Marty and Me, Me and Marty

Marty and Me, Me and Marty 
     by Epithalamion Leigh

May, 1969. David F Friesen invites me to bring my guitar to Red Rock Lake Bible Camp to be music leader for a group of 18 year olds having a young peoples meeting/conference/spiritual experience at the camp. I am older by 4 years than the others, except for Friesen. All goes well. I meet Marty. We Rendezvous at the lakeshore late afternoon and canoe to Turtle Island. We walk, we hold hands (me trembling, melting, everything otherworldly), I notice her wonderful green sweater, covering a small body, and that (along with something I haven’t put my finger on yet) altogether pleases me greatly. 
     On the ride home I sit in the front seat next to her. My arm touches her arm the entire way home for two hours. This is completely new territory for me. I’ve never sat so close to a female for such a period of time ever before.
     I am in love but can’t bring myself to believe that it can be so. Of course I’m not, because I haven’t known her long enough. My sister Gwen asks me if I intend to call her. This is a few days later. Right then I have almost forgotten Marty. Survival mode. I cannot believe that I would be of interest to her more than for a day or two, because I have never (tear jerker time) believed in my worth. So there you have it, I have always felt rather worthless. But have by now brilliantly succeeded in reversing this debilitation over three quarters of a century. Just kidding. 
     Mustering courage, I call her. She lives in Portage la Prairie. She teaches primary school there. It is her first year on the job as a teacher. We talk, we agree to meet at Island Park for a picnic. I bring my guitar and sing for her; “I Dreamed I saw Saint Augustine.” And “House of the Rising Sun.” And “You’re as Fine as Fine can Be.” She wears a wide-skirted, turquoise summer dress she’s made herself, and on her slight frame she appears delicate and fragile to me. Her face dazzles me. I feel lucky I’m short-sighted! I get that wrong about her too. When we embrace it feels like I’ve got hardly anything in my arms. 
     That year I live in Winnipeg’s north end, on Dominion Street, at my brother Jim’s and my sister-in-law Marg’s place. Close to the Armory.  During the next year, Marty and I bus back-and-forth between Winnipeg and Portage la Prairie every weekend. (Jim: “Doug, you and Marty can’t sleep together if you’re going to stay at our house.”)  I have a small room upstairs with a child-size desk where I try to do my first year university English literature assignments. Being with Marty is so much more fun than writing essays for Robert Green, for Professor Robert Green. I get an F on my first essay and suggest to him in his office that I should probably pack it in. He tells me, in that unfamiliar-to-me British accent of his, not to be so hasty; that I am essentially a good writer, but a verbose one. I continue, I make some writing/thinking changes towards plain style, I get a C+ on my next essay and I end up near the top of the class by the end of the year. 
     I drink wine as I study. My nascent habit should have suggested to me by now (and did, sort of) the detour I will take in the next three decades. I start making homemade wine at the age of 15, I intermittently (too often) drink too much for 30 years, I have my very Last Drink on the way home from the cottage in my 1966 Mazda B 2200. I’m alone and stop outside of the pub in the west end of Kenora. (Ontario, Northwestern Ontario, if you are not familiar with Kenora.) It’s a couple of glasses of draft beer. I have tried to quit many times before with varied success, in Thompson, in Grand Rapids, in Winnipeg, in Winkler. This time it sticks. I leave half a glass of beer on the Formica. I get up and get out of there and drive the rest of the way home in my truck. 
     July,1970. We marry and move to Grand Rapids, Manitoba. We teach there for two years, then enrol at the University of Manitoba for another two years before excepting work in Thompson, Manitoba. The process of getting that job proves to be quite exciting because of a strange case of mistaken identity. The seven years that we spend in Thompson are fraught with experience, some of which, not all of which, is destined to see a retelling on these pages. In subsequent stories. 
