Blustery Days

My earliest memory of hella high winds formed when I was about five years old. I was in kindergarten in Sorel, at a school that was, I believe, walking distance from home.

I don’t remember much about kindergarten except that I didn’t like it. It was new and strange, and full of kids who spoke French when I was the only one who didn’t. I don’t know if I lasted the full term, or if my folks pulled me out after I pitched a four alarm tan-tan in the driveway one day; so much of that time in my life is long gone but for the dramas that tend to stay with a person well into adulthood. Allowing for said dramas to become exaggerated over time, I have a clear sense of losing my mind one day, and my mother telling the kind folks who had come to pick me up to go on their way. I don’t remember anything more than that, but if Mum does, I bet the story’s as embarrassing as the one she likes to tell about the day I first saw snow.

I digress.

While I was still in kindergarten, I remember stepping from the school into bright sun and big wind. The leaves were doing their swirly dance on the sidewalk and skittering into the street. I was wearing my plush green winter coat, which was heavy enough to keep my feet on the ground when the wind tried to lift me off them. It was so strong when it hit me that it felt like a big hand curling around my legs. It tugged so insistently that I was sure I’d achieve liftoff like Piglet in the stories by AA Milne—to this day, on a big windy one, I’ll generally ask of no one in particular, “Can I fly Piglet next?”

Fast forward to November 2015. Ter and I had ventured out to do some Christmas shopping and the wind was so strong when we got home that folks were parking on Dallas Road to watch the ocean pound against the shore. I love a stormy ocean, and while I normally watch it from the shelter of my living room, this time, I couldn’t resist. “I have to go look,” I told Ter, and promptly left her to struggle with the shopping bags while I headed up to street level.

Our street sits a bit lower than the main road. How much lower became evident when I reached the top of the slope and was struck full in the face by a blast of salt spray—and this before I got across the road. I waited for a break in the traffic and crossed over to join the other nut cases hanging out by the railing.

Wind roaring. Surf crashing. Gulls hanging overhead. Kids in their twenties spreading their wings and leaning into the teeth of it, letting the wind hold them upright. Small dogs being carried because otherwise they’d be airborne. My vision immediately obscured by the spray on my glasses. The sheer force of the wind felt like that long-ago hand trying to push me back into traffic, shoving so hard that it seemed almost enraged. I fought back, kept my feet, staggered a few steps along the sidewalk. You can’t breathe in wind that strong; it jams itself down your throat and stays there. And all the while, you are reminded of how fragile, how mortal, you are against this heaving, howling, living entity.

Jesu Maria. Get me out of this.

With the wind helping me along, I trip-and-a-trip-trip-tripped back toward home, where Ter had managed to secure the Tiguan by the curb and wrestle our loot into the house. “Well?” she asked from the top of the stairs. “How was it?”

“One of the stupidest things I’ve ever done,” I replied, gasping.

“Yah,” she said, “while I was trying to drop the hatch on Tiggy, the wind swooped in and snatched one of the empty grocery bags. The last I saw, it was zipping toward Moss Rock Park.”

I could very easily have gone the same route.

Last week, the west coast was treated to a hat trick of storms over three days, ending with the remains of Typhoon Songda predicted to be the most intense of the trio. Once again, folks pulled over to watch the ocean do its thing. Ter parked Tiggy behind the house for the third act, as did most of the neighbours. The street out front was empty that night. The wind ramped up for a bit of a show before dinner, then died back by eight and never really took off.

I didn’t even try to go outside.

Teacher, Teacher

My fear of missing the bus can be traced back to an episode in first grade. The class was to copy a page of text from our reader before school got out, and my Virgo perfection complex had me taking my time to get it right.

My sibs and I were bussed from home in those days, to the English speaking school across the Richelieu River and, at six years old, I assumed if I missed the bus home, I’d have to stay at the school overnight and it wasn’t even in the same town. Scary stuff, right? But when the bell rang and I wasn’t finished the assignment, the teacher made me stay behind until it was done.

The bus was waiting and if I wasn’t on it ... all sorts of nightmarish possibilities scampered across my mind, horribly distracting as I struggled to meet my deadline while in a burgeoning panic.

So I hurried. I did the best I could under duress, but it wasn’t good enough because the old bat looked at my work, picked up her red pen, and crossed out the whole page of my exercise book.

I made the bus home, which was my priority objective, but I fought tears the whole time. I think, but don’t recall, that I ripped out the page so my parents wouldn’t see the humiliation—I was hugely upset because I’d done my best in a race against the clock and the teacher had totally negated my effort. Whether or not it was, and forty-nine years later I’m still undecided, it felt unfair.

