By this time, most of our grade three class had gravitated over to Blackie, kneeling down for a hug, hoping for a lick on the cheek. The most popular girl in the class, Penny Bond, was on the receiving end of a mighty slurp when we heard the sound of wheels on gravel.
The van pulled up right beside us. It was the dogcatcher.
“I have to take the dog,” said the dog catcher as he got out of the van.
He was carrying a pole with a loop of rope on it. It looked like a noose to me.
Nobody moved. Blackie woofed.
Glen kneeled beside Blackie, hugging him.
“He’s my dog,” said Glen. “It’s okay. He’s my dog, Blackie.”
But the dog catcher took a step toward us, slowly swinging the pole. “I don’t see a licence on this animal. He doesn’t even have a collar. I have to take him to the pound, kid. If he’s your dog, you can claim him there, pay the fee and claim him at the pound.”
Glen was trying really hard now not to cry in front of all his friends. He didn’t want to say that his mom didn’t have the money to get Blackie out of the pound. He didn’t want to say, If you take Blackie now, nobody will get him from the pound. He didn’t want to say it, but we all knew what happened to dogs that nobody claimed from the pound.
The dog catcher wasn’t listening. He took another step toward Blackie. Glen started to cry. Suddenly, somehow, we all stood in front of Glen and Blackie. We stood between them and the dog catcher. And then Penny Bond grabbed my hand, and I grabbed someone else’s hand, and we all linked together and formed a circle—a huge circle of grade three kids, arms outstretched, building a human fence around our friend and his dog.
It was one of those moments. One of those moments you know you’ll always remember, even when you’re old. Especially when you’re old.
We stood there, Glen and Blackie in the middle of that circle, the dog catcher outside it, not exactly sure what to do. Nobody said a word.
We would have stood there forever if it wasn’t for Mrs. Lougheed. Somehow she was out the back door of the school and calling to the dog catcher. They stood by his ugly orange dog catcher van, and although we couldn’t hear what they were saying, we could see that they were having more than just your everyday, normal, boring adult-type conversation.
We hung on to our circle even harder. And then something amazing happened. The dog catcher got into his van and drove off. He didn’t say anything to us at all; he didn’t even look over at us. He just drove away.
When the cheering, and hugging, and crying died down, Mrs. Lougheed got us settled down in the classroom, Blackie sprawled in the corner at the back of the room, snoozing away contentedly for the rest of the afternoon. I’d never seen Glen so happy.
Blackie never went on the school grounds again. He would wait for Glen on the boulevard across the street, in the shade. Blackie was smart that way.
Glen and his dog and his mom moved away that summer, and I never saw them again. But every now and then, I take out my old cardboard box of memories and pull out my grade three class picture. If you look closely, there with all the silly smiles and goofy hairdos and proud and shiny eight-year-olds is an old black dog curled up at the feet of the biggest kid in the class.
Red Deer, Alberta
JIGGIN’ FOR SQUID
My first parish as an Anglican minister was in the small outport of Trinity East on the north shore of Trinity Bay, in Newfoundland and Labrador.
My wife, Karen, and I had just moved from Toronto, and I soon realized that we could fit all the residents of Trinity East into one Toronto subway car.
I lived there in the early nineties, a time when the folks in Ottawa were making decisions about the future of the fishery. I would sit at kitchen tables in the homes of my parishioners and listen to them talk about their future. I knew that in order to do this job well I had to learn about the fishery. And what better way to find out about the fishery, and those who make their living by dory, than to get out on the ocean and see for myself?
It was cold at dawn on the morning I went out. I stepped into the boat and waited for the three cups of coffee to take effect. One of my parishioners, Ray, started his Mercury outboard and off we went.
I felt excited about this adventure. We rode for an hour in the boat, and I wondered where we were going. Ray knew. He was looking for the seagulls, which, he said, always knew where the squid were swimming.
Ray soon stopped the motor. He looked up at the gulls circling above.
“Put down the jigs,” he said.
There were four large spools on gunwales, rolled with hundreds of metres of heavy fishing line. Every thirty centimetres or so there was a small hook, a jig, which would grab onto any part of the squid’s body. It was crude but effective. I let down the line until I was told to stop.
My captain told me to rock the spools back and forth, back and forth, until I felt the weight of the squid on the end of the line.
“Haul her up!” Ray shouted.
I could not have been prepared for what I was about to see and hear. Squid, all about the size of my hand, came flying off the jigs into the bottom of the boat, their gills gasping for water.
There were more squid than I’d ever seen in my life.
I could tell by the look on Ray’s face that this was a good catch. Ray looked happy. I was proud and honoured to be part of this day.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Well, my son,” he said, “now you got to separate the males from the females.”
“How do we do that?” I asked him.
“Well,” he told me, “if you pick them up and look closely through their tentacles, just below their eyes, you can see the difference.”
