Dutch Christmas

I was the only one in my nuclear family (parents and siblings) who was born in Canada; my family emigrated from Holland in 1953. I'm pretty sure I know what Dad got for Christmas that year, because almost 9 months to the day later, I was born. My eldest brother Laurens, old enough to be my father, married when I was an infant and his first son was born only a year and a half after I was. He and his wife had four children in total, and we grew up together more like cousins than aunt and nephews/niece. When I was a kid, my parents and Laurens and his wife Lida would alternate hosting the Christmas day family gathering, and they still practised some of the holiday traditions of the Old Country....

The true Dutch tradition is to get and receive presents on Dec.5 (that's when Sinter Klaas leaves gifts for good children in their klompen, and his assistant Zwaarte Piet canes those who were wicked during the year); Dec. 25 is a celebration of the birth of Christ. But, eager to do as Canadians did, my parents quickly adopted the customs of their new homeland, and Dec. 25 became the day for gifts and turkey dinner.

But there were still some stringent rules (Germanic peoples seem to love rules; they cling to them tenaciously like they are life rafts)....

1. NO gift-opening on Christmas Eve.
2. No stockings (When I reached my teen years and started working part time, I started making stockings for everyone that people were allowed to get into on the 24th, but my parents never bought into that custom.)
3. No gettin up at 5 am and greedily tearing gifts open. Uh uh. YOU WAITED.
4. Waited? When my parents had Christmas, I had to wait until the entire family came over, wait until the grownups yakked and slurped coffee ENDLESSLY, wait while my Dad and Laurens would play a chess game that lasted approximately four geological ages. Play? They would sit and stare stonily at the chessboard for hours, each resembling Rodin's statue, "The Thinker". At times I felt tempted to hold my mom's lipstick mirror under their noses to make sure they were still breathin....
5. No shaking of packages under the tree, no touching of packages under the tree, no moving of the gift tags on the packages under the tree so that we could determine their recipients (our parents always positioned the tags strategically so that they were impossible to read), no comin within 10 metres of the packages under the tree.....I'm surprised the grownups didn't surround the tree with that yellow "Do Not Enter" crime scene tape....We kids would agonize, sittin cross-legged around the tree, salivating like a pack of hungry wolf cubs.
6. No whining about when we got to open the gifts or we'd be made to wait even longer as punishment for bein selfish.
7. When the time finally arrived for gift-giving, the procedure had to be done in an orderly and carefully orchestrated manner: Someone would be designated to be Sinter Klaas. S/he would select ONE gift (often bein prompted as to which one by a parent) to be given to ONE family member, who would then meticulously unwrap his/her parcel so that the paper could be recycled for at least three more generations of Christmases. Everyone else would watch the unveiling, the opened gift would be passed around and admired, and then Sinter Klaas would continue the ritual. It took hours. By the time a kid got his/her next present, s/he would have worn out, played out or outgrown the previous one.

There were advantages to this custom, of course. For one, my friends had long tired of their new stuff when I had only just begun to revel in mine. It WAS nice for the gift-givers to enjoy the reactions of the recipients. And there was a respect for the givers, too.

But nowadays, every once in a while, when someone hands me a gift, I rip and tear so furiously that there are shreds of paper and ribbon flyin all over the place. Just cuz I can! (But not if my mom's around....)

Rain, Rain, Go Away

When I was a child I prayed fervently for sunny days. So did every youngster, you are probably thinkin. Uh uh. It was a matter of self-preservation. Rain meant my brother Fred couldn't play soccer - at least not outdoors, and not with a ball....

Six and a half years younger, I was his perennial victim. He was taller than I was, faster, lither, and had longer limbs. Whenever he teased me to the point that I was trembling with rage and tryin to bite and slug and scratch in revenge, he would simply hold me at bay with one long arm and I would thrash at the air fruitlessly to the point of utter exhaustion and frustration.

One of his favourite torments was to pin me to the floor with his knees on my shoulders, and then paint my nose elaborately with coloured felt pens. Sometimes it was an intricate multi-coloured paisley pattern; other times it was a solid red or black clown nose thickly applied in Marksalot. If I moved or struggled, I would succeed only in gettin his artwork all over the rest of my face, as well. The foulest torture he ever subjected me to, and one which left me sputtering with outrage and disgust, was when he sat on my face and passed gas. To this day, I believe that should be grounds for fratricide.

We used to thrill to All-Star Wrestling, an early low-budget, and much milder, precursor to the extreme stuff you see today. I would lie beside my brother, secretly admiring him despite his constant abuse, and imitate the way he was stretched out luxuriously on his tummy on the livingroom carpet, with a toss cushion under his folded arms, ankles crossed. I never learned to run for cover in time whenever a commercial came on.....still mesmerized by the phony violence, I wouldn't notice until it was too late, the sly sidelong leer on his face, the way his teeth seemed to come to points. In a microsecond, he would have me ensnarled in an excrutiating figure-four leg lock, me howlin in pain, him gigglin maniacally in sadistic delight. Occasionally I would escape his clutches and barricade myself in our bathroom, but only temporarily. The doorknob had a push-button lock in its center, with a hole on the outside, ostensibly so parents could rescue children who accidentally locked themselves in. Fred would get one of our mom's knitting needles and growl in his best werewolf voice, "I'm puttin the needle into the doorknob....I'm going to push it in now....I'm comin to get youuuuuu...." I would get an inch-deep dent in my thumb, tryin to defend myself against his forced entry, always to no avail. Ultimately, the struggle would end with me havin acquired more bruises and/or gettin a head wash in the toilet (and probably more facial features than I was born with).

Where were my parents during all this? Grocery shopping, secure in the knowledge that my big brother was babysittin me and all was well. My attempts to seek justice when they came home were unsuccessful - they weren't interested. Be quiet and go play.

It may surprise you that I went to all of Fred's soccer games. My sympathies were with the ball

What's in a Name?

Who among us has not looked up the "origin" or "meaning" of his or her given name? Or consulted an overpriced, eyelet lace adorned book of baby names in anticipation of a newborn? I confess to the former, but not the latter, having (a) never had children, but only pets to name - and I do that by pickin them up, lookin at their faces, and sayin, "You look like a......Sheldon" (That probably wouldn't work with newborn humans, because then you'd have to name them "Larva" or "Purpleandwrinkled" or "Nose"); and (b) the opinion that those name books are silly and pretentious.

Now, when my parents named me, they had no hidden agenda. They weren't naming me for anyone or anything, and they had no plans for me to be drop dead gorgeous (good thing, or they would've been cryin in their soup once I hit puberty). As new emigrants anxious to assimilate, they wanted me to have a "Canadian" name, and that meant Anglo-Saxon. Look it up in a book? Heck no - they could hardly read English at the time, but they could make out the street sign outside our church, and it read "Ellen." (I always thank my lucky stars my church wasn't built one street over on DAGMAR.....) So Ellen it was, and that's all it was: no middle name to complicate things.

When I look up my name, it doesn't even exist, in and of itself. (In fact, all those cutesie pootsie name thingies they sell at Wal-Mart - you know, nameplates for a kid's bedroom door, pencils, toothbrushes, mugs, etc., rarely include my name.) I am directed to "see Helen", like when I look up somethin in the wrong place in the Yellow Pages. So I look up Helen, and there I am told that my sort-of name means "bright", that I am sort of named for the beautiful Greek queen whose seduction by Paris caused the Trojan War, she whose "face launched a thousand ships". My brother Fred said yeah right, my face would be more likely to stop a thousand clocks.

I'm not the only one whose name doesn't suit her. When people name their infants, they do so with optimism - even with good genetics and good nurturing, they can't accurately predict how their offspring will turn out. The scariest lookin guy I ever taught was named Adonis. And I mean scary in every way - appearance and demeanor. Not only did he look like Magilla Gorilla with a spiral perm, but his attendance in the vocational school where I taught was a condition of his parole. After class every day he returned to lock-up, where he was serving time for murder. And I shudder when I think of the dysfunctional teens I have encountered with the misnomers of "Harmony," "Chastity," "Felicity," "Destiny," and yes, even "Justice" - all no doubt conceived under the influence of sitar music and marijuana.

Some names border on cruelty. I met an English teacher whose name is Mark Essay. I'm not kidding. It's like he had to go into this occupation out of obligation. How much better off he would have been, had his name been Rich Surgeon!

I've been told by my colleagues that it's difficult for teachers to name their children. There is always an association between a name and a former student; consequently often teachers have kids with unusual or "homemade" names - the kind the poor kid will have to spend the rest of his or her life explaining or spelling: "Yes, that's 'Einstein': E - I - N...." or "Yes, 'Paper Clip' is my real name; I plan to legally change it to John when I turn 18."

Maybe our given names should be temporarily assigned, until we see how we turn out. Then we could apply for a more appropriate or desirable name, maybe take it before a committee for approval or something:

Name Committee: Next!

Me: Um, hi, my given name is Ellen, but as you can see, I'm no ancient Greek beauty, although I'm kind of adorable, so I'd like to change it to "puppycakes"*, please.

Name Committee: Nope, you look like a Dagmar.

Maybe not......

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* Note of explanation to readers: "Puppycakes" was an endearment I had for my beloved chow chow, and I use it as my screen name in her memory.

The Next Best Thing to Grandparents

I never had grandparents, but I had the long-distance love of aunts and uncles who were my mom's siblings across the ocean in Holland. When I was four, and then again when I was fourteen, my mom and I travelled there, and our main headquarters were at the home of my Uncle Adrian (my mom's brother) and his wife, my Tante Tina. They were an elderly childless couple who doted on me and thought everything I did was brilliant. Gotta love that....

