Grey-Bruce Boomers Winter2023

COMMUNITY
by Arlen Wiebe
I’ve started writing about my own childhood
experiences and coming to terms with how they have
affected my adult life.
A Canadian boy in California
I could see my boyhood coming to an end when I
was 12 years old. The curious warmth of springtime
in Winnipeg had come back like a long-lost relative
returning from a freezing and miserable journey.
Light green leaves were budding once more on
ancient elm trees as I walked south along Arlington
Street, turned west onto Wolseley Avenue, and
begrudgingly arrived at my weekday destination,
Laura Secord School.
Like all boys of school age should be, I was in a
terrible hurry for the unbearable monotony of
the daily academic ordeal to be done for the year.
I was exhausted from trying to speak and write
in my teacher’s funny foreign language. Pourquoi
apprenais-je le français when my forebears spoke
Plautdietsch, Nederlands, or Russki yazyk and wrote
in Hochdeutsch? Other kids in my class came from
families that spoke even more exotic languages. Why
were we all being forced to learn a language not one
of our families had ever spoken and likely never
would?
And why this inanely prescribed schedule? All this
writing, reading, presenting, doing, and going here
and there at the same time every day. Had the
adults who ran the school given a maniacal villain
permission to set up a labyrinth of torture? Why were
we tested for our ability to remember the random
order of letters in words or how numbers changed
themselves when they met the funny symbols on the
page?
Once the clock on the classroom wall was finally
persuaded to place a short stingy hand on the
number three and its longer hand on six, I fled the
prison and quickly reversed the route I had slowly
walked that morning.
Once at home, I put on a blue jersey, white pants,
and cap and held my baseball glove in my hand.
I finally felt free of all restraints. My mother had
mercifully signed me up for a team through the R.A.
Steen Community Centre, located on the far end of
the field behind my school. We played our games in a
sunken double baseball diamond circled by a gravel
walking and biking path, near Omand’s Creek.
I tried all the baseball positions in the field but I
most enjoyed pitching. Standing high on an elevated
mound. Controlling the start of each play. Deciding
where to place the baseball to the waiting batters.
I always held the baseball with the fastball grip. I
hadn’t been taught how to throw any other kinds of
pitches. Instead of variety, I tried to throw the same
pitch again and again, laser focused on the shifting
strike zone. Sometimes the ball would thread through
that invisible rectangle between the elbows and knees
of the cocky boy poised at home plate. Other times,
it flew out of control, avoiding that rectangle, and
rolling to the chain link fence behind our catcher.
Most of my pitches flew past the boys at the plate.
On the rare occasion when the batter made contact
with the ball, my teammates organized themselves
around the ball, stopped it, and threw it to first base.
Midway through the baseball season, my mother
got an emotional phone call. My absent father
lay dying in a Regina hospital. She and I dropped
everything and immediately drove 600 kilometres
west across Manitoba and Saskatchewan to visit the
man my mother had once given her heart to and
that we barely knew anymore. When we entered
my father’s hospital room, I saw a sickly, shriveled
man in a hospital gown. He could barely sit up in his
bed to greet us. Who was this person? I stood there
stoically, listening to my parents catching up on years
of missed time together.
My father had three brothers. His brother Jake, from
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