Mr. Brown was not only Indian Creek’s history and geography teacher, he’d also worked with my dad at Ontario Steel for a couple of summers filling in for vacationing full-timers. He lived in the east end like us, in an apartment over top of the Satellite Restaurant. He always wore a corduroy jacket the same colour as his name and round wire-rimmed glasses like John Lennon’s. I’d show up in his homeroom after classes were over and we’d walk to his mustard-coloured Chevy Vega and talk away the ten minute ride home. Mr. Brown wasn’t like most adults in that he asked questions about what you were up to and were interested in and seemed to actually want to hear your answers, but recently he was doing most of the talking, mostly about the plan to demolish Harrison Hall—what everyone called “Old City Hall,” which had been at the corner of Fifth and Wellington since the late-1800s—to accommodate the construction of the new mall. Technically, the space wasn’t even going to be part of the mall; it was eight proposed parking spaces.
“You know, this isn’t just something we talk about in class, Tom. It’s very important for the entire community that we do our best to preserve our oldest and most unique buildings. They’re part of who we are.”
If it had been any other teacher I would have just nodded and attempted to look my most eagerly acquiescent, but because it was Mr. Brown, “My dad says new jobs are more important than a bunch of old rocks.”
The soon-to-be new mall—over 60,000 square feet of shiny new shops, an eight-restaurant food court, and a full-service Sears—was supposed to save Chatham’s sinking downtown commercial core by stealing back the shoppers who’d abandoned it for Zellers and K-Mart and the big Woolco mall out on Highway 40. Before they could construct it, though, they needed to tear down the century-old buildings standing where it was supposed to go, most of which had been happily sold by their owners to the City at above-market cost. Harrison Hall should have been the easiest building to erase—the City already owned it, after all—but a small but vocal group of local residents, Mr. Brown among them, was attempting to change the City’s mind, to get them to force the mall’s developers to modify their plans and keep Old City Hall from becoming simply the old city hall.
“Your father is a business man,” Mr. Brown said, clicking the Vega’s turn signal and looking carefully both ways before pulling onto Queen Street. “It’s understandable that he’s concerned about jobs. We all are. No one is saying that the mall isn’t a good idea. People can’t eat architecture.” Passing by Kentucky Fried Chicken, I thought how funny it would be if, instead of just destroying the restaurant, Godzilla plucked up the enormous spinning bucket out front and popped it into his fire-breathing mouth.
“But people need something else too,” he said, “or else they won’t be happy, no matter how much money their job pays them or how well—or how much—they eat.” A car swerved into our lane and Mr. Brown leaned on his horn. “C’mon, buddy, pick a lane already.” I liked it that Mr. Brown wasn’t afraid of getting mad in front of me. Most adults pretended like they had all the answers and were always in control.
“You mean they need to know history and stuff,” I said.
Mr. Brown audibly exhaled through his nostrils, though whether because of the guy who’d cut him off or because of my question I couldn’t tell.
“History isn’t only dates and names in books and pictures of people who aren’t around any more,” he said. “It means feeling a connection to the place you live, to the people that lived there before you. Otherwise, life is just…”
We’d stopped in front of the tattoo shop now, but I didn’t say thanks and jump out like I ordinarily did; I waited in my seat for Mr. Brown to finish what he was saying. He looked at me. “I think you know what I mean, Tom,” he said. “Or at least you know it better than most other kids your age.”
I didn’t, but I didn’t want to let him down, so I just nodded.
“See you tomorrow, Tom,” Mr. Brown said.
High School Teacher Has it “Up to Here” with Local Yahoos
“If I Can Understand Their Point of View, Why Is It So Hard for Them to Understand Someone Else’s?”
HE COULD SEE their point. He wasn’t some artsy shit from Toronto, after all—he was from here, just like them. Born and raised and, except for four years of university in Windsor and another twelve months at teacher’s college, right back where he’d started, doing exactly what he always wanted to do: instructing, molding, maybe—hopefully—even inspiring.
The son of a factory worker at Ontario Steel and a cook’s assistant in the cafeteria at Libby’s, he’d been saved from a life of the same by parents who made sure he got the education they never did and by the few good teachers he’d been lucky enough to encounter along the way, men and women who considered their occupation as more than good pay with no heavy lifting and two months off in the summer and a fat pension to grow old and fat on. There had been Mrs. Johnson, grade eight, who’d instilled in him a love of reading—not necessarily to acquire information; not to keep up with what everyone was talking about; not as a way to kill time when there’s no one else around to talk to or nothing on TV; but because without its inimitable spiritual shake-and-bake, how else were you going to find out what you believed, what you wanted, who you were? There was Mr. Moritz, grade eleven, who showed him that there was a world outside of Chatham outside of Ontario outside of Canada outside of North America outside of planet earth outside of our solar system outside… There’d been Professor Evans, Eng 2041: Introduction to the English Romantics, who’d revealed yet another world to him—the real one—where seeing what’s actually there entails sealing your eyes and callusing your senses to the sights and sounds, the poking and prodding, that passes for what’s important if you’re going to end up with the biggest or the most or be one of the insufferably respected.