The first time I encountered Uncle Ad, I was less than impressed. Nowadays, any Netherlander under the age of 50 can speak English, but 44 years ago, a 70 year old sure couldn't. My uncle Ad, in preparation for my arrival, studiously learned a couple of English greetings. When my mom first presented me to him, exhausted from travel and sickness (I barfed my way all across the Atlantic on the ocean liner), he bellowed into my face (because everyone knows if you talk REALLY LOUD, people will comprehend you better, even through your heavy accent), "HELLO!!!!!HOW ARE YOUUUUUUUU??????" I nearly had the pediatric equivalent of a stroke, and promptly burst into tears and screams of terror, belying my mother's claims in her letters that I was a happy, personable child.

Didn't take me long to relax and bask in my uncle and aunt's bottomless and unconditional love. They had a warm little home that always smelled of freshly ground coffee, a cuckoo clock that performed every half hour, and a bathroom with a toilet on a platform (felt like the Queen every time I piddled) that had the tank high on the wall and a chain you pulled to flush. As if all that wasn't wonderland enough for a child, Tina had a closet PACKED full of the finest Dutch chocolate (cuz you never know when there might be another seven year occupation and you won't be able to get the stuff at any price), and a back yard with pens of chickens - real chickens! Every morning I rose early with Uncle Ad to scoop corn out of a barrel and feed them, and one day he came home with a peeping cardboard box on the carrier of his bicycle. To my delight, there was a flock of fluffy yellow chicks to add to the menagerie.

I had many experiences during my stay there, and have remarkably remembered them in intricate detail, despite how young I was. The best part, though, was the relationship that followed through years of correspondence with those two wonderful people. I never spoke a word of Dutch in my life, but I grew up hearin a lot of it peppered with English, and, to the best of my ability, I wrote letters in Dutch to Tante Tina and Uncle Ad. They were so full of spelling and grammatical errors that my mom would laugh till she cried, but my dad would say, leave her alone, and fix only the errors he thought made my communication indecipherable. The rest, he said, was charming.

Well, my aunt and uncle thought I was a prodigy, and they treasured my letters and wrote back faithfully. When I saw them again at the awkward age of fourteen, I finally refused to speak my broken Dutch in front of my mom because of her unrelenting hysterics. My disappointed Uncle Ad sent me with a meat order to the local butcher shop and tiptoed behind me, ineptly tryin to hide behind lightposts, just so he could eavesdrop in the door of the store and hear the words spill from my golden tongue. I deliberately doddled back so that he could scurry home ahead of me to breathlessly report my genius to my aunt and mom.

Over the next couple of decades, Uncle Ad and Tante Tina eagerly followed my life history through the precious letters I penned. I never failed to receive a lovely fragrant, foldout birthday card with Dutch paper money pinned to its inside. I sent them a picture I lovingly cross-stitched for them as a 50th anniversary gift and learned later that it occupied an honoured space on their livingroom wall.

When my Uncle Ad developed Alzheimer's, Tina devotedly cared for him until shortly before his death. He had had a brilliant mind, and his decline was devastating. I was sad when he passed away, but inconsolable when Tina joined him a few years later. I am weeping now as I type this. How lucky I was to have their love, and how I miss it, even now, at age 48.

When Ya Gotta Go....

I've always been able to describe the location and cleanliness of the ladies' room in every public place. That's basically because I can never go very long without needin to go to the litter box. This can be a real problem when boating, fishing, travelling in a car or sittin through a lengthy movie like Titanic. It became a serious issue one particular day in elementary school.....

Our teachers were not allowed to leave the building at the end of the school day until they had evacuated each and every one of their students. My teacher must have had a very interesting private life that she was in a hurry to get to, because she would not tolerate us delayin her departure for any reason. She saw to it that we were swiftly bundled, mittened and queued up (according to our heights, noses rigidly aligned with the midpoint of the nape of the kid in front), ready to be marched out when the bell rang.

I ALWAYS had to pee. ("Why didn't you go at recess?" I did; I had to go again; why couldn't she understand this?) My relative height - all boys in grade three came up to my kneecaps, it seemed - placed me near the end of the line, so sometimes, when Mrs. Bellyea rounded the corner, I could duck into the washroom. But she was a cagey lady - one determined to burn rubber leavin the parking lot - and she very often stood sentry, and so I would be forced to make the long trek home with a bursting bladder.

Now, how fast you can move under such circumstances is highly problematic: too fast and you'll have an accident; too slow and you won't make it home in time and still have an accident. I barely made it to my back door. IT WAS LOCKED. Laundry day. That meant all day in the basement for Mom, who insisted staunchly that nuthin cleaned like a wringer washer. You can't hear thieves loadin all your worldly possessions into a truck while you are clumpin around on cement in wooden shoes and sloshin around with a washer and rinse tubs, so you lock the door. Anyway, there I frantically danced and wept, tryin to fish my house key from its string around my neck, where it was deeply buried beneath my undershirt, sweater and snowsuit. I just couldn't hold on any more, and my shame and self-loathing caused me to howl so loudly that Mom, on her way up the basement stairs, feared I had been run over by a bus. When she learned what had happened, she reacted with uncharacteristic calm, adding my urine-soaked clothing to the wash and sitting me in a warm soothing bubble bath. I was comforted....until I heard Dad, home (and always irritable) after a long day of roofing in the freezing cold. He was angrily chippin the yellow ice off our back step landing with a shovel. I'm going to be killed, I thought.

Dad wasn't angry with me at all, but he sacrificed an hour and a half of his precious wages to stay home long enough the next morning to give my teacher a piece of his mind. In his gruff voice, he demanded that, "when a little kid has to take a leak, you let em take a leak!" From that day forward, every time I raised my hand in class to answer a question, I was excused to the bathroom.

Husky

In some of my other stories, I've mentioned the dog our family had when I was a little girl. He was a handsome mongrel of questionable parentage glossy waves of black coat with cedar markings on his muzzle and paws, a big happy, shaggy tail, and a white crest on his chest. Despite his boundless patience and gentleness with humans, he had some idiosyncrasies .

Husky was terrified of water due to a traumatic puppyhood experience. I recall vividly the day he tried to lap some lake water from a dock that was too high above the surface for him. He fell in, and every time he tried to resurface, he'd come up underneath one of the boats tethered to the dock. He was drowning! Finally my brother rescued him by diving in and scoopin up the little shivering mutt. From that day forward, if we so much as flicked our wet toothbrushes at him, he'd head for the hills.

Seems harmless enough, until you couple this quirk with another he had: he LOVED to roll around in cow dung. Didn't matter where we went to fish, picnic, or sunbathe: Husky would run off, find a pasture, and return, caked and reeking. And we would be faced with the task of tryin to wrestle him into the lake to wash off the excrement. It was either that, or my brother Fred and I would have to surrender the back seat to Husky the dog sprawled contentedly, full-length on an old blanket, and us perched on the edge, pluggin our noses until we could muscle him into the big washtub in the back yard when we got home. Either way, it was a formidable task, Husky dog-paddlin for all he was worth, his eyes bulged out in panic, and us frantically scrubbin. We had to wear bathing suits, because we'd get wetter than he would.

Whenever we would launch the rowboat that came with the cottage rental on our annual family summer holiday, Husky would bark hysterically from the shoreline. My mom and brother and I would plead with Dad to please row back and take Husky with us, but whenever we reached the dock, Husky would run away, fearful of the water. Finally, Dad had had enough and said, He can bark until he's hoarse, but I'm not goin back for him again for nuttin! Our hearts broke as Husky clamoured over the rocky terrain, following us as we boated around the cove. Then, to our shock and amazement, he dove into the deep waters from a high cliff, and paddled towards us at a breakneck pace! We wept and hauled him into the rowboat. Never again would he fail to accompany us on boat rides after that; if we so much as walked down a dock or pier, he would leap into every boat tied to it, ready to go fishin, even if it meant lyin for hours in a murky puddle at the bottom of a leaky rowboat.

Now that's loyalty. We figured it was worth all the cow poop.

The "F" Word

I teach senior high English, and I kick off my grade 11 course with a unit on Style. We begin by studying levels of language from the formal expression used in, say, a learned treatise, to the slightly less formal used in a job interview or a business letter, to the relaxed lingo used in everyday conversation with peers, to the nonstandard and substandard which includes shoptalk, jargon, slang, and....you guessed it, obscenities.

Call me subversive, but I see this as an opportunity to teach these teens to govern their salty tongues. They are, after all, fast approaching adulthood, when it is rumoured they should behave, well, like adults should (but, sadly, sometimes don't). Now, I am a goody two-shoes from way back, but the majority of them are not, so I know that flat-out preachin at them won't work. So I take a more pragmatic approach....

It is my routine to put the agenda for the day's lesson/activities on the board. When the kids walk in they are shocked to see the same heading I used for this post (I bet some of you weren't sure what to expect, either). They can't wait to see what their wacky English teacher is up to this time.

I tell them, when I finally get to it, that the "f" word has its place, that it is a very useful word, and that - when you are truly outraged, in pain or beside yourself, that there is supreme satisfaction in the lip-tightening, teeth-clenching, "FFFFFFFFFFF" and the percussive "K!" sound at the end of the word. It's purgative, almost cleansing, and more comfortable and efficient than spending six hours in a sweatlodge. I'm careful to say that I am not advocating the use of the word, but that it is forgivable in extreme situations.....

