I was born in
Saskatchewan in 1952, and grew up in Ontario and in Zambia (southern
Africa), which was still Northern
Rhodesia. I first arrived there at the age of nine.
I
traveled extensively from childhood to my mid-thirties and
visited about 35 countries, including one complete
round-the-world trip which lasted for two years. I had
lived and worked on four continents before marrying Deborah and
settling down in Ontario thirty-two years ago. Deborah and
I continued to travel together on our summer vacations from
teaching, and in our years of retirement. My tally
is now 52
countries.
In my late teens, I trained as a radio operator in the
Canadian army. I was a favourite of the training sergeant
and corporals, who called me in to explain that I'd been a close
second
choice for the Commandant's Shield, but I had one black mark for
missing the bus back to base while playing sheepdog to a drunken
buddy. Admittedly,
I'd had enough rum myself that I couldn't stand the taste for
several years afterward, but at least I was conscious and
ambulatory. The guy who won the shield was a solid soldier and a
great guy - I'd have voted for him myself.
I aced my radio training too, but
the army lost me when they fenced in my future. "Seeing
the world" was one of recruitment lures, and the main reason I'd
quit high school to sign up in the first place, but they seemed
to have a lingering cold war paranoia, even in the early '70's.
I
requested and received a voluntary honourable discharge when I
learned that because of my childhood presence in foreign
countries (Africa, Israel, Europe), they would not grant me the
security clearance to be posted overseas! What an example of
"military intelligence". I had imagined that with my
experience with travel, with the customs of other cultures and
lower potential for culture shock, I'd have been at the top of
their list for foreign assignment. Instead, they sent the
kinds of fellows who eventually brought down the Canadian
Airborne Regiment, a Canadian military institution that imploded
in disgrace as a result of the Somalia Affair in 1993.
Instead
of an army career, I worked at a variety of jobs through my
twenties and early thirties. I sold pianos and organs,
and vacuum cleaners, and worked in retail department stores,
sporting goods and book stores. I worked in factories
building mattresses and travel trailers, installed kitchen cabinets,
framed new buildings and spent one hot summer in the "cool room"
of a meat packing plant - not on the "kill floor" upstairs,
thankfully, although I had to make frequent trips up
there. I learned insurance underwriting as an "executive
trainee" - what a great component of training for a future
investor! I co-ran a summer youth hostel. I worked
the front desk, switchboard, and did the nightly audit in five
different hotels. I worked in restaurants, repair garages
and car dealerships. I was a dance hall "bouncer" and a music
teacher and performer: I spent three years in
travelling country rock bar bands and jazz lounge combos, and
several years as a music teacher, including two years
self-employed in my own private music studio. I was a roughneck on an
oil rig, crewed for a water driller, laid pipeline and repaired
railroad track across the prairies. I drove oil and gas
well logging trucks, and delivered dynamite to seismic
crews. I taught ESL in Vienna, Austria one winter, and in
Japan the following summer. I taught a business management
skills curriculum at an adult night school in Toronto.
This tapestry of experience formed a rich "street" level
curriculum that you wouldn't get from an armload of textbooks.
Between jobs, I finished high school with
marks in the high nineties - in considerable contrast to the
earlier marks I was pulling down when I hated high school and
dropped out to join the army. In fits and starts, I
enrolled in various college and university programs, hunting for
what I'd most like to do for a career: pre-med, commerce, fine
arts and literature, and a year at a jazz college. I
finally graduated Cum Distinction from the University of
Alberta with a B.A. in English and Drama (Playwriting), and was
invited into the two-year Master of Fine Arts program in
playwriting. I was flattered by the invitation, since they
took in only two graduates per year, so that there were never
more than four of us in the program being coached by two
professional playwright professors; but I gave up on the program
at the conclusion of my first year, once I became aware of the
bleak economic realities of playwrights in Canada.
According to Statscan they lived on $12,500, on average, that
year. Financial well-being depended too heavily on a small and
fickle market, and my vision of the future featured me as sole
male breadwinner of a household with children and a
mortgage. In the early 80's, a time of spiking interest
rates, a mortgage was a really big deal. It didn't occur to me
at that age that a future wife might be a partner
income-earner. If it had, I might have continued in that
path. I enjoyed writing, and still do.
