Tag Archives: Champlain High School

THE TURNING POINT

POSTED: December 1, 2021

One of the lads I was able to reconnect with at that high school reunion was Tom G. He was  a really talented musician when I knew him in high school and continued composing and performing as his main focus for his adult life. When he wasn’t composing, or on the road with various bands he spent his time managing craft fairs and running a music store he owned with his brother in Ottawa. It was named after  John Mayalls seminal album The Turning Point.

I happened to be a John Mayall fan myself repeatedly listening to  all the albums John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers produced in that late sixties and early seventies era. But its other things that have me thinking about Turning Points  these days.

While considered in its original use it is simply a descriptor of any change in direction or focus and does not have values attached to it, most of us associate it with a positive turn of some kind. Its that turn in the story or the point where the old drunken sheriff decides to put down his whiskey bottle, put his guns back on and clean up the town, or a predominantly white jury in the American south makes the decision to convict the white murderers of a black man. Most of us who have decided to stay with the living are by definition optimists so we always look for this turn, and root for the underdog or hope to see things unfold as they should.

But sometimes turning points are negative ones, where with just a little bad direction the elements can be set in motion to have things go very wrong. This is particularly the case with young people.

A while back, I was heading off to get some groceries on my little fold-up bike one morning and I encountered a carpenter who had himself in a pretty precarious position. He had a small beam above his head but had his foot twisted in some debris. Dropping the beam safely was not an option but he could not free his foot. I arrived just as another passerby did as well and we got the fellow out of his jam. He was a  bit shaken up and I offered him some coffee from my thermos as we chatted about the job he was working on. As a small contractor he told me he occasionally needs a second person but doesn’t have enough work to ever hire someone regularly. So he plods along working small jobs and occasionally, (rarely I think) gets himself into these kinds of problems.

I joked that the old square, that I had grabbed from the back of his truck to help pry him loose was not going to be much good if it was used that way very often, and he told me a story. It seems that particular square which hangs on the wall in the back of his truck he never uses as he has newer and better ones but he keeps it for nostalgic reasons. He was given this square by the carpenter he apprenticed with many years before. It was quite old when he started with the carpenter and that was many decades before. The carpenter gave him the square on his first week as an apprentice and had him build a section of a platform they were doing for an outdoor public seating area. After a morning of working the carpenter then checked the finished components  the apprentice had built and showed him how every corner, every joint, every aspect was not square. The young fellow felt humiliated and was somewhat ashamed and put the square on the various points and found they were all correct from his standpoint. Over lunch his mentor showed him that the square he had bestowed on the young lad was indeed not square at all.

The message was to always check your tools yourself, sharpen them as needed, maintain them regularly and don’t rely on anyone else’s figures, dimensions, or representations. A bad square will make everything wrong in the first place and the errors will just compound. So that square travels with the carpenter today, as a reminder of his apprenticeship and of the lessons learned.

He gave me his number and said if I ever needed some help with refinishing En Plein Air to give him a call and he would give a very good price on any work I needed.

I felt good about the morning and kept his number. But more than that the story about the square stuck with me. The more I have thought about it the more the cumulative effect of one good decision or event or one bad decision or event can just snowball into a full-fledged success or disaster.

The financial world is rife with this. Cumulative interest if working for you can create a small fortune, or if working against, be your downfall.

I know this of course when out navigating on the water. Now to be fair I don’t do this much – I have always had a captain who makes those decisions but I have great respect for what’s at stake as a slight miscalculation at the beginning if not corrected will have you end up hundreds of miles off course.

But so many life decisions are like this as well. Link up with the right partner in life or business and things can truly blossom. Or make a bad assumption that you cumulatively base more  decisions on, and it can be ruinous.

The high school reunion I was at has me thinking about this in terms of personal evolution. The little bad or good decisions made early on have had such an impact on what happens later, unless there is a serious influence to change that direction.

I am not a parent. I don’t know if I really wish I had been and at 67 years old it’s not something to think about now. But in working with kids through the years and reflecting on the insecurities I know many adults have, it is pretty damb clear that the perspective a parent gives at a critical stage in a kids upbringing matters more than almost anything else.

Over the last twenty months of Covid, I have seen some rather extreme examples of how well and how badly it can go. Some parents are so stressed out, under financial pressure and generally so freaked out that I think they are permanently bending the square their kids will learn from. Others, under the same pressures seem to be able to relate to their kids that there are some things we can change, and some things we need to roll with because we can’t and learning to roll with them is the key.

My mother used to talk about the depression in fairly glowing terms. They were dead poor, there was little food, the future was bleak, but it was a time that both her mother and father were home and could do things with them. They learned to sew, cook, cut firewood, clean, cut grass, do gardening , and paint the house, together. Along the way there was a bit of math, geography, history, reading  and some life stories as well.

