Contempt for Calgary Teachers

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Editor’s note: I had planned to keep with this month’s theme of sound, with a piece about a friend’s hearing impairment, but news has overtaken me.

Hello Reader,

Got breaking news?

Just when you hoped teachers could learn? 

BREAKING NEWS: 

Bullying Report Merits Contempt says Sean Crawford

This week, the Calgary Herald newspaper page 3 headline (Thursday October 17) goes, 

Staff training urged in CBE bullying report. 

(CBE stands for Calgary Board of Education) Right below is the “kicker,” 

Critic charges board review ‘dismissive’ of parents, students facing difficulties.

As it happens, although I graduated from the department of disabilities at the local university’s Faculty of Education, with due respect for my fellow alumni, I must agree, not with the school board that made the report, but with critic Barb Silva, the spokeswoman for the Support Our Students advocacy group. The context is the suicide of a bullied nine year old girl in March.

History repeats. I sympathized with parents and students back in mid-2015, in my essay Saving Tomorrow Land (regarding a movie about George Clooney wearing a jet pack) where I noticed that Bully Solutions, with 40 case studies, gave little hope because nearly all of the solutions had come from parents: Teachers with university degrees seemingly knew less about bullying that an untrained parent with common sense. Hence my contempt. I am of the opinion—let’s hope I’m wrong—that the tragic death of that nine year old, and the many tragic deaths at the Columbine School, have been in vain. In tomorrow’s land, as astronauts soar into space, the bullying down here will go on and on.

Please forgive me for voicing this distressing opinion. In February I reviewed What We Want You to Know by children from a good affluent area of southern Ontario, subtitled Kids Talk About Bullying. Of all the stories told, (think case studies) the teachers were effective only twice. May God and parents help those poor children, because nobody else will.

The fresh report by the CBE (Calgary Board of Education) says teachers need more training. Really? Where have I heard that line before? Oh yes, in South Vietnam and Iraq, remember? 

Experts told us that with “more training” those well-equipped armies would bravely take on, face to face, ragged insurgents and ISIS forces which are without training, only common sense. Rubbish! Soldiers will not risk their sacred lives, nor teachers risk their sacred comfort, unless they feel mutual trust in each other, having confidence that the “hearts and minds’ of everybody else are in agreement. In February I documented, from practical U.S. for-profit hospital meetings, how such a “win” is indeed possible—without reliance on classroom “training,” while noting it might take a year or more for teachers to trust each other. The founder of those for-profit meetings is living right here in Calgary, a former Calgary Alderman and Member of the Legislative Assembly, (think US state government) Brian Lee. (Note: Lee’s plan takes three years, not ‘one year and then stop,’ lest confidence, attitudes and momentum be lost) 

The school board, through Kent Donlevy, interviewed 150 CBE staff. Donlevy said there was no time to interview parents and students since the research was done over the summer months. Silva asked, “So why not do this important research over the span of a year?” The Herald article by Eva Ferguson notes, ‘But Silva argued the language being used in schools is too vague and serves little purpose:’ “Why use well-being or wellness? Why not call it what it is? It’s bullying. Where is the discussion, action and initiative around conflict resolution for students? Where does the board address emotional resilience?”

Long ago a philosopher said, “If a goal is true and good and beautiful, AND if it is not being reached, then there is an obstacle in the way.” Want to stop bullying, unrelenting misery and suicide? There is an obstacle here, and it’s not the parents.

Sean Crawford

Wetaskiwin

October

2019

Footnotes, for those with hardy stomachs: 

~A field tour of Vietnam stopped after one year. (Six months for officers) Unfortunately, children may be in misery for years, plural, according to those Ontario students.

(Reminder: There’s no excuse for being surprised anymore—It was back in the early 1970’s that Women’s Liberation, to society’s big surprise, discovered that even drab nuns in shapeless clothing can be assaulted, with rape being not from arousal, but from the joy of violence and bullying)

Three news links from the BBC, from this year:

(link) A wife and mother, even though (sarcasm) ‘kids will be kids and you should just ignore them,’ has Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

(link) A young girl was repeatedly sexually assaulted by bullies on the playground but her teacher didn’t believe her until she was too sore to sit down.