Let's imagine, I invite them, that you are, for some strange reason, determined to drive a very large spike into a piece of oak. As you steady the nail with one hand, you swing your heavy anvil back with all of your might and bring it down heavily onto your thumb. Now, I figure that no one would hold you accountable if you said the "f" word, because not only does it hurt like the dickens, but you are incensed that you actually did this to yourself! I figure that, when you get to the pearly gates and Saint Peter calls up your life record on his hard drive (I reckon He's computerized by now, don't you?), even He'll send that one to the recycle bin.

But my complaint, I tell my students, is that people waste the word. I've heard it used as a noun, verb, adjective, even punctuation! Now that's wasteful. If you say stuff like, "I f-in went to the f-in store, f", what impact will the word have when you really need it? It's like yellin at your pet all the time - it loses its effectiveness. Economy, I urge them, economy! Save it, hoard it, for when you really need it! (Personally, I'd prefer that the word is permanently sent to a trashbin somewhere, but this seems a compromise they can live with.)

In the controversial book The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, who wants to shield all innocents from possible corruption or exploitation, is distressed to see the "f" word scrawled on the walls of his little sister's elementary school. He erases it, and says he'd like to become a school custodian so he can obliterate all the curse words before the little kids see them. He laments that, of course, it isn't possible to do this for all the world's children. One can only do one's own little part. That's what I'm tryin to do in my classroom, as futile as it may sometimes seem. I don't swear much myself anymore; although, if I bludgeon myself in the thumb with a hammer, you'd forgive me, wouldn't you?

Porridge

Although I came into the world at a whopping 9 lbs, 6 oz., there was a time in my life when I was an underweight infant. I couldn't keep anything down and so I cried incessantly from hunger. No one knew anything back then about lactose intolerance, but it's pretty evident now that it was the cause of my misery and my mom's worry. To this day I cannot tolerate much milk, and if it's boiled I can't even swallow it down. My lifelong inability to keep cooked milk on my stomach was chalked up as melodrama, and as a child I was frequently forced to eat things that made me sick and tearful. Cooked pudding was one; but porridge was the worst.

Porridge. The bane of my existence. Lumpy porridge that had been prepared by Mom in the morning, and left for Dad to reheat for the family dinner while she was at her nightshift cleaning job. My dad was strict, and refused to let me leave the table, and as I listened to him lecture me sternly about starving Africans who would LOVE my porridge (mail it to em, I thought, but didn't dare to suggest aloud), I wept into that congealed mass of wallpaper paste until there was an inch of my salt tears floating on its surface. When, under duress, I would try to force a one molecule-sized morsel of the nasty stuff past my tongue, my gag reflex would go into full operation. That would earn me a trip to the basement stairs with my bowl of the loathed substance.

Now we had a half-basement. It reeked of slime mould and was home to daddy longleg spiders the size of cocker spaniels. The Tower of London had more ambiance. But I had learned that if I avoided the stairs that creaked, I could creep down to the sewer and dispose of my porridge, leavin just enough in the bowl to look credible when I showed it to Dad, wearin my very best sheepish expression. He would hrumph into his newspaper, satisfied that he had won another round in the battle known as child-rearing, and I could wash my bowl and spoon, retreat to my bedroom and softly pour my woes into the sympathetic ears of my dolls and stuffed animals.

Good thing I never had kids. Rather than force-feed them anything, I would've allowed them to subsist on a diet of tootsie rolls and Dr. Pepper, if they'd wanted.....

In Loving Memory of My Elementary School Custodians

As a student of Riverview Elementary School, I distinguished myself in a number of areas. Gifted at memorization, I was always the lead in school plays, a reciter at Remembrance services, and undefeated spelling bee champ. I was also the best known kid on campus to our two benevolent school custodians, who provided first aid care during recess.

As nimble as my mind was, my body was less coordinated, and although I was physically active, I was not gifted in playground athletics. I spent most of my pre-teen years with scabby knees, wearin leotards that had been heavily darned and re-darned by my thrifty mother. Double-Dutch skipping regularly sent me sobbin my way down to the custodians' office with bloody shins. Those two wonderful men, whom we lovingly referred to as Fatty and Skinny (no disrespect intended - that's what we called their adored lookalikes, Laurel and Hardy) were waitin for me with a bottle of mercurochrome (not iodine, cuz it stung), a bandaid, and a sucker. They would cluck sympathetically, call me angel, gently dab the gravel from my knees, and assure me that my mom would NOT yell at me for wreckin my umpteenth pair of leotards. (She WOULD SO.)

One day, on my way down to music class, I lost my footing and tumbled, head first, down the stairwell. My stomach landed on every tread, causing me to empty its contents on the landing. I wept in shock and embarrassment and my classmates gasped in horror. But Fatty and Skinny materialized, like two angels in coveralls, one of them gently whisking me away from the mess to console me, the other discreetly removing all traces of my accident.

I dimly recall that one of these fine gentlemen was named Mr. Smith, but I don't know which one, nor do I remember the other's real name. But they will forever be indelibly cherished in my memory as two benign and nurturing people who truly understood and appreciated and ENJOYED little kids.

Another Rollerskating (Mis)adventure

A few blogs ago, I told how my teeny-bopper girlfriends and I used to go rollerskating every Saturday. Early one frigid winter day, I rolled up my hair and laid out my most eye-catching outfit on my bed, when Mom told me to take the garbage out. There were three smelly bags, and I was determined to make one, and only one trip, to the back lane. When I opened the back door, I saw that the entire city had been sheathed in a treacherous layer of thick ice. I crossly muttered as I fought to stay on my feet and keep the soggy trash from soiling my parka. The only thing that prevented me from slitherin out into the glassy back lane was slammin into the hinged wooden box that housed our two garbage cans. It was so slippery that bending over to put down one of the sacks so I could open the heavy wood lid, would have been enough to land me on my back, so I used my elbow to pry it up. At that precise moment, my left foot slid out behind me, which caused a chain reaction: my body bent forward, which removed my elbow from the hinged lid, which caused me to look up at it fearfully as it crashed heavily down on my brow bone, which caused me to see stars and land unceremoniously on my bottom harder than I ever had at the roller rink.

Now I had three bags worth of refuse spilled all over the ice, with the cold north wind maliciously scatterin it even more. Reeling from the pain in my brow, I scrabbled clumsily on my hands and knees, frequently losing traction (picture Bambi on ice) and striking my chin or landing sprawled on my tummy, gatherin up the stinky food scraps, coffee grounds and other remnants of our daily lives. (Mom’s cooking, never very good, looked even worse now.) Every time I regained my feet, down I would go again. Twenty minutes later, I staggered into the house, parka stained, rollers askew, and sporting a spectacular shiner. Mom thought it was funny; I didn't.

Despite the conditions and my black eye, which I tried unsuccessfully to mask with about three pounds of cover-up, applied like spackle, we still went rollerskating. I finally got so sick and tired of explaining how I had injured my eye, that I, who was rather generously endowed even at that age, took to saucily telling people it had happened when I was jumping rope braless. I took some pleasure in their surprised reactions.

On Why Being A Natural Blonde Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be

Most of my life, people have envied me my natural hair colour. To that I say phooey - colour you can get out of a bottle. I would settle for a little texture, some body, SIDEBURNS, even. I've decided that in my next life, it'll be my hair that's thick, and my body that's thin. Seems only fair.

My hair has always taken a beautiful curl: soft, shiny, child-like. But it lasts about 3 milliseconds, less if it's humid. You wouldn't think that anything that weighs less than a hummingbird's feather, would be subject to the laws of gravity, but my canary-crotch hair must be; for it falls limp almost immediately after curling, no matter how much mousse, gel or hairspray I use to try to cement it in place.

My mother, who when she groggily received the news in the delivery room that she had FINALLY given birth to a daughter, immediately fantasized about weaving ribbons through her little princess' thick, luxurious locks. Not to be. Blonde children are born bald, and they stay that way until they are about two or three, when they finally sprout a few sparse wisps. Ribbons? The closest she could get was to run her tongue between her index and middle fingers and try to coax the thin sprigs on my crown to stand briefly upright, hopefully long enough to snap a photo. It took several years before I finally produced what, in my case, would pass for a head of hair: snowy white, frail duck fluff. Mom decided that a perm would magically transform me into a reasonable facsimile of Shirley Temple. She went to the corner store and purchased a Toni and proceeded to douse my fragile scalp with the pungent toxic sludge that came in various stinky bottles. She left it in extra-long, to ensure the curl would really take hold.

The result was frightening. A white, tight ball of fuzz through which it was impossible to navigate a comb or brush. My head crackled and reeked on my pillow. I endured merciless ridicule from my schoolmates. I was likened to Phyllis Diller. My mom, just as horrified as I, covered badly by sayin it would grow out. Did I mention how slowly my hair grows? The stuff on my head, I mean - everywhere else requires daily harvesting.

The summer of my fourteenth year, I went to Holland with my mom, and she decided a perm was in order to tame my straggly locks. Now, I know firsthand that Dutch people are obsessive about cleanliness, but I had no idea how much chlorine they put in their public swimming pools. Nor did I have any idea of the effect that chlorine would have when it came into contact with the shafts of my chemically saturated hair. My first inkling that my hair had turned avocado was when all the other swimmers pointed at me in unison and began to laugh. Great. So now I had green fuzzy hair. I was a freaking chia pet.

The next time a woman kvetches to me about how unmanageable her thick, luxurious, naturally curly hair is, she is one dead cookie.

