A Tribute To Pat

November 4, 2014

Today, the anniversary of Pat's passing, the sky is a brooding grey, and a wispy wind cuts through my jacket.  I am in Banff, one of Canada's mountainous jewels. The mountains are freshly snow-clad so that if the sun was shining, the light would reflect off the peaks and you'd feel just a little closer to heaven.  

But today the clouds curl and scurry and hang low over the valleys and drape the mountainsides.  Dull, cold, and grey like an old dog's teeth, the mountains all around suffer and snarl.  The sun will not come out to play today.

But I am on a mission.  In my pocket is a plastic bag of ashes.  Pat always loved Banff and we built memories here, starting with our honeymoon.  We camped here all through our children's lives and into our empty nest.  And we dragged friends and relatives into the mountains hoping to have them cleansed of the dust and dullness of the big city.  And it worked.  The savage beauty of Banff cleanses and reorients the crippled soul..

Banff and places like it inspire awe in the sensitive soul.  One is moved to look upward at the craggy peaks, outward at the wild barriers and the beckoning valleys, and inward at the still, small, quivering soul. One feels the artifices of self-importance, of personal missions and accomplishments, of troubles and grievances slough away. One feels naked, small, and new.  And, if accompanied by friends or loved ones, one is drawn to acknowledge their importance.  We, and the love we share, are all that matters in this moment.  The people in one’s life take a central, life-affirming position.  For the moment.  

Pat and I had many of these moments in our visits to Banff.  In the crispness of the morning with clouds lazily caressing the slopes, or while walking along a path towards the rumbling of a waterfall, or while sitting by a mirrored lake, the sounds of birds and squirrels punctuating the silence, we would glance at each other and smile, and the smile would draw us into a brief embrace - an affirmation, and a momentary rebirth of mutual commitment.

So Banff was one of those ‘holy’ places for us, our cathedral into which we respectfully and expectantly travelled and were never disappointed.  Banff was our place of worship, the place where we rediscovered our sense of worth to and for each other.

There could be no better place to serve as final and eternal resting place for Pat.

The deed is done now.  

Half the bag was dispersed into the Vermillion Lakes.  Tears flowed and disappeared into the clear blue/green water.  I watched the ashes sink and curl and gently swirl in a widening circle.  A strange emptiness.  Deep and painful sadness. Sighs of resignation and a flood of memories.  She will be at peace in the beauty, the harmony, the living wildness all around.  Forever.  

The rest of the ashes found a home on Mt. Norquay, on the valley side of the stone wall.  I spread them in the grass, the wind gently caressing her as she fell.  I turned around and there, just beyond my boot, I found another scattering of ashes. She'll not be alone in that place.

I made my way down the mountain.  The sun suddenly came out and began to melt the chill of the morning. Tears don't need to last forever either.

Antipode

Was texting with my son Phil about the upcoming February trip to Palm Springs. The excitement and anticipation of the trip is somehow coupled with a sense of foreboding. The sun, the warmth, the opportunity to actually ride our bikes outside are all very desirable, obviously, but at the same time I feel a kind of yuck factor, and a sense of impending danger.  My fear of flying is part of this second set of feelings. The yuck factor  arises out of my general disgust over the American tinsel-extravagance typified by places like Palm Springs, a playground for the rich, the aged, the mindless, the lazy and the lucky.  The Bermuda-shorted herd exhibits an exclusionary clubbiness, and a futile communal grasping after ephemeral unearned hedonic rewards. Life apparently has little meaning for these people other than to breathe and consume, and yet they are in a desperate struggle to get as much of life as they can, as quickly as they can.  I do not look forward to my immersion into this culture and yet I thrill thinking about the riding, the sipping of beers in the shade, the comfort, without mitts, jackets, scarves and boots.  I love the idea of this environment.

So the idea of antipodes, of opposite qualities within a single thing, struck me.  Palm Springs is a good example of an antipode.  Originally a get-away for the LA crowd looking for some privacy, the names of celebrities litter the roads, the parks, the golf courses.  A secret hide-away becomes a public museum.

Palm Springs, a week later.  A strange and beautiful experience - a desert, barren and waterless - no reason for a city to exist here.  No vegetable, mineral, or animal to draw speculators or inhabitants, except for the winter warmth.  And it is this warmth, dry and soothing to the winter-damaged souls from the north, that is worth gold, glory, and three hours of flight.  It is the warmth and the winds that shape this area.  Endless expanses of sand and scrub, and eroded hills and denuded mountains and palm trees and salt lakes and Joshua Trees.  Palm Spring and the Valley are like diamonds within a wasteland, a fountainhead - the source of life flowing out of death.  An antipode.

Another more heart-centered, more visceral example, visited me while sitting around the pool at Di and Phil's new house in Palm Springs.  Idyllic, comfortable, and so convenient.  It occurred to me that Pat would have loved being here, in the warmth, with the kids and grandkids, surrounded by the sounds of love and happiness.  She would have felt as if she had arrived at perfection.  Nothing could be better.  A dream fulfilled.  Pat would have loved this.  But she never had the chance, never had her dreams fulfilled, never tasted the rewards of a life lived for others, especially for those closest to her.  What a moment of profound and painful sadness resting at the center of a moment of contentment.  An antipode.

