Ted Barris

About a month ago, a hockey buddy and I went out for a round of golf at a nearby course. He’s a member there, but this was just a casual round for a bit of relaxation, conversation and refreshment after the round. Through most of the game, I’d had no luck hitting the greens with my tee shots. Since most of the holes are par threes, my problem was critical.

“Try this,” Geoff Gaston said and he handed me a hybrid golf club.

It looks like a small driver, but lighter. I tested the club’s weight, teed up the ball and sure enough I drove the green. First try.

“That fixed that,” Geoff said. And – thanks to his club and his tip – I consistently drove par three greens all afternoon.

As he and I sat enjoying that refreshment after the game, I pondered my golfing breakthrough. More important, I thought about the guy who’d fixed my problem. In many ways, that’s the story of Geoff Gaston’s life. Whether in his work, at home or in his relationships, Geoff has very often been “the fixer.” Just ask anybody he met while on the job in recent years at Zehrs, the local grocery store. Can’t find something? Need a hand? Geoff provided it, and not just because it was his job either. It came naturally.

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A few weeks ago, a few members of my family – several cousins and an uncle from the U.S. – gathered at a rented cottage up north. Between cloud bursts and wind gusts, we attempted to holiday. We threw a few horseshoes. We got some summer reading in on the deck. We attempted a couple of barbeques. We even approximated some swimming. During one of those warm spells, my cousin’s husband made an announcement.

“I’m off to dig up earth worms,” Jerry said, “and I’m going to do some fishing.”

“Go to it, Jerr,” we all said.

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Just after the holiday Monday, I walked into Blue Heron Books to find its proprietor on the phone. She looked as if she were having a lively conversation. She was as animated as she usually is when anybody drops into the store for a book or to talk about a book. As I got closer I realized that, no, the conversation was one-way. She was essentially leaving a message for a book representative or a publicist.

“So if you can get back to me,” Shelley Macbeth said, “maybe we can work out a way to stage the event.” And she hung up the phone, rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders. Clearly, the experience was unsatisfactory.

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Just after the holiday Monday, I walked into my favourite local bookstore – Blue Heron Books – to find its proprietor on the phone. She looked as if she were having a lively conversation. She was as animated as she usually is when anybody drops into the store for a book or to talk about a book. As I got closer I realized that, no, the conversation was one-way. She was essentially leaving a message for a book representative or a publicist.

“So if you can get back to me,” Shelley Macbeth said, “maybe we can work out a way to stage the event.” And she hung up the phone, rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders. Clearly, the experience was unsatisfactory.

I lamented to Shelley that it’s too bad people don’t talk to each other anymore, that we’ve resorted to communicating by leaving voice mail for each other, or tapping out coded messages on computer keyboards as e-mail, or, more than likely these days, “twittering” text messages in more abbreviated and clipped language than even an e-mail message allows. I mean, how many times has someone on the other end of the telephone line cut short a conversation by saying:

“Why don’t you just e-mail me and I’ll get back to you.” Which is short for “I can’t be bothered talking to you. I feel less threatened if I sit at a computer keyboard and compose an answer later, rather than deal with you person-to-person right now.”

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I should have been suspicious.

I should have been suspicious when Ronnie Egan, my neighbour of nearly 25 years, asked if I would take her to the grocery store. I should have been suspicious because it was a Sunday. And she wanted me to drive her there at precisely 2:15 that afternoon. Odd in retrospect. But given that 1) she was a chief petty officer in the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service during the war and she therefore does everything with purpose and precision, and 2) that she is the world’s greatest neighbour, who was I to question? But I did speak up at one point.

“What do you need at the store today?” I asked.

“Just a few things for an event I’m going to,” she said.

It turned out the event was a surprise party for me. You see, Sunday was my 60^th birthday. Ronnie and the whole world – well, my whole world – was in on the scheme to gather at the local music hall and surprise me. And I didn’t suspect a thing. Although I should have.

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I listened with great interest, the other night, to the pronouncements from the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission about what we’re likely to be watching on our television sets in the coming years. Depending upon whom you believe, this week’s CRTC pay-for-carriage decision is either a victory or a defeat.

“[It’s] the key to our viability,” one broadcaster said.

“I’m fighting mad,” a cable executive countered. “We’ll explore all avenues to contest it.”

What the two giants appear to be fighting over is what the broadcasters claim are appropriate payments to them for the on-air content they produce in their studios and production facilities. While the cable companies call it “a massive tax grab by the broadcasters” to expect cash payment from them, when all they’re doing is delivering the product to viewers.

The truth, in my view, is that neither broadcasters nor cable companies are entitled to claim sovereignty over content. Actually, it’s the writers, researchers, producers, performers, journalists and the technicians who produce the content – they are the true creators. And I believe if both the corporate giants of broadcasting and cable delivery paid the creators their fair share, there might be more production money and content for everybody – including us viewers.

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The lunch seemed more elegant than it really was: jambon, fromage et tarte framboises. My dining partners, enjoying ham sandwiches with cheese and strawberry tarts, were fellow travellers – a retired public servant, a photographer and a D-Day veteran – in the Normandy region of France. Suddenly, however, the lunch became secondary, when a stranger approached us. She spotted our Canadian pins.

“Do you know about the ceremony today at l’Abbaye d’Ardenne?” she asked.

We nodded. We told her our group of 47 Canadians – on a tour of Normandy for the 65th anniversary of the June 6, 1944, invasion – had included the ceremony she mentioned. We knew that on this day – D-Day-plus-1 – members of German commander Kurt Meyer’s 12th SS Panzer Division had captured and executed 20 Canadian soldiers and then hurriedly buried their bodies in the garden of the thousand-year-old Catholic chapel.

“It’s the most important thing in my life to remember the murdered Canadians,” she said on the verge of tears, “and to make sure the story doesn’t die.”

Her name is Joelle-Lise Perthuis. At 56, her lifetime occupation has been as a teacher of French, Latin and Greek at a Paris high school. But her more recent life’s preoccupation has been the murders at l’Abbaye. She described the shame she felt when she first came to the chapel near Caen, a decade ago, to find just a cultural centre and no acknowledgment of the SS atrocity (she called it “crime de guerre.”) She trembled with emotion, trying to articulate her anger both at the Hitler youth soldiers who shot the Canadian troops and equally the French government for ignoring the gruesome deaths.

“I come here every year without fail,” she said. “It’s impossible to forget these liberating Canadian soldiers.”

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