Grace Personified ..NOT

There's a reason my parents didn't name me Grace. They must have had a premonition, when I first entered the world (just in time for dinner) at 9 lbs, that I was not destined to be a ballerina or a gymnast. My mom said that, despite my birth weight, I was an easy delivery as she inelegantly put it, she farted once and there I was. I was not a pretty newborn: purple and scrunched up and mostly nose. When the nurse told her she had just given birth to a beautiful baby girl, my mom, stoned out of her gourd on gas, took one look at me and slurred, Beautiful? You call THAT beautiful? That's the ugliest thing I ve ever seen Put it back; it's not done yet!

Despite that ignominious welcome, I thrived as a child. I was a polite, academically earnest and happy-go-lucky little girl. But a sudden growth spurt in my pre-adolescent years made me ungainly and self-conscious. It was also during that phase of my life that I discovered two passions: boys and roller-skating. I'm not talking the sleek rollerblades of today, but those big white boot skates with the clunky wheels. Now, you put a gawky girl who hasn't grown into her body, onto wheels, and you have a Lucy episode .

Undaunted, I curled my hair and rode the bus with my girlfriends every Saturday without fail to the Winnipeg Roller Rink, a large barn-like structure with a wooden floor and racks of rental skates. We quickly learned to get there early and request particular pairs (they were numbered), after sufferin through skates that chafed and pinched and blistered our feet. After many falls and bruises, I learned to skate with competence, even mastering the cross-over and backwards skating. At the center would be the show-offy types in their custom skates and glitzy outfits, the girls in short flirty skirts and the boys in tight flared stretch pants. I envied them, and although I couldn't dream of performing the fancy steps they could, I did learn to twitch my bottom fetchingly as I skated round and round the oval floor.

One day I caught the eye of a show-offy boy, and before I could refuse and make a clacky dash for the girls room, he hauled me out onto the floor for one of the special skates. It was my worst nightmare: There I was, a big-boned girl who could skate comfortably in only one direction, and this clown wanted me to do pirouettes! He clutched both of my wrists and began to twirl me around in a basket spin, me clunking and screaming horribly. Everyone in the roller rink was watching. He wouldn't let go, so I did the only thing I could: I went for the floor.

I suffered finger-pointing and giggling for a couple of Saturdays after that, when mercifully, someone else suffered a more memorable embarrassment: A woman wearin a wig had it pulled off of her head when she was forced by a show-offy boy on each arm, to duck under the arms of the trio ahead of them. I was one of the dozens who skated over top of her tumbling wig. She retreated screaming, with her hands over her bobby-pinned hair (which I might add, looked like a turkey's ass), to the ladies room. I picked up her mangled hairpiece and handed it to her over the wall of the washroom stall where she was sobbing, mortified. I was sympathetic, sure. But more than that I was grateful.

Aquatorture

When I had recovered sufficiently from my 1994 car crash that I could walk again, I sought an exercise program that would be kind to my battered bod. In my community parks and recreation programme was a paragraph describing how in aquasizes (aerobics in a swimming pool), the buoyancy of the water took the stress off the joints. It all sounded benign and perky to me, so I signed up for two sessions a week at two different pools.

As the date of my first class drew near, I realized with dismay that I'd have to wear a bathing suit for this. A water-logged baggy sweatsuit might camouflage my flab, but it would likely drag me down to the bottom of the pool. I'd paid too much for physio to have it all end in a drowning. So I dug grumpily through my swimsuit drawer (I have a lot of them ranging wildly in size due to my yo-yoing weight) until I found one of the larger ones.

The evening of my first Tuesday lesson I put my suit on under my clothes at home. I hate gym and pool change rooms. HATE them. I'm far too bashful to expose my white parts to anyone, let alone strangers who parade around in the all-together, subjecting everyone else to the obvious ravages of time and gravity on their own gelatinous bodies. Ugh.

At the pool, I artfully stripped off my outer clothing while simultaneously swaddling myself in a beach towel the size of a Persian rug - all this while teetering on my thongs to prevent contracting athlete's foot or some other ghastly fungus from the murky puddles on the floor. It takes real skill to slither into the pool without exposing any flesh, while leaving your towel bone-dry at poolside.

Our instructor was Debbie, and her class was as unstrenuous as I had hoped: a little bit of hopping about to the beat of dance music from a boombox, and kicking daintily while clinging to flutterboards. Barely got the tip of my ponytail wet. I came closer to target heart rate tryin to wriggle my damp body into my clothing in the little dressing room afterwards.

Thursday's class was another story. No cute little cheerleading captain for an instructor there, but a stern, buff peroxide Marquessa de Sade with a close-cropped hairdo, who stalked the bridge between the deep and shallow ends barkin out orders like a trainer at boot camp. She introduced herself to the class by bellowing in a foghorn voice, "I'm forty-two and I have five kids, but I don't look like it, do I?" as she pounded her abs of steel with a fist for emphasis. I scanned the faces of the thirty-five obese matrons bobbing in the water around me, and they all had that "deer caught in the headlights" look. We were in for it. I was too proud to allow myself to lag during her gauntlet of torturesizes. Never knew until then, that it was possible to sweat in a swimming pool. I nearly got swept out of the pool by the tsunami created when she made us reverse the direction of our marching circle. I was burpin up chlorine for hours afterwards and could hardly walk for days. Each week the attendance at Thursday's class dwindled, and just for spite, Xena made the workouts more torturous. I missed the last couple of weeks myself due to the horrible cold I caught from the chill of the pool.

Someone suggested aquasizes as an exercise regimen that might be manageable with my arthritis. Yeah. Right.

You Say "Tomato" and I Say Screw It

Reading Brenda's rhapsodic blogs about gardening makes me hot with shame when I reflect upon my own horticultural ineptitude. Oh, I'm a whiz with tropical plants (although I've had to replace all mine with silks, which are the only vegetation my boy cats won't eat), and my flowers are the envy of the neighbourhood, but vegetable gardening is the bane of my existence.

For the first few years of my first marriage, we were apartment dwellers, and, pining for a garden, responded to a newspaper ad offering the use of garden plots on the city's outskirts for a nominal fee. I happily invested in shiny new gardening implements, cutesie gloves and dozens of packets of seeds, and we set out to our little Eden. When we got there, our spirits were a little dampened to discover that our plot was barely discernible from the tangle of weeds and brambles that choked it, and the "soil" was so parched it made the Dust Bowl of the Dirty Thirties look like the Fertile Crescent. Did I forget to mention that this turned out to be the dryest summer on record, with the most consecutive days without rainfall? And that the nearest hand pump was so far away you had to pack a lunch?

Filled with resolve, we shlepped a toboggan and two 5-gallon buckets out there so that we could irrigate. The well was almost dry, so I built some pretty buff biceps tryin to fill those pails all summer. The one crop that flourished was weeds, the seed of which blew in relentlessly from the fallow field next to our garden. In a desire to prevent contaminating my future "harvest" with herbicides, I constantly dug and plucked and tweezed. Finally, we were able to coax some infant plantlings out of the dust. That's when the bugs came. Bugs of all sizes, shapes and colours. Bugs in Biblical numbers. Screw the toxicity - I spent a fortune in pesticides. Bugs under control, next came the blights. Blights that spotted and curled and shrivelled the leaves of my fledgling vegies. By the time the summer was over, our garden was a heap of diseased, toxic sludge. An expensive one. I swore off of vegetable gardening forever.

Until we bought our first house. It had a large back yard and a big plot of black earth, so I thought I'd give it another go. Didn't take me long to discover somethin I hadn't known before: that twelve zucchini plants is wayyyyy too many. Did I know the plants grew that big? That they produce enough gargantuan squash to sink the Queen Mary? That they can swallow up Volkswagens and neighbourhood dogs? I made zucchini casserole, zucchini chocolate cake, fried zucchini, zucchini everything. I wouldn't let the meter reader depart until he accepted a big bag of zucchini. One of the guidance counsellors made the mistake of declaring that she liked zucchini, and finally told me to PLEASE STOP, THANK YOU after I dragged two bags of the stuff down the corridor to her office every couple of days.

But I was revelling in my success, especially when a lush crop of leaf lettuce emerged. Anticipating a nice fresh salad, I soaked a big batch in the kitchen sink, only to find an inch-thick layer of aphids doin a backstroke on the surface. Into the trash it went.

In a conversation with a neighbour, the faint chemical smell of our garden that we had always mused about, was explained to us: Seems the former owners of our house, who had done a lot of decorating and renovating, had used the garden as a dumpsite for all of their paint, turpentine, and brush cleaning effluence. Given all the zucchini we had consumed from that soil, it's a wonder we didn't light up at night and spit nickels.

I don't vegetable garden any more. Last year Curtis made a healthy, flourishing vegie patch that produced an astonishing number of tomatoes. My job was to pick em, can em, make salsa, etc. That I can do. The rest of the time I merely gave our garden a desultory glance over the rim of my margarita glass as I floated leisurely in our giant inflatable pool.

Keep Your Phentex Dry

My mom was always gifted with knitting needles. Growin up, I had a wardrobe of gorgeous sweaters, and my baby dolls won first prize for Best Dressed at the local community centre, thanks to my mom's handiwork. But one of her projects didn't work out so well....

There was a time when I actually had the figure and the confidence to wear a two-piece bathing suit. In one of her women's magazines, Mom spotted a pattern for one that was knitted using Phentex yarn. Phentex was the new Wonder Synthetic of the late sixties and early seventies. She chose an unusual salmon colour of yarn and produced a fetching, lined bikini for me. I sported it proudly at a busy beach, and the colour was flattering against my golden tan.