I read recently somewhere that the reason we cry when we experience beauty or excellence is that these moments are so rare and so fleeting. Some element inside of us weeps underneath the moment of joy - a recognition of the transience and the rarity of these most significant and treasured moments.  Joy wrapped around sorrow.  An antipode.

(My dearest friend, my wife Pat, died a month before Christmas this year, losing her year-long battle with cancer.)

A Dark and Snowy Night.

A dark and snowy night tonight.  On a walk with my dog, Leo, around 9:30.  A small ‘commons’ called Terry Clark Park is a block away from my house.  Leo loves to run free there, working out a good poo.  I follow with my blue plastic bag.  Dry snow skitters down my collar.  I see a note pasted on the mailbox.  Barely readable in the light of the street lamp.  Lost toy helicopter, blue and black.  If found please call ___.

Sad little note.  I think of a child praying for a kind stranger to find the helicopter and the note.  I think of that moment of kindness and the birth of a child’s belief in the goodness of people.  But I don’t believe it will happen.  The toy could be in someone’s back yard, in someone’s truck, on a roof, or stuck in the bushes or in a tree.

I’m thinking I’d love to be that stranger, stumbling upon the lost toy.  I kick at the dark bushes in the park for a while.  Nothing.  I walk home, senses heightened, looking at rooftops in the dark, over fences into yards, and then, on the corner of my street, a large dark pine tree. Something moves slightly in the wind.  It seems translucent. I look closely.  A plastic bag?  A helicopter? I’m only 15 feet away.  No helicopter.  But a large, ghostly white owl, shifting from foot to foot watching my 75 pound dog.  Leo stands beside me, sniffing the ground.

I’m in awe.  Without the note in the park I wouldn’t have seen the owl.  I’m thinking I will buy that child a new helicopter.   

I just read a little booklet put together as a tribute to one of my mentors, Dr. Max van Manen of the University of Alberta upon his retirement.  A wonderful tribute to a person thoroughly deserving of tributes. In my small and humble submission to this project I wrote,

“Max, sadly for me, was often a voice crying in the wilderness.  Amid the contemporary storm of calls for 'accountability' which, for most educators translates into increased performance scores, Max continued to cry out for the fundamental accounting of a teacher to his students.  His vision of the trusted, caring protector who walks with his students into the larger world, is as real in this fragmented and wired world as it was in the world of the ancient Greeks.”

 I'm pessimistic about the future of education when I see that people like Dr. van Manen and the wonderful contrarian, Dr. Alfie Kohn, are sometimes relegated to village idiot status by the present 'thinkers, movers and shakers' in education.  These new education nabobs seem to be fascinated (blinded) by two themes - themes that are not bad in themselves, but that become so when seen as THE answer to all of our problems.  The latest gadget (not i Pad, but i Pad 2!, or whatever the megamothercorp pukes out next) rather than a useful tool, becomes the must have, the new engine for discovery learning, the road to pedagogical nirvana, the thing-without-which-we-cannot- live.  And those who happen to have a head start on others because of the idle hours they spent gaming in their recent youth, suddenly become the new swamis, and how stupid you are not to thoughtlessly follow them.  

The second theme is the unreflective reliance on the procedures and findings of 'science' as the one true road to educational wisdom.  The most suspect phrase in all of education is 'studies show...'  Dueling studies, rarely read but often adopted by lazy bandwagon jumpers, raise more questions than answers, and pose as authoritative pills to suppress healthy skepticism.  Studies show that studies show almost anything the reader wants them to.  Or, most often, they simply confirm the obvious. 

And the sacrificial lambs, the children, sit and wait for us to take their hands, offer a smile, offer a little bit of ourselves, and walk with them into an often cruel and confusing world.  But we'd rather be erudite than thoughtful, up-to-date rather than authentic, mechanical and systematic rather than human.

From a Speech given to First Year Teachers

In my experience two very simple but somewhat contentious ideas are central to what made my life in the classroom enjoyable and rewarding.  I want to share these ideas with you.  I’ll refer to these two ideas as The Calling, and The Mystery.

The Call to Pedagogy.

My Social Studies 20 class was beginning a study of the Renaissance.  We were looking at slides of Michelangelo’s David, that perfect embodiment of human worth, human potential.  Students observed the smooth skin and the perfect proportions.  A few oohs and aahs.  No question, a great artist.  Then we looked at slides of some of his other statues that stood along the hallway.  These were called “The Captives”.  They seemed to be crude, unfinished blocks of marble.  Rough grooves showed where Michelangelo had been chipping away at the stone.  Human figures could be discerned within the blocks of marble but they were misshapen, incomplete, cramped, and seemingly abandoned.  “Were these Michelangelo’s failures?” I asked.  But then one student said, “Maybe Michelangelo was trying to say something with these statues.  Maybe these rough forms are his statement about mankind, that we are all captives of circumstances, all imprisoned and imperfect in our humanness.”  The class went silent.  Smiles of recognition spread from face to face.  It was one of those moments that every teacher lives for.  A moment of discovery, of growth.  A small change had occurred in the world.  I beamed inside.   I felt pure joy.  Why?