It sounded reasonable to me. I’d taken enough marine biology as an undergrad to know that, yes, it was possible to tell the difference between a male and a female squid. As a minister, I knew that God had created them so.
What I’d forgotten, however, was the sophisticated defence mechanism that squid and other cephalopods had developed over millions of years of evolution. It was sophisticated, though not very precise.
But when you’re a squid swimming through the cold waters of Trinity Bay, when you’re a squid trapped in the bottom of a dory, gasping for air, when you’re a squid being picked up by an Anglican minister who until very recently lived at Broadview and Gerrard in downtown Toronto—you don’t have to be very precise. I picked up a squid and tried to determine its gender.
“You might have to hold it closer,” Ray told me.
That was the last thing I remember hearing.
The ejection, if not precise, was certainly thorough.
It was thick, cold, and too salty to describe. It splashed over my face, covered my eyes, went further up my nose than I care to remember. It tasted like nothing I’d ever tasted before. The fact that it got into my ears surprised me.
With my ears clogged I could hear only one sound rising above the squishing sound of the squid on the bottom of the boat. It was my captain, my very much amused captain, laughing harder than he had for a long time. My initiation into the community had begun.
Brighton, Ontario
OVER THE RAINBOW
Every time I hear “Over the Rainbow” it brings tears to my eyes, for a very good reason.
Nineteen eighty-one was a bad year. My husband died early that year and, a few months later, in July, I almost lost my eldest son, Nick.
Nick was a music student at Mohawk College in Hamilton.
He was born with a medical condition that we became aware of when he was seven. Because this condition limited him physically, he quickly fell in love with music. Music was Nick’s life.
A few months after his father’s death, Nick became ill and went into the hospital in Hamilton.
The neurosurgeon told me that Nick needed surgery, but that the risk was high and if he survived he could be completely or partially paralyzed.
Nick’s brother and I sat through the six-and-a-half-hour su
rgery in the hospital waiting room.
Finally we were told that Nick had come through okay but that we’d have to wait and see regarding his mobility.
A day later Nick slid into a coma. He’d had a stroke. He did recover, and was eventually sent to another hospital for physiotherapy, but the prognosis was bad. He was told that he most likely wouldn’t walk again and that he’d never again play the piano.
Nick went into a deep depression. He refused to talk to his music teacher or students from Mohawk. He wouldn’t even listen to music.
His brother and I tried to encourage him; we told him he had to believe in himself. We told him that anything was possible.
Months passed. Each Sunday I would leave my home in St. Catharines and go and visit Nick in the hospital.
By the time six months had passed, Nick was able to talk and “walk” himself around the hospital in a wheelchair.
One Sunday I arrived at the ward for our visit and found that Nick wasn’t there. I was desperately worried about him until one of the other patients said he’d gone down to the common room.
I hurried down there and found Nick sitting at the piano. He was trying to play “Over the Rainbow.” His fingers were collapsing on the keyboard and tears were streaming down his face. This was the turning point for him. After another six months of therapy, Nick came out of the hospital and returned to complete his degree at Mohawk College.
At the graduation concert Nick walked onto the stage, threw down his canes, limped to the piano, and played a concerto he’d written. He received a standing ovation. It was the proudest day of my life.
Calgary, Alberta
A TINY SILVER BIRDCAGE
I grew up in Berlin, East Germany. My parents, both stage designers by profession, spent most of my childhood talking about leaving East Germany for West Germany.
This was a crucial decision, because there was no way back. Once you left East Germany you couldn’t return home. We were subject to the most severe travel restrictions. We weren’t allowed to travel to Western countries, which made it nearly impossible for people to cross the border.
I witnessed my parents wrestling with this. Numerous times they claimed that they’d made the final decision to stay or to go. And then I would watch them change their minds for various reasons. Even as a child I was able to tell that this wasn’t easy for them.
I wasn’t convinced that the predicted paradise truly existed on the other side of the wall. But I began to replace my parents’ escape fantasy with one of my own. I too began to focus on something in the West, but way farther west than my mother and father were aiming. The first word I wrote, at the age of five, wasn’t my name. It was “Canada.”
My East German kindergarten teachers were not amused with my growing admiration for a land that was considered part of the evil West. They confronted my parents and asked them why their son was writing “Canada” everywhere he could: in the sand, on the wall, on the table, even on the skin of my palm. My parents couldn’t explain it; they had no clue where it came from. They suspected that my aunt, who worked at the public library, may have given me a book with the alluring maple leaf on the cover.
At school I was more familiar with the shape of the St. Lawrence River and Hudson Bay than with the geography of my own country. I begged my mother to stitch maple leaves onto my clothes.
My parents were still thinking about how to escape our socialist country. In early 1989 they made their most serious attempt. They used a fake invitation to an exhibition in West Berlin to apply for an artist visa. As soon as they received the permit to cross the border, they packed the car with exhibits. The documents they would need for the new start in West Germany—like birth certificates and proof of their degrees— were hidden underneath the costumes of the fairy tale marionettes. The plan was that my father would “officially” escape, meaning he would announce to East German officials his desire to stay in the West after he became a registered refugee there. Afterward, the rest of the family would apply for permission to follow him.