Some friends approached and offered to take me water skiing, and I eagerly accepted. Thank God in Heaven, I got an impulse to pull on my terry-cloth romper. (It was one of those one-piece short outfits, you know....)

I was a fairly accomplished skiier, considering how seldom I got the opportunity, but the prankster at the wheel of the motorboat was doin his level best to make me fall, making sharp u-turns to create slack in the tow rope and playing "crack the whip" with me. So I took a couple of tumbles. As I sped around the lake, I felt my new bathing suit, now water-logged, getting heavier and heavier. It was sagging badly, bunchin up in the butt and crotch of my terry cover-up. I knew I looked like a baby with a loaded diaper. Before long, both the top and bottom of my suit were hangin out of the legholes of my jumper and flappin behind me, givin me a pretty good butt-spanking.

By the time I stopped skiing and waded ashore, I felt like a Sherpa mountain guide carryin a two hundred pound pack. As embarrassed as I was, I was grateful that I had, indeed, been wearing something over top of my swimsuit or it would've ended up in a soggy pile around my ankles!

Swan Diving

As a young man, my dad was a gymnast and a diver. Those disciplines were well suited to his small, wiry physique (would I had inherited that, instead of my mother's large-boned frame!), and left him with the lifelong ability to do two things very well: humiliate my dates, and fill me with pride and wonder....

I recall watching, red-faced with embarrassment, as Dad challenged a nervous boy waitin at the back entrance to take me to a movie. "Hey kid, can ya do dis?" he'd bellow in his gruff voice. Then he would place two kitchen chairs, one on either side of him, facing away from his body, rest his hands on their backs, and suspend himself in mid-air, forming a perfect "L". "How do ya like dat?" he'd ask, and then insist the boy do it. "Daaaaaaad!" I would protest to no avail. And the poor kid would try, fail, and have to endure my dad's snorts of derision at my date's inadequate abdominals. I felt pained for the boy's humiliation, but more than a little proud of my dad's physical strength. He was, at the time, a man in his sixties.

But it was at one particular beach that I would glow with pride at my dad's artistry on the diving board. I don't recall which of our many beaches it was, but there was a high diving board. I would point to the slight figure of my dad as he climbed up the ladder and say, "That's my daddy - watch this!" When he reached the top he would stand perfectly still with his arms pressed close against his sides, and a look of placid concentration would come over his face. It would strike me how beautiful he looked, his black swim trunks contrasting against his clear pale skin. It was like he had become another person, a black and white photograph of an Olympic athlete, a smooth porcelain figure. Then his lithe body would spring into action, he would catapult towards the diving board's edge, one knee would bend, there'd be that flawless toe-point, he'd launch high into the air, and then be suspended in a graceful arc. He looked like he would fly forever, sweeping above us and the sand and the water in the clear blue sky, a white dove riding the currents of the air. Then his wings would reach their full extension as he cupped his hands over his head to torpedo into the water with hardly a splash, slicing its surface smoothly, being absorbed for only seconds, when he would emerge, a slick, glistening porpoise.

It would be only then, that I would realize that I had been holding my breath from the time he had reached the top of that diving tower. Only then that the sounds of the beach returned to my ears. For those few moments, I had seen and heard nothing else. Nothing else had existed. All of my being had been concentrated on that perfect swan dive.

More Misadventures in Babysittingland

Years ago, when I was younger and really into the indulgent auntie thing, I used to give up a day here and there during my summer holiday to rescue my brother and sister-in-law when, for some reason, the sitter was unavailable to care for my little niece, Kristin. I'd arrive early in the morning before they left for work, armed with a full itinerary of fun activities to keep her amused.

I've always been good with kids, and she was a real cutie. I think she was about four at the time and, of course, had long ago mastered potty training, so I figured the day would be a breeze. WRONG.

We began the day, which was warm and sunny, on the back patio around their in-ground pool. That's when I noticed it: a thin brown river wending its way down the inside of her left leg. She had the runs and didn't realize it. I leapt up from my chaisse lounge and cried, "Kristin! Come here, quick!" She thought we were about to have a merry game of catch-me-if-you-can, and, giggling, zigged and zagged her way over towels, lawn chairs, pool toys in order to escape my clutches. She, shall we say, left her "signature" everywhere.

Minutes later, she was happily splashin in the tub with about half of Toys-R-Us's inventory; and I was hosin down the back yard and doin laundry. I watched her closely afterwards for about an hour as we played with puzzles and colouring books, and she seemed over it; so I dressed her in her bathing suit and drove her over to the local playground, where there was a kiddie pool and lots of play equipment. An affable child, she immediately befriended some other little urchins and they played amiably in the sandbox while I watched her closely for signs of leakage.

Yup, you guessed it, Mount St. Kristin erupted again, down both legs this time. I scooped her up, put her beach towel on the seat of my brand new car, and held her pinned to the back seat with my right hand (no small feat when you're drivin a standard transmission - I think I steered with my chin). She thought it was really cool how "Auntie Ayan" (she couldn't pronounce my name, "Ellen" - it came out sounding sort of like "onion") let her STAND on the seat while she was riding in the car. (Don't look at me like that - I told you my car was new; besides, this was in the days before kiddie car seats.)

Into the tub again. As oblivious as she was to her condition, she continued to have the runs, even while in the bath, and I was reduced to scoopin the "floaties" out with a paper towel-lined colander. (I boiled it later.)

Well, the day continued like this, with more wardrobe changes than a Cher concert. I think Kristin had five baths that day, despite me packin her drawers with half a roll of Bounty. I did so much laundry and scrubbin and washin that day, that I was exhausted and pruney by the time my sister-in-law Diane finally got home. How was I, after my day with her child? she wanted to know. I told her: POOPED OUT.

Hooray for Huggies

When I reached my early teens, I was, like most girls my age, in a big hurry to grow up. I learned too late, how I should have savoured my youth for the few fleeting years that I had it. Too young to seek a job, and too young-looking to fake my age, I had to content myself with volunteerism until I discovered the one treasure trove of income available to me: BABYSITTING. It paid 35 cents an hour - that shot up to 50 towards the end of my career. New Years Eve paid a staggering $5.00. I'd be rich.

I was the youngest, by quite a long shot, in my family. My parents had me late in life, so I grew up with nephews and nieces who were pretty much my age. I had no experience caring for small humans, much less infants. I wasn't even sure I knew how old they were when they opened their eyes....

Well, how hard could it be? I had always been darn good at clothing and grooming my baby dolls. They never complained and always went to bed sweetly whenever I wanted them to. It would be just like that, I reasoned.

The first time I babysat an infant, it was so young it was barely out of its cocoon. It had a bad cold. It was dependent on a soother to sleep, but was forced to breathe out of its mouth, which made it exceedingly unhappy. And noisy. It seemed to constantly ooze from every orifice of its body. I soon realized that I had no idea how to put a cloth diaper on it. There was no instruction manual anywhere amongst the powders and salves on the change table. I looked. Honestly. Diapering was more complicated than origami, and a lot messier. I spent most of my shift on the phone with my mom, and it would've been hard to determine whether I or my feverish little charge was cryin louder. Did I want her to come over and rescue me? NO, I couldn't let my employers discover that they'd hired an incompetent; I might not get the opportunity to sit for them again. Shows you how badly I wanted the money.

I got good reviews from their older child, a toddler who liked the voices I used when readin him stories, so they overlooked the fact that they had come home to a baby swathed in two diapers knotted together clumsily, and actually called me to sit for them again. I did get better at diapering eventually, and said extra prayers for the parents who bought Huggies.

Family Car Trips

Ah, family car trips, I remember them well. Dad at the wheel, my neurotic mom beside him, and my brother Fred and I jammed excitedly into the back seat with our dog Husky and approximately three hundred comic books. Yay, we're goin on a holiday! Well, that euphoric mood would last for about five minutes after we hit the highway, at about the same time my parents would start bickering, my brother and I would start brawlin, the dog would start barkin at the cows, and I would get motion sickness from readin in the car......

Mom was in charge of the road map. Dumb idea, as she could never read them, had no sense of direction, and would invariably navigate Dad sixty miles in the wrong direction. Add that to two kids whose nerves were frayed by nausea and cramped conditions (Husky sprawled luxuriously along the back seat while our hineys were perched on the outer edge of the bench), and the old man would get a little testy. Dad was never renowned for patience, and I recall at least twice when he suddenly lurched the wheel to the right, jammed on the brakes, adding whiplash to our long list of grievances, and bellowed through the flying dust on the highway's shoulder, "Get OUT!" One time it was to leave Fred and me wailin on the roadside as we watched our Plymouth become a small dot on the horizon. (Oh, he came back for us, with something approaching a contract legally binding us to silence and cooperation.) Another time he pulled over, it was to command me to BARF, damnit. You see, my carsickness was a conditioned response, like Pavlov's dogs slobberin at the sound of a dinner bell - I only felt sick when the car was in motion. Every time Dad stopped, so did my ailment. Time after time, Mom would wearily say, after my pleas and incessant gagging, "Okay, out the window," and I would relieve my stomach of its dubious contents (homemade egg salad sandwiches for the trip, cherry koolaid and hard raspberry candies meant, futilely, to placate the Tasmanian devils in the back seat), all over the outside of our car. I hope I don't need to describe what 60 miles an hour in the hot summer sun can do to fossilize kiddie vomit - a car's paint job should be so invulnerable. Lookin back on it, I have to feel sorry for the old guy, havin to stoically scrub and chisel when we finally arrived at our destination and Fred and I bounded happily to the beach with our pails and shovels. No wonder he was a grumpy man.