It was also a turbulent decade of (some)
regrettable choices and "anti-social" personality traits
described by Malcolm Gladwell in his profile of heavy smokers,
in The Tipping Point (chapter 7 - 3). Misconduct,
rebellion, defiance, risk-taking and snap judgements were never
far below the surface, and sometimes porpoised between
intermittent efforts at stable relationships and developing a
career and a grown-up persona. It included substance abuse
of the sorts common for a certain kind of late-blooming adult of
the day - later, we often excused our excesses with a knowing
phrase: "it was the sixties!" (wink and nudge) -
although in my case it was mostly the seventies. It took a
prolonged effort to finally overcome nicotine addiction
(nicotine gum was an essential
aid), but alcohol never owned me, and eventually I had
no trouble giving it up completely. Adventurous drug
experimentation with a variety of substances never resulted in a
compulsion to go back for more, which makes me a very lucky
person, in retrospect. I capped that decade with a full year of backpacking
around the globe -
literally, out one side of Edmonton, and back in the other
side. Maturity settled in. Now I've amassed four
decades of generous, empathetic, sober, productive and
level-headed living. The contrast astounds me, and sends
me searching for childhood clues to what can now be seen as a bas relief aberration
in my life. There were some possibilities: being
constantly uprooted, depression, and weak self-esteem (cf.
Gladwell p. 245-246). I wondered for a time whether this
was a decade that defined me as a person; it hasn't, and it
doesn't. So, can people change? Yes they can, and
always will, if they live long enough, and often for the
better. There might be those who knew me then who formed
their definition of me based on that time, and not on what came
later, but since I lived and worked in new communities and
formed new relationships, I didn't remain trapped by early
reputation. I suspect that sometimes happens to people who never
leave the geographies of their regretably foolish youth.
My
career, in summation: Slowly I began to notice
that apart from writing and playing in bands, the jobs I'd
enjoyed the most were teaching ESL to adults and music to
kids. I was accepted into the University of Toronto
Faculty of Ed in 1987. Michael Fullan was the new
dean. I made his Dean's Honour List that year on
top of my earlier B.A. Cum Distinction, and earned my
B. Ed, specializing in Junior/Intermediate English, plus
Instrumental Music plus Senior Basic Industrial Arts; with those
diverse qualifications in addition to my international travel
and work experience, and the fact that I was a male teacher
willing to teach in an elementary classroom, I got hired in a
heartbeat by the former Scarborough Board of Education. I
continued learning new curriculum, became a Design and
Technology Specialist, became Board qualified to teach ESL, and
also became a Computers in the Classroom Specialist.
Since then I've been a music specialist for a whole school, a grade 5 teacher, a grade 3 teacher for
four years in two schools, a grade 7/8 math/science teacher and
computer lab specialist in two schools, and operated two grade
7/8 Design and Technology centres for a total of nine years.
This was "the best job in the system". One of those
assignments was a seven year stint in Samuel Hearne Sr. P. S.
where a kind friend, Greg Martin, was newly assigned as
principal. He called me away from a prior D&T position
at John McCrae to clean up and re-open the shop at Hearne.
He had a larger vision of the educational needs of his clientele
than most principals of senior schools, and worked hard to keep
his technology centre open even as they were being shut down in
similar schools. I was his teachers' union steward as well
as his D&T teacher, and we had a good partnership.
However in 2002, panicked by an end-of-June
announcement of the closing of my D&T centre due to
neo-conservative funding cut-backs (a decision which was
subsequently reversed by the school board), I signed up for my
Principal's Qualification courses, with Greg's
encouragement. Two years later I found myself serving as
vice-principal at a school where I had been a rookie teacher at
the beginning of my public school teaching career, and teaching
ESL at all grade levels and "music appreciation" to the grade
7's and 8's - that was a music alternative for kids who didn't
have the capacity to learn musical skills, or who couldn't focus
and behave well enough to be included in a school band. It was a
challenge, but I designed a program that they enjoyed, with an
immersion in modern musicals, historical and classical
music. We used the best stereo in the school, and
projected videos and whole musicals like Phantom of the Opera on
the screen at the front of the classroom. Being a rookie
VP there was a weird and difficult situation, caught in a state
of constant conflict between a Thatcherite principal and a
strong union-oriented staff, most of whom I'd worked with as a
rookie teacher twenty years earlier, and a few of whom were
distinctly ornery. Coming into administration straight out
of a decade of service as a union steward made it even more
uncomfortable: I related to the teachers and wanted to support
them as much as possible so that they in turn would deliver the
best possible programming for the kids; I was trusted and became
friendly with most of them as well as with the union steward on
staff, but I was castigated by my principal for sympathizing and
connecting with them on that level, and my effort was pinched
off and limited in terms of time, resources and moral
support.
