my adopted province. Twice in that ten years Southern Alberta has been ravaged by floods, though 2005 is only a memory now. The Flood of the Century forgotten in less than a decade. I have come to love Alberta, and am proud and delighted to live where I do.

                On this day where we celebrate the nation we live in, if you’re like me you’re feeling, perhaps, a little guilty to be celebrating anything while others toil in in homes that, unlike your own, are not dry or safe or perhaps even standing. How can we celebrate anything, especially something as vague as our national identity when people are shovelling sewage out of their basements rather than looking aloft at fireworks?

                I won’t remind you of the savagery of Mother Nature. I won’t add my voice to the chorus of “This too shall pass.” Instead I will encourage you to celebrate things that are very worthy of it, as an Albertan, as a Canadian, as a human being. I will remind you of the good.

                Of the grinning firefighter carrying the little old lady through knee-deep water.

                Of the volunteers who keep coming, long past the expectation, to work in their neighbors’ devastated homes.

                Of Edmonton military, police, firefighters, rushing down the QE2 to come to the aid of their beleaguered sister city.

                Of the people who opened their homes to complete strangers needing a place to stay.

                Of students and teachers from Strathmore who, a day away from summer break, went to Siksika to help the stricken.

                Of the people who donated clothing, food, or time to those who lost a little or lost it all.

                Of the people who said, over and over, “At least we’re alive. Stuff can be replaced.”

                On this Canada Day I’m proud of us. As we march further into the days that came after, we need to remember this unity, this good. The clean-up and rebuilding will be long and difficult, and possibly more demanding than the initial shock of tragedy.

                We have two lives now, the one before and the one after. What we need to remember is the unity we saw at the point where our days became divided. Where we stood as one and we held a mud-streaked hand out to a brother or a sister.

                I love you today, Southern Alberta, for I have seen us all stand as one. 

Get Passionate, It's Okay. In Fact, It's Better

Hey, just FYI, if you Google "passion," the majority of images depict either porn or Jesus. 

I am a passionate person, at both poles. I come with a healthy Norwegian temper (and its accompanying knack for holding grudges), and, because of North American bloodline mixing, also with French-Canadian Catholic guilt. A product of late-20^th century “I feel” education, I am predisposed to self-analysis and doubt.

So I ask myself when it is okay to be passionate. When is it okay to show intense emotion on display? Arguably, always when you’re showing love, but the rules for public affection tell us there are times where it’s possible to be too passionate. What about happiness? Can you be too happy? Can you have too much joy? The inspirational-poster answer is probably no, but realistically, expressing too much unabashed and extreme elation actually cheapens it. If you celebrate the tenderness of your boiled broccoli with the same fervour as you celebrate a sibling’s nuptials, your sincerity is suspect.

That’s happiness, but what about more awkward passions, like anger? Is it ever okay to lose it? I try to keep that Viking temper of mine bottled publicly and privately, but there have been times where say, Shaw Cable, NHL officials, anything Stephen Harper spins, or a rude idiot at the airport have warranted an outburst. I’m not proud, but it happens. Unlike my ancestors, I have not been responsible for any rage-related fatalities. To date.

                Why do I keep mentioning where this is happening? Because we really don’t handle public emotion of any sort well, do we? Crying, screaming, fighting, kissing, laughing, smiling—all of these can be viewed as awkward if done in public. We judge anyone who allows himself the indulgence of his emotions as immature, irrational, flaky.

                Is there a merit to passion?

                For fear of not being taken seriously, I have endeavoured to reign in my passions in most circumstances. I’ve noticed they put people off. Unfortunately, in my career as an educator, my second career as a writer, and my hobbies such as playing music or sports, passion is not only encouraged, it’s critical. What use is a dispassionate teacher, writer, musician, or athlete? Passion equals success, and it’s hard to turn it off.

                 So, if I’m in favour of being passionate, why reign it in? Because I’m sensitive to offending the delicately introverted, or, to a lesser degree, to being thought an emotional twit. It’s hard, though, when your very nature is to be excited by life, whether positively or negatively. EXCITED! says I.

                I don’t stress over whether people think my passions make me dumb or silly. I know I’m not dumb and I am passionately silly. But I don’t want my happiness or anger to be overbearing, to offend. More importantly, I worry about ho-hum mediocrity.

                Being in control, expressing no emotion is too often defended as an adult approach to life. “I don’t get excited” is the mantra of the smug. I would also argue that it’s also the mantra of wilfully dull.

                I’m not saying that a perfectly-folded paper airplane should illicit the same joy as attending your team’s championship victory, nor that you respond the same way to a paper cut as you would to a car crash. But, dammit, there are proper times to get good and angry or to laugh out loud or to cry for the sake of your own sadness. There are good times to let it out.