One Good Fart Story Deserves Another

Sea World. Where you learn the TRUE meaning of endless queues and interminable waiting between marine shows. Not the best place on the planet for me. Patience is NOT a virtue of mine. Ostensibly to amuse you while the throngs seat themselves in the large stadia for the next Orcan spectacular, the stands are infested with mimes. I hate mimes. I hate their stupid white faces and their stupid exaggerated expressions and their stupid craned necks and their stupid "I'm stuck in a box and it's getting smaller" routine. I hate them even more than I hate barbershop quartets.

Anyway....Larry (my first husband) and I were among the hordes in the roped zig-zag lineup to see an indoor show. The heat and humidity were staggering, so we were lookin forward to an air-conditioned venue. The closely packed people were sweaty and pungent and crabby. I was amused by the irritation of a fuming Sherman Helmsley (that's the actor who played George Jefferson on TV, for those of you who are younger than my underwear) lookalike in an orange leather suit (battle jacket and matching flared pants - I'm not makin this up), who was there with his girlfriend and her hyperactive nephew and niece. The kids were about four, adorably clad, bored shitless. Sherman was a little guy with that chicken strut that little guys so frequently affect in an effort to look taller. He kept pacin back and forth, loudly insisting, "Aint MAH kids, aint MAH kids, mumble mutter grumble...." Every time the two tots squabbled or ran between legs or whined, he would get more infuriated. I liked this show wayyyy better than the mimes.

Then it happened. Someone cut one. It was toxic. I felt my hair begin to fall out. Talk about a weapon of mass destruction. In the motionless air it hung and clung. It grew a beard.

This was the last straw for Sherman. His face contorted in utter disgust and he protested, "Aww may-an! Sumbuddi FAHHHHHHTED!"

I nearly peed my pants. Especially when my suspicion was confirmed. The offender was none other than my husband. See what I had to live with?

Life's a Gas

Over the years, I've enjoyed some pretty wonderful relationships with students, some of which have extended for the decade or two since their graduation. One beautiful summer day about 15 years ago, a carload of recent grads visited me at the cottage my ex and I had. We all put on our swimming togs, loaded our two-man Hobie sailboat, and hit the beach.

I have had irritable bowel syndrome for years, and that day I had gas. BAD. My tummy was bloated and grumbly, and I just didn't feel a whole lot like romping. Just wanted to oil up and bake in my beach chair and let the younguns play. One of the boys, a jovial lad and one of my favourites (Mykola), couldn't get enough of our sailboat and he finally tired everyone else out. He wouldn't quit pestering me, and what could I say to his and everyone else's insistence that I go for a sail? Everyone knew I was a good sailor and the conditions were ideal - balmy winds and big yeasty waves. Fine. Okay. I slipped on my little water socks and waded out with him.

In spite of my discomfort, we had fun. Mykola did his best to tip me out of the boat, but I was better than that. He took one huge tumble into the surf, and when he surfaced, he knocked one of his big front teeth on the ship's hull and chipped it (his tooth, not the boat). I was startled and concerned and leapt forward towards him in a crouched position, which put undue stress on my gassy tummy. POOT. OMG. Mykola and I looked at one another in astonishment, his eyes saucers and his mouth a perfect "O". Then he clung to the bobbing sailboat shrieking with hysterical laughter. "Omigosh!" he kept exclaiming. "My English teacher FARTED!" I thought I would drown myself with embarrassment, but I knew my distended belly would keep me afloat for weeks. I made him SWEAR on his Ukrainian mother's soul (Ukrainian boys LOVE their mothers) that he wouldn't tell the others.

When we rejoined the others on the beach, Mykola could not stop laughing, but despite everyone's pleas that he tell them what was so funny, he kept his word. Maybe he has to this day, but I doubt it.

Times have changed. I was never in a situation where I saw any of my teachers in their swimsuits. Nor did I ever hear one of them pass gas. Heck, I was shocked if I saw one grocery shopping. Never occurred to me that they did human things. I thought they just hung from the light fixtures of their classrooms overnight like bats.

Driving Lessons

Step aside, Elliot Ness. I could write a book entitled, The UnTEACHables, and my mom's failed attempts to learn how to drive could be the substance of the opening chapter.

Many was the time my parents would leave the house on a Sunday when the big grocery store a block away was closed, so that my dad could use the empty parking lot to give Mom a driving lesson. There she would grip the steering wheel, white-knuckled, eyes bulging with terror, circumnavigating the lot at a snail's pace while braking frequently for mirages. The lessons typically ended an hour or so later with Mom bursting into the house in hysterical tears and Dad following a few minutes later - after he had parked the car that Mom had abandoned in the middle of the back lane because she was too scared to drive it into the garage, of course. He would be purple with rage and sputtering that that was the LAST time he would try to teach her anything.

Well, of course it wasn't. One day the lesson ended in half the usual time, Mom bustling into the house tight-lipped and nervous, Dad not arriving until about a half hour later. What had happened, my brother and I wanted to know......

There had been another man givin his wife a driving lesson that day on the Loblaws parking lot. In their new Mercedes. His wife, also crawlin around the lot at one metre per geological age, plowed their vehicle straight into one of the cement-based light standards. She didn't brake at all, nor did she remove her foot from the gas pedal. My dad said it was the most fascinating thing he'd ever seen, the way the car's front end bent around that pillar in slow motion, the metal screamin in agony. She stove it in until the motor was so mashed the car just quit. Then she snatched up her purse and ran away, sobbing, leavin the driver door wide open and her husband sittin in the passenger seat, stunned, waggin his head and murmuring over and over again, "I just picked up this car at the dealer's yesterday....."

When Mom saw this she panicked, snatched up HER purse, and scurried home. Dad walked the shaken gentleman over to his own car and drove him to a nearby gas station where he could arrange to have his mutilated vehicle towed for an autopsy.

Some years later, Mom finally graduated from the parking lot to the streets. I made a point to stay indoors. After a short drive down quiet residential streets, they were headed north towards home and Mom knew she had to make the dreaded LEFT TURN to get back to the house. Well, just make the turn whenever you feel you can, Dad said. When Mom still didn't feel the urge when they were about two miles from where Admiral Byrd planted his flag in 1926, Dad finally had to take the wheel so they could make it home before my brother Fred and I were put into nursing homes.

Suffice it to say Mom never got her drivers license. Good thing - I've seen her take out displays of cereal at IGA with her walker.

Galoshes

Little kids back in the stone age when I was a little kid, all wore the same kind of boots in the winter: warmly lined brown galoshes with fold-over, clip-like buckles that clicked when you walked. I guess because their thick treads tracked slush and muck onto the floors, we were instructed by our teachers to remove them outside of the classroom and set them neatly against the hallroom wall. Twenty-some pairs of identical galoshes can make it pretty difficult to identify your own, especially in the mad rush to make the most of your twenty minute outdoor recess, so, in the interest of efficiency (and tidiness, which appealed to the obsessive-compulsiveness I was already exhibiting in grade two), we each carried a wooden clothespeg with our name neatly printed on it, to clip our pair together. Some of us - yours truly included - took great pride in decorating our clothespeg to make it distinctive and stylish.....as stylish as a clothespeg on a pair of homely galoshes can be, that is.

I made the long trek to school every day with a neighbourhood classmate, Diana Hamblin. Yes, I know, all of us geezers always say we had a long way to go to school, but I really really did. We were often sidetracked - sometimes because of deep snow and slippery conditions, sometimes because we found playin on the snowbanks created by the street plows just too tantalizing to resist - and so Diana and I would often arrive during opening exercises. Our tardiness meant that all the choicest spots for galoshes were already taken, and it was a serious breach of etiquette to move someone else's galoshes and take his or her spot.

One day, as attendance was being taken, Diana and I scampered into the building, whispering, and saw that there was really only one desirable parking space left for our galoshes. The only other spaces were behind the door to the nurse's office. Well, THAT wouldn't do, because any time the door opened, it would knock your galoshes awry! (Funny the things grade two kids value.) Bein the more nimble of the two of us, I dove for the good spot and placed my galoshes neatly into it. Diana didn't like that, and she did the unthinkable: she moved my galoshes to a spot behind the nurse's door and placed her own pair in the spot I had rightfully claimed. As "Oh Canada" began to play over the p.a. system, I stormed over and switched the position of our two pairs of galoshes. Diana grabbed my pair and hurled them across the hallway and moved hers into my spot again. I returned the favour. Then Diana KICKED my pair and - say it isn't so! - BROKE MY CLOTHESPEG. This was war!

I have never been a violent person, but a jury of my peers would have exonerated me for what I did next, as an act of justifiable vigilante rage for Diana's heinous crime of clothespegicide: I popped her one, right on her sensitive nose. I say sensitive, because Diana Hamblin would get nosebleeds on the seesaw, nosebleeds on the swing, nosebleeds on the merry-go-round, nosebleeds on the top of an anthill. She was always talkin about her adenoids and wearin packing up her shnoz and haulin bloody strings out of her nostrils - YUK.

