Grey-Bruce Boomers Winter2023

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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 16 • GREYBRUCEBOOMERS.COM
y Arlen Wiebe COMMUNITY B.C., came with his wife and two kids to visit in the hospital. Once his daughter, Shalom, had seen my father and left the room, she started to sob in the hallway. I watched her from my dad’s bedside. Why was she so upset? It wasn’t her father dying, it was mine. If anyone should be worked up, it should be me. I looked inside myself to find something that matched my cousin’s emotion but there was nothing there. We returned to Winnipeg and the baseball season continued. A few weeks later, there was another difficult phone call. We buried my father beside a little country church on the Saskatchewan prairie. Soon after, my mother was very surprised to receive a large payment from my father’s life insurance policy that had been kept active. This set the gears in motion for my mother’s next step. She had always dreamed of studying to become a pastor and now she had the money to do it. She wanted to study at a seminary in California. All that summer, my mother prepared us to move. I was devastated. I didn’t want to live in a foreign country without friends or anything familiar. In late August, my mother and I boarded an airplane that took us from Winnipeg to Minneapolis, then on to Los Angeles. We crossed that huge airport to catch a tiny airplane to take us to Fresno. We moved into a small apartment on the campus where my mother would study the Bible and theology. I would attend school as a light-skinned Canadian among a sea of black and brown faces. I would travel to Yosemite National Park, San Francisco, and Hollywood. I would be forced to adapt to many new things as I started Grade 7. My Canadian boyhood had come to an end in California. Route 1 Route 2 Highway 10 Owen Sound to Dundalk Highway 10 Dundalk to Orangeville MON to SUN MON to FRI Book Your Ride BOOK <strong>Grey</strong>.ca/GTR Route 3 Highway 26 Owen Sound to Meaford Route 4 Highway 26 Meaford to Blue Mountain CALL Highway 6 1-226-910-1001 Route 5 MON to FRI Owen Sound to Wiarton MON to SUN MON to SUN WINTER 2023/24 • 17
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