Posted on October 18, 2021 under Monday Morning Musings with one comment

 

Out of the closet

 

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,

Who is the fairest one of all?”

The Evil Queen

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Why would I be thinking about Snow White? Stay tuned dear reader for its not what you might think. We have already had a few light dustings of snow, but this piece has nothing to do with snow, or winter, for that matter.

I’m a closet junkie. “OMG, Len. We knew there had to be a rational explanation for your irrational act to go and teach in the north at the age of 68.”

No, no, no. I haven’t turned to hard drugs late in life.

It started innocently enough. In our school, we have a large room which was once a computer lab. It gradually turned into an electronics graveyard. Someone decided that the back of this room (it’s actually a separate room) would become our Covid room. The problem is that there was Covid material in several rooms in the school. I decided, once and for all, to consolidate all the masks, hand sanitizers, wipes, thermometers and gowns into one tidy space. I’m a bit of a neat freak. Just ask my children. After big family dinners, I could often be found cleaning off plates and organizing the dishes before the meal was over.

It took me a few days and the help of my colleague, Audrey, to get the room ship shape. This got me to thinking, which is dangerous. I knew that there were several other rooms in the school that needed a major housecleaning and reorganization.

“Mark my words, there’s trouble a brewin.”

Grumpy

When I first came up north to teach two years ago, I went to the school’s resource room looking for material. In large schools, there is one large resource room and a resource room teacher. Our school doesn’t have this luxury, so teaching aides and resources are stuffed into three oversized closets. The first time I went looking for something, I realized that these rooms had also become storage rooms for everything imaginable in the school. Things piled up over time and the rooms had become virtually unusable.

In a fit of insanity, I decided to tackle the largest of these rooms on the secondary side of the school.

“Sink’s empty. Hey, someone stole our dishes.”

Sneezy

No, Sneezy. No one in recent memory had gone into the resource room and magically tidied it up. I waded into a jungle and five days later I emerged unscathed other than a few serious paper cuts. (For something so innocuous, paper cuts hurt like hell. ed) Day one was spent clearing out all kinds of electronics, mostly old computer parts, keyboards, and a million miles of wires impossibly tangled. Houdini couldn’t have unraveled them. Of course, there was only one place to take them- to the computer graveyard once serving as a lab.

I am not going to waste your time describing every item I stumbled across once I had cleared a path and was able to tiptoe through (the tulips) the room. A few things stood out. Some of the textbooks were over thirty years old indicating the last time that this room may have had a serious inventory check. There were boxes and boxes of old slides, 8-tracks, VCR tapes, cassette tapes, DVD’s, an old overhead projector (and the plastic sheets that went with some of the lessons) and a few tape recorders. I was staring at the technology revolution of the past half century right in front of me.  I caressed one of the old cassette tapes and thought about the days when we used a pencil to rewind a tape when it got discombobulated. I know many of you did this. Or thinking about the 8-track playing in your car until a zombie attacked your prized Everly Brothers tape, ate it up and spit it out.

But the piece de resistance was an ancient reel to reel machine. Cue “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. I was immediately transported back more than 50 years when I remember, with absolute clarity, watching Snow White in the music room at our old high school.

“When hearts are high, the time will fly, so whistle while you work.”

Snow White

Several of the secondary students were following my progress and, from time to time, popped in to help me lift heavy boxes off high shelves. They had never seen a reel to reel before and were mesmerized by my accounts of ancient history. “Len, those movies were probably in black and white,” they said jokingly. You betcha. I’m not about to suggest that I started to whistle but this wave of nostalgia made the work a bit less cumbersome.

There were all sorts of old things that took me down memory lane but one box in particular, left me scratching my head. I had finally whittled down dozens of boxes so that I could actually catch a glimpse of the floor. And there, sitting in an oversized carboard box, was an engine. Now it should be made clear that we do not have an auto mechanics course at the school. After several inquiries, no one knew how this engine had come to occupy space in the resource room.

Besides getting the room organized, I was getting one hell of a workout with all the lifting, and moving things around, including relocating items to their rightful place in the school. By Friday, I discovered that there was an actual floor in the room and every single item was now either trashed or sitting on a shelf. We all know that feeling of satisfaction when you tackle a seemingly impossible task but, by just staying with it, the job eventually gets done. There’s nothing like a good purge.

“Look, our house! The lit’s light. The light’s lit.”

Doc

After a week of toil, the job was done.

I was feeling proud of myself, but I had another feeling that trumped everything. When I stared at the finished product, I realized, with the deepest of humility, that it would take me the rest of my life to read everything in that small room. Knowledge is so powerful and there’s just so damn much to learn.

The secondary math teacher is our “go to” guy in the school when it comes to technology. We are threatening to take the reel-to-reel machine down from the top shelf during our next professional development day and see if we can get it to work.

Maybe I’ll contact Disney and see if they can provide me with a copy of the original Snow White movie… in black and white, of course!

Have a great week.

P.S. At the end of each day, I went home dusty, dirty and smelly. I give the last word to Grumpy:

“I’d like to see anybody make me wash if I didn’t want to.”

Posted on October 11, 2021 under Monday Morning Musings with 2 comments

Thanksgiving bonfire singalong

 

Things for which I am thankful.

I am thankful to be a Canadian.

I am thankful for vaccines.

I am thankful for sunrises and sunsets.