Anyway, Diana kicked up a fuss as if I had cold-cocked her with the business end of a shovel. The innocent piping voices of my classmates came to an abrupt hault, and as the anthem came to a flourishing finish, my classroom door flew open and Mrs. Belyea (we would call her Mrs. Bellyache behind her back, giggling insanely) emerged to see what all the ruckus was about. Behind her all the other kids craned and rubbernecked. To evade questioning, I did the only thing I could think of: I bent over the water fountain and started guzzlin like mad. Diana was too busy howlin to report my crime, and I kept gulping water, holdin my finger up to Mrs. Belyea in a "just a minute please" gesture. I think I drank about forty gallons before I felt I would burst, and finally turned to face my inevitable interrogation. As I did so I glanced at Diana. Her face was vermillion, there was a trickle of blood down her chin, and her mouth was open so wide as she wailed, that I could see that little thing hangin down in the back of her throat. It was vibrating. Somehow, that struck me as hilarious and I started to snicker, then chortle, then giggle, then guffaw. That made Diana bawl even harder, which made me laugh even harder.

I don't recall what happened after that. All I know is that Diana never again messed with my galoshes. And she got her nose cauterized.

On Beginnings and Endings

It's a bittersweet time of year for me. I have survived the frenetic end-of-school-year hustle-bustle for the twenty-fifth time. Having endured piles of marking, tons of paperwork, and eleventh-hour pleas from underachievers, I now wile away these last few days in my classroom. I've run out of things to tidy, and I'm so bored I could snatch myself bald.

I'm the kind of teacher who forges close relationships with some students, and I used to get pretty choked up when they reached graduation. But the past few years I've become less invested, or maybe better adjusted is more accurate. I still hug them and wish them well (and really mean it), but I actually like the departure.

I mean, how lucky are these kids? For at least thirteen years of their lives, they've had buildings full of talented and dedicated people nurturing, guiding and caring about THEM. They won't enjoy that privilege again in their lives. And I feel good having been a part of that. Did I make one kid more curious, or more joyful at discovery? Did I have a hand in making him/her feel better about him/herself, for even one minute? If so, I am content.

So spread your wings, my little birdies. And Godspeed.

The First Mammogram's the Hardest

It was in the shower that I discovered my first breast lump, and the terror that overcame me is hard to describe. Within days I saw my doctor and was sent for a mammogram.

Now, as many of us know, only in recent years has breast cancer begun to get the funding it deserves, and Winnipeg was not exactly in the forefront of medical technology to diagnose the disease. I think we were a little ahead of the Flintstones. Only a little.

When I nervously arrived for my test, I was directed to a tiny booth and handed HALF of a paper gown. Apparently, this pretense of modesty was only for the ten paces between the change room and the examination room, because I was instructed to remove my thin covering as soon as the door closed behind me. The temperature of the room approximated that of a meat locker - it was more than a little "nippy", pardon the pun. To add to my discomfort and embarrassment (I have always been, by nature, extremely bashful to begin with), the technician left me in that exposed state while she puttered for what seemed half a millennium or so. Finally, I was asked to sit on the x-ray table beneath a large cone-shaped protrusion. I began to anticipate what was about to happen, but nothing could prepare me for what came next...

The technician began to inflate a child's party balloon. A yellow one. Festive, at least. After she knotted it, she began to stuff it into the cone-shaped protrusion. Then she lowered the contraption onto my right breast. While she adjusted it, the balloon made hideous farting and squelching noises. I thought I would rather stick pins in my eyes than be there at that moment. Perhaps sensing my unease, she attempted to relax me by wisecracking, "I know it's the right breast your doctor's concerned about, but we'll take pictures of the left one too, so she can compare one to the UDDER." Ha ha. When this agony was finally over, I bolted for the door, my arms crossed chastely across my chest, but the technician said I couldn't leave; we weren't done yet.

Defeated, I sat shivering in the chair she pointed out and watched with a mixture of horror and fascination as she wheeled a table on castors over to me. A table with a kind of tray thing on it. The tray had concentric half circles drawn on its surface, and a long screw sticking up from each of its four corners. This can't be good, I thought. I was right. I tried to make a joke - "You’re servin me lunch? But in this restaurant it's the diner who goes topless instead of the waitress?" She grinned, almost maliciously I thought, picked up my right breast, rammed the table into my ribs and unceremoniously plopped my boob onto its surface. Before I could recover from that humiliation, she handed me a thick rectangle of Plexiglas with a hole drilled into each of its corners - its holes corresponding to, you guessed it, the screws protruding from the table jammed into my body. Last but not least, she held out her outstretched hand. In her palm were four WING NUTS. She didn't even have to tell me what I was to do next. As I tightened the wing nuts, unable to watch my breast bein gradually flattened in its uncomfortable sandwich, I prayed fervently that no one would pull the fire alarm. I could just picture myself standing outside among hundreds of hospital employees and patrons with a table hangin offa my chest while the firefighters doused the flames in the building. I hoped my bra and blouse wouldn't be consumed by fire.

I'm not Catholic, but I praised God and all the patron saints when I crept in for my next mammogram and saw the new mammogram machine gleaming in a room that was actually heated. It still wasn't fun (when you have cystic breasts the squashin really hurts), but it was mercifully faster and more discreet.

On a serious note, I should add that all of my breast lumps have been benign, and I sincerely wish the same for every other woman. And, of course, I hope none of you ever has to be tested by that prehistoric machine...

Zits

There are some benefits to aging. One of them is that you are far less frequently plagued with blemished, eruptions of the skin, complexion problems...ZITS. Gone is the oily skin I had as a teenager, when I swabbed my face with industrial strength astringents capable of dryin up Lake Mead: Nowadays I am far more likely to fill the cracks of my parched epidermis with a spackling trowel loaded with expensive moisturizing creams...Come to think of it, not much of a "benefit," is it?

I never had acne or clusters of pimples, but every now and then I would get one of those mean tender bumps that would lurk beneath the surface threatening to erupt like Vesuvius. It was conspicuous and purplish, and I felt the whole universe had its eyes trained on it. How to disguise it? Cover-up sticks and creams refused to adhere to it, turning an ugly muddy bruised colour upon contact. I tried one of those small round bandaids (what would I say, that I had cut myself shaving? that the cat had scratched me? the infected mosquito bite story wouldn't fly in winter), but the sticky stuff refused to stick, and it teetered precariously like a tiny sombrero. Oh great, my sit had a hat...

As I type this, I am afflicted with a cold sore - a big, horrible painful cold sore that has misshapen my upper lip to the point that I look like an aging starlet with a bad collagen job. I feel like a toad. And I can't even get it to wear a sombrero. Sigh.

My Supernatural Mother

There's a big fat lie that European parents tell their children, and it is this - "Just tell the truth and you won't get into trouble." What a con game. If you freely confessed to some transgression, major or minor, you were gonna get it bigtime. It wasn't until years later in University that I learned about Pascal's wager, in which he pragmatically charted the advantages and disadvantages of believing in God, but as a child I had developed a more rudimentary version - lie like heck and take your chances because you've got nuthin to lose.

Actually, there was no such thing as a minor crime in my family - everything was a very big deal. My mom was Gothic in her descriptions of what became of naughty children. Once as she removed the skinny braids from my fine blonde hair and began to roughly tear a comb through the snarls, I yelped in protest and she smacked me with the brush. Before my brain could tell my hand not to, I instinctively struck back - it wasn't more than a light rap, really. Even as I did it, I knew I was committing a mortal sin. My mom got her "scary eyes," when they got so wide that you could see the whites all they way around her steel grey pupils Then she said in a low, ominous tone, " Do you know vat happens to girls who hit dere own mudders? Ven dey die and dey are buried, dere hand grows out of de ground, and everyone vat valks by says, 'Dere lies a girl vat hit her own mudder!" I tell you, I lost sleep over that one.....

My mom has the longest fingers I've ever seen, and her index finger is not only incredibly lengthy, but has a mole near the knuckle that looks really scary when she beckons with it in that "come here" gesture. I remember her summoning me that way, scary eyes and all, whenever I was about to be interrogated for something. The ritual was always the same. I had to follow her into my parents' tiny bedroom. Their modest double bed was pushed lengthwise alongside one wall, and there was just enough room between it and my dad's chest of drawers that, if you sat on the edge of the bed, your knees would touch his bureau. Mom would sit there and spread her legs (she always wore dresses or skirts back then), and I was to stand in the gap between her knees. She would clutch my shoulder with one hand in a vise-like grip, gesture towards each of her eyes with her bony finger, and growl, "Kijk in de poppetjes van mijn oogen," which means, "Look into the pupils of my eyes." I believed implicitly that if I did as she ordered, and prevaricated, the word "liar" would be emblazoned in red across my forehead. I wasn't allowed to shift my gaze. I caved every time. The KGB had nuthin on my mom when it came to makin people talk. I would've confessed to bein the Boston Strangler.

Brain Blips

All of us are familiar, I think, with the stereotype of the absent-minded professor. I believe it has some basis in truth, for I have encountered many people of provably superior intellect who tend to show astounding gaps in logic from time to time. Maybe it's because they're so focused on complicated matters, that they skip over the trivial. Maybe it's a lack of concentration. Maybe it's because some of the synapses in the brain occasionally misfire, a brain blip.

When I was in grade 3, the Department of Education believed firmly in IQ testing, something which is no longer in vogue. After our little brains had been weighed and measured, a small number of us were herded into a specialized program that lasted from grades 4 to 9. (In those days, kids were labeled "robins" or "bluejays" - streamed according to their ability, with no consideration given to hurtin anyone's feelings. If you were in the "brain" or the "dumb" room, everyone knew it, and no bones about it.) I have no doubt this caused untold damage to some children; but I thrived, benefiting richly from the rigours and challenges of my accelerated academic program.