                Emotion is a human quality, and most innate human qualities have merits that are far too often unrecognized by humans.

                And that pisses me right off.  

I Don't Want My Kids Watching Star Wars . . . Yet

No, they're not mine--but easily could be.

Parenting is often harder than I was led to believe.

                Me, I struggle. With choices, with doing what my dad did, with doing what my dad didn’t do, with doing what other parents my age do, or with ignoring what they’re doing. It’s a great schmozzle, a plethora of options. At risk: your kids’ adulthood ruined by the choices you made in their childhood. Or, your own un-ending guilt despite having pretty normal kids and despite your own faults as a parent.

                Currently, I’m struggling with a lot of things, but a silly one taking up big chunks of my brain is, of all things, Star Wars. I’m a child of the 80s, and grew up with a fairly decent obsession with George Lucas’s meal ticket. I recall the spring of 1983, when  mother took me to see Return of the Jedi and had to read Jabba the Hutt’s subtitles to me. The eldest of my two sons is the same age, and I’m reluctant to show him those movies of my youth.

                When you consider these parallels—where your kids are in relation to where you were at their age—you get caught in the conundrums I’ve outlined above.

                Returning from a Star Wars-themed birthday party recently, my son showed me a Chewbacca tattoo on his arm. Immersive advertising works, and he could recognize from the style and colour that—like superheroes and Thomas—this is someone he should recognize. It’s only natural that many of his peers have seen the movies: their dads are my age, raised in the same era. You can’t avoid the decisions of parents or permeative marketing that, really, is the fault of the 80s anyway. Our own karma.

                They are, after all, kids’ movies, right?

                Right?

                Do we excuse them as kids’ movies because George Lucas originally employed fairy tale motifs, or because he was such a bad writer that we can’t in good conscious regard them as mature? I’d say the majority of Star Wars fans are middle-aged nostalgics with more money than they know what to do with attempting to buy back their childhood at ten times the original cost. Thank heavens for Calgary Comic Expo!

                It’s not like my kids watch much TV. We don’t have Treehouse, but they watch movies sometimes, like weekend mornings. They watch releases by Disney, Pixar, and their thousands of imitators. I like that these are the movies my kids watch. The films are relatively innocent, and usually have the sorts of messages I can get behind (with the exception of the always-embedded BUY THIS!)

                What’s different about Star Wars? The damn violence. Guns, shooting, explosions, lopping off of limbs. Bobba Fett watching his daddy decapitated. I hate guns, even fantasy lasers, and just because I grew up playing with them doesn’t make them okay now.

                Little boys like—even crave—guns. They have such a knack for imaginatively converting a stick or a rod or a bat into a firearm that one sometimes believes it’s a genetic predisposition. Some parents just accept boys being boys, and despite that I want my kids to grow into their own people and not who I want them to be, I’ll admit that my wife and I fight against gunplay hard. I grew up playing Star Wars and G.I.Joe, and even if I’m kidding myself, I want my kids not to play that way. At least right now.

                I’m aware that it sounds like I’m resisting boys being boys and am over-concerned about what it means in the future. I had a toy AK-47, and today I shun weaponry as piddly as slingshots (Saskatchewan gopher-hunting aside). The excuse that “they’re just as bad as we were” doesn’t hold water for me.

                I also run the risk of appearing like one of those parents I despise: those that hide the realities of the world from their kids, creating ignorant innocents who then get trampled by society when they leave the commune. I am not. I readily expose my kids to reality, encourage them to make the right decisions, without me—as the lingo goes—hovering above them. I do enjoy having small children who are innocent. I see no need in shoving them into the world’s nastiness—that’s different than hiding them from it.

                I like having sensitive boys. It’s my way of resisting this recent wave of New Men I’ve railed against in past posts, those that feel manhood has been robbed of us so we need to fight and spit and “screw chicks” and eat meat and hunt. Apparently, the only way to show you have balls anymore is to scream it from the rooftops, rather than have balls enough to move on and carve a new identity for men. Dudes what can cry and still lower a clean body check, grill a mean T-bone and yet can be soothed by vocal harmonies. It’s an evolved man I’m talking about.

                My wife puts Star Wars in my decision category—with the caveat we discuss it in advance of course. Right now, I’m resistant. I see them as violent films that treat women as weak supporting characters in need of rescue, that state a good blaster can solve anything, that all films should be nothing more than an advancement of merchandising, and that storytelling is nothing more than a series of badly-dialogued fight-scenes strung together by romping chamber music.

