I once stood silently beside my Irish neighbour as we contemplated the fetid stink of his non-functioning septic field. He finally broke the silence by stating, “These are the times sent to try us.” I just laughed. But I think we are currently living in times that are sent to try us.
Weather and craft balloons now demand the intervention of F-16 fighters and Sidewinder missiles to protect our northern border while the US opens up its southern border to whomsoever will come in. In a complete anarchy of regulatory order, someone thought it a good idea to blow up seven rail cars of vinyl chloride killing flora and fauna and distributing goodness knows what carcinogens to the downwind human population. Boys and girls are no longer boys and girls in a binary way but are something in between and on a sliding scale. Boys, by merely pronouncing the magic words “I identify as…” can enter girls’ change rooms and cause those who shriek to be arrested for taking offense. Truth has no meaning and morality is defined by skin colour. When you are a geezer and as grumpy as I am, your mind immediately goes to,
“It used to be a lot better when this nonsense wasn’t tolerated!”
I am not going to go on a rant measuring the stupid vanities of today against the stupid vanities of yesterday. Instead, I am going to tell the story of a remarkable man called Fred and let you be the judge.
Fred was known to me through his friendship with my father. He was a lawyer in our small town and to say that he was a bit rough around the edges is to put too fine a point on it. I grew up with “Fred” stories that were head shakingly funny. But it hadn’t always been so.
Fred grew up on a hardscrabble farm in drought-stricken Alberta during the 1930’s. One morning when he was fourteen, he and his younger brother woke up to find that their mother had decamped in the night. This was about six months after waking up to find that their father had decamped during the night. There being but two parents in those days, the boys were on their own so Fred packed what they had and, with younger brother in tow, hitch hiked to Calgary. He found a home for his brother and, with a job hawking newspapers, was able to pay his way through life albeit with a foreshortened academic career.
Hearing of big wages being paid in the Yukon to those intrepid enough to make the trip, Fred said goodbye to Calgary and left for the goldfields of the Klondike where the gold rush of 1898 was being replayed in a more scientific and less glamourous fashion. Companies were building dredges and reworking the creeks and valleys that had been scoured for easy gold thirty years prior. Fred made his final assault on the arduous journey to Dawson City by becoming a steam tender on a Yukon River paddle wheeler carrying material from Whitehorse. When the boat made a stop to take on fuel, Fred had to carry the logs stacked on the river bank onto the boat at a dead run or risk losing his sinecure. He was big for his age but not that big.
Arriving at Dawson City, Fred convinced one of the mining companies that he was just the man to stay sober and work safely on their dredge. And he did just that for the next number of years. Most dredge workers left the north after the five-month season with their hard fought earnings but Fred saw no reason to leave as the dredge company was willing to pay his room and board while he watched over their equipment during the cold winter. He was joined in this work by a down-on-his-luck and slightly alcoholic former high school teacher. Fortunately for Fred, his partner possessed a library that incorporated much of the great books of the western canon and over the course of Fred’s Klondike winters he read them all.
With the books digested, his tutor told him that hanging around a gold dredge had no real future and that he should go to university. He convinced Fred that he would have no problem with the university entrance exams and should consider studying to be a lawyer perhaps. I imagine that the idea of parting with the money required to travel to a southern university was as anathema to Fred as it would be to me, so it took some time for him to organize the trip to Saskatoon to challenge the entrance exams for law school.
As Fred told the story, he breezed through the English and Math portions of the entrance exam but found the going a bit more sphincter tightening when the invigilators dragged out the Latin portion of the exam. He hadn’t anticipated this bit of nastiness and wondered how he was to translate into English a two paragraph portion of Latin - a language that he had never seen much less studied. Fred was about to put down his pencil and walk out, furious for having spent all that money on a whimsy when he spotted a word in the two paragraphs that looked familiar. And then another… and another… He spotted enough cognates, in fact, that he recognized the passage as coming from Shakespeare and a passage of Shakespeare that he, as fate would have it, had memorized. He passed the Latin test with ease and four years later graduated and was called to the bar.