Now, lest anyone think I'm bein egotistical in telling you this, let me clear that up right now...I am merely laying the groundwork for the point I began to make in my opening paragraph...

Around the age of 16 or 17, I discovered and fell in love with camping. One day my dad brought home a big box of WATERPROOF MATCHES and gave them to me, sayin, "Here – dese could save your life, you know." (My dad's awkward say of sayin, "I love you and I worry about you and I want you to be safe and I'm sorry I was such a butthead and said all those mean things to you earlier." Dad never could apologize, which explains the cupboard full of Ronco gadgets that accumulated in Mom's kitchen cabinets over the years.) ENTER BRAIN BLIP...

I could not wrap my head around the concept of a waterproof match. (For those of you similarly impaired, all it means is that the heads are wax-coated, so that if you tip your canoe and your matches get wet, they will still light if you strike them a couple of extra times.) So I, Little Miss Mensa, honour roll resident, scholar, lit one of the matches, stuck the flame under the stream of the kitchen faucet, and wailed, "It doesn't work!"

DUH.

Which only goes to prove my point: Sometimes even intelligent people say and do dumb things.

Monkeys and Career Choices

When I was a child, my love of animals led me to feel that I wanted to work with them when I got older. As time went by, I realized that the pain of watching them be abandoned, abused, or devastated by disease or injury, made me a poor candidate as a vet or shelter worker. Maybe a zoologist? Well, good thing I ended up workin with primates that are slightly higher on the food chain than our hairy cousins, because there is somethin about my mere presence that makes monkeys of every species behave in a lewd and lascivious manner.....

Case in Point: Early in my career, I was part of an enthusiastic group of junior high teachers of various subjects who decided that a field trip to the zoo might provide a platform for some interesting activities. It's pretty easy to imagine what the science, social studies and English teachers cooked up in the way of assignments, but what could the French teacher require of the kids? She decided a creative writing piece would be in order. The subject - "An Amusing Sight or Incident at the Zoo" - en francais, of course.

There we were, in the tropical house. I stood quietly marvelling at the spider monkeys - their old men faces, their skinny hands and deft fingers, their.....HEY! As if on cue, THREE monkeys firmly planted their buttocks against the glass, right in front of me. I was embarrassed, but not as much as I was when I had to explain to the French teacher, why she got 32 compositions on exactly the same topic - me bein mooned.....

Second Case in Point: I have always enjoyed goin to the Ex (the local moniker for the Red River Exhibition - it's the fair - you know, with the rides, the carnies, the crooked games of chance, the commingled essences of corn dogs and barf) for only two purposes: One - to eat a WHOLE LOT of really bad, artery-clogging food, and TWO - to whack the snot out of those little mechanical gophers. If you're not familiar with the game, you stand at a terminal with an oversized fabric mallett and smack the smithereens out of the little suckers as they pop their heads out of various holes....first person to hit a given number, wins a prize. I think the first time you win you get a toothpick, and after approximately four hundred rounds and a thousand dollars, you finally get to trade up to a nice plush animal. Well, I have always been generally inept at athletics requiring even a moderate form of coordination, but for some reason, I AM THE QUEEN OF WHACK-A-MOLE. Probably has somethin to do with bein my mother's child and pent-up frustration - Freud would have a field day with this. But I digress.....After numerous successive victories, and having incurred the wrath of the guy runnin the game and every paying participant, I won myself a truly luxurious red velvet teddy bear. I toted him happily around the fairground, even agreeing to let my (former) husband drag me over to the barns. Barns. Who goes to the ex to trudge through a smelly poop factory, ogling bedraggled farm animals? I was bored and disgusted.

While my then-husband went over to enthrall himself with some mangy Clydesdales, a monkey caught my eye. I was surprised to see a monkey in a cage suspended above an anorexic-looking goat, but there he was. He was the skinniest, longest-limbed, most depressed-lookin monkey I ever saw, and I felt sorry for him. I stood and commiserated with him softly, tellin him I was no happier to be there than he was. He suddenly took great interest in my red bear, pointing to it, jumpin around in his cage, vocalizing. When I danced the bear before me, he went wild. An amused crowd gathered, charmed that he was so attracted to my prize. Then, to my horror, he squatted on the floor of his cage, a scrawny knee on each side of his ears, grimaced horribly with all of his teeth and gums exposed, and began to, um, gratify himself, with both hands at lightning speed! I was mortified, even more when a young thin voice filled with wonderment piped, "What's the monkey doing, Daddy?" I treaded water through the mob in a desperate effort to flee, and one wise guy quipped, "At least throw him the bear!" No way. I clutched Teddy close to me, protecting his innocence, and scampered out of the barn to the midway, my panting husband in pursuit, askin, "Was that monkey whackin off?"

There is a God. I know it, for many reasons, not the least of which is the hand He must have had in my career path. My students, however simian they might sometimes seem, have never felt moved to such behaviour in my presence. At least, not to my knowledge.

On Thinking Aloud

I used to think that a person only talked to oneself if elderly or addle-brained, but I have discovered that I do it when under stress. It's no more than a declarative statement of the particular situation in which I find myself at the moment. Not panicked, not hysterical, not emotional in the least - just a flat statement of fact. It's as if the only way I can process the reality of things is to roll the words around on my tongue, taste them, then spit them out. Hearing them makes me able to decide from there, how to handle my predicament.

The first time I remember doing this was as I hung upside-down, suspended in my seatbelt, after the car had finally quit rolling. My then-husband had been knocked unconscious upon impact, but all I could see was his right leg, and when I shook it, it lolled lifelessly under my hand. I thought he was dead, and I said aloud, "Oh God, I'm a widow."

The next instance I recall was as I sat rocking numbly on the bedroom floor, right after my ex, at the apex of his mid-life crisis, unexpectedly announced that he wished to leave our 18 year marriage. "Oh Lord," I muttered, "I'm a statistic." This was the sort of thing that happened to other people, not me; and yet here I was, confronted by a black gaping hole where my future used to be.

A few years later, a surgeon told me that my bladder infection had led to the discovery of a deadly cancer that would necessitate the removal of a kidney in a few days, and that the prognosis was very grim. He wouldn't answer me when I asked how long I had, except to say that I should "put my affairs in order." As he walked away, I gazed at my stunned mother and stated, "I'm gonna die, Mom." She stared at me in that open-mouthed way that the elderly have, and opened and closed her mouth a few times, unable to find anything to say. It didn't matter. She wasn't my intended audience, anyway; I was.

Annie Get Your Uzi

Between the ages of 12 and 14, my circle of girlfriends considered horseback riding the activity of choice. They overlooked the fact that only one or two were even vaguely familiar with those large muscular beasts. I was and always have been an animal lover, but the closest I had come to anything resembling livestock, was the exotically painted plaster carousel critters at the fair. And they were easy to train.

It was my thirteenth birthday, and my "treat" was to be an hour of horseback riding at the Diamond D stables on the outskirts of the city. I was nervous, but donned my blue jeans and my best show of bravado. We took two buses and waited in the hot early morning sun for the stable guys to give us a lift to our destination in their pickup truck. They looked like escaped convicts; to say that their greasy hair and tattoos added to my trepidation, is putting it mildly.

I asked for the oldest, fattest, most mild-mannered swayback they had. They gave me a rogue stallion the size of the Hindenberg with the temperament of Attila the Hun. He was also very, um, independent of mind, scornful of traditional horsey-type commands like "giddyup" and "whoa", and completely indifferent to "nice horsey" or "oh please please God, don't let him kill me." Whoever had previously braved riding him, had been about seven feet tall, judging from the position of the stirrups, and before one of the ex-cons could shorten the second one, Attila decided it was time for takeoff. He began to gallop, nostrils flaring and eyes wild with insanity, at approximately Mach 3; I believe we broke the sound barrier. We must have, because I couldn't even hear myself scream.

My bottom kept colliding gracelessly with his broad back, winding me immediately, and, although I pulled back on the reins with all of my might, the horse kept galloping, pell-mell, down the center of the opposing lane of traffic on the highway near the trail which I presumed we were supposed to take. He was playin chicken with the cars, which honked and veered to avoid striking us! The darn behemoth was runnin with his chin tucked into his chest, oblivious to my tugging and weeping. With no stirrup to support my right foot, I began to slide sideways out of the saddle, hangin on for dear life with my legs clenched around his belly like a trick rider. I was terrified, and my tears, obedient to the laws of gravity, ran into my ears.

Bored finally, I guess, with his game, Attila began to side-step into the roadside ditch, which enabled other riders to catch up, although their horses had used the designated trail. His antics also caused my hiney to slam jerkily against the saddle with even more force, so I was exhausted and distraught when the others complained that mine was the "lead horse" and they didn't appreciate where he had been shepherding their horses. The loudest complainant, and the most profane, was a fellow in a trio of boys who had begun their trail ride around the same time we had. I could endure his abuse no longer, and challenged him to switch horses with me. His machismo led him to foolishly accept, and I mounted his fat dapple-gray mare (even her name, Daisy, was benign) with immense relief. For the remainder of the hour I allowed her to lazily chomp on grass while the others pursued the loudmouth at a breakneck pace. When they returned, harried and sweating at the end of their ride, Daisy amiably ambled to the stable for more eats.

I was saddle-sore for days afterwards, but I had learned a valuable lesson: I resolved that if ever, in a weak moment, I found myself persuaded to return to the Diamond D, I would go heavily armed in the event that my beloved Daisy had died.