It is so useful, dammit

It’s not that I haven’t had a thought or found anything provocative since June 26. It’s that for late June and all of July, I was making up new eClass websites and notes for my Fall Term classes, so I could go on holiday at the end of July but be ready to go back into the classroom when I got home. 

Then it was that I was spending a lot of time in the sun on the beach at Nice, thinking about going into the water. And a lot of up to my chin in the Med., thinking about getting out to enjoy more of the sun. And a lot of time thinking about which restaurant we would go to for supper, to enjoy more piles of fresh seafood.

Then I was thinking about how relaxed I felt after coming home.

Then I was thinking about plans for a Sept. 19 poetry workshop I was co-hosting with Anna Marie Sewell, for the Edmonton Poetry Festival.

Then I was back into Fall classes, thinking through the dullness of a cold that was draining my energy for much but teaching.

I was, with many of my colleagues, also thinking about provincial government policies and practices, backed by University blogs and state-of-the campus missives, that seem to indicate there is some concern that showing up to do our job is maybe wasting our students’ time, as we in the Faculty of Arts are not “training” them for jobs.

Pronouncements from the Ministry of Enterprise and Advanced Education the past few months mention the plan to develop more jobs through a more entrepreneurial spirit. Then they cut the budgets and shrink the programs of the universities and colleges where entrepreneurial (as opposed to MBA managerial) skills and vision can get a start.

Then the tech schools brag they are being spared because they are training people for jobs. But without imagination developed through non-job-training types of education (i.e. not just apprenticeships and other training to be employees), without imagination to see opportunity and to have the confidence and thought processes to see it through, what jobs are they training people for. Not the new ones that have not been created.  Just the existing ones—the ones that disappear with the end of every resource boom and the end of every construction project.  

Scouting not for Boys

Scouting For Boys, by Lord Baden-Powell himself. It was one of those good gift/bad gift choices. Good for a twelve-year-old boy just entering the age of independence, written to teach him all sorts of useless but time-consuming and distracting life skills great for a war fought long ago in South Africa, and to create a narrative to ease him out of childhood on the promise of competence in adventurous outdoor situations of all sorts. A book to stimulate the imagination.

Bad because it was, after all, a book for BOYS. The narrative spoke of courtly, gentlemanly standards of a time long gone—if it had ever been. And it didn’t say anything useful about the kinds of stimulation going on as puberty set in. Oh, there were some deeply coded warnings about being clean in thought, word, and deed, and resisting temptations to self-abuse or self-defilement, or some such activity. Nothing about his testicles, wrestling like rambunctious puppies in his nut sac. Nothing about the dazzling procession of erections that kept getting twisted up in his shorts. In Math class. In Science class. In Music class. In Literature class. In Sunday School. On the bus. On the street. On his paper route. While thinking about red-headed Nancy. While not thinking about red-headed Nancy. No help from Lord BP himself on that aspect of becoming fit for adulthood.

And no way to reconcile all that advice on courtesy and clean thinking and respect for women when all his hormones were urging “Go for it, Cowboy.” Whatever “it” might be. That was the worst part. Not having much of a clue what “it” was, other than sniggering acknowledgement it was something only bad girls did with bad boys. Older boys. Something older boys only smirked about. Something to do with that live animal in his pants. He knew that much because once, when some embarrassing story about teen pregnancies came up on the tv, his dad—the guy who had given him Scouting For Boys—had said, “Let that be a lesson to you. Keep it in your pants.” 

By that time, it wasn’t so much the contents of his own pants that concerned him. Not so exclusively. It was the mysterious contents of red-headed Nancy’s pants. But Nancy was a good girl. At least, none of the bigger, older boys had told any sniggering stories about her—not in his hearing. Not like they told about Rachel. Rachel who missed a lot of school. Rachel who, it was whispered—especially by the good girls-- missed a lot of school to go riding in cars with older boys chasing something called “tail” (which seemed to refer to something way different from what it referred to in Scouting for Boys). There was something not quite right here. Rachel who was so open and friendly and funny? Rachel who got pretty good marks in school as easily as she seemed to have acquired a pretty bad reputation outside of it? How could the two things be possible in one person? Nothing about that in Scouting For Boys.  

It took rather a long time before he figured out Scouting For Boys had been written to keep the red-headed Nancys of the world safe from ignorantly stimulated adolescent thoughts like his had been. And the Rachels safe from the pollution of unclean words about unproven deeds. And by then, the two of them lived in a different city from him--the surest socio-sexual counter-stimulant of all.

No compass bearing, star-reading, track-reading boyhood skills could close that gap.