He was thankful, in other words; he wanted to give thanks. And the only way to give thanks that matters is by giving back some of what you yourself have been given. He wanted to teach; he wanted to call himself a teacher. And he did, and he did.
But he could also see their point. The poetry of William Blake sounds better and makes more sense when you’re warm in the winter and cool in the summer and there are two weeks’ worth of groceries in the cupboard and a few extra bucks in the bank when you need braces for your twelve-year-old daughter or you have to buy a new roof when the rain doesn’t care that the old leaky one isn’t really that old and shouldn’t need fixing. Money may be the root of all evil, but it’s also pretty damn close to the source of all that’s good, too. Noble thoughts and fine feelings are a lot more likely to occur when your stomach is full and your roof doesn’t have a hole in it.
But a gut can only be so gorged. There are only so many times you can renovate the downstairs bathroom. And too long looking exclusively for what is necessary will eventually blind you to what is important.
I mean, Jesus H. Christ, folks, it’s only one building. One structurally beautiful, historically significant building that helps ensure that the town we live in is more than just a place where a bunch of different people work and sleep and procreate and eat and shit and die. Just move the frigging mall a few hundred feet the other way, people. It’s only a bunch of bricks and steel.
~
Julie was busy waging her own campaign, and it had nothing to do with preserving Harrison Hall. Julie had saved up enough money from her two-evenings-a-week job at Dairy Queen to go with Angie to Toronto for a few days during March Break. What she didn’t have was our father’s permission. Not yet, anyway.
“Where do you plan on staying?” They were drinking coffee after dinner while I cleared the table and got started on the dishes. I had math homework to do before M.A.S.H. came on at nine o’clock. M.A.S.H. was probably my favourite TV show, and Hawkeye Pierce was probably why. He wasn’t a rock star or a superstar athlete, but he was still pretty cool, came up with the funniest lines and had his very own booze still and
wore a cowboy hat with a smoking jacket. But he was also the hospital’s best surgeon and the one everybody turned to when they were worried about something important. Hawkeye made it seem like it might not be too bad to be a grown up.
“With one of Angie’s aunts,” Julie said.
“I don’t suppose Angie would mind if I talked to her aunt.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Just to touch base. If that’s where you’re going to be sleeping for three nights, I’d like to at least let the woman know who your father is.”
Julie got up and went to the counter for a refill even though her cup was still full. Looking my father straight in the back of his head, “It might not actually be her aunt.”
“Really.”
“I mean, it might be. But she might be out of town, Angie’s not sure yet. But we’ve got a backup plan, so there won’t be a problem.”
“A backup plan.” Dad slowly turned around in his chair, crossed his motorcycle-booted foot over his knee. Dad dressed like a biker and usually tied his long black hair into a ponytail, but he didn’t ride. He didn’t even like motorcycles, would roll up the car window whenever one of them screamed past.
“Angie’s brother and his girlfriend have got this huge apartment and—”
“No way,” Dad said, sliding back around.
“But you don’t even—”
“Forget it, Julie. You’re not going to Toronto for three days without an adult being there.”
“I told you, Angie’s brother and his girlfriend will be there the entire time.”
“How old is her brother?”
“I don’t know. He’s got his own apartment.”
Dad picked up his cup of coffee and blew on it; sipped, set it back down. He collected the remaining utensils I hadn’t gathered up yet into the empty pasta bowl. Julie was losing him, could see that he was doing one of his disappearing Dad acts, so sputtered, “He’s studying to be a doctor. Is that adult enough?”
“He’s in medical school?”
Having been busted already over Angie’s phantom aunt, she knew better than to risk strike two. “He’s pre-med,” she said.
“He’s an undergraduate.”
“But he’s pre-med.”
“He’s two years older than you. Forget it.”
“You don’t even know him. That’s called prejudice, you know that?”
“If he’s twenty years old, I know enough.”
“Who said he was twenty? Maybe he’s twenty-one, you don’t know.”
“Forget it.”
“I can’t believe my own father is prejudiced.”
“I said forget it.”
I finished clearing the table and squirted some dish soap into the sink.
Chatham Girl, 18, “Wants it All”
“Sometimes Thinking About the Future Makes Me Feel Physically Dizzy”
SHE WASN’T SURE what she wanted, but she was certain what she didn’t, which is a pretty good place to start. She didn’t want to grow up to be Mrs. Someone-else’s-name. She didn’t want to keep a beautiful home and sell Mary Kay Cosmetics and host Tuesday night Tupperware parties and wonder why her adult children so seldom called and rarely visited. She didn’t want a lifetime subscription to TV Guide, she didn’t want to have sex in the dark, she didn’t want to have second thoughts about what she did with her life. Everybody has to die, but some people actually manage to live first.