      In 1981, Marty and I return to Winnipeg where for a number of years, while living in a side-by-side in Fort Richmond, a suburb in the southern part of the city, Marty kindly takes care of the three children that we by this time have somehow acquired. I enter an MA, and eventually a doctoral, program. So, to review, I switch from teaching primary school in Grand Rapids to high school in Thompson and, in this final stage, for the next 25 years, to lecturing at the University of Manitoba. Marty studies too and her area of specialty is psychology. The only course of hers that I recall us discussing is Statistics with a Dr. Kesselman who, not so popular with his charges, passes only a small percentage of the students in his classes.
     When I finish my MA degree and Marty receives her baccalaureate (1983), we struggle to decide what to do for the next number of years. Whether fortunately or not, we choose to move to Winkler, MB where I take a job in high school English and Marty stays home with the children. My career in winkler lasts approximately three months. Well, actually not that long; two months, more like. At this point (blessed with a cavernous bout of clinical depression), I begin to write fiction and eventually (1990) enroll in graduate school for my doctorate. In 1995 I become Dr. Reimer. In November Marty remarkably dives into a teaching job while I recover at home. 
     Probably the most memorable moment in which I experience the success I have achieved happens the day I pass my orals. I tell the class of 50 first year literature students (Eng. 4.120)  that I’ve just become Dr. Reimer! A student raises her hand and asked whether from now on they have to call me Dr. Reimer. I say, no, that’s fine, you can call me Mr. Reimer. Another person asks whether it’s OK if they call me Reimer. Yep, I concede, with a pretended reluctance. Another enters what is quickly becoming a game and asks if they can call me Douglas. I say, sure, no problem! A student in the back row shouts, Can we call you Dougie? And I say, happy at the fact of life in these kids, Absolutely not! I draw the line at Dougie. And, of course, lots of laughter.
     Outside of continuing to learn to live together, the rest of our married life is unremarkable. Well, not entirely, I suppose. If I thought that our earlier married life occasionally went off the rails and was most difficult and that all would get easier, then what I think now is that the mature period of our cohabitation has had us encountering more difficulties than ever. Life does not get easier as you get older, especially if experiences before this in the years preceding have meant that you are not overly judgemental nor overly worried about following conventions and conforming to social proprieties. Maybe for the better, maybe not, living in Thompson taught us that, if it taught us anything. It taught us to think about our life less in terms of how we might best benefit the community, let’s say of Winkler, than it taught us how to navigate an imagination and a life of excitement. It goaded us into attempting to walk shoulder to shoulder instead of face to face through everything the world offers. Ideas became unscary to us. Homosexuality, alcoholism and addictions, death and dying, friends who seemed not to understand and were judgemental and yet we stayed friends, the absence of family, the end of the familiar, both of people close to you and those far away, and many, many other ideas that often cause anxiety in us humans somehow didn’t overwhelm us. 
     Music suddenly became big in our family life. In ‘78 I bought a ‘73 Martin D28 acoustic guitar. It was, next to family, my great love. Daughter Jess and I formed a bluegrass band, “The Doug and Jess Band.” We sang at numerous festivals over the years. The band became my focus that, to a degree (a fairly big one), wrenched my stranglehold attention from philosophy to it. How exciting vanning it up to Smithers and Missouri Valley, or flying to Toronto, Ottowa and Nova Scotia, to sing at their venues and festivals. Little grandkids, Marty and us, the four-piece band, doing what we loved more than anything else. 
     One other thing that strikes me at the moment as worth narrating, or intruding as a point in this narration, is the fact that together Marty and I built a cabin in the northwestern Ontario woods near a lake, classic in its coniferous forest, deep blue waters, trout, muskellunge and even bears trying to get in at the door now and then. The cabin was and is very beautiful and it sits within a stone‘s throw of the edge of the lake. That is about all I have to say just now except that in the process of the last 20 years of our married life Marty has become an excellent writer and I have to come to make very attractive diamond willow walking sticks.
     
