I’m sure my teachers taught it during a day I was absent from high school. But somewhere in there I missed that important life lesson that came from physics class.
“For every action in the universe,” Isaac Newton said around 1687, “there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
I’m often asked what it’s like being a freelancer – someone who creates often without knowing whether the work will ever be published. Suffice to say, it’s a speculative jungle out there. I know. As a newspaper and magazine writer for some 40 years, I’ve been eaten alive whole more than a few times. A bit of background:
In the late 1960s, I enrolled at Ryerson (before it was a university) in the Radio and Television Arts program. While working towards my diploma (1968-1971) I craved a taste of the real writing world, so I began submitting ideas for features to magazines and newspapers.
On the third floor of a building in the southwestern quadrant of this major city on the Prairies, sits a non-discript office. Nothing special about its look or identification. Just another downtown Calgary workplace. However, inside resides one of the most precious resources, the city discovered last summer, that helped thousands of its citizens weather perhaps the city’s least predicted natural disaster – the 2013 flood of the Bow River.
“[As many as] 2,159 free counselling sessions were delivered,” the Distress Centre in that Calgary office reported. “Online crisis chats increased 739 per cent,” during the flood.
The conversation began much the way many of my chats with men of a certain age do. I got his birth date. The man told me he was born in January 1923. He quickly pointed out he’ll be 91 in the New Year.
Next, I asked about where he’d grown up and because he’d lived through the Second World War, where he’d served. He explained he’d been with the East Yorkshire Regiment on D-Day as part of the Operation Overlord invasion force.
I asked Geoff Leeming if he would be our honorary veteran at the Uxbridge Oilies Remembrance Tournament on Nov. 9 at the arena.
“Fine,” he said, “but you know I didn’t serve in the Canadian Army. It was the British Army.”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “You’re a veteran in my books.”
A few weeks ago, as I showered, shaved and made my way to work, CBC Radio’s local Toronto morning show invited audience comment. Host Matt Galloway wondered: “Where do Torontonians go, to find absolute silence?”
In a matter of a few seconds, I had an answer and texted it to him: “Sealed inside the rare books section at the Robarts Library, right down to the white gloves so your hands don’t rustle pages.”
I hadn’t thought about Ontario’s 17th premier in a long time. But when Galloway posed the question, I quickly remembered research I had conducted back in the early 1970s. I needed to find excerpts from particularly rare books and the only source was the then brand new John P. Robarts Research Library at the University of Toronto. By coincidence, this past week, I’ve been reading my colleague Steve Paikin’s new book, “Paikin and the Premiers.” Among other things, Paikin reminded me that Premier Robarts gave this province much more than a quiet research library.
What’s with these guys? This week, Stephen Harper, the leader of the largest dominion in the 64-year-old, 53-member Commonwealth – covering a quarter of the world’s total land mass and including a third of the world’s total population – told fellow members he’d decided not to attend the upcoming meeting of the community in Sri Lanka. He said he wasn’t happy with the human rights record of the host nation’s president. So, in a desire to protect what he felt are the values of Canadians, he’s decided not to show up. It was the prime ministerial equivalent of a schoolyard child’s pout:
“Nya, nya, na-nya nya!”
There’s generally at least one of these in every neighbourhood. This person is most often extremely well grounded in the community or has lived there for years. People next door or down the block all feel they could trust this individual with their mother or their kids. I had a proxy parent like this. Only I didn’t realize I needed her as a surrogate until I was a young adult.
I knew her as “Ma Ross.”
Actually her name was Betty Ross. She was born Helen Elizabeth Watson on July 11, 1920, in Toronto. When she was four, her father died. So, she was raised by a caring brother. Betty came of age during the Second World War, fell in love with an RCAF Spitfire pilot – when they danced on terrace of the Palais Royale on a night in 1940 – and waited for her beau, Richard Ross, to come home safely from the air war overseas. In the 1950s, I met Betty through her son, David, who’d become my closest friend in elementary school in Agincourt, Ont. But that’s not when she became my fill-in mom.
The man approached us with plenty of confidence. He seemed self-assured, but had an inquisitive look on his face too. He pulled out a pen and paper ready to make some notes about who we were. One of us at our booth, on Wellesley Street in Toronto, asked him the burning question of the day:
“Are you a writer?”
“Sure am, “ he said. “I’m a poet. Have been all my life.”
I remember it like yesterday. Students in my broadcasting class seemed particularly rowdy that morning. They didn’t appear to want to calm down to take in the lecture. I’d had an unusually difficult commute to the campus. I began the prerequisite attendance check, couldn’t get the students to respond and came to a name on the attendance list I sensed had been a regular absentee. She bore the brunt of my frustration.
“You know, you should pay more attention when I call your name,” I said to the young woman. “If you paid more attention, perhaps your grades would be better.”
Throughout the day, following my operation, I was restless. In fact, that night – last Friday – I couldn’t sleep in the hospital ward where I was recovering. Coincidentally, however, the Registered Nurse on the night shift had a few minutes to spare as she recorded my blood pressure and heartbeat, so she stopped for conversation. We talked about her birthplace – East Africa – and how she’d come to Canada in search of a career. Eventually, I asked her what her name was.
“Meseret,” she said. “It means foundation. My father chose it because it was a strong name.”