I am thankful for rainbows and the Northern Lights.

I am thankful for having great colleagues at work.

I am thankful to be still working.

I am thankful for having good energy.

I am thankful to have access to food whenever I want it.

I am thankful to the Inuit of Kangiqsujuaq for accepting me in their village.

I am thankful for siblings.

I am thankful to my loyal Week45 readers.

I am thankful have all my senses still functioning… I think!

I am thankful to be from Nova Scotia.

I am thankful to come from one of the greatest small towns in Canada.

I am thankful for democracy.

I am thankful for rain when we need it.

I am thankful for people who go walking with me.

I am thankful for warm summer evenings.

I am thankful for having amazing parents who taught us what was important.

I am thankful for the gift of three incredible granddaughters.

I am thankful to my four children who are great citizens of the world.

I am thankful to have experienced the north.

I am thankful that I have been able to travel and see other parts of the world.

I am thankful for a warm place to live when it’s -53!

I am thankful for coffee in the morning.

I am thankful for warm chocolate chip cookies and a cold glass of milk.

I am thankful for short walks and long ones too.

I am thankful to have experienced country food: caribou, beluga, arctic char, Canada goose brain and the eyeballs of a ptarmagin!

I am thankful for music in my life.

I am thankful to Betty for answering every question I pose about taxes, government websites and more. When in doubt, call Betty.

I am thankful for friends that I’ve made from every corner of the earth.

I am thankful to the creator of coconut cream pie.

I am thankful that I grew up close to the ocean.

I am thankful for a good night’s sleep.

I am thankful for lobsters… and scallops, mussels, fish and chips. Anything from the sea.

I am thankful for the gift of laughter.

Mostly, I am thankful to enjoy good health. I don’t take it for granted. It will desert me some day but until then, I plan to kick ass and live life to the fullest.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Posted on October 4, 2021 under Monday Morning Musings with 2 comments

 

 

The sun setting on a successful marathon walk (Len/Pouria and Chad)

(Chad Bourdages photo)

 

It is Sunday morning. I’m sitting here at my laptop trying to tap out my Monday piece. I must admit (and this is not whining but an observation), I am stiff and sore. I did my final long walk of 2021, a memorial walk of sorts. A few of us decided to do a walking marathon (42km) as our personal acknowledgment of National Day Truth and Reconciliation Day observed a few days ago.

There are still many people who don’t believe that the treatment of indigenous people was as bad as purported in the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There are also people who don’t believe in vaccines or seat belts. Maybe the only thing that we might all agree on is a beautiful sunset but even then, there are scrooges and pessimists who can find clouds on a sunny day. Optimists believe that rainbows will appear after a rainy day.

There was a time when I thought that walking (or running) a marathon wasn’t such a big deal. I keep reminding myself that sane people don’t do extreme things like this. They do sensible things like walk 5km, eat two cookies in one sitting, use crosswalks, and settle for just one glass of wine. These rational people (I don’t know many of them!) are paragons of virtue. I have finally realized (I think) that my days of extremism are over. My body hurts today and that is actually not a bad thing. My pain will be short lived, and it is not terminal, although the recovery times are getting much longer.

It was a perfect fall day for a long walk. It was sunny and cool all day. As always, I was struck by the vastness of the land. If I was back home now, I’m sure I would be watching the leaves turn color. It is one of the most magical gifts provided by Mother Nature. Being above the tree line, one might think that the mountainous landscape would be rather bland by comparison. Wrong. The colors are more muted but no less spectacular as vegetation in the mountains and on the tundra show their reds, oranges, yellows and rust hues. When the sun hits them at a certain angle, they are spectacular.

A good friend messaged me after the walk. She was concerned about the state of my health. She knows about the issues with my back and knee and was wondering about pain levels. I can see many of you shaking your heads wondering why someone with these infirmities would tackle something so grueling. There is no answer that would make an ounce of sense. Ask any long-distance runner and they will tell you that when the pain kicks in, you just have to redirect it. In my case, all I had to do was think about the indignities done to indigenous people over the years to gain some much-needed perspective. And let’s face it, we’ll all have lots of time to rest when our expiry date shows up!

Oh man, am I kicking my arse this morning. Two nights ago, the northern lights made their first appearance in a while. It was a perfectly clear, starry night. Living beside the bay where there are no obstructions and few lights from the village, I get to see the northern lights in all their glory. They danced along the edges of the mountains, pirouetting every few seconds. As an added bonus, the lights were reflecting on the bay. No magician could replicate this sleight of hand.

I was told Sunday morning that the northern lights were jaw dropping Saturday night. Had I known, all that was required was for me to open my bedroom curtains a few feet away and I could have watched from my bed. But to get the curtains open would have required me to actually get out of bed. Only James MacEachern’s boom truck would have been able to perform this delicate operation, such was the precarious state of my body.

One might think that sleep would come easy after such a long day. We left at 8:00 in the morning and including rest stops and a lunch break, we staggered home at 6:00. Actually, in my experience, it is very difficult to sleep after a huge day of exercise and fresh air. I tossed and turned as I tried to find a comfortable position. When I realized the futility of this exercise, I did what any noble person would do. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, trudged to the kitchen, grabbed the jug of milk and a bag of cookies.

I swear to god I was so tired that I stopped at three cookies.

Have a great week.