     
     

The Freewheeling Hansel and Gretel

[2009]

 The Freewheeling Hansel and Gretel 
     by Loug Conformity-is-Crucial       
     Leimer

Grim tales told by Hans Christian Anderson. Christian tales not told by the Grimms brothers. Hansel and Gretel meet the Grimm Reaper. Grimy landscapes from a white porch. Anderson died, Christian lived and Hans existed as a paraplegic, though his surgeon predicted that he would someday walk despite sitting in the direct line of the semi’s impact. 

     Hans told the story of his tragedy often to whoever he could get to listen (over time virtually everyone) using placards and grunting noises, prodding his sister, Grimmamma, until she reluctantly contributed in the telling of the story to the newcomer, or to the ones not audacious enough (given the raucous nature of the said Hans) to walk out of the room the second they recognized the persistent high-pitched calling and squealing of this wounded, gurney-bound, mobility-challenged person. 
     He had not the use of his arms and hands, nor the full employment of his mouth, but did of his bum. He sported the most alacritous anus. He had learned how to vigourously pinch his buttocks together to grasp a particular cue card and hold it legibly in the air by thrusting his cheeks sharply upwards before the faces of those conversing above him. 
      These cue cards outlined the essential facts of his accident.  It was amazing to behold him sort through these, some 50 of them, in a jiffy, rifling them about expertly with one of his buttocks as if it were a digit. He would get someone there to lick the right cheek as one does one’s pinky or forefinger to wet it in order to get purchase on a dry page. Then, with aplomb, quick as a wink, he would—sometimes to the accompaniment of a small fart, or even the decisive breaking of wind—find, take, lift, and display the cue card he’d been looking for and in print carry the story further, at times with the assistance of the reluctant offices of his sibling amanuensis. 
     He had special trousers and drawers constructed in aid of these endeavours, with folds and apertures through which he could, at will, thrust his gifted bum, an organ luckily unaffected by his otherwise omnipresent paraplegicity. Someone had to turn him over, however, to make these tale-telling achievements possible. Frequently ignored at first when he pled to be so rotated, his entreaties would speedily crescendo in volume and insistence till they came forward so stridently, and with such certain phonic heft, that the groans of oiliphants, and the barking of huge Arctic oxen were nothing to compare. 
     An incipient impatience, a growing irksomeness at the sudden heightening of bothersome noise in the room, would commonly cause bystanders to respond and assist him in his entreaties. Immediately, the moment he got
turned over, and in a flash, they would be treated to another series of cue card sentences, brought to them slickly by his dumb, breathing, infrequently scrubbed, continually appearing and disappearing nether flesh. Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity! O Spectacle! O oppression!
     Now, on a day when downtrodden Hans had fallen ill and died, Grimmamma at last found her future husband. Alone, willful, ill disposed to play and prancing, the newly discovered fellow sat in a nookling by a small brook and read some work or other (of which no hint will be given here). She espied of him. Drawing nearer, she soon convinced him to both board her and then woo her. Till by evening she wore his ring, one his grandmother had left in his keeping, he being oldest, till his young and lovely sister would be of age to marry. The ring fit Grimmamma poorly, but it would do for now. A preacher found and employed, they set about the production of children on the spot. After the preacher had expressed his surprise, they ate and drank and went to bed, and that was the pattern they followed for the rest of their days together. They divorced a few months later and she remained unmarried from that day fourth, did Grimmamma. 