(link) A boy is no longer the same since he was raped by a bully on a play date.

Three essays of mine, archived from this year:

Human Warmth and War of the Worlds includes a part regarding a  U.S. school shooting, and teacher’s CYA response, May 2019

History repeats. During Vietnam, angry young soldiers observed that army paperwork was not to advance the war effort but “to cover your ass.” (CYA)

Bullying Still, is regarding teachers at that Calgary school not changing their culture after suicide, and a girl, with an award from the prime minister, having to change schools, May 2019

Bullies and Teachers, regarding practical advice for teachers, beyond “try harder,” February 2019

For folks “archive challenged,” here’s (a link)

Woking of Wells and Mars

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got media pilgrimage?

On Sunday (link) we had the North American premier of the new, exciting BBC mini-series War of the Worlds. I won’t see the series myself, because I won’t pay for the T and E channel, a channel I never even heard of until now. Of course fans of War of the Worlds are excited. 

Fans of anime, over in Japan, I hear, do pilgrimages. They travel to see the real locations that anime (Japanese animation) artists use to draw their cartoons for television. (Cartoons that are far, far superior to the noisy ones made in the U.S.A.)

Being a fan of prose novels, I finally did something I have wanted to do since elementary school: Travel to see where HG Wells lived while he was gleefully writing about his neigbors being blasted by Heat Rays. As a boy I decided: Someday I would go up Primrose Hill where the narrator looks out over a desolate London, seeing a gash in Saint Paul’s cathedral. And on my first trip to England, with a detailed map of South England for tracking the Martian advance, I finally did so. What I had never imagined, in my boyhood, was that as a middle-aged man I would be inspired to write a book of poems about the novel, poems that would take place both in the real present and an imagined one. Note: Modern poems don’t rhyme.

I have been posting those poems onto my blog since Christmas, at roughly fortnightly intervals. Here is a poem of my very first hours on English soil. As you may know, the first Martian cylinder landed not in New York or L.A—go figure—but outside the town of Woking, south of London. Soon after my jet screeched down at Gatwick, I hiked  down the sidewalk and turned into the Woking historical society. I invited an historian named Duncan to guess why I had come straight from the airport. “You have relatives.” No. “A military connection.” No. (There is a big WWI Sikh graveyard) I said, “I’ll give you a hint: Three legs.” Turns out the high Fighting Machine in the town square, advancing from the direction of Horesell Common, is affectionately known as Tripod. I had a swell time in Woking, staying at two hotels, (my first time ever seeing Downton Abbey, in the hotel cafetria-lounge) but never staying, as it was full, at the HG Wells Hotel. Here’s a poem:

Into Woking

I flew the strato-jet from Calgary to the airport,

from the airport I rode a passenger train to Woking,

from Woking station I backpacked to the historical society.

I met Duncan who expressed his regrets 

that Occidental College is now Occidental Shopping Centre.

We both remember how the Martian Heat Ray 

blasted the college, 

putting the chimney 

of Mr. Wells’ house 

in line of sight of the Ray.

Crack! went the chimney.

The house of H.G. Wells has a little plaque.

I stood outside his home 

with my back to the raised rail line across the road.

Wells knew the station was close yet too far

so he borrowed a cart and drove his wife to Leatherhead.

The cart was borrowed 

from the owner of the Spotted Dog.

The horse, 

poor brute, 

suffered a broken neck.

The owner, 

poor man, 

was found dead in dark of night.

Wells, 

mercifully, 

was innocent of

what was to become of Leatherhead.

Today there is no Spotted Dog.

Locals raised on Wells tell me with distaste

a few years ago 

a car dealer 

levelled it to make a paved lot.

A bar named Ogilvies has a sign of a telescope.