Two for Father's Day:

 Fatherhood: No wonder it's such a complicated concept.

My father died forgetful, but unforgettable, for so many actions and so many traits.

Grand father and son                                      

In photos, desert-uniformed

military trimmed

nineteen and twenty year olds

lounge jauntily, pleasurably on or under

armed wings of now obsolete

killing machines in North Africa,

relieving boredom or

relaxing between or before

risking, meeting or dealing

death sixty-six years ago; men

young as this other

nineteen-year-old in

Death-Metal T-shirt

peacefully scanning, enjoying

images of himself reflected in

one subject of many pictures:

Family resemblance not completely

masked by much longer hair, and

flouting little beard 

Between these two young men is

me, the only aged face

in this unsnapped shot,

shared features wrinkled over by

gathering symptoms of late and

lengthening middle age---

Hair thinning beyond military standards

beard vainly removed because

a shade too close to Santa;

thankful the pictured youngster

survived to generate these now

bi-focalled eyes and gift this

vision, living history

traced in a cocky

bullet-proof late-teen

grin shared across

miles and miles and

years and years.

#####################

History lessons

Sunday night in September

at Greenwoods’ listening to the poet read

a poem about reading a poem

at Greenwoods’ four years ago.

Shelves of War Books

behind. My dad is maybe mentioned

in one or two of the histories. He was in

several sixty years after D-Day.

I’ve never read them or searched out

those references. Maybe they tell stories

I’ve heard a dozen times or more, live

in the living room or at the family table. Maybe

they’re stories a son should never hear

about his father.  Maybe they’re so

slight they will mimic the life

he seemed to think he had lived ever since,

trying to regain the status he once risked --

asking a kid on the C-train who has no idea

what he’s talking about, coming home

from a Flames game in Calgary,

“Say, why don’t  you stand up

and give an old Spitfire pilot a seat?”

Telling us in moments of our own relative

or perceived failure, “You’d never

make it as a fighter pilot,”

as if we should want to try.

As if that were the only test of a man’s worth.

As if he could have celebrated with us if we did

make it in the world that made him better

than we could ever be.

We all had to survive that war,

many times over,

his kids and him. 

June 2013 draft

 

Wanderlust

Moez Surani, in his GEIST Magazine essay "Driving to the Grave of Thomas Mann," (http://www.geist.com/articles/driving-with-maurice-sambert/)  recounts this delightful exchange over why his friend Maurice Sambert would take such trips, and why he was so interested in the final resting places of writers past: "We spend all of our years living in different houses, in different cities, we travel around, trying different cultures, and all we are looking for is the place where we want to die. Then we stay there and wait for it. We wait to be taken. For these writers, it is the final decision they make." 

Apart from the fact that we can finally afford it, maybe that's why I have developed a desire to travel a bit more these last few years. I don't mind having lived and made a living in Edmonton the last 27 years, and to be counting down an indeterminate few more to retirement. But I just do not want to die here. Or to be interred here. Many people achieve those ends or make their endings in Edmonton--the cemeteries prove it, even of they are not the reason for the city's notorious nickname: "Deadmonton." I just do not want to be one of those people. If I have to wait for death, in terms of climate and amenities, there are so many more comfortable and hospitable places, and in terms of company there must be somewhere with more people I can appreciate and maybe connect with. That might even appreciate and welcome me.

It's not Edmonton's fault. But I have this gnawing sense that I have never truly fit in here. At work, I am in a limbo position between the short-term temporary teaching staff in my department, and the permanent, tenured faculty--not quite part of either. I have made no lasting friendships here, formed no unbreakable bonds. Oh, I have found ways to make myself useful, and all that. But my departure would be unremarkable, and, I think,  largely unremarked. 

Edmonton for me has always been rather an accidental way station: it was not the place I chose to spend by far the longest period of residency in my working life.  It was meant to be a place I came to for an education and to complete a degree and to move on from. Only . . . I never moved on. And I never really committed to it as "home," just as the place I lived. It became by default the place Eva and I married, had a baby, raised a son, and watched him leave for his own education, leaving us behind. 

That seems to be the larger source of agitation and motive for wanderlust. I hate the sense of stasis that comes of living in a default setting and of being left behind when there is so much out there out there. 

Maybe I'm inheritor of the same restlessness expressed by Tennyson's Ulysses, who found he could not abide sitting, that he could not rest from travel. It's just that I never was that much of an adventurer to begin with, so the urge is rather late in arriving. I might not have spent all of my life traveling, but it is time to get on with it, time to shake off routine and be en route.