Until she met Angie, it was as if she were the only one who felt like this. People who thought like you and acted like you wished you did in books and movies and songs are good to know, but you can’t call up Janis Joplin or Catherine Deneuve or Simone de Beauvoir on the telephone when you want to study for your history test but you’re getting your period and are cranky and feel like crying and eating barbeque potato chips and watching something you know is totally stupid on TV like the The Love Boat instead, and how unfair is it that guys can study as hard as they want whenever they want just because their bodies don’t turn on them? The first time she noticed the new girl, Angie, was during lunchtime in the girls’ section of the cafeteria, when the subject somehow came around to having kids and someone asked Angie, who’d said she didn’t want any, “Aren’t you afraid no one will remember you if you don’t have children?” and Angie answered, “If no one remembers me for myself, I suppose I don’t deserve to be remembered.” It was then that she noticed Angie didn’t feather her hair or wear Daniel Hechter sweatshirts or earrings or even lipstick, only a little purple (purple!) eyeshadow that made her brown eyes even darker and more difficult to decipher.
It wasn’t long before they were spending so much time together—why, at a party in somebody’s parents’ basement, for example, stupid loud music and stupider loud people, would they talk to anyone else when they had such a good time talking to each other?—that people started to whisper (she never heard it, but she could hear it) that they were lezbos, which was why they sat alone laughing so loudly at lunch and never went out on dates and even went to the movies together on Saturday night. She didn’t care. Might’ve cared before she’d met Angie, but she didn’t care now.
~
Round one went to Dad, but I knew Julie would be back to fight another day. She had a way of making what she wanted happen, even when she was a child. When she was ten and had a crush on one of the characters in Adventures in Rainbow Country, Billy Maxwell’s Ojibwa friend Pete, she managed to get the mailing address of the show and send him a Valentine’s Day card she bought at Woolworth’s with her own money. (On the front, a picture of an Indian in head feathers with a raised right hand and a caption that read HOW! and on the inside of the card the words Would You Like to be My Valentine?) She even got a signed photograph back in the mail, but immediately lost interest when the actor signed his own name. When she was in grade nine or ten and decided it was time she had a boyfriend but that all of the boys at school were immature, she came home from the Jaycee Fair with a guy who ran one of the rides and who had to be at least eighteen. My dad didn’t know what else to do so he invited him in to wash the grease off his hands and have dinner with us. After supper he and Julie sat on the back step and ate ice-cream cones while my father kept an eye on them through the screen door. She never saw him again, but she’d had her first date.
I finished the dishes and went upstairs to my room. My math textbook and notebook lay open on my desk where I’d left them before dinner, but I didn’t sit down and get to it like I’d promised myself I would. I had my own milk carton of records now, including a new double album, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, that I’d bought less than a week before. I’d also just that day checked out of the library at school the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, which sat on my nightstand beside my portable radio. I knew if I clicked it on and turned it to WJR the Red Wing game would be playing. And M.A.S.H. was on TV in a little more than half an hour. I could hear Julie in her bedroom across the hall talking in a fervent mumble on the extension to Angie, most likely about their proposed trip. It all seemed like such a big hassle. If they just stayed in Chatham they could do whatever they wanted and no one would have any reason to bother them. After all, anything anybody could want was already here. Why did people have to make everything so complicated?
Chapter Three
A first-rate Friday; but, then, what else could Friday be?
Not only was there no school the next day, there was no school the day after that. Saturday got all of the songs written about it and had more things going on—adults visited other adults, teenagers went on dates or got into trouble, Hockey Night in Canada was on—but after the excitement of Saturday there was always inevitable Sunday, and no matter how much fun you’d had the night before, the morning after meant school or work the following day, and no matter how satisfyingly sunny Sunday was, it was always compromised by the cloud cover that was knowing—feeling—Mond
ay a.m.’s melancholic imminence.
Fridays the year I was in grade seven were even better because not only did I have gym last class, so the school day felt fifty minutes shorter, but one entire period was given over to a classroom library visit. As long as you brought back the books you’d borrowed the week before, you were allowed to take out two new ones, providing they weren’t on the same subject. I usually checked out a sports book or magazine and used loan number two for something about music or Bigfoot or UFOs or the Loch Ness Monster. Most of the other boys’ borrowing habits were similar, while the girls favoured novels about other girls or books on animals and something called Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. There was a waiting list for this one, something that had never happened before, and when you’d ask a girl what it was about, why the book was so popular, she’d smirk and say Why don’t you read it for yourself? Scott Cassidy eventually took one for Team Testosterone and endured the girls’ giggles and the furrowed brow of Mrs. Wilson, the librarian, and added his name to the bottom of the waiting list. It took so long for it to be his turn, though, that once it was, the mystery had ebbed, other unknowns now weighed more heavily upon our minds. (One day in math class, for instance, we were stunned to learn that what was once miles per hour was now kilometres per hour and that growing up to be six-foot tall really meant you were a strapping 182.88 centimetres.) When his name finally came up on Mrs. Wilson’s list and Scott casually declared that he didn’t want the book anymore, like it was her idea in the first place, Mrs. Wilson made him take it anyway, to teach him something about responsibility. Scott shrugged, took it, then promptly lost it (meaning no one else got to read it either), only to find it again on the last day of classes when we cleaned out our lockers (which essentially meant dumping everything into one of several steel garbage cans that the janitor placed down the middle of the halls). If he hadn’t found it, Scott’s parents would have had to pay for a new copy. “Check it out,” he said, pulling it free from the pile at the bottom his locker. “That stupid book. Man, is that lucky or what?”
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