This was one of the known procedures East German people used to leave the country illegally.
My father ended up in a refugee camp in West Berlin. He was anything but happy. He had to live with four other men in a narrow shipping container. He missed his family and his house.
He’d never been convinced that leaving the East would be the best idea. The situation he found himself in made him feel even more doubtful. When he implied this in several phone calls with my mother and then told her that he was close to returning, she decided to mount an attempt to rescue the plan.
If the guards would let her cross the border with her own visa, she would visit my father, cheer him up, and convince him to stay. With this intention she left my sister and me for a day trip to the western side of the Berlin Wall.
She achieved the opposite of what she’d hoped; my father’s yearning to be reunited with the family grew even stronger when he saw his wife. It began to dawn on my mother that the plan was failing.
She made two more trips to see my father. After the third visit she realized it would most likely be her last.
She walked through the streets of West Berlin in despair. East German officials would never allow them to travel again after this illegal escape attempt. In her resigned mood she thought it would be the very last time she could be in the West in her entire life.
Lost in thought, she reached Kreuzberg, one of the Turkish neighbourhoods in West Berlin. She stopped in front of an antique silver store and spotted a silver birdcage in the shop window. It was tiny—made to be worn on a necklace. There was an even tinier bird in it, sitting on a bar. She bought the necklace for me as a gift. When she gave it to me she told me that my father would soon return. She said that they’d never be able to leave the isolation of East Germany, but that, one day, I’d be leaving alone. If they had to stay forever, at least I should go and see the world outside the cage. I decided then and there that that little piece of jewellery would be my lucky charm. I would wear it as a symbol whenever I crossed the border.
In the fall of 1989 political change came. I was eighteen years old when the boundaries of the Eastern Bloc were pried open. All of a sudden it was possible for us to travel the world.
In the following years I visited many countries. Out of an inexplicable hesitation I didn’t go to Canada. Maybe I shied away from my own expectations—which were, I figured, connected to the fantasies of that difficult time so many years ago.
I finally did make it, however. I am, like my parents, an artist, and a couple of years ago I was invited by another artist to an exhibit in Toronto. I remembered the lucky charm my mother had given me fifteen years earlier. I wore the birdcage on a silver ring in my ear when I passed the Canadian border control.
I had only twelve days to discover my “promised land.” It was long enough for me to fall in love with a Canadian woman. She made me want to stay in your country forever. I did have to leave, on that twelfth day, but I left part of myself with her. As we said our goodbyes at the airport, I handed her the birdcage, hastily telling her the story.
In the past two years she has shown me much of Canada’s beauty and introduced me to many wonderful Canadians. Modern Canada is different from the one I dreamt of as a child. But the Canada I love now is real.
Berlin, Germany
TEACHING THE DANCER TO PULL
I was born on a farm in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia. My father’s parents shared their home with us. Their other son, my uncle Robbie, owned a similar property a short distance down the road. Since there was little money to buy farm equipment, the two brothers shared everything. Not only did they share implements and machinery, but they each contributed a horse to the team required to perform heavy tasks around the farms and woodlots.
Eventually my father took over my grandfather’s farm. Grandfather had a carriage horse named Dick. In his youth, Dick had been a racehorse pacer. In his new career he was more suited to pulling the ridi
ng wagon or passenger sleigh than being hitched to a wagon tongue with a draught horse on the other side. When Dick saw an open road he had only one thought: run.
Down at the other farm, my uncle had Queenie and Gunner, a well-matched horse team. When Queenie died, Gunner needed a teammate. Out of necessity, Dick was put into a work harness.
The life of the speedster was about to change.
Gunner was a sturdy-legged, Canadian prairie boy. Because of his size and strength he’d previously worked as a draught horse in a logging camp. When my uncle returned home from the First World War he bought Gunner to work on his farm.
Those who served as teamster to the mismatched pair had to work hard to keep Dick in check. As a small girl, I recall standing in my grandmother’s bedroom watching the horses haul hay, apples, firewood, logs, pit props, and whatever other loads they were asked to pull. As I watched I sensed Dick’s impatience at his plight.
No one knows what my uncle’s designation was in the army, but I assumed he’d been a gunner, and that that was the origin of his horse’s name. However, my brother Ernie recently told me that originally Gunner had been trained by the military to pull field guns. The war ended before he was shipped overseas, so he escaped the horrors of France. His work in logging camps, even in harsh conditions, paled beside the life he would have experienced pulling heavy artillery in the muddy and bloody battlefields. The horse soldier now had much gentler battles to fight. One was the red Annapolis Valley clay that stuck to his hooves like glue when it rained, and the other was teaching Dick, the dancer, to pull.
Ajax, Ontario
THE BIG MOVE
Time Now for the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange Page 10
