Today I Lost a Friend

At 2:05 am today, Lanie's suffering ended. Good night, sweet friend, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

My Left Arm

At one of the schools where I used to teach, the science teacher kept live animals and plants in his classroom. The plants stayed put, but sometimes one of the critters would decide to wander...or should I say, slither.

I do not have a girly aversion to creepy-crawlies, unless you place bats into that category. Bats give me the heebie-jeebies; just typing about them gives me goose bumps. But turtles, frogs and garter snakes I have handled with ease from an early age. I raised baby turtles for years, raced frogs down my dad's bare chest at the lake, and captured garter snakes for pets every spring. (We usually released them again in the fall, but kept one for a couple of years.) So when the science teacher's garter snake side-winded his way down the upstairs corridor, scattering female (and a few male) staff and students, I was the go-to girl.

Cornering him was no easy feat; he was terrified, and all the hysteria made him even more panicky. Finally, I was able to grab his tail - He was a very big snake, and he immediately coiled himself tightly around the full length of my arm, under the sleeve of my brand-new sweater, and voided.

Snakes do not excrete solid waste: Everything is liquid, and when they are scared, their glands add an obnoxious odour to the mix, designed to ward off predators. He must have been particularly frightened, because he could've discouraged starving hyenas a continent away. The stench was staggering. After returning him to the sanctuary of his cage, I sudsed my arm until it was raw, but the stink did not diminish. I drove all the way home at lunch, scrubbed some more, soaked my sweater, and changed; still I reeked all afternoon, and for the next couple of days.

Had this incident occurred a couple of decades later, Bush could've sent me to flush out Bin Laden - one whiff of me, and those caverns would've emptied out, right chicken louie.

Winter Then and Now

There used to be so much more snow when I was a kid. I remember hours and hours of toboganning on flattened cardboard boxes down the huge hills created by plows in the Loblaws parking lot behind my block, for hours, until our snowsuits were soaked right through to our chilled butt cheeks We dug an elaborate tunnel system through the mounds, which my mom used to forbid me to do, threatening that the walls might collapse and bury me alive. Where did she think we were playin - Mount Everest?

I was a tough little kid. On weekends I'd tie on my white figure skates and skate along the snow-packed sidewalks for 20 blocks to the nearest outdoor skating rink. That way, I didn't have to change out of my boots in the clubhouse, or struggle to untie my ice-encrusted laces afterwards. In fact, I avoided going into the clubhouse altogether, ignoring my bursting bladder, because I didn't want to experience the agony of my feet thawin out more than once. I'd wait til I skated back home and Mom would rub my frozen tootsies hard between her warm hands (exactly the wrong thing to do, I learned years later in First Aid class, but somehow it felt so right) while I howled and wept fat tears of misery. I once stayed too long at the rink, and had to crawl home on my hands and knees, bawlin all the way, because my feet were so sore. Only to go back and do it all again the next day.

I guess I was a dumb little kid, too...

What was the allure? I would get there shortly after sunup, hoping to have the ice surface to myself for an hour or so. As I listened to my blades make that distinctive skating-blade-against-ice sound, I'd imagine I was Petra Burka, or the legendary Canadian ice champion Barbara Ann Scott, flitting like a sparkling butterfly around the rink. Never mind that many mornings I would spend an hour or two shoveling the night's snowfall from the ice, just in time for the arrival of the bullying and tripping HOCKEY BOYS. Oh, how I resented them and their violent speed, their crude mouths, their clacking sticks!

When I think about it, a lot of my winter fun was spoiled by the presence of boys, and my brother Fred was the King of Evil Boyness. I suffered many face washes, shoves down snowbanks, and cement-hard snowballs to the hiney, thanks to him. Only on family outings to the riverbank, under the supervision of my parents, did he treat me with any measure of civility. Together we would plummet down the snowy banks on our long wooden toboggan again and again. When I was really small, I'd shuffle along on the ankles of my bobskates, while our dad, in his fedora and dress overcoat, did elegant looping figure eights with the same clamp-on figure skating blades he'd worn on the canals of Holland, his hands clasped casually behind his back.

Over the years my enthusiasm for outdoor winter activity has dimmed. Well, to be honest, it has more like burned out completely. I don't like the cold; exposed to it, I am transformed into a sniveling, nose-running whiner - not fun company. I'm a lot more pleasant when kept at room temperature or warmer.

I'm a wimp. Even though winters are generally less severe than they were during my childhood, my tolerance for them has decreased with age. I get chilled if I keep the fridge door open for too long.

Cool Hand Lukewarm

Yesterday I developed a new appreciation for those old prison movies: You know, the ones featuring tough guys or babes whose poor life choices landed them in an institution where their movements and activities are controlled by rigid scheduling and an omniscient authority.

Granted, my working environment is lock-step, in that it consists of days tightly regulated, much like an inmate's existence; but you'd think that when teachers had a day for professional development, we would parole ourselves from this and enjoy a little freedom. Noooooooo....

We had a scant number of uninspiring sessions from which to choose, nothing that seemed relevant to me, despite the ironic title of the workshop: "Making Connections." But more about that later....

The day started off well enough, with plenty of juices, bottles of water, and fresh pastries. The presentation opened with a lively song and dance performance put on by a large group of talented students. A temporary distraction from what was to come, much as Johnny Cash must have helped inmates forget for a short time, that they'd be spending Christmas in Folsom Prison. Until they died.

Things went downhill from there: a repetitive, tedious thank you speech by a chairwoman with a droning monotone that had us all willing the clock's hands to point to a more enjoyable diversion in the exercise yard, like a stabbing. She was a laugh riot compared to the keynote speaker, whose hour long address had no discernible thesis, was filled with empty aphorisms, and urged 650 professional teachers to "remember, it's all about the kids." Well, DUH. By the time he told his fifth self-congratulatory anecdote about how he had been single-handedly responsible for rescuing an at-risk kid, by the time he had used the expression, "Right?" for the fifty-sixth time (a colleague beside me actually kept count), I was about to start clanging my metal cup and demanding to see the warden.

Like so many lifers, we were calmed with a little entertainment by a comedian, whose fifteen-minute bit was just barely enough to quell any impulse to riot. Then we were grouped with others in for the same thing - in my case, high school English - for a "sharing session." Ah, group therapy....

Finally we were sprung for a quick lunch, then back to our cages to be talked at for two and a quarter agonizing hours. I had been registered for my second choice, led by the world's most tedious librarian. She had us form groups to "problem-solve" how Mr. and Mrs. Smith could go to a movie on a weeknight when their babysitter had a 10:00 curfew. The exercise took twenty minutes. I'm not kidding. Is this how serial killers are rehabilitated - by boring the living crap out of them, until they have no will left to commit another crime? You either go brain dead or you make a break for it. By this point, had I been armed (I contemplated chewing my HB pencil into a lethal point), I might have held my department head hostage in exchange for early parole. Instead, I wrote this diatribe.

I'm sure incarcerated persons who suffer through rehabilitation programs offered by well-meaning bureaucrats seeking advancement, must be bombarded with tons of jargon/rhetoric/catch-phrases...maybe even as much as assailed my ears yesterday.

Prison could make writers of us all.