Yellow

 Yellow
     By Palsy and Jaundice Pauls

At some predictable time in the morning, the napping mats were placed on the floor and all of us kindergarten kids had to lay down and be quiet for a short length of time, maybe 15 minutes. I liked it, that respite from noise and activity. I believe John Zacharias (not the one that was my uncle), whose family ran the Zacharias’s Store, whom I forever feared right till leaving Altona, attended kindergarten when I was there, but my close village friend Norman Schmidt and my other close friend, Ronald Enns, did not. Other students whom I found myself among were David Friesen, who later became the CEO of D. W. Friesen’s printing in Altona, Manitoba, Margaret Loewen, who later became my older brother’s wife, Grant Thiessen, Grace Braun and Libby Friesen. Libby, Grace and Margaret, when they were in high school, sang on our local CFAM radio station and various local venues as a trio, as a popular, lithesome and generally beloved three graces of our modest town. 
     In middle school, or as it is usually called, elementary school, my grades suffered. I like to think that the reason for this concerned or had to do with my shortsightedness. My grades also suffered later in high school, where I recall getting 52% in English literature. I later received a doctorate in English lit and taught it for 40 years or so in both the high school and at the University. 
     I was tall for a grade 10 student. Six foot two placed me on the basketball team coached by Harry Pauls. Besides playing games at the Altona Collegiate, our team, the Altona Aces, travelled to a few other towns in the vicinity, such as Lowe Farm, Winkler and Plum Coulee. Since I saw about as well as someone with good eyesight looking through the bottom of a Coke bottle, my role on the team was  ornamental, was simply to sit on the bench and look tall. I once received praise from the coach in the two years that I “played” the game. Moose, another team member, who played every game and most of the entire game time, ran past me, I had the ball, I successfully passed it to him by bouncing it on the floor once between his body and mine and he scored. Harry Pauls cheered and yelled his praise of the success—of the style—of the pass. The Lowe Farm gymnasium had no space past the net which was simply attached to the wall. When you did a layup you had to also smash into the wall simultaneously.
     Norman Schmidt did not play basketball but dutifully headed home after school to feed livestock and clean livestock pens. For this reason we seldom walked the mile from the high school to the village together. Once when we did, he bloodied me so badly that my mother nearly fainted when I entered the room where she was sewing. This sounds vicious but it was not, since it was an accident. Spring ice in the rutted black fields simply called to us to slide. With rubber boots on. You ran, built up speed, and slid as far as you could. Being in the process of doing this just as Norman fired a good sized rock at a telephone insulator on a pole, I ended up in precisely the correct place to receive that rock on the top of my head. Scalps always bleed profusely when cut. My white T-shirt was blood red over the shoulders and down almost to my belly button because the cut was quite severe. Quite severe but not life-threatening.
    Terry Sawatsky and I attended young people’s meetings weekly. We also sang in the church choir. It may have been Gordon Friesen with whom I sang in the choir. Nevertheless, we enjoyed the silliness we could stir up in the back row of the choir without being noticed by the conductor. Our interest there was mischievous, and focussed in part at least on the females in the choir. They spent not one minute thinking of us as attractive males but we thought about some of them a fair amount as attractive females. 
     We had teachers who got from us identifying handles (nicknames): Screwy Bob, Chromedome, AP, Bertie, Hairy. My most vivid picture of one, whose handle escapes me, must be my grade twelve chemistry teacher. His red mop, above a pale face given to intense reddening at the slightest embarrassment, suggested to us the necessity of making jokes at his expense. His very stature (six feet six inches and weighing no more than 120 pounds) contributed to our desire to discombobulate him. 
     He wore always the same outfit, a black suit without a sign of shoulders and a starched white shirt buttoned right up to his Adam’s apple, finished off each and every day with a bow tie of the most brilliant yellow, as if he had a canary tied at his neck. One day at recess Terry suggested we all make yellow bow ties and wear them when he entered the classroom after lunch. We did that. When he turned at the front of the room he found himself facing thirty bright bow ties, coloured using yellow Marks-a-Lot.      
      In chemistry, which I can’t claim to have understood in the least, I received a final mark of 36%. Norman Schmidt, my friend (by five miles the best artist in the school) received, if my memory serves me right, a whopping 11%. We were not proud of these accomplishments, but also not devastated by the thought that we were stupid.     
     I returned for a second year to high school to take a class that I needed in order to complete my senior matriculation. History. With Albert Schmidt, Norman‘s relative. Albert had much influence over me in my life. Once, me being a prompter in a high school play, and thus also one of the boys who cleaned up after practices, Albert Schmidt, who directed the play, commenting on my behaviour (which must’ve always been that of a comedian), obviously exasperated by my antics, said to everyone who was left in the auditorium, “Reimer, you will never be anything better than a street sweeper.” And I think he was right. I am no better than a street sweeper and, although I feel no superiority over street sweepers, I find that the longing to judge one person as more valuable than another has either never existed for me or has receded from me to the point that I no longer recognize it as an internal energy.
     So many more memories of school days flit about in my mind, some of which I intend to record over time, but which for now will need to be left unremembered.