Dorky’s Daydream

 Dorky’s Day Dream 
     By Douglas Dorkheimer the Second

Dorky (we called him Dorky in those days). He would, now and then, tell anyone who listened a story so quaint and curious it invariably drew embarrassed laughter all around ifi km pdzz a and the shaking of heads in disbelief. Magic island, my foot, you could see them thinking. And fairies and royalty, right! But on each occasion Dorky gave his account with such innocent enthusiasm and with such irreproachable, precise repetition that listeners sensed a new range of (how should I put it) possibilities within the workings of nature. Their senses underwent a widening of sorts in all but the most callous (or impaired among them), an expansion of mind that left each of them slightly less certain of the rules that govern nature and spirit in this world. And this is the story he told, introducing it with the assertion that you could set your clock by every detail in it, all of it one hundred and one percent true. (Reader, I regret that my rudimentary Italian limits the accuracy of my account. But, as Holmes himself often said about his own imprecision, “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.” Damned wise that.)
     “You would have had to be there,” Dorky would always continue, “as I was, having stowed away on the Argyle at Carthage bound for Italy and home. Within three days of departure, favoured by a pleasant, strong sou’wester, we ran with little warning into a change of weather so fierce and so precipitous we quickly lost all our rigging. Left with no choice in the matter, we flew before the winds to parts of the darkening seas known to no one.” 
     Anyone with half an imagination would have left his warm seat at the fireside to hear such a tale. Stormy crossings of the sea and shipwreck on an island with great loss of life and luggage appeal universally to men. Who would not stop whatever he was doing to find out if anyone survived and what they got up to on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere, unmarked on any maps known to man? So inevitably, half a dozen of us layabouts migrated to Dorky’s side to hear him tell it again. Always the tale struck us as newly minted, as something just now reported by a returning sailor. Or as if the tale, like blue jeans fresh out of the laundry, had undergone a sea change in Dorky’s mind and taken on wonderful and before unconsidered layers of mystery and meaning.  
     “The Argyle slewed and wallowed before the gale,” Dorky started, his voice a hoarse whisper, eyes fear-widened, “its masts down and overboard and its sails and rigging long since swept tangled and torn out to sea. The captain, a man of great valour, courageous to a fault, worked in vain to pilot his crippled vessel, calling all the while for the dejected sailors to take courage, calls lost in the demonic howling of the storm.” At each moment Dorky’s hands moved about in imitation of the good captains’ on the ship’s wheel and his features showed wildly the horror of the coming destruction. 
     “Oh! The confusion and terror among them all!” Dorky called, his head shaking in fruitless denial. “And, oh! The wild eyes and desperate prayers of the passengers! You must know that, to make matters worse, aboard this vessel we carried the king of Italy himself (for whose safety the crew felt deeply, fearfully responsible) as well as his retinue of both members of the royal family and acquaintances.  
     The storm grew steadily more savage so that the furious waves rose high above us and then fell with such a vicious weight upon the decks that before long our great ship broke deep and began to take on water. In terror sailors leapt over the rail, only to be immediately swept from our sight. In vain did our good captain implore us to remain steadfast and keep to our posts but none heard him above the roaring of sea and gale. 
    “And so it was that when the ship began to come apart the men all gave themselves to the embrace of the waves and the mercy of their maker. No one of them knew of the fate of the others, each grieving in his heart the loss of all the rest to their graves. 
     “But wonders befell this their world now (and I advise patience to you, my good readers, for I shall make all plain in good time). Finding himself with great good luck a few arm strokes from a ship’s mast the king swam to it and, grasping it in tired arms, gave himself up in despair to the water, wherever it might take him. And he was not the only one for whom flotsam provided a temporary salvation. I, too, Dorky Briggs Columbiner, almost at the end of my strength, found a shocking refuge that arrived not from heaven above but from the dark chaotic depths below. Facing down into the water, in the very act of giving myself over to it, I beheld, to my utter astonishment, a smoky and ghostly shape rising up towards me! Oh! My heart! The apparition began to clarify and suddenly i saw it to be an upturned face with its eyes starting from their sockets and its visage wild and fierce fixed on mine. And I knew the angel of death had come to claim me. 
     Then, to my amazement, I recognized the face of Quebecette, my good companion! His head broke the surface next to mine. We stared open-mouthed at each other. What else could possibly still happen? Surely, these little miracles threatened us! They must mean us some harm. They must mean the coming of…of… of a disaster greater even than the loss of the Argyle! Or else, maybe, just maybe (much less likely though more desirable) they presaged some wonderful thing still before us for which our miserable selves were being preserved. 
     This man, this fine friend, this Labin Lois Quebecette and I had initially distrusted each other. But that enmity soon diminished during the early days of our voyage. Within a week we’d found ourselves captive to friendship, bound together in a profoundness that even catastrophe could not hope to diminish. And then disaster had accomplished precisely such a split! This tempest had ripped us apart and left us with nothing but the hope for a quick death. 