I am sure there will be some kids that will come through Covid remembering these times as some of the best years of their lives and be set up for whatever nonsense is thrown at them later. Its all whether someone shows them the square was bent and teach them the tools of how we cope with adversity. I think I have been offering that in my little cooking classes at the marina, but I am going to offer up an extra dollop of it for the young people in my classes from now on.

Django

The Turning Point

A ONE MINUTE HALF CENTURY

POSTED: November 1, 2021

Yes, I made it to my reunion and back. It was all  part of my trip involving my short stop in Ireland and then several days in Canada.  I filed the police report in Cork. I made it to Canada and my teeth are cleaned and inspected.  I am to be getting a new mouth guard in the mail. I got to check in with my doctor, and my neurologist. The optometrist I usually also have an appointment with,  like all other optometrists in Ontario, is on strike. Yeah, in the middle of a pandemic. Now there is entitlement!

But the real feature of the little time away was to reunite with my high school graduating class. For those who don’t follow this website of mine regularly you may want to go back a couple posts to August 1st, FORTY-EIGHT.

Now the idea of getting together with a lot of people you have not seen in about half a century is a strange notion to start with. The people you always cared about from those days you probably kept up with anyway and the others – well the only real thing you have in common is that you went to school together. I was musing about this on my flight over but came to realize by my flight back, that while you may not share common interests or beliefs given that you all lived in the same neighbourhood, have experienced the same sequence of world events and are the same age we really did all have a lot more in common than not.

 

That fact became clear when hearing the one-minute summaries. Each person was given one minute to talk about what they had been up to in the last forty-eight years as a way to get some info out there so everyone would not be repeating the telling of their history over the rest of the evening. It is interesting what someone choses to talk about when it is a summary of their life since high school and they only have one minute. I expect that if it had occurred ten or twenty years after high school there would have been a lot more focus on the business card – a life defined by the persons occupation, and their credentials. If it had occurred at that ten- or twenty-year mark as well I bet that there would have been more of a competitive vibe –“ I am an astronaut, and you are not”.

But forty-eight years after high school graduation– man that’s a lot of business cards under the bridge. So, at this reunion the topic of partners, children, grandchildren, community work etc. all made more significant appearances. Of course, the big superficial novelty is the skinny high school guys who now look like Humpty Dumpty, or the people who had long hair who now have none at all.

It was during Covid times of course so we all got checked for our double vax at the door, but then let our guards down and there was a lot of hugging. I got to thank a woman who, in class all those years ago, had an uncanny way of looking at me when I was just on the brink of being out of control. June still has the same eyes and did not realize that there were many a times I stepped back from some stupid antic because of her look. An amalgam of pending disappointment, with a bit of sternness that I was about to take away some quality time for her in biology class with my inappropriate behaviour.

There were some who were inspiring with the leading-edge stuff they have done in medicine for example. Most just told the stories of how they put one foot in front of the other, went to university or college for something they had an interest in, then worked at whatever that thing was, married someone, had some kids and then retired.  But for me I loved hearing about the offbeat paths taken. Tom and his career in music and managing crafts shows, how Tanya’s nursing career supported her lifestyle around the world etc. But I was really taken by a woman who left after grade twelve.  She did not graduate with us from grade 13. At the time you could take a four-year diploma after grade 12 if you wanted to go to college or work instead of going to university. She started as a secretary right after grade 12 but enrolled part time in college for office management and business admin courses. The years passed and she moved to being a legal secretary, and kept taking courses, eventually finishing an undergraduate degree and finally, law school. Today she has her own law practice.

As most of us have had to work to survive the occupations we took up to a certain extent did partially define us. Certainly, some occupations compensate better than others, offering more options for how you live your life, but one thing that really struck me when looking back over this long period and over these many lives is not that the particular occupations define us but our approach to those livelihoods. Some people live for the end of their shift, whether its at an auto plant or a surgical room, while others enjoy their Monday morning as much as their Friday night. I saw many examples of the continuation of those traits from high school right through to retirement at that reunion.

But what I also saw was how some people can change. It may be just their own evolution or because of the relationship with a  life partner or a business partner, but some do transform themselves. I don’t mean just the outward side of changing occupations or activity set,  but the personal evolution aspect.

Its also interesting when pushed to talk about your 48 years in one minute, what can be said and not said in just a few words. “My partner beat cancer three times”. It takes about three seconds to say that phrase and it reflects decades of anguish and pain and leaves the question open as to whether there was a fourth time. Similarly, “I have a troubled child”, just points to a very dark doorway.

