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Sunday, January 17, 2010

On the other side of the fence…

Two boys, two families, two diverging roads. Who would ever think I would thank my Mother for all those rules? Need a gift for the kid who has everything? Give the gift of love. Give them boundaries.


The voice on the phone was hauntingly familiar but I couldn’t quite place it. “Know who this is?” the voice said coyly. My mind was racing. A pause that was way too long to be comfortable passed after I had said “NO, I am sorry, I don’t.” “It’s Donald. Don O’Connor.” You could have knocked me over with a breath. This was a blast from the distant past. Don had disappeared from my life sometime in high school. He slipped away almost unnoticed and yet I had always wondered what had become of him. Now here he was, big as life on the other end of the line. But where? And why was he calling me now, after all these years?
Don and I had been close, once. We did boy stuff. We lit surreptitious firecrackers; we fished suckers in the swamp behind the school with sharpened sticks. We threw snowballs and raised harmless mischief as boys are wont to do. The sixties were a great time to grow up. Yet we came from very different homes. It was that difference that would ultimately drive a wedge between us. In the woods behind the school we were equals. We were both free; we roamed as pirates and hunters. We made believe that we were cowboys and Indians, we re-fought the battle of Normandy, we stormed the beaches and we took Pork Chop hill, just like our heroes on the big screen. Then we went home…
“Of course I remember you Don. How the heck are you?” my mind was still racing. “Well I guess that’s why I am calling. I messed up Greg, I really messed up my life.” his voice was taught and faltering. I knew the words were hard to come by so I left pauses for him to continue. “I am going through counseling and part of my therapy is to call people from my past and talk to them about what kind of person I was... Is it O.K.?” a lump swelled in my throat and now it was my turn to have a hard time speaking. “Of course it is! How can I help?” There was a choked sigh on the other end of the line. It is amazing sometimes in how much you can read in a voice. Especially if you know the voice. I knew this voice; even if it had been a quarter century. How could I forget, we had stormed the beaches together?
Going home was what separated Don and I. Two more different households you could scarcely imagine. My Mom was old school. She had been raised in a strict household, a household that knew scarcity. My Grandfather had died when my Mom was not even two. My Grandmother moved in with her sister also a widow and the two women set about raising two families in a world without much for safety nets. But they were both women of faith; they raised the kids in a house filled with love and prayer. Mom and Dad weren’t rich either and when I was young it often seemed to me that other families had more than we did. Their lives seemed better somehow. Other friends including Don had more freedom that I did. In fact in Don’s house it seemed there were no rules at all. He had no fixed bedtime, no fixed mealtimes, his hair was long, and he wore clothes my Mother would never let me wear. He never had to go to Sunday school.
“I always envied you, did you know that?” I truly did not. “Me?” I said incredulously. “Yes, I always thought of your family as the Cleavers from Leave It to Beaver.” The Cleavers? That was certainly a thought that had never occurred to me. “You guys had it all, regular meals, regular bedtimes and a Father that worked and a Mom that stayed at home. You had structure and faith and direction. I had none of that. Because of that I wandered into a life of drinking and drug abuse. I was messed up for a very long time. Only now in middle age am I starting to put my life together.”
I thought back to the time when we had drifted apart. Don was already on his way to a life of dependency. He was drinking in High School. He smoked he did drugs. We had less and less in common and one day he just wasn’t there anymore. He slipped from my radar. I heard rumors of him overdosing. It was a world I couldn’t relate to. He was right I had a very good childhood. When you are in the middle of it; on the inside looking out it didn’t seem so hot. Rules seemed like chains. I saw others doing things I wasn’t allowed to do and I was envious. I hadn’t given it much thought since; but a seed had just been planted. I had just experienced an epiphany that would change my view of my childhood. What had once seemed boring and limiting now seemed stable and enabling.
“I went off the tracks.” Don continued. My life became a train wreck; no a series of train wrecks. One after the other. Booze, drugs and failed relationships. I didn’t like what I became. Do you remember me as being a violent person?” The question stopped me in my tracks. We had a nickname for Don. We called him the Marquis de Sade. He was always doing things to others, hurtful things, physically or otherwise. That was not the Don that I knew and it was one of the things that pulled us apart. I waited longer than most to break the ties, but eventually even I drifted away. I wanted better from life. “I needed to talk to someone from my past. Someone I admired.” Don said. “Admired?” I repeated dumbly. “Yes, I admired your family. You were what I needed.”
I thought of the image of a train wreck. I thought again of the rules my Mother had laid down. They didn’t seem so bad anymore. The rules were the rails that my train ran on. They hadn’t carried me to a train wreck. They had kept me out of the danger that Don had been mired in. He suddenly didn’t seem so free to me anymore.
“I called you because you were easy to find. Your Mom and Dad still live in the same house; so I called your Mom. I hope that’s O.K.?” I was smiling as I thought about what that meant. I had grown up in that house. Don and I had played in that yard. “Of course it is.” I replied. “Are you going to be alright?’ I asked. I was starting to see a glimpse of the little boy that I had been friends with. “Yeah, I think so. I mean it’s day to day; but I’ve got someone special now and I’ve got something to live for.” He said with confidence. “I’m glad, thanks for calling.” This stunned Don. “Thanks, I should be thanking you.” He added. “God works in funny ways. You seldom do anything good that it does not bring some good back to you. Talking to you has shown me just how special my boring little life was. “I said. “I’d take boring any day, Greg. Thanks for being there for me.” “Thank my Mom. If she hadn’t been the person she was you probably never would have even found me.”
Life is about changing perspectives. If the view doesn’t change you are going around in circles. Life is also about rules. Boundaries can be very important to a kid. They can make all the difference in your life. I may have been on rails but I was going somewhere; college, a career and a life that could make a difference to my community. Don would have to endure a pile of pain before he would get his life back on the rails. The next time I got back to that little two story house I am going to take a walk in that yard. Maybe the grass is greener on this side of the fence.