Inside are many old pictures of telescopes—

etchings, lithographs, engravings,

but no mention of Ogilvie, 

a friendly astronomer

and a good man 

who perished under a flag of truce at the sandpit.

A bar of the Witherspoon chain has a Wells theme.

On the ceiling are two great illuminated glass circles,

a clock face,

and a circle of book pages,

readable from the floor. 

A local eagerly asks, 

“Do you want to see time go backwards?”

“Yes.”

He rushes over to the secret switch 

for the Time Machine.

Someone says George over there 

was the model for the Invisible Man.

George raises his glass to salute

while the Man sits alone 

in the window 

wrapped in his bandages.

I pull out my walking map from the town library.

A drinking buddy tells me the sandpit isn’t marked. 

“Just go there, and turn here,” says the friendly man.

No one wants to drink under the gaze of nasty Martians. 

Far down the hall to the loo is an old steel etching,

a stiff Martian holds a projector to blast a bridge.

Be thankful those times are long ago.

Sean Crawford

October

Calgary

2019

Sidebar of childhood memories:

Penguin books always had plain covers, (Not for sale in the USA) except for some of the comic ones—and The War of the Worlds. I read it cover to cover while at a thrift store, waiting for my mother to finish volunteering. She said cruelly that I should have waited, because now I had it all finished before I even got home.

Through “the bush” (as we called it) from my home was a high jump sawdust pit at the far edge of the vast school grounds. There pop cans dented the sawdust like crashed Martian cylinders. I remember running to the pit and crying myself to sleep. When I awoke I saw a brown rabbit very close by… 

I had often cried from abuse, utterly normal crying, but that was the day I faced a Truth about my life and my mother, a Truth of horrible knowledge and despair, a day I will recall forever, to be used when I wrote of a boy running up the church stairs to cry in a bell tower, to be asleep and safe when Black Smoke smothered the rest of the town. (Archived June 2019 as Losing Innocence, With Martians)

  

Dark Emotions and Martians

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Note to Mars fans: my last War of the Worlds poem was in Innocence is Gone, and It’s Not OK, archived August 2019.

Hello Reader, 

Got dark emotions?

They say we live in a vale of tears, a vale hard to see clearly.

Strange, to think that today’s younger adults have never known a world without murder-suicide. I can remember when such tragedy was a novelty; newspaper stories would always include a quote from a baffled expert to help people understand. No longer. Now murder-suicides are like discovery X: We know X exists, but just like our ancestors contemplating electricity, we don’t expect to understand it.

Our ancestors would quote the Bible that the years of a person are three score and ten, 70. OK, if so, then middle age starts at 35. At least, I have long thought so, if only to remind myself to see clearly that I could not be a permanent, timeless, graduate student past age 35. (in terms of lifestyle, I mean)

People who turned 18, on this day in the year 2001 A.D., during the year of 9/11, will have spent their adult lives seeing a world of Arab suicide-bombers from 18 to the ripe middle age of 36. The Arab religion is old, but the first such bomber, according to a Muslim member of parliament, was not until the 1980’s during the war between the Muslim nations of Iran and Iraq. 

(I used to tell those two countries apart by saying Iran had an “N” in the name, like India, so it was the farthest east)

When a society is ready, the teacher will appear. 

A lady who took part in a Women’s Liberation “consciousness raising” group reports something. She well remembers those exciting days. As you know, the feminists would meet in circles, partly to help each other to “deprogram” from society’s messages, partly to face the facts of their experiences, and from those facts to then create concepts. This effort required time. They surfaced unbelievable things that society hadn’t seen—but they never, reports the lady, talked about rings of men and women engaged in child pornography: Society wasn’t ready yet. Like discovery X, we know now that such rings exist, but we don’t yet understand, certainly not enough to prevent them.