The one-minute exercise makes us look at what we are, and what we value. A great partner?   A good parent? A dependable friend? Or just the guy with more donut franchises than anyone else?

Some of us came a distance for this reunion, while others walked to the venue. I think in that regard we all have a different set of memories of the geography of the time. I had not been back to that neighborhood in a long while, and could hardly recognize the block the restaurant was in. It was only a short distance from where I delivered pizza (check out the posting on Sept 19, 2020 CLEANING OFF THE GUCK) but that building is now a condominium.

I found it interesting that some who did not have that far to come did not attend. I don’t know if it was the experience of high school or what we build up in our heads about those years afterward that kept some away. I hope they make it to the next one.

Name tags are a must after forty-eight years. Some people I recognized instantly but many others would have been a struggle with out the identifiers. Some didn’t recognize or remember me so the apologies I had prepared were not needed. LOL.

I loved the reunion and as I sat on the plane reflecting on it, the looking back over those years actually has me looking forward. Is what I am doing now what I want to do? What should I do with the next twenty years of my life?

Its easy when you get over a certain age to think that your big adventures are behind you but as I was reflecting on these things this week in writing this post, I had a note from a buddy who is contemplating a trip next spring.  It’s a sailing trip down to Panama, and  to go through the canal. After that its all sailing north to Washington State. Time to mix it up after a lot of years in Key West.

As an experienced sailor he knows what risks lie ahead with over  forty feet of fiberglass and an adventurous perspective.   A few years back when the Stones played in Havana he sailed down from Key West for the concert and back. One way was a nice day on the ocean. The other was sixteen hours of hard sailing with Mother Nature reminding him of just who is in charge.

Now he is of an age that some would say he “is old enough to know better” but I think he is just about the right age to appreciate and savour the experience. I will live vicariously through his notes to me on his trip, but it does have me thinking….

 

Django

FORTY-EIGHT

Posted: August 1, 2021

In the spring of 1973 I graduated from Champlain High School in Ottawa, Canada. That was forty-eight years ago. And about a week ago I received a note from my longtime buddy (and classmate) Jim H. who still lives in the Ottawa area, letting me know there was a movement afoot to have a reunion on October 2nd , the first for our year.

Wow.  A high school reunion. There are few things that conjure up such a mix of emotions. I know that for some the nine weeks from hearing of this until the actual event will be the period to: lose 40 pounds, get a facelift and win a Nobel prize for physics. Well, I never was much good at physics. Physics and a few of the other sciences did various cameo appearances on my high school F column with the regulars Math and French. Yeah French, and I have a French heritage. I am kind of squeamish when it comes to surgery so that puts the face lift out of the question for me as well. Forty pounds? I think it might be easier to get that Nobel prize in the nine weeks.

Now while high school is a pretty crazy time in the evolution of teenagers it was particularly strange in that period when I was there – 1968 to 1973. Yes, that is a five year period because at the time Ontario Canada offered a four year high school diploma for anyone wanting to pursue the trades or community college and a five year diploma for most people who aspired to go to university or had parents with such aspirations for their offspring. I had such parents.

And what was happening in that 1968 to 1973 period? Well at the beginning of that period the Cold War was still hot, the war in Viet Nam was heating up as both a war and effectively a civil war in the United States as well, and  Martin Luther King had just been murdered in April of ’68.  In 1969 gay rights in Canada were opened up, the Americans put a man on the moon, and by October 1970 the War Measures Act was used in Canada to try to manage the FLQ,  a Quebec liberation group. Women were fighting for their liberation, race relations were poor, particularly in the U.S., and as we now know, the Canadian Government with the Roman Catholic Church ramped up both the Residential Schools and the forced assimilation of our indigenous peoples with the sixties scoop. Shameful. It really was a very screwed up time on most fronts and many of us had parents who had no idea how to cope with the perspectives their teenagers were developing regarding many of these issues.

In contrast to those turbulent times the soundtrack for our high school life was amazing. It started with The Beatles releasing The White Album and then Abbey Road and the Stones releasing   Beggars Banquet and Let it Bleed. Led Zeppelin was formed.  By the summer between grade 9 and 10 we had Woodstock. If you are new to this website you may want to look back in the archives ( MY VERY FIRST POST,  posted December 14, 2013) to Jim C’s Woodstock experience and the recent follow up to that  (WOODSTOCK: 50 YEARS LATER, posted August 15, 2019). Every week a new album would come out that today would be considered epic. And as if to celebrate our graduation in 1973, Pink Floyd released The Dark Side Of The Moon.