That particular teacher had a bit of a reputation among the student body (my older sister once did a hilarious impression of her yelling at kids on the playground), but she certainly left an impression on me.

Fast forward to seventh grade, my final year in elementary school after we’d relocated to Victoria. I had gone down the corridor where grades one, two and three were taught, probably to deliver something to one of the teachers. It wasn’t to the old dragon I encountered; that much I remember. I also remember her stopping me in the hall and demanding to know why I wasn’t in my own class. Mostly, I remember wondering why they assigned the most frightening old biddies to the first grade kids!

I seriously doubt this is the case now. From the antics of my co-workers who have school age children, I’m more sorry for the teachers than I ever was for my classmates because I’m pretty sure the sabre-toothed modern day mother would have had her fangs drawn by my first grade teacher.

Cursed Cursive

The local newscast recently put up a viewers’ poll, asking the question, “Should chilren continue to be taught cursive writing in BC schools?” I didn’t see it, but Ter did, and her first thought was, if it has anything to do with spelling, you guys have failed!

Spelling should definitely stay in the curriculum, as should the mechanics of handwriting—both printing and cursive. While we’re at it, let’s insist on pushing the kids to do basic arithmetic in their heads instead of with a calculator, to colour with crayons instead of a mouse, and depend less on technology than on their own manual abilities. You might think that cursive writing is expendable, and maybe it is—or would be, if the aforementioned technology was more reliable, but one sizeable electro-magnetic pulse and we’ll be back in the Stone Age. The handwritten word will resume its status near the top of the communications food chain and how will the millennials survive if they can’t communicate without their devices?

The viewers’ poll resulted heavily in favour of keeping cursive in schools (evidence, perhaps, of the median age in their audience demographic), and it also reminded me—because I need more reminding as I get older—of my pledge to draft blog posts by hand.

One of my delaying tactics is my reluctance to boot and park in front of the computer. It’s a pretty weak excuse when I can curl up on the couch with a notebook on my knee (the original laptop) and scribble in ink until my hand cramps. Transcribing to screen is easier than drafting onscreen anyway.

My handwriting is harder to read, though.

Smarter Than the Average Bear

He may not be smarter, but he’s far cuter. Moon Pie decided to hold Ter’s reading glasses hostage the other day; we were running around getting ready for work—always a bit of a circus—and he pounced on her purse when our backs were turned.

His enthusiasm reminded me of being a kid and believing that work was better than school because you got paid for being there. Every kid plays at being a grown up. Conversely, too few grown ups play at being a kid. Moonie gets to stay home and play all day, but I guess that gets old after a while. I wish I could remember those days. I disliked school for the most part. Almost every report card from grade five to twelve features a teacher’s comment along the lines of “Ruth would do so much better if she would apply herself.” I was obviously rich with potential (aren’t we all?) and highly unmotivated—except in English, of course. I reckon I’d have done better if I’d been healthy and thus less preoccupied, but I could be wrong. I simply did less well in subjects that failed to appeal.

I regret some of that, now. Math will always inspire an Ugh!, but I must harbour a closet engineering gene because physics has become more fascinating as I’ve grown up. I can grasp concepts of space/time/energy etc. that have Ter gaping at me in astonishment, yet the most significant thing I recall from physics class is shooting light through a prism … and I’d likely have forgotten that little item if Pink Floyd had chosen different cover art for Dark Side of the Moon. Still, with naught but that tiny experiment to my credit, I understood the concept of trans-warp beaming as defined in the Star Trek movie from 2009. I couldn’t possibly write out the formula (which doesn't exist, by the way ... yet), but I totally saw how it could work. You aim for a set of coordinates at a point in space X number of parsecs or light years or whatever from where you are now, compensating for the speed at both departure and arrival points. The tricky bit is figuring out where the arrival site will be, given that it too is moving at warp and could change speed/direction en route. Firing a bullet at a moving target at breakneck speed while blindfolded was a good analogy as expressed by Montgomery Scott, but the entire thing made complete sense to me.

Easy.

I think.

Even math, when I get past the ugh, has become a test of skill. I’ve relied on my calculator for so many years that I’ve begun losing my ability to add three digit figures in my head. Panic ensued on that discovery, and now I’m adding my invoices by hand … then confirming with the calculator. After all, I work with taxpayer dollars so accuracy is key. It’s hardly the same as beaming Captain Kirk from the Romulan Narada to the Enterprise during a high speed space chase, but the fundamentals are pretty much the same.

I think.