Reimer’s Loose in Darp Altneijv

Reimer’s Loose in Darp Altneijv 
     by Clandestine Dougie 

Mom selected where we were to throw the slop. The kitchen gathered about 5 gallons of it every week. In summer it got tossed who knows where. In winter, though, it’s “traces” were more readily noticeable. If not Rudy, then I carried the pail out of the kitchen into the garage and out the back door where we stood on the doorstep and slung the murky mess in the direction of the big evergreen just a dozen yards away. Of course, the slop froze during the night. By the end of winter the frozen pile stood 2 to 3 feet high, often partly covered in snow, except in April when it began to thaw and smell. In later years I wondered if we were the only family in all of Altona who had that much hillbilly in us. I don’t recall any other family slinging its  slop out the back door of the house. I don’t recall any other family throwing slop onto the yard anywhere, except ours. I have felt a modicum of shame about our rudeness of manners, but mostly I have been proud of my family. Of us Reimers. 
     Once Rudi, my eight year old brother, younger by 3 1/2 years, jumped up and hung onto the attic opening just above the landing between our house and the attached garage. Since there was no lid over this opening, you could jump up and hold onto the two by fours that framed it. I heard him scream. I ran out the door to see him hanging there. I asked him what was the matter and he sounded incoherent. I believed something was wrong so I grabbed his legs and began to pull. I thought he was afraid of letting go. He screamed even louder. I tried pulling harder, calling for him to let go! He bellowed twice as hard. And then I stopped and noticed that with his eyes and his head he was attempting to get me to push him up. His eyes and face were making frantic up movements. So, I grabbed his legs again and pushed him higher. Now he let go the “hole” and I dropped him down beside me. Blood streamed down his hand. Apparently there had been a nail sticking right through his finger. It was bent in such a way that there was nothing he could do to loosen it because his weight pulled him down further onto the nail. No place his feet could reach to push against. He asked me, crying, “Why didn’t you lift me up? Why did you just keep pulling me down? Why were you so stupid?” What could I do to explain? How do you defend against accidental stupidness?
     Dad hated carrying out the cash-and-carry pail. Situated in the basement immediately beside, and in the sleepy warmth of, the Booker furnace, it needed emptying at least once a week. I knew that he hated the job because he inevitably waited half a week too long and it would fill up to and over the brim. The emptying process meant first successfully lifting the 5 gallon pail out of the tin container with the seat and lid. Once out of there (which feat itself took a prodigious effort, as anyone knows about 5 gallon pails full of an uncomfortable mixture of solids and liquids that have you also gagging while exerting). Once up and over, the 80 pound pail travelled the width of the basement, moved up a flight of eight stairs, got walked through the garage 20 feet to the back door, was lifted up onto the doorstep and then stepped gingerly out onto the icy backdoor landing and from there (in the fresh air) onwards to the toilet, the biffy. 
     Two full 5 gallon pails are hard enough for a man to carry. But one! One massy pail with its inevitable imbalance, pulling hard at either the right or left side of the body, is triply difficult. The distance from the back door to the outhouse was easily 150 feet. Oh Gauntlet! Oh Narrow Way! Oh Nemesis! You see, all winter the snow deepened in the back yard. That 150 feet became a monstrous obstacle course. The hard path, just ten inches wide where dad‘s steps had trodden it down (because it was not the path not taken!), increasingly deepened as winter wore on. Actually, the path increasingly rose upward and simultaneously packed down as more snow fell. And on each side of that hard ten inch wide path the snow rose and stayed soft. 
     I know that you know what I am about to tell you. I’m lying in my bunkbed in the basement, I hear dad scrabbling near the furnace and I realize what he’s about to do. When he gets to the first set of stairs I hear him say, “Oh, no! Obviously, the overfull container has sloshed and dribbled. I hear him proceed through the back door and then I don’t hear anything for a while.      
     However, shortly, from somewhere halfway down the path, I do hear a terrible outcry. A single word! And I know exactly what has occurred. It comes out later in dribs and drips. The snow beside the path has risen high enough to mean that he’s had to hold the 5 gallons higher than before so the bottom doesn’t scrape the snow, tilt and spill. 
     Suddenly, the unthinkable happens. His foot slips off the path and into the soft stuff and his body tilts sideways and he falls completely flat on his back, face up, into the snow, as if he’s about to make a snow angel. Unfortunately, the pail does not tip the way any normal human would like it to. Instead, its bottom hits hard against the uneven snow, the pail loses its proper center of balance, lays down on its side and empties itself immediately and entirely over the body of the person who is now lying bug-eyed in the snow, who seconds before was walking gingerly upright in the direction of two-holes. 
     Now, covered from head to toe in filth, dad jumps up raging in denial, and then in disbelief. Actually, no, he does not jump up, but struggles and writhes in a futile panic (probably likenable to Jacob desperately wrestling the angel) to get his body upright as quickly as possible. In order to do that, he has to flail around in the snow, in the brown stuff, until he is able to turn over onto his side and then onto all fours (face likely nose-deep in the snow, or nearest facsimile) and then that way slowly raise himself up to sitting, and eventually standing.
      From the basement, my first indication that there has been an incident is the sound of dad‘s voice calling out very loudly one word only,    
     “No!”
     Then again, a minute later,
     “No!”
     And two minutes after that, 
     “No!” A pause of 10 seconds followed by “No!” 
     Then again, “No! No! No!” No swearing or lengthy harangue but just a repetition of the single negative, as if in an attempt at whitewashing the event, of erasing the past. 
     All is quiet for a bit and I have decided that things are OK, and then I hear a sudden even stronger declaration, “No!” Pause. “No!”
    Intermittently, throughout the day, dad breaks into this particular song. This song of one word only, “No!” and then later suddenly any old time out of the blue (brown, really), 
     “No! No!”
     And tomorrow he teaches Sunday School, hoping, I’m sure, that the smell hasn’t stuck around, uncleanable by even “…all great Neptune’s ocean.”