As teachers we are intimately involved in the most essentially human project – the project of leading children to the world.  A teacher has a passion to share the world with a child. There is nothing that compares to the ‘aha’ moment when a student suddenly gets it.  It doesn’t happen every day, and you can’t predict when it’s going to happen, but when you see that face suddenly break through the clouds of incomprehension, wide-eyed and smiling, there’s nothing better.  It’s what a teacher lives for.  It’s what a teacher is called to do.   Those smiles in that moment in that classroom affirmed me as a teacher.  And that is a source of pure joy.  Erich Fromm said that joy is knowing that you are on the road to becoming what you were meant to become.

Teachers, be ready, be open to these moments of joy.  They’re worth more than any pay increase, any working conditions clause, any promotion, any unfunded liability, or even a secure pension plan.  I wish you many moments of joy in the years ahead.

The Mystery

Two sources of mystery confront the teacher.  On the one hand there is the mystery of what makes humans tick, and on the other is the mystery of what makes the world tick.

A teacher ought to be preoccupied with the continual mystery of human being.  Like the child rapt by a worm writhing on the sidewalk after the rain, so too a teacher should be forever fascinated with the parade of young humanity passing before him.  I have been privileged to see a hundred first loves in my classrooms.  And they’re all the same and they’re all different.  And they’re all so sad and so giddy and so hopeless and so affirming.  And most of the time the young lovers survive and learn and grow.  I’ve seen breath-taking nascent beauty sitting in the third row, unable to put words to the profound loss of childhood.   I’ve seen masculine giants tremble at a poem, and hesitant introverts rage at injustice.  I’ve seen the smile of comfort on a troubled little face.  I’ve had the joy of experiencing these essential human moments with children.  What a privilege!  What a joy!  There’s no life like it.

A sense of mystery is the vehicle that drives growth, and healthy curiosity is the fuel for that vehicle.  Teachers must be the guardians of mystery and the flame keepers of curiosity. A teacher’s job is to keep the joy of discovery alive, to never allow mystery to be killed by the false demon of certainty.  We should leave certainty for others and, instead, frolic in the joyful mud of uncertainty with our students, get dirty in the messiness of unknowns and unknowables.   We should be forever modeling the joy of thought, of puzzlement, of discovery, of making sense of the world.   We should be walking question marks.  We should have more questions than answers for our students. 

I walk into my classroom and say to the students,  “Here’s what I just saw in the hallway during class change – two grade eight students kissing, she bending down to meet his lips.  What’s that all about?  Why kiss in a crowded hallway?  What’s the message?”  And we launch into a deep discussion about love, infatuation, and teenage angst.  No definitive answers.  Just an atmosphere of inquiry.  Soon students come to class with questions – honest, serious questions about life and the world.  They want to know.   Teachers need to model the joy of learning and the best way to do that is to openly, unapologetically, infectiously ask questions, and be passionate, life-long learners.   Embrace mystery.   Avoid the dead-endedness of certainty.

Teachers, I wish you a life of questioning, of growth with and through your students.  I urge you to become childlike in you curiosity and your passion for learning.  Infect others.  Joy is found through this infection.

So what have I learned about teaching?  It’s not just about lesson plans and record keeping and reflective journals, classroom management techniques and professional portfolios, test scores and on-task measurements, or the Fraser Institute, or accountability, or measurability.   These things are all necessary and important and we have stakeholders and administrators to please.  But being a teacher is so much more than any of these things.  Being a teacher requires a sense of vocation, of being called to be with children, to walk with children, to experience mystery and joy with children.   I wish you all joy as you begin the road to becoming that which you are meant to become.   

C'america

So the people have spoken, or at least 60% have.  And what have they said?  By stumbling into a Conservative majority in our fair land, they have chosen a sad course for the next four or five years.  We can expect a new growth industry in Canada - the building of jails.  Vic Toews is off the leash and he's going to 'clean the place up', lock all the bad guys away, and throw away the keys.  Getting tough on crime didn't work in Texas and it won't make us any safer here either.  It will, however, slake the bloodlust of an idiot segment of the middle class and allow them to wallow in their suburban ennui, safe in the their belief that the best way to make angry people less angry is to hurt them, or at least hide them away some where.

And, with Harper, we can expect more privatization of all things, including the running of jails and the provision of health care.  The conservative way is great if you have money and connections; not so great if you don't.  We'll see greater disparity between those who have and those who don't, with the concomitant increase in societal unrest.  (That's where the new jails come in handy.)  And we'll see a slashing of funding to anything that isn't geared directly towards economic  growth.  Do we really need artists?  Do we really need the CBC?

Our foreign policy will become a spawn of the American foreign policy as we rush to become their dependable and obedient northern pet.  Middle East issues?  Let big brother set the agenda.  The UN?  Who needs a seat on the Security Council?  How valuable is it to protect our traditional image of 'the middling power' and 'the honest mediator'? Who needs sovereignty anyway, when you have free trade?  

C'america, here we come.