titty.” Sister Rosalie, who brooked no insolence, had her hands full with this lot. A large leather strap hanging in her office warned of retribution for any misbehavior. Only once was I ever sent to the principal’s office for some infraction I no longer recall. When I entered her office and explained my transgression to her, she looked at me as though I’d disappointed her awfully. “Hold out your hand,” she said dispassionately, as she picked up the strap. I pulled up my sleeve and extended my right hand. She lashed my palm hard several times. I felt a fiery pain after each lash. “Now the other hand.” She lashed my left palm the same way. “All right, go back to your desk.” Although my hands were stinging as fiercely as if I’d stuck them into a hornet’s nest, the greater pain I felt was in having let the principal down. I knew poor Sister Rosalie held high hopes for me, and I had betrayed her expectations, shown myself no better than the worst louts of the class. But also, perversely, I experienced a moronic little swagger of satisfaction at my badness and at my courage under the lash of the murderous strap.
However, the infraction was an anomaly for, like my brothers, I maintained my piety even in the unencouraging environment of the new school. I excelled in class and took satisfaction in scoring top marks, winning spelling bees and the like. Singled out as both pious and bright, I was forced into a public-speaking role I didn’t really want, so that whenever a visiting dignitary addressed our class—a priest from the overseas missions, perhaps, or someone from the police warning us about the hazards of train tracks—it fell to me to rise and thank them for their presentation.
Fine literature singled me out as well. So far as I can remember, my first public poem was penned in the eighth grade. It concerned itself with a trout. My imaginative life had by then sashayed away from the Wild West, replacing cowboys with a fixation on trout fishing. I pored eagerly over old fishing magazines. I obtained a fiberglass rod with spinning reel and spent long hours perfecting the techniques of casting. My favorite event when the school visited the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto was watching expert anglers cast plugs into circular targets floating at the far end of a long tank. My tackle box held a jumble of barbed hooks, leaders and lead shot, spinners and flashers, and, most absorbingly, flies. I studied the difference between wet and dry flies, stared longingly at displays of delicate flies in the neighborhood sporting goods store and practiced making my own flies, inexpertly gluing random clots of feathers onto hooks. No wily trout ever would, or did, attempt to eat one of these, though I cast them expectantly into the upper reaches of the Humber and Credit and whatever other streams I could. The thrill of an elusive trout flashing silver in a little brook excited a poetic impulse in me, as it had in Yeats before me. Sister Rosalie read my poem aloud to the grade 8 class. I had become a poet.
But I was still consumed with sports, devoting myself to track and field and fastball. By the time I was in grade 7, playing first base was no longer sufficient. Recognizing that the diametrically opposed ambitions of pitcher and hitter are at the heart of baseball, I set myself to become a pitcher. I worked on my pitching with fanatical single-mindedness and eventually was elevated to school pitcher, the player upon whose prowess the glory of the school largely rested in contests against other schools. Although I couldn’t conceptualize it at the time, I was intrigued by how aspects of psychology, intimidation, and momentum attend each pitch.
I’m uncertain whether I developed a fervid competitiveness through playing sports, and particularly pitching fastball, or whether I possessed the attitude all along and athletics merely gave it a publicly sanctioned platform. I do know that loving to win and hating to lose became an abiding mindset, later spilling over into political and environmental issues in which I became involved, my own little personalized reworking of the nineteenth-century maxim that “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”
BY THE LATE fifties, my old heartthrob Patti Page was yesterday’s darling and the schmaltz of the Four Lads and the Mills Brothers had similarly faded. We kids were swept up in the breakout mania of rock ’n’ roll and its pantheon of stars—Bill Haley, Little Richard, the Big Bopper, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly. Parents everywhere were outraged. I can remember my mother being not the least bit pleased when she overheard me listening on my little transistor radio to Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” But even we kids were engaged in earnest debate over whether the “clean” songs of Pat Boone and Ricky Nelson weren’t preferable to the lewd wigglings of Elvis or the sinister leer of “the Killer,” Jerry Lee Lewis. A gang of disreputable greasers used to cruise our neighborhood in a big flip-top along the sides of which were painted leaping flames in tribute to Lewis’s scandalous “Great Balls of Fire.”
During these fraught times, walking to Saint Bernard’s school every day along Jane Street, I passed a little music store that had outside its front door a rack containing free handbills listing the Top 40 tunes for that week. The list was a matter of intense interest and considerable discussion among my classmates. Did the blatant teenage pathos of “Tell Laura I Love Her” justify its rating? Did Sheb Wooley’s “The Purple People Eater,” topping the charts in ’58, even deserve to be on the list, it was so spaz? I think the list was compiled by chu m Radio, Canada’s first Top 40 radio station, for whose disc jockeys we developed fierce attachments or dislikes. When the Canadian National Exhibition was on in the late summer, one of our great delights was to stand around an outdoor plaza watching the deejays spinning their discs in a glass booth.
More complicated by far were the sock hops occasionally attempted at school, dreary events at which many of the girls and very few of the boys were mad for dancing. Most of us boys plastered ourselves against the classroom walls and longed for the torment to end. Every once in a while there’d be a dance party at my friend Chuck Savoy’s house, where, despite the best efforts of Chubby Checker and Little Eva, I’d squirm against the twin terrors of dancing and the proximity of flirting girls. The music was in my head, not my body.
For many months a banjo sat on display in the front window of that little music store on Jane Street. Banjos contributed little, if anything, to the music we were all crazy for, and yet I was strongly drawn to this instrument. I looked at it longingly, imagined myself playing it. The price was some outrageous sum well beyond my paper route life savings, and anyway it was inconceivable that I would spend so much on what might prove to be a short-lived whim. I didn’t buy the banjo and eventually forgot about it. But over the years, every so often, I visualize that banjo again, wishing that I had bought it and mastered it, and wonder had I done so what curious avenues it might have led me down.
WANTING TO IMPRESS my friends and to be admired by pretty girls at school helped collapse the innocence of the early days and usher in a more complicated confusion of feelings. I had come to detest being poor, living in a poky house, and wearing cheap clothes. Going grocery shopping for my mum at the local a&p, where I’d often find bargains in the “reduced for quick sale” bin, no longer offered the excitement it once had. These frugalities didn’t seem clever anymore; they were niggardly and shameful. To have owned a car, any car, back in England would have made us gentry, but here our family car was an embarrassment. We started off with an old Ford panel van, my parents sitting up front and us kids perched on crates in the back. Our eventual elevation to the relative luxury of a secondhand 1955 Chevrolet four-door sedan was permanently undermined when my dad hand-painted its exterior by brush. To make matters worse, he began periodically removing the rear bench seat in order to haul home buckets of sewage he picked up at a city treatment plant. His compost heap may have benefited, but the lingering stench never left the car—or, I think, us after riding in the car—and my mother finally put an end to his ingenious scheme for free fertilizer. Parking outside church on Sunday morning amid the gleaming new coupes and panel wagons of the parish, he’d make a great show of locking the car’s doors, as though any self-respecting thief would lower himself to steal that crummy heap. I became embarrassed by my family and envied what looked like the cool, smooth sophistication of my classmates. Traitorously, I ignored the sacrifices my parents were making in order that we kids could have a better life and instead cringed at their idiosyncrasies of appearance and mannerism.
One