The cone of silence, make mine a double scoop

I was in another place entirely. The book I was reading had me so engrossed I was on another plain. By the magic of the printed page I had been transported from the tiny cramped living room of the run down single wide trailer I shared with my roommate and fellow trainee Dan. It was a Sunday the one day that the Hudson’s Bat trading post in the isolated northern Alberta town was closed. We had only CBC North and Sunday afternoons meant opera music. I was sitting on a black leatherette love seat which was excruciatingly uncomfortable. The matching sofa had been destroyed by a previous trainee who had gone round the bend and burrowed himself into the stuffing with a soup spoon. He had been “sent out” as the saying went. I wish they had let him finish the job first, I hated that love seat. Dan was on the ugly but much more comfortable sofa. The rest of the furniture in the tiny living room consisted of a pressboard coffee table which was a slab of wood with four screw in legs. The matching end tables consisted of two plastic milk crates each shrouded in green cloth pinned with safety pins. Two old lamps topped these, they did not match. The TV sat on four milk crates which no one had bothered to cover.
“How do you do it?” Dan asked. The words exploded into my world like a hand grenade. I fought desperately to keep my concentration, trying not to be sucked back to the present by this verbal vortex, like some sort of wormhole back to the reality of that drab trailer and that drab Sunday. I wanted to stay in my warm dimension like a sleeping child pulling the covers around him as his mother tried to drag him off to school. I left a pregnant pause after the statement. It was a very pregnant pause. It was a pregnancy of elephantine proportions. Eventually Dan delivered the follow up by caesarian section. “How do you go off into the bush by yourself and stay there? All weekend, sometimes three or four days without seeing or talking to another person?” Under the weight of this verbal onslaught, I conceded the field and closed my book, marking my page and tossed it on the coffee table. I wish it was a huge leather bound tome that would have struck the table with a thunderous clap to let Dan know of my displeasure. Alas it was a paperback and made virtually no noise at all.
“I am not alone.” I said sliding my hand down to the head of my golden retriever ruffling his fur. “Seiko goes with me.” “Oh, I suppose he is a stimulating conversationalist?” Dan replied mockingly. “Compared to present company…?” I asked. “Har har!” he replied. Seriously, how do you stand to be alone like that? Don’t you get restless?” he persisted. “We are very different people.” I pointed out. It was true, we were very different. I remember when I picked Dan up at the town’s desolate, wind swept dirt airstrip. No one looks graceful getting out of those tiny single engine planes. You have to put you foot on a tiny step no bigger than a drink coaster and take hold of the wing strut and lower yourself down. Dan was not aided by the way he was dressed. He wore no toque or gloves. He had on a brown sheepskin lined jacket, which was warm enough but he had dress slacks and leather-bottomed dress shoes on. When his feet hit the frozen, packed, icy surface of the busy runway he was slipping like a pig on skates. The oversized blond afro on his head did not add to his image. Hey, it was the eighties. When he regained his balance he extended a bare hand. I took it; he shook hard, for two reasons. First to keep his balance and second for a bit of heat as his hands were red and cold as ice. “I’m Greg!” I yelled over the screaming wind. “Dan!” he yelled back. The pilot shook his head as I took Dan’s bags to the truck. He tucked his head in close and said quietly “He won’t last a week.” He thumbed towards the odd looking young man. “Greenhorns.” I said knowingly. I was a veteran with two full years under my belt.
In spite of first impressions Dan managed to settle into the town without burrowing into sofas. He was different; to be sure, but the locals accepted him because of his inherent good nature. He would never be described as a typical northerner. He was a city kid through and through. He preferred indoor activities to spending time on the land. I spent as much time on the land as a hectic schedule would allow. With my golden retriever at my side I drove and hiked every road, trail and goat path for a hundred miles. Local people would come to me and ask how the roads were for traveling.
“No seriously.” Dan persisted “What’s so great about going off into the bush all by yourself?” “Well; if I had to sum it up I would say peace and quiet!” I said loudly. “Peace and quiet? How can you get more peaceful than around here?” Dan said totally missing the hint. “You have to like your own company. You also have to know how to build a fire, pitch a tent, and do a hundred other things that you don’t know.” I replied my voice dripping with sarcasm. “I could do it!” Dan replied. I looked at him hard; he had surprised me once. But could he do it again? “Maybe.” I said skeptically. I liked Dan a lot. He had grown in my estimation since that first day on the frozen runway. He still had a long way to go; but an agreeable personality makes up for a host of sins.