Sometimes I think, “How queer, that a person from the age before electricity could know more about our human nature than a space age fellow with a psychology degree.” Yes, I’m thinking of you-know-who: The Bard. No wonder English literature, besides having themes and symbols and such, is so concerned with character. People are the original black box. I certainly want to know more about people, but…

…Sometimes, instead of just slumping on my couch to lazily read a book, I show initiative: I get up and go over and make an effort to stretch out an arm to turn on the TV set. 

(“The” TV because I only have the one, “set” because of the collection of glowing tubes in the back) 

After the cathode ray tube, the screen, warms up and comes on, 

(and then I can safely then turn up the volume) 

I don’t want to see Hamlet standing there like a “talking head.”. No, I want movement in my moving pictures, I want car chases and heroes leaning out their car windows wielding pistols, and cars plunging over cliffs. 

Since I never get such action in my English literature poetry—why not?—I decided to write my own poems. And let’s face it, sometimes “a dark time of Martians” might stand in for things society can’t look at yet. And that’s OK.

SIDEBAR:

Because I know society is not yet “ready for the knowledge to appear” I felt foolish posting my Bullies and Teachers (archived February) essay, feeling especially foolish when I wrote:

QUOTE

I wonder how many boys and girls, bullied and sexually assaulted, end up losing their innocence … growing up to be well groomed, well employed, socially skilled adults moving among us, adults who are social isolates because they have lost something along the way… A kid above says, “I just can’t be around people anymore.”

UNQUOTE

I had felt foolish from the thought of readers scorning me for daring to say that bullies would sexually assault other children. But they would. Since then, here is a story (link) where a teacher called a six year old victim a silly girl. Her assault from peers during school playtime only became known when she was too sore to sit down.

Also since then, here’s a story (link) where the mother notes her “raped on a play date” son “is not the same boy”

Of course I like our dear school teachers… and I’m also feeling strident today, like a new feminist.

Poem

The Highway

People say Martians have no emotions,

But I know better.

I was on a hill looking over the middle of 

a slow busy highway running between high banks of grass.

I had been too passive to grab a life-saving ride myself.

Now all the cars were crawling away from the direction of the Martian crater.

From behind a hill to the rear of the fleeing cars

a Fighting Machine rocked and swung into view.

For a moment the Martian inside contemplated the fleeing ants.

A metal arm raised in a slow arc

holding a projector for the Heat Ray,

I forgot to breathe.

The Ray was invisible in the daylight

stabbing the lead car—it exploded in an orange petroleum fireball

too far away for me to hear anything but a distant thoom.

The adjacent cars, one by one, were blasted, 

blowing black clouds 

curling up low over the remains.

The way forward was now blocked.

The Martian turned its attention to the hindmost cars.

There too cars blossomed orange under dark clouds.

Then with the cars all prevented from escaping

there was no need,

(—or so thought the humane side of me)

to do any more damage.

The Martian proceeded to ray the whole line,

Car by car by car,

from glee or spite or lust 

for power.

I was too far away to hear any death-yells.

People say Martians have no souls.

True, so true.

Don’t say they have no emotions,

not after what I saw.

Sean Crawford

September 11,

Calgary

2019

Footnotes 

From the previous century, the 20th, some examples of social programming: 

`Men remind, women nag; men get angry, women get hysterical…et cetera.

~Women must never be aggressive, and even being softly assertive is being aggressive.

~In a religious colony: Women must be sweet, and their standing up for basic rights or even asking questions to clarify basic rights is not sweet.

~The legal standard of “a reasonable adult” is “a reasonable male adult.” (No longer the case)

~To be strong and effective, professional and businesslike… is to be unwomanly and unfeminine.

~Women are not reasonable creatures.

~A woman must never command a starship. …Let alone command the starship Voyager for several years during prime time. (Star Trek)

Innocence is Gone, and It's Not OK

essaysbysean.blogspot.com   

Reminder: Back when the communists and nazis were friends they divided Poland between them, down the middle.

Hello Reader

Got knowledge of fragility?