We were neighbours to Fred and his family, so it was natural that we became their friends. In the days before no fault divorce, my father would be called upon to be Fred’s accomplice to witness the cheating wife or husband in flagrante delicto and then swear an affidavit that secured the offended party’s vengeance. These nocturnal forays involved Fred and my dad climbing around roofs looking in windows to find the scene of the crime. Then, with my father watching, Fred would enter at a critical moment, secure the photographic evidence, and bound out before the interaction resulted in blows. Some men entertain with stories of fish that got away or superhuman feats on the field of play. When I was old enough my father told his pornographic stories of the things unhappy couples do in bedrooms not their own. And Fred’s retelling missed none of the details that my dad thought too raw for the ears of his youngest son. That is unfair. I was eavesdropping on them as they once laughed over “the good old days”.
Every memory I have of Fred is crowded with his dogs as he loved to hunt geese and his pack of Brittany Spaniels were constant companions. More than once he was evicted from court by a judge who was not sufficiently impressed by the good behaviour of his dogs. When walking at his normal, unnaturally fast clip, Fred was always accompanied by his besties. And it is good that he walked more than he drove because his driving skills were essentially non-existent. He was the first person in our town to have a remotely operated garage door and legion were the times that he smashed through the door because its ability to climb out of the way was outpaced by the speed of Fred’s approach.
Fred’s wife, Iris, was a renowned cook and it was always a delight to be invited to their house for dinner. In the first place the food was guaranteed to be delicious and in the second, it would add to our storehouse of Fred stories. One story, in particular, represents an interesting intersection of these two motivations. After a lovely steak dinner, Iris crowned the meal with a sponge cake. Having some trouble cutting the cake without squashing it, she invited Fred to cut the portions. Big mistake. Fred stood over the cake with knife in one hand and fork in the other and then engaged us with an extemporaneous, learned, and funny peroration in the style of Cicero. To summarize, according to Fred, his wife’s problem was that she lacked the force of personality required to impose her will over that of the cake. When he was finished, he dropped the knife and fork and tore off great chunks of cake with his hands and flicked them onto the plates. When the cake was distributed, Fred sat at the end of the table with a big grin on his face, unmoved while Iris unloaded her own peroration on him.
It could not have been easy living with Fred due to his rough edges but, in my experience, when he did something selfish beyond understanding he would compensate with something equally sensitive. I have vivid memories of Fred putting my sister on a fence rail during a violent but dry tempest and reciting the relevant parts of that play to her as her long hair was whipped into a frenzy by the wind. The Instantaneous Shakespeare. He once recognized my turn to Christianity by reciting the entirety of Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments, and challenged me to learn the basic tenets of my faith. A remarkable man.
One last story and it is not mine but belongs to one of my nephews. As can be imagined, my siblings and I got good mileage from telling Fred stories to our kids. When Fred was in his eighties my brother took his family to visit him and my nephew thought,
“Great! I will get one of my own Fred stories!”
But how active and outrageous can an eighty-year-old be? They visited with him at a Denny’s restaurant and Fred came across as the doddery old man that he had become. With the air conditioner on, Fred complained about the cool air on his back and asked that the machine be turned down. In fact, he asked twice and yet the offense continued. Without saying anything, Fred got up and walked with his cane towards the bathroom and, coming to the overhead air conditioner, he commenced destroying it with his cane while screaming,
“I told you to turn the g.d. thing down!” (Without the niceties of the abbreviation.)
This, of course, elicited an immediate and salutary response leaving the air conditioner in an operating but somewhat dented condition. Classic Fred. And my nephew had his Fred story.
From the most difficult of circumstances at the tenderest of ages, Fred overcame all odds. Not everyone growing up in the 1930’s was abandoned by their parents as Fred and his brother were, but nor does every boy today change his gender to peek at naked girls in the bathroom or win the swim meet. I think history is full of weirdness and every generation has its own particularities. Not that I am looking for it, but I prefer the chances of my fourteen-year-old granddaughter dealing with a male making a wrong turn into her change room than dealing with the anxiety of being suddenly alone in an uncertain world. So maybe it is the nature rather than the amount of weirdness that changes. Cranky as I am, I haven’t yet decided.