                I want my boys to be better than me, and I’m not satisfied with using my own childhood as an excuse for their behaviour. There will be a time for Star Wars (and its superiors like The Avengers and Lord of the Rings) later. Right now, I’ll lay the foundations of good and important storytelling in Brave or The Lorax.

                After they climb a tree. And possibly fall out of it.

This Film is Based on a True Story

You’ve just watched a film, likely one from Hollywood. You may have caught the quick text flying across the

screen—just after or before the opening credits—declaring that this film was “based on” or “inspired by” a true story, or, even more vaguely: “true events.”

                Inspired by true events. How’s that for safe? What story isn’t inspired by true events at some level? And “based on”? “Based” means the directors and producers—I carefully avoid using the term “artists” in this sense—are declaring their right to take as much licence with the truth as they feel is necessary to sell tickets. Every film, if you stretch your thinking far enough, every piece of art at all, is based on true events, or inspired by them. I mean, where else do ideas come from?

                They add and alter to create drama. The question becomes, why can we not simply tell a true story? Why must we inject lies into truth to make it supposedly more interesting? Sin? Sex sells?

                So you watch the film, which follows a pretty basic Hollywood formula. Despite this, because of the little disclaimer at the beginning, you keep telling yourself: true story, true story, true story.

                Then, if you’re like me, once you’ve seen the film, you go look it up. You’re surprised that what you watched was nothing like what really happened. You’re a little hurt. Maybe you even feel cheated. Very little of what you saw was true, yet they used the names of real people, they used actual dates and locations in quick flashes across the screen, so that you would note “this moment was important,” and, depending, draw parallels to other events in history or your own life that were happening at the same time. (Was I the only one thrilled by the Star Wars toys at the end of Argo? Doubt it.)

                So you’re disappointed, feeling conned into believing this great story of sacrifice /success /ingenuity /perseverance /insanity /sex was actual, when really it’s just another fiction.

                When you follow up those inaccuracies, you learn that the director or producer or screenwriter made the changes for the sake of drama. That is, for the sake of fiction. To make the truth more moving, they needed to turn it into a lie.

                This always bothers me. Not because I don’t like fiction—I love it—but when they use real names and events and then dress them up, they try to fool the audience to gain its sympathies. It’s like they don’t trust themselves enough to tell a good made-up story, so they give steroids to a true story, but then hide what they’ve doctored.

                Braveheart, Pearl Harbor, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, Titanic, Munich, Bonnie and Clyde, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Patton—just a cursory glance at the Academy Award nominees list for any given year will reveal that lying about the truth sells very well as art. But when you do a little research, you ask yourself why they didn’t tell the truth in the first place, why it wasn’t good enough.

                One of my favorite films is Finding Forrester. It’s loosely inspired by the life of J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye. Rather than deal with awkward bits of reality, or whore up the truth to make it exciting, the creators took the themes and a handful of applicable facts regarding Salinger’s seclusion and turned them in to a very fine fiction, without using real names, people, or events. If you know Salinger, you know it, but you don’t need to know Salinger to know it. It’s inspired by a true story, but they don’t need to flash you a lie at the beginning. They trust that their art can stand by itself, and it does.

                When I was young, I saw the violent climax to the film Bonnie and Clyde. Clyde gets out of the car to help a stranded motorist he recognizes. He munches an apple and smiles in the bright sunshine. Suddenly, a Thompson-toting posse springs up from some nearby bushes, the old man dives under his truck, and the ambush is sprung. Clyde gets that one, meaningful look back at Bonnie, who is sitting pleasantly in the car with the door open. Then, for what felt like forever when I was ten, the bank-robbing lovers are hammered with machine gun bullets. I recall still the spasms of Bonnie’s body as they fired and fired.

                Violent, horrifying, intense.

                Untrue.

                In reality, the car never stopped. The posse leapt up and opened fire—no one gave the order—and turned the couple into Swiss cheese while they were still driving. Hundreds of rounds were fired, passing through the car panels, the couple, and then the other side.

                Violent, horrifying, intense.

                True.

                I’ve often wondered what that ending would have been like if the true version would have been filmed. Would I have felt cheated because Beatty and Dunaway wouldn’t have been filmed in close up for that last “I love you” look? I don’t think so, but my dependence on art has begun to influence my truth.

                Cliché time: art imitates life. But when life becomes so informed by art that only art can be depicted, where is the life at all?

                Have we become so dependent on drama that we can’t tell a true story? Has capitalism and salesmanship so permeated our thinking that lying isn’t just easy and natural, but expected?

                Perhaps the next great movement in film will be a true cinema verite; the true story as accurately as you can give it without making a documentary. How’s that for a challenge for actors: to make them act like it’s life, not art.