8030

 

8030 Doug Edmondson

1969 Review

I read a few Class of 69 biographies and my eyes glazed over as I read what jobs were held and what recognition was given. So I thought to take a different approach. After RMC I worked at in Ottawa at headquarters in a section devoted to logistics research: one study was on delivery time in hours from supply depots to units, another was in just in time food delivery to Bases so that Messes would not have to maintain as much food storage. Then when I was posted to the RCR as logistics officer with prospects of NATO winter exercises in Norway, I decided hell no, too much snow, and resigned in May 73, and attended Ottawa Teachers College and became an elementary school teacher.

I still smile to myself when I think of a parent teacher interview I had in November with a dad who told me his grade 6 son Danny had heard before he started at the new school that I was “a real prick”. But by the time of first term interviews, Danny had reported back to his dad that I was just “firm and fair”. Translators at parent teacher interviews were needed when the boat people arrived in the 70s and 80s, and later when Iranians arrived in the 80s, and later again in the 90s when Somali refugees arrived. One year I had two cute little grade 3/4 girls in my class from Iran whose families had escaped riding donkeys and by walking on foot through the mountains. After some time in my class, Dalal and Zaman would start giggling and would answer questions or accept directions with, yes Sir Sir, or no Sir Sir. So one day I said, let me let me in on the joke, what’s so funny? And they said in our language Sir Sir means cockroach. It still makes me smile.

In 2016 I went back to my first school for a reunion, and you don’t normally realize what impact you have on people. Richard, one of my former students was the parent MC-ing the event. I remember him as a student in art class, he drew a beautiful owl, a beautiful green owl which is how I learned he was colorblind. Another former student Mary Lou who had a reputation for making up problems to get attention, came up to me and thanked me for believing in her when she said her foot was really hurting with the result that I drove her home. She said she was treated a hairline fracture, and thanked me again, 34 years after the fact. Many students I had taught came up to me and said do you remember me, and a couple with cameras asked me to be in a picture with them. I was surprised that I could remember so many of my students, and realized from that reunion that my memory recordings were of a person’s way of being so to speak, rather than from labels like name.

Yes I saw Pierre Trudeau a couple of times walking his boys along Buena Vista Road to Rockcliffe Park Public School when I taught there. When Trudeau was defeated in 1979 and Joe Clark came in, two of my new grade 3/4students were children of newly arrived Conservative MP’s. One was Paul Yewchuck from Edmonton. At our first parent teacher meeting in November he said, “we’ve come to put you people in Ottawa in your place”. I was amazed that I, a lowly elementary school teacher, was considered to be part of the group deserving his resentment just because I lived in Ottawa. That’s what I call early signs of western alienation created by the National Energy Program, and that resentment toward Ottawa was reflected years later once again when The Freedom Convoy invaded Ottawa during Covid. Now although I’m small “L” liberal or progressive, I can’t say the Wage and Price controls brought in by Pierre Trudeau from 1975 to 1978 endeared the Liberal Party to me. Teachers were restricted to zero wage increases because increases couldn’t be justified under the rules. But I remember being shocked when Trudeau and MP’s on both sides of the house voted to increase wages for themselves during the same time period.

Don’t get restarted on the Harris Conservative government in Ontario, because Ontario teachers went for 9 ½ years without a wage increase, and when one was finally given, it was less than 1%. Did you know that the Harris government in order to justify consolidating andclosing schools, started to count hallways as classroom space. French teachers lost their classrooms so that they had to visit their different classes with their teaching materials on a trolley.  Many ESL or English as a Second Language teachers and Special Education teachers were consigned to working in windowless book rooms or even large oversized cupboards. ESL is not part of Ontario’s Education Act so in fact there is no legal mandate requiring the government to provide this service. In the early years of the Vietnamese boat people, an ESL student received 40 minutes per day, four times a week, but by the time I left teaching in 2001, ESL students received 20 minutes once per week. I could say more, but I’ll just say I loved my students, but not the Ontario education system or politicians so much.

I have loved traveling. In the summer of 1973, my first wife Judith and I travelled to the USSR. At a large restaurant in Moscow, we spent quite a few minutes examining the menu and making our choice. But when we called our waiter to make the order, he told us there was only one item available. So we saw the inefficiency of planned economies. We could see the government poured money into science, the Space Race, the military and the police, while many people lived at a very low standard of living. Kids without shoes; little old ladies with hunched backs sweeping streets to earn their government pittance. And fear everywhere, as no one wanted to talk freely if someone else was listening and could be an informer.

In 1976 we travel to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. After the Russian invasion and ouster of Dubcek in 1968, Czechoslovakia became frozen in time. I was shocked to see Prague was like a ghost town at noon for all the streets were almost literally empty as the population was either inside at work or at home. In the famous Old Town hall square with the famed medieval clock, there were a half dozen Russian military vehicles and soldiers milling about. One old Czechoslovakia man stood alone ranting at them. In contrast Hungary was practicing goulash socialism, so there were lots of people in the streets out shopping since consumer goods were more available compared to Russia. But there was a lot of public drunkenness too- symptoms of a society with lack of opportunity.