Sources:

Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savit,

Ember, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, 2017

Poppies of Iraq, by Brigitte Fndakly and Lewis Trondheim, Drawn and Quarterly, originally published in French, with help from the Canada Council, 2017

A writer once pointed out that most people move through the world gingerly. That sounds right, based on the ordinary folks I have known, including writers. Then again, my writer peers would never be blazing oblivious extroverts. How could they be? And still do the art they do? 

This week I was with a small circle of writers to discuss our latest book club selection: Anna and the Swallow Man by. Gavriel Savit. Highly recommended. In wartime Poland, the two title characters, innocent girl and mysterious wise man, are trying to survive the holocaust by keeping on the move through forests and towns, using their wits to get past Russians and Germans. Call the bad guys bears and wolves, as the Swallow Man does, in this book of magical realism and flowing literary sentences. It’s marketed as YA, young adult.

My peers thought the novel could be for any age group. This despite dead bodies delicately described. As for readers too young, we thought they wouldn’t “get” the sexual assault scene, and thus wouldn’t be harmed. My peers were mothers and school teachers: They would know children, and they hastened to assure a sensitive lady who had not read the book yet, that the assault scene would be OK. Here’s the aftermath, on page 212-213:

“She cried, of course…Though she would not have been able to tell you so at the time, Anna had broken a part of herself like a piggy bank to pay the (person’s) price, and it felt to her as if she had already failed to…”

The book’s cover, by Laura Carlin, is inspired: A far off view: Under the shadow of a passing swallow, a girl is walking all alone in the snow. The problem with your losing innocence, or even worse, gaining unspeakable knowledge, is you then walk through life always a little cold, a little alone. I can relate. A writer once told me that I was looking out of a mask, through little eye holes, at people. Maybe she was quite mistaken, and only “perceived” so because we knew of each other’s past. It was all so long ago… This year, if I rail against teachers being documented as allowing school bullying, then it’s because I am certain assaults and bullying are a form of losing innocence, and it’s not OK. (as archived February 2019, Bullies and Teachers)

An actual example of an entire society changing its innocence would be here in Canada. We still believe in our sacred freedom of speech, of course, but now we also have laws censoring hate speech, as we are conscious of living in a post-holocaust world. We realize at last that “human rights”are the canary in the coal mine; and we know now that evil unchecked anywhere threatens the world. 

One of my favorite writers knew about the existence of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) long before Veterans Affairs did. In fact, HG Wells knew back in the 19th century. His hero in War of the Worlds, years after the passing of the Martians, is still having flashbacks. Wells knew that, just like individuals, a whole society can be affected. (Like today how folks of continental Europe sees the EU as way to prevent having enemy boots on the ground, while folks of the British Isles, having never been invaded since 1066, sees the EU as merely a trade organization) In Well’s novel, once the Martians had left, people no longer saw a friendly night sky. 

In my opinion it’s OK to face reality, and also to say that reality does not feel OK.

Breaking News regarding assaults and bullying
Being returned to a sixth form bullying environment can (link) cause PTSD-like trauma for a wife and mother (God bless society for slow-w-w-ly becoming ready to begin to face the effects of child bullying)

SIDEBAR

Documented loss of mental health on a national level, in the graphic memoir Poppies of Iraq:

Besides people under oppressive censorship gradually losing their freedom of conversation, until all they had left was trivial gossip, I was struck by this:

Quote

It’s 2016. For a long time my cousins hoped things would get better. They stayed until their parents died, and then, to give their children a normal future, almost all of them left, emigrating to the four corners of the earth. Australia, NewZealand, Canada, the U.S., Sweden, France…… And all have become Islamophobic. 

I won’t try to argue. I’ll continue to love them as they are, as people I care about.

Unquote.

As for Arabians becoming Islamophobic, to paraphrase what a “good German” said after Europe was reduced to rubble: 

“All that is needed for Islam to cause phobia is for “good Arabs” to do nothing.”