Of course, that flood of new music was also reflecting growth on some amazing music from before and I have great memories of sitting at Jim H’s living room listening to Gene Vincent Rock and the Blue Caps Roll, or his fathers Dave Brubeck albums.

And that’s the really fun part of memories. It is not just the music but the link of that music to what we were doing at the time.  I have fond recollections of lounging in the dark listening to the Moody Blues in Myles C.’s basement after a warmup joint outside, and singing along to The Who, Rush  and Black Sabbath  while riding in Bo M’s amazing Datson 240Z with the music just loud enough to have the whole city turn to listen.

Ahh, the cars. Bo always had a nice ride, as his dad was in that business and Bo would clean the cars and sometimes bring them home. Jim H’s parents had the ’66 corvette stingray fastback, and Steve Z. got a brand-new Corvette for graduation. The rest of us mortals, rode bikes, motorcycles, took transit, walked, borrowed our parents’ cars or had really old junkers. I had an 80 cc Yamaha motorbike, that spit and coughed and farted all the way to wherever I was going. My main man Jim C. had saved a lot  so that in January 1970 when we both turned sixteen, he had bought a three-year-old Volks Beetle  and drove it to the driving test – Yeah, don’t ask.  He delivered pizza with it part time and loved that thing. But one sunny Sunday morning in August  of that year on a tight bend near his parents’ cottage he rolled it.  That turned him on to doing autobody and worked on a lot of other guys cars over the rest of High school.

For some of us we did not do high school well. At the time, what we now call Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder was in its early stages of identification and treatment,  and the confusion for most practitioners was that some inflicted with this had  a big attention deficit while others had not as much but a lot of hyperactivity. For most of us with it , the identification only came much later than high school, after some seriously disastrous experiences. I have ADHD but unlike my buddy Jim C. who was given an extra dollop of the H part I got an extra dollop of the AD part. It meant that I was laid back and identified as “mentally lazy”  and he was identified as “overwound”. I just cruised through high school failing stuff and for him the behaviors are as if you took  a regular kid, gave him a bunch of amphetamines, a couple of double espressos and send him off to school each day.

He channeled it into track and field – literally to run it off. I, on the other hand, would self medicate. Both of these techniques work to a degree but only partially. Each of us only figured out we had this later in life and much too late to have a very positive high school experience – at least academically.

Our high school  was a little weird as well. We had a real range on the socioeconomic front – some not very well off, some exceedingly well off and most of us in the middle. When we were in grade 10 the school board decided to turn our school into a Francophone school and the English school would be phased out. We were the second last graduating class as the year behind us was the last intake of the English students.  I think it was a Canadian application of the U.S. bussing program that had been so successful. LOL.

The result of this phase out of the school’s intake was that each year the scale of the student body dwindled, and as normal attrition was also occurring with some families who would move away, the number of students in our year also went down in size, as no new families moving to the area  could have their kids join us as this strange orphaned school.  There were positives to this small size of course in that we were a tighter group and could do some things that at the time were unique like moving the whole bunch of us (students, teachers, admin people)  to camp together, but in general we could not put together a football team or have as many extra curricular clubs etc.

Looking back over almost half a century is also scary. We look at the choices we have made, the experiences we have had since high school and how we might have done things differently. I spend a lot of time writing on this website  reflecting on life, looking back and looking forward. I think if this reunion happened twenty years ago I would have been pretty uptight about it,  but now it has been so long it is just a novelty that we have made it this far and will be fun to get reacquainted. But it has taken me this long to get to that point that I can see my high school years more  objectively and pull out those positive memories. It is as if over the years I have gone through a set of slides and year after year thrown out one or two of the bad memories only to be left with mainly slides of the good times and the positives that have come out.

Forty-eight years is a long time. That number has significance for Jim as he retired on his forty-eighth birthday and significance for me as the trip we did in June 2004  was En Plein Airs forty-eighth trip moving people to safe points as I described  in THE NEW MILLENIUM, posted March 26, 2017.

My buddy Jim C. has a lot of travel points and has got me a ticket to come over, see my doctor, dentist, and go to the reunion. The flight is by way of Ireland so Ciara is joining me for that leg as both of us need to sign statements at the police station regarding the death of her ex husband and then she is staying on for a few weeks as she needs to do something to keep up her medical accreditation. I will be in Ireland for just a day and then off to Canada for a few days of quality time with my doctor, dentist, and people I have not seen in about five decades.

I am now off to the library to sign out a bunch of physics texts.

Django

High School Django

P.S. As regular readers know I don’t usually put in pictures of myself as I like to keep a low profile but here is one of me from my high school days in grade twelve or grade thirteen. I am going to spend some time trying to find some images of my classmates and if they are cool with it, I will post them here as well.