A relative of mine offered up the suggestion that because I was tall and wide shouldered, I'd make a great military policeman. I was instantly insulted. What I heard was...you'd make a great, tall wide shouldered drone. I considered myself reasonably bright and artistically inclined...so that idea seemed a lot like a cheap shot on a fellow family member.
( I had no clue what a military cop did, but I was wasn't interested in blindly following orders then, or now. )
Besides, daily shaving was not on my to-do list.
In grade school, I was on top of my scholastic duties and got top marks, and pretty much enjoyed the whole process. As high school dragged on, and uninspired day after uninspired day oozed by, I began to lose my zest for the whole idea of school and forward motion. The usual distractions kicked in, dirt bikes, cars and girls. These things can keep you very busy and fully occupied all by themselves.
At one point in grade eleven, I just couldn't do it any more. I started to skip classes or miss the whole day all together. I developed a new routine. Catch the school bus, maybe or maybe not show up for home room and attendance....then bail out. This involved going for long walks around town away from the school. Some days if the weather was good, I'd head to the beach to toss rocks at driftwood, or just sit and watch the tide go in and out.
If I had a few bucks to spare, then I could go to a coffee shop and read the paper ten times over and stare out the window. This is all pre-Starbucks, pre-Ipod, pre-internet, so that whole experience was pretty meat and potatoes.
I couldn't make sense of the whole school/work connection in a way that allowed me to be comfortable in the system that was requiring my attendance. My dad was a hard working logger, but never really showed off how bright he was. ( he somehow knew the risks of sticking your head up above the crowd ) My mom worked as a practical nurse and may or may not have been just a tad nuts. She was certainly one of the meanest, foul mouthed people I've ever met...maybe that was just some bad chemistry between her and me. Both parents had a fairly high daily intake of alcohol ( I'd have to imagine that dad drank to be able to tolerate his wife )....You know how it can be described as " They struggled with alcohol addiction "...well in this case it was no struggle...it was all out immersion...deep end of the pool kinda stuff.
You know it takes a lot of effort to stay "lost" all day long, when your supposed to be in school, but your not. Time drags, there's no friends to hang with, and not enough pocket money to fund a truly great adventure. When I was a kid, I never smoked pot, so getting stoned and cruising carefree though the day wasn't an option. I made it through a month of skipping just about every class, every day.
A pair of nice shoes and brown pants arrived in the driveway and stood beside my feet that were sticking out from beneath the car. A voice inquired "What are you doing?"
I answered back, "Trying to get these spring bushings out."
The voice calmly and clearly restated the question with a twist.
"No, I mean what are you doing with your life?"
Hmm..maybe I should crawl out and see who I'm talking to now.
It was my metal work teacher, John Spence. He had driven to my house on a Saturday to see what the hell I was up to. My parents saw me leave on the bus everyday and return in the afternoon, so there was a big gap in their knowledge of things. John had called them to ask if I was OK, and was I ill or injured. John in his kindness didn't fill them in on the details of a full thirty or so days of no-shows. He was standing in my driveway on his day off, to ask politely if I would consider returning to school ( and attending all the classes ). John Spence said that he would arrange with the other teachers to get me caught up in lessons, and back in shape to pass into grade twelve. So there in the driveway, ( the one in the picture...standing between the car and house ) we shook hands on a deal that would transform my life, and have me owe John a debt of gratitude for....well pretty much for the rest of my life.
So...I went to Elphinstone High school in the seventies...on the Sunshine Coast....returning to school didn't exactly go the way you might assume. John did indeed negotiate with the other teachers to re-assimilate me into the system. Catching up on math, sucked something fierce.
Shop and metal-work...I owned those classes, I was such a gear head and grease-monkey in those days! When I ran out of metal work assignments, John had me and Joey Boser go to his house and cut 24" hand split shakes for the roof of his new house. ( Both of our dads were shake cutters...a near lost art now ).
In English class, the Welsh madman, Geoff Madoc-Jones enjoyed my written creative work and just barely tolerated my complete refusal to play along with sentence structure and rules assignments. Obviously he consulted with John Spence on this issue, and that resulted in Madoc-Jones fence and driveway getting repaired by me and a few friends.
Near the end of the school year, Geoff Madoc-Jones took me aside after class and asked what kind of grade I thought I deserved. I pondered this for a bit, an "A" was out of the question...a person should know a pronoun from an adjective in order to pull that off. Pretty much the same for any kind of a "B". I ran out of reasonable options in my head, so I asked for a hint...
"What do I need to pass?"
Madoc-Jones replied "A C plus will get you a pass...and out of my sight"
Done deal, another handshake from another reasonable person and off I went.
Seemed like a pretty fair deal to me at the time, and I still appreciate the tolerance, kindness and vision of these people. Seems to me that everyone did they best they could with what they had to work with.
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We did have some really second rate teachers and counselors too. Lots of issues with teachers smoking pot, and doing other various drugs, screwing other teachers and having relationships with students...just showing up to collect a paycheck etc. Combine that with a small community that in those days was all about logging, commercial fishing and working at the pulp mill, it's lucky that we had a few people out there trying their best to make a difference.
We had several teachers and assistants who were Vietnam vets ( 1976...the whole Vietnam war thing was still cooling down in the minds of people ) Every single one of these guys, were the nicest, most considerate of all the staff...for whatever reason , I don't know.
Our teachers were also very creative in their own right. In grade twelve, they arranged for a noon time floor hockey game in the gymnasium. Individual invitations to play in the lunch time game were made personally from teacher to student. When we all assembled at the appointed hour, it didn't sink in right away...but there was a lack of the established school jocks in the student line-up. You know, the usual suspects for a sporting event. The other thing that went unnoticed was the lack of a ref and whistle to calls on broken rules and bad conduct ....Hmmmm.
It wasn't until the game started that it all became painfully obvious, we were set up. With in seconds the teachers unleashed years of pent up frustration by bashing us head long into the boards and slashing mercilessly at our shins, legs, arms...pretty much whatever was hanging out to be hit with a floor hockey stick
Calls for fair play and a ref went unheeded. We we trying to play floor hockey, and the teachers were trying to beat us into submission with high sticks and body blows.You could hardly blame them really..spending all that good money and time getting in to teaching and then having to face the likes of us...? At about twenty minutes into the
It was really only then, that we fully realized how badly we had all been sucked in.
Different times,.... near the end of corporal punishment, away from frivolous lawsuits, and still in the days of getting a whooping for stepping out of line. Not like these days when the student is likely to either sue or shoot the teachers for looking at them the wrong way.
Looking back. If I had to go back and whisper into my own sixteen year old ears, I would say this...
1. Listen to your heart, it's really the only reliable source of information out there.
2. Take responsibility for your own life...it's yours and yours alone...sculpt it as only you can.
3. Somewhere, somehow you need a mentor. Someone to explain the basic rules and shine a light into the darkness.
4. If you need to be a poet that comes from a line of sewer workers, so be it. If you need to be a tool-push on the oil rigs, coming from a family of academics, then that'll just have to be OK.
5. Get yourself a set of friends that accept you as you are, and will come a running when the shit hits the fan...and the bad times set in for a long stay.
6. Keep asking questions...accept nothing as the gospel truth..especially if you sense something is amiss with the so-called "truth".
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