Urgubabba Embers

 Urgubabba Embers
     by Doug the One-Eyed Wonder

President Moomoogabi reached over the embers of the sweat fire and asked for cake. He received it from the hands of the bowed figure directly across from him. On his right, a quaint and huddled form waited. When that one had received the goodie from the president, he in turn passed it directly over the fire to Pulvis, the priest in charge of the event. Pulvis likewise, after touching it again to his groin, reached it towards his right and that one shook his head. Pulvis offered it to the one on his left and, when that goodly person also declined to receive the morsel, he popped it into his own mouth. He smacked his lips loudly, as a sign of his enjoyment, and then asked for another.
     “One taste is never enough!” he remarked, and ate a second and then a third slice of kangaberry cake.
     “Nice!” he intoned and stood up to leave. 
     “ Not so fast!“ Moomoogabi growled. “Sit down! I’m not finished here!” Pelvis did as he was told. He pouted. In his heart he knew that one day this man would pay for inflicting such repeated humiliations on the sacred one. He would not be so treated. Moomoo looked about the fire. He paused till all were quiet and then spoke. 
     “You, my eunech, deserve to be blessed with material wealth if not with the warmth of a wife. You are so deprived year after year, and you give such an abundance of skill and wisdom despite your thin life that I am in immense awe of your goodness. Here, sir, take this gold. Each year that I am in this position of leadership you shall receive a present of equal worth as well as coinage enough to feed and clothe you and all of your relatives.” Moomoogabi swallowed, smiled and handed the necklace to the surprised holy man. A bow, scraping of feet, and the priest fell prostrate before his beneficent leader.
     “Thank you! Thank you!” was all he could say. Over and over he repeated his thanks until Moomoo told him to stop or he might recant his promise. 

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. 

 M. The Rubik’s Cube
     Douglas Reimer

Matt sat in the back of the station wagon doing what I didn’t know. The family was on some long ride, maybe going from Thompson to Winnipeg. As I tended to do now and then on such a trip, especially if the kid was unusually quiet, I asked Matt how things were going. He said fine. What are you up to, I asked? I assumed reading because in his early years he read all the time. Jess answered for him. He’s doing the Rubik’s cube, she said. Good, I said. Way to go, I emoted. I did that a lot in those days, praising too much, thinking that stroking a kid’s ego would get him to do more of the good stuff. 
     We drove for some time and I asked how far he’d gotten. I was interested always in discovering signs of genius in the kids’activities. I really, really wished for smart kids. I’m done, he said. Wow, I thought, and said as much. How’d you do that? Marty, our kid’s bright! Both of us glanced back to see. He showed us and, sure enough, each side of the cube was a solid colour. Maybe I should enrol him in university, I said to Marty. He’s bright!
     Jess put a stop to my euphoria, though. He just pasted them on, she said. What do you mean, I asked, pasted on? He took the blues off of where they were and stuck them all together on one side and now there are blue, red, green and yellow sides, like that, she said. 
     Oh well, best laid plans and all that