Crossing the border from Hungary to Yugoslavia was an experience. We arrived in our car at the Hungarian borderguard tower and bar gate across the road.  There we could see the border was lined with tank traps and barbed wire. The guard looked at our passports and exit visa and lifted the bar and waved us through. The road to the next guard tower and lift gate was a very narrow, single lane road about 50 metres in length on a raised isthmus of land. So we drove across that narrow strip of land and stopped at the next gate. The Yugoslavian guard looked at my passport and entry visa and said “nicht gut” and pointed for us to go back. I stepped out of the car and tried to explain the passport and entry visa were good. The guard continued to refuse, so I asked him, what was the problem, was ist los? I pressed, and he became officiously impatient with me, and pointed the submachine gun that had been slung over his shoulder at me, and ordered me to go back again. Well that was a point of high stress because we had no visas to reenter Hungary either. I couldn’t turn the car around on that narrow lane, so I slowly backed my way toward the Hungarian guard tower. As we neared the tower, the Hungarian guard leaned out the window and called out, “der Bart”. My wife Judith who spoke French immediately understood and said, it’s the beard you have grown- you don’t match your passport picture. Out came the water bottle and shaving kit for a roadside shave. Soon we drove back to the Yugoslavian gate. The border guard carefully compared my face to the passport picture, raised the gate and waved us through.

In the former Yugoslavia, if there was a second language written on a restaurant menu alongside Serbo- Croat, it was German. In the Eastern block at that time, it appeared that locals thought tourists usually spoke German.

In 1978 we visited China about one year after the fall of the Gang of Four. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping had just changed the Party policy from, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” to “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work”. And we see the results today.

I took a sabbatical in 1885-86. First I took a four month overland tour from London across the Middle East, through Iran to Khatmandu, Nepal and then onto Australia. And then a 5 month overland Adventure tour through a dozen African countries from Nairobi to London. At that time cities in Africa were “islands” of civilization in a sea of vast plains or rain forest or subsistence agriculture or desert. Roads weren’t really roads, just dirt tracks through the rain forest and Sahara desert. We kept up with the news on this journey with those small battery run Sony shortwave radios, and during this journey we heard the January 1986 news of the NASA space shuttle explosion. My experience visiting more than a half dozen Muslim countries in that year helped me to connect and relate to my Muslim students and their parents.

My second wife Anita and I love bird watching, and snorkeling to watch fish, and our travels have been for the love of nature. But at home we also had a barred parakeet for 11 years who learned to speak a half dozen phrases. She could really feel and sense what was going on. One day when Anita was feeling sad and tearful, we were astounded when on her own initiative, our little bird climbed around from Anita’s shoulder and pressed her bill to Anita’s face, kissing Anita multiple times before saying, ‘I love you Mama’.

For some 18 years between 2004 and 2023, Anita and I went south in the winter for 3 months to Barbados, Curacao, Indonesia or the Maldives, and we snorkeled pretty well daily when weather was good. Over that time we saw fish who spawned in groups, group sex, and others who as a pair spent time together in close contact. Some fish build nests, while others release their eggs to spread through the currents. We have seen small herbivore fish protect their garden of algae from larger fish. We have seen two pairs of different species hunting together. We have seen packs of carnivores swimming fast in a determined hunt for prey fish. We have seen two male fish go face to face, mouths wide open to prove who had the biggest potential bite, and was therefore was dominant. And if that didn’t work, a wrestling match would ensue. Some fish swim alone, others as a bonded pair and if they have children, the children swim with them as a family group. Others swim in schools. And different species of fish have different characters. Some fish are very curious and will approach, while others are always wary. Cleanliness is central to their lives too. At cleaning stations, small cleaner fish pick off and eat the dead skin and parasites of larger fish, and go inside the mouths of larger fish for mouth and dental cleaning. And if the cleaning station isn’t open, a fish will go for a good rub against a rock or a rough sandy bottom.  I have recounted this simply because Anita and I have seen that fish are a lot more like other animals than many people recognize.

Although there are many anecdotes I could have related, and more sides to life I could describe, I won’t – too much and too long.  But I will mention my active interest in genealogy and history, and that along the way, I have also learned a lot from research.

Although I won’t be at this year’s 2024 Class of 69 reunion, I’d like to point out that the stories I shared with you in the past few years which included the stories of my father’s Dieppe and Normandy experience, was my way of letting you know that I both remember and value the time that I spent with you, classmates.  Finally, if there is a 60^th reunion in 2029, I’ll say where the hell did the time go, and attend!