Here are two old poems, by Lutheran Pastor and former U-boat commander, Martin Neimoller which I would wager have never been translated into Arabic (as Arabs do surprisingly little translating)

"Thus, whenever I chance to meet a Jew known to me before, then, as a Christian, I cannot but tell him: 'Dear Friend, I stand in front of you, but we can not get together, for there is guilt between us. I have sinned and my people has sinned against thy people and against thyself.'" 

And this poem,
which, after being recited live with different versions, (like Bob Dylan's live presentations of All Along the Watchtower) is now classic:

First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

and there was no one left

to speak out for me. 

Link

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists

As for my knowledge of horror: My perspective, in this world of woe, means I don’t get paralysed. Not me. I feel it’s perfectly OK to do like the missionaries, 

working in starving nations, when back here on vacation, 

who would “eat, drink and be merry,” without guilt, 

who would gladly embrace our “merely first world problems,’ 

…and maybe embrace a nice Mars poem too:

Poem

The Martians are Gone, and It’s Not OK

Martians gone, six years past.

Rubble cold, red weed dust.

Mother is gone, and it’s not OK.

If I look up at the starry night,

it’s not friendly.

If I contemplate the cosmos,

there’s no God.

The planets revolve unheeding;

they’re not for us.

I never taught my mother

to honor me

or know my friends were not bad,

not stupid.

Mother is gone,

and it will never be OK.

Sean Crawford

August

2019

Calgary

More Free Fall

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got Free Fall?

It is summer and hot and I’m tired. You know what I mean? And lazy too. So at this point in time it would be easy to post some stuff from our weekly Friday “Free Fall writing” group. Easier than trying to compose a big fresh essay. I was thinking in my head that during the summer no one wants to hear political essays. By “hear” I mean read, of course. I suppose that sometimes a bland and boring blog is truly for the best.

As you may know, our Free Fall writing is where we read aloud after we swiftly do stuff composed off the cuff, off the top of our heads, out of our subconscious, while Susan volunteers as our group timer. Yay Susan! (We should appreciate our volunteers!) She’s my age. Sort of my opposite number, while of the opposite gender, you might say. Married, with grown up boys, one still at home but probably not for long. A good family… Not like how I grew up. Needless to say, I don’t cry or have any self pity, while at the same time, according to folk wisdom, living “a life worth examining” is like circling around an onion and peeling down to yet another layer of knowledge. If the onion makes me cry it is only when I am in motion, such as reading and pronouncing words aloud; not when I am silent at home and can therefore stiffen up my whole body to stiffen away my emotions. I once delivered a eulogy without tears by dint of white knuckling a hard cup. There is a good reason why repressed people don’t go around looking spontaneous, relaxed and free.

Lately, from memories voiced by my brother Liam, memories that I confess I’ve forgotten for a good many years, I’ve been putting another onion layer into my mind and into perspective. I’m ready for a deeper slice around the onion. Maybe my forgetting has been from a vested interest. And no, not to avoid making any excuses for my life being different than my opposite number, although that’s one (very minor) payoff… Mostly, things were too gross to remember. Besides, I guess I wanted to act as if I was like everybody else by putting the past behind me. Below, the writing prompt was correspondence school:

My dear dad could have done correspondence school, or maybe just gone off to trade school. He thought about it. He thought about being a baker, but those were family run operations. He drove for a baker, and for Canadian Linen, but those were not jobs with a pension. He once told his sister, who at Cold Lake was making more than the base commander, “Yes, but will you have a pension like him?”

So he found a life with a pension where he would merely tell strangers that he was a “civil servant.” None of the guards ever had to operate the electric chair, which is a good sign that we shouldn’t have capital punishment. Often dad would say, “I’ll be walking the tower today” which gave him lots of time to be alone with his thoughts. In actuality, of course, he probably just “vegged out.”

Year later, after the Munich massacre, I would have to walk sentry all day, and it was excruciating for me. I wonder now if father liked his peers, as they seldom visited, and dad used to talk to himself a lot. Meaning I don’t think he talked to them. The good news is that he got to leave the service early because he was taken hostage so he said he was all messed up. I don’t think he really was, because years earlier he had taken a knife wound and been OK with that, and hadn’t even told his children but his big bandage showed.