Fate changes things with haste and I very shortly found myself moving on. Temporary jobs called relief assignments had opened up and I had to go. Dan and I stayed in touch. He was looking after my dog until I found a more permanent home so we needed to. I could; of course, understand his mystification with my love of solitude. It is not for everyone. But there are those who share my enjoyment, even if they may be ascetics, hermits and monks. We share something. Something most of us have lost. I frequently misplace it myself. It is not silence in the true sense of the word. For those who know the land know there is no silence there. The noises and sounds are natural ones. The wind in the leaves, the water over the rocks, the drumming of a partridge, the chatter of a squirrel. There are even much more subtle noises. The thing is that when you storm the bush on a snowmobile or four wheeler; commando style, weekend warrior style, with rowdy friends and boisterous talk there is no way you can hear it. It is the heartbeat of the earth. All this sound. Unless you are still, probably alone; certainly in a state of mind to hear it you cannot appreciate the miracle of it. You must be still enough to hear the beating of your own heart. Not the frantic beating that happens when you are stressed or exerting yourself; but the quiet calm beating of your heart when you are at rest, at peace. When you are propelled into the wilderness by a two stroke motor it would take an hour for your ears to recover enough to even hear it.
But carried into the wilderness by the effort of your own feet; carried on feet that make an effort not to disturb every creature for miles around; thusly immersed into the wild, you may hear the beat of nature’s heart. We are after all creatures; a part of nature not apart from nature. Go there. Settle. Settle on some rock or stump. Become part of the forest. Sit. Be still. In a time; perhaps an hour, perhaps longer nature will resume around you. You will hear pine needles fall to the forest floor. You will hear the wing beats of the birds flitting from tree to tree. You will see the rabbit stare at you in awe as he makes his way along his beaten path. He will stand on hind legs and sniff the air. If you are still he will perceive no threat and move on with no more fuss than if you had been a squirrel or a deer. The longer you stay in the bush the more likely this is to happen. The more naturally you fit in, the more practiced your ear becomes and the less the stink of civilization clings to you. It is a perfect time to relax; to lie in your tent and read; for contemplation and prayer; to cleanse your soul. Nothing eases tension like the sound of running water and I invariably make camp beside a source of it. I had favorite campsites in that country. Not surprisingly they had been used many times before I came there. I had shown Dan some of them on his rare trips with me.
So when my phone rang one Monday morning I was not surprised that it was Dan. “I took a page out of your book and went camping this weekend! “ He said jovially. “A whole weekend!” I replied “I am proud of you!” There was a brief pause “Well not a whole weekend. I went to that campsite overlooking the Little Red River.” Dan said his voice a little less confident now. “Ah, I know it well; I can picture it in my mind’s eye.” I replied a sense of calm rising in me at the thought of it. “That’s a long hike; it must be the better part of fifteen klicks.” I said incredulously. “Yeah; I biked it.” Dan replied. The mind boggles. “Biked it? Man you can hardly walk it, with all those potholes and deadfalls.” I was amazed. “Yeah it was an ordeal, with the pack and the tent and the gear.” Dan added. “I was exhausted.” I didn’t doubt it. “Well I am impressed. How was the weather, did you get bored?” I asked. I had a million questions. “Well, I didn’t really have time to get bored. I lay down for a while then I headed back to town. I guess I am just not cut out for solitude.” He sounded so down I felt I had to do something to lift his spirit; to recapture the mood he had been in when the conversation started. “Tell me; when you were there; when you were resting in the bush; did you hear it? Did you hear the heartbeat of the earth? “I so wanted him to at least experience the feeling of peace that I had known. “Um, well. I had my headphones on the whole time. AC/DC blaring. I couldn’t hear a bomb go off!” As I hung up I shook my head. A bomb going off indeed; I thought. The final shot in the war on solitude; civilization one silence no score.