MEMOIR
Friends for life
Sometimes stars just want to rest
In my three months in Fernie school I was the dumbest kid in the class. Ironically, when we moved 150 miles up the Columbia Valley in mid-winter, and I attended Nicholson School, I was deemed the smartest.
My Grade 2 Fernie School teacher, Mrs. Talarico, would have me stay late and finish lessons I could not complete on time.
I recall one lesson.
I was to put words in alphabetical order. On the backboard she had a list of 10 questions. On each line three to five words. We were to put words in each line in alphabetical order.
I didn’t understand.
I put every word on the blackboard in alphabetical order, not realizing there was a simple list to follow, each line of three to five words.
Mrs. Talarico was frustrated, angry, in no mood to explain and I was in a panic, thinking I’d be belted behind the knees with her ruler. A tall girl volunteered to stay behind to help me and let me know what I was doing wrong.
Mrs. Talerico, brittle, stern, impatient, had a face that seemed tense all the time. She was just a head taller than the tallest boy in our Grade 2 class. I watched her beat him with a wooden ruler to the back of his legs, her preferred spot for corporal punishment. I watched his knees bend and his hand jerk toward the punishing ruler, as if to ward off her blows, as she determinedly wacked him on the back of his knees, her face determined, tensed in concentration, as she struck him repeatedly with that ruler, her every blow aimed and delivered with concentrated force and serious determination. He was injured with every blow and she knew it. She determinedly aimed the next one and the next one to the tenderest spot at the back of his knees until she was done and so was he.
After my Fernie school experience it was a surprise for me to discover, on my first day at Nicholson Elementary, people here were friendly.
That first morning students were encouraged to answer roll call with animal sounds. As names were called out for students I didn’t yet know, I heard dog barks, elk bugles, and cat meows.
When my name was called, I obliged by barking.
Our teacher, Mrs. Graham, paused in her calling out the roll to ask me in her New Zealand accent if my bark was a seal. I had no idea seals barked. Not to be contrary, I went along, told her yes.
Later, during recess, a short, over-muscular kid, who had a brother the same size in our class, approached me and told me he knew my animal was a dog, even if Graham had no idea.
“It was a good dog,” he said.
From that moment, Don, his brother Leonard, and I became friends for life.
Don, a year older, had failed Grade One, and so was now in the same grade as his younger brother. Both were already avid outdoorsmen. Both knew how to fish, and could name every type of fish in the nearby Columbia River.
I wrote about the moment of our first meeting years later.
I had just received word Don had died. I reflected on our first meeting again when Leonard passed away a short time later. Ralph, a good friend, had been killed before we completed Grade 10. With the three of them gone, I became the last one left.
November, ’62, Nicholson School,
in Jill Graham’s class full of Grade 2 kids.
That morning we had a strange roll-call rule-
answer with animal sounds- so I did,
a plain dog’s bark, after kids grunted, wailed,
mooed, whistled, and made elk in rut squeal.
I deferred to our teacher when she failed
to distinguish between my dog and a seal.
Outside, later, during our recess break
You and Leonard approached to say hello
to the new kid, out of politeness sake.
“I know that was a dog,” you said, as though
indulgent Jill’s ears couldn’t comprehend.
“It was a good dog,” you said, as a friend.
Don and Len’s father, Marcel, was a sawyer at the small lumber mill below and across the highway from the four-classroom Nicholson School. The mill yard’s tall silo burner, at least 100 feet high, or 120, was brown oxidized metal.
In the evening the towering burner threw sparks up in the dark air through its rounded screen top. The large sparks drifted slowly through the air above the burner, glowing red, yellow, and orange, rising in the dark night sky, then falling back again, like tired stars wanting to return to rest on the earth.