Prompt was shovel:

I like shovels, I like the earthy common touch conjured up by the name. As a boy, I never liked the word spade, because no one I knew ever said that word.

Here’s an old one from the peasant’s rebellion against feudalism in medieval England:

“When Adam delved, 

and Eve span,

Who was then 

the gentleman?”

My scout troop peers noted how I was pretty good with a shovel: crump, kick, lift; crump, kick, lift. On the old farm we shovelled drainage ditches. I’m sure we had a pick around, but except when we were digging bedrock in the east land, we never used the pick. No need, our land was black soil from the glacier.

As an adult I was to dig in God’s own country: “God made it, then forgot it” we said as the land was all rock with a little bit of dirt for decoration. Now I used the pick to do all the digging, the shovel then was a mere afterthought to throw the earth. No wonder people used the phrase “pick and shovel.”

Prompt was a catch in the throat:

Lately, my body has been less restricted, more free, and with more opportunities to have a catch in the throat. Not something easy for characters in fiction, not something common on the idiot box for time wasting shows down from vaudeville and radio plays. But there you are.

I’ve always known, without knowing why, that the last three kids in my family didn’t have the sense of humour of the first three kids; the first ones could laugh, the later ones were mannikins. Last night I was writing a letter to a brother who named labels. Our mother was like someone out of woman’s liberation where a super-violent person would be totally sane in public or around police officers. It was not healthy to laugh around her. That is all.

Prompt was campfire:

I’ve been thinking lately of my campfire days. Mother would always scream at me on days I came back from camp, on Sundays I mean, because she was angry that I got some time of happiness. It was stressful packing on Friday, but gradually I got used to it. I remember I would always find some cardboard and twine and punch holes and make an axe guard. Often I would file the axe sharper the night before.

Part of my stress was being criticized for what I packed: Call it “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” Once I defended myself in advance for packing dry wood, on a rainy weekend, and it turns out I got laughed at for defending myself for of course, ha-ha, they would pack wood too. One weekend we attended a district jamboree; my troop won. Result? We still got criticized for being not as good as troops from a decade ago. My family was curiously detached from time, giving no credit to the modern decades, as well as no credit to me for being a patrol leader and troop leader. If only I knew then what I know now.

A campfire was my chance to mingle closely with the kids who were otherwise so far away. Once we drove past an Indian reservation on our way to camp. Boys were playing hockey with home made sticks. “Wow” said the rich Scouts. ‘Nothing’ was what I said, nothing about having such sticks at home. My brothers and I also made our own bows and arrows, staining the bows with salmon berries and leaving them for a season to cure.

Prompt was family circle:

My brother recently reminded me of my mother’s frequent rampages, where you could hear her from the mushroom sheds a hundred yards away. Strange how he has been my memory for this. I had remembered my mother burning my toys, but not this. I had remembered violence from others, but not this. My mother stopped hitting us after a mother down the road killed her three kids with an axe, and after Liam stopped her. So she started using words that probably did greater long term damage. Strange. I had nightmares after I left home about physical things, but not the mental. I was so pleased one day to realize the nightmares had stopped which meant, I was sure, that I was getting more confident.

The whole family circle had trouble. My dad walked my cousin down the aisle for marriage because her father was too drunk that day. I know now that people use medication when they are not willing to feel. Maybe I am the only sibling to have escaped such escapes. Lucky and determined, that’s why. Lucky.

Sean Crawford

August

Calgary

2019

Footnote: Speaking of spades, if you are a native English speaker you may appreciate this one: I believe it was writer Philip Jose Farmer who had a scene near the Mississippi where an army general says, “Have your man take his shovel and dig here…” A young Lieutenant speaks truth to power, “Uh, Sir, that’s an “entrenching tool.”” The older man replies, “I’m a general; I can call a shovel a shovel.”