Richard Branson, the visionary and
outstandingly successful founder of the Virgin complex of
companies, would say, "Take care of your employees first, and
they will take care of the customers." Too many principals
I worked with were more small-minded: they believed that the
union would take care of the teachers, and that their role as
principal was to scrabble and fight with their teachers on
behalf of the students and their parents. They seemed
unable to acknowledge that most teachers became teachers because
they already liked children and wanted to do what was best for
them. Admittedly, there were also a minority of teachers I
worked with who displayed more than modest self-serving
traits, some more consistently than others. A capable
school leader was challenged to be strong and balanced in
dealing with his staff.
I spent the next two years as vice-principal
at a senior school where I was also the computer lab and AV guy,
and taught English, math, art, music, dance and drama to a split
grade 7/8 class of 28 students that included fifteen ESL
students with a wide assortment of mother tongues, at varying
stages of fluency in English - several with no English at
all. I had a different principal again in each of the two
years I was there, the second one particularly weak and
ineffectual, while there were strong teachers on staff looking
out for their own interests in terms of time-tabling and student
assignment into their classes. I really loved my ESL
class, but that was too heavy a workload for one person, and an
injustice to some of the most needy children in a school, the
newest arrivals in Canada. It was hard on my health - I had to begin taking
blood pressure medication in those years. If you want to
know what I really think about my years in teaching versus
school administration, click here.
In September of 2008 I began my final
administrative role as vice-principal at one of the largest public schools in the
city, Cedar Drive P. S., working for someone I really liked,
Principal Karen Robertson. That was a terrific school with
a wonderful staff, and that's where I closed out my public
school teaching career and retired, 18 months later - a few
years early for me, admittedly, but it was Deborah's official
retirement date and we could well afford it, so we decided to
retire together, escape the Toronto winter and go traveling
again. Friends and staff from Cedar Drive and several of
my earlier schools, who have huge hearts, threw us a memorable
send-off and made generous donations to two of our favourite
charities. I left on a high note, and I didn't look back.
Travel:
"To travel is to breathe". Deb and I do like to
travel. We've been back to my childhood stomping grounds in
southern Africa for a six week visit to Zambia,
Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Pretoria and Durban in South Africa.
We've also travelled together to Maui, several times to Mexico, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton
and PEI, Alberta and B.C., Florida, Grand Cayman, the Dominican Republic and many places
along the way. We went to Singapore,
Indonesia (Bali/Java), northern Thailand (touring out of
Chiang Mai), and Malaysia (mostly scuba diving from Malaysian
islands), and even Laos, sort of...; since retirement
we've gone south in winter months: we've been to Cuba twice,
spent three months on our trailerable 22' sailboat Tiger Moth in the Florida Everglades
and the Keys (which also included two weeks on a 36' Taiwanese
sailboat called Cypraea),
spent two months in Australia and the next winter in California,
New Zealand and Fiji, and we drove home through the
southwestern states of the U.S. In the winter of 2012/2013 we
tried a less frenetic pace of travel and did "voluntourism" in
Ecuador for two months and Peru for two more months, staying in
a few different places but each for weeks at a time, with side
trips to visit Machu Picchu and other amazing sights. We spent a
winter in Vietnam, took a break from winter travel for one year
(I had a small stroke), and then resumed the practice by
visiting Czechia, Poland and East Gerrmany, then South and
Central America over two more winters - Argentina, Chile, Costa
Rica. There are blogs and photos of these trips on my Archives page.
"The detour is the
destination". We've driven across Canada to visit our
God-daughter's family on Salt Spring Island via Edmonton at
least five times, and detoured through numerous communities and
beautiful lake and mountain scenery on adventurous secondary
highways in southern B.C. Visiting family and
friends in Western Canada was
an annual tradition for us for two decades while my Dad alive; a
little less frequently in the
past decade.
It usually culminated in a
group camp site where the whole family gathered for a weekend, somewhere in rural
Alberta, often in the remote foothills of the Rockies. In 2010 it was
close by the Ya-Ha-Tinda federal horse ranch, in the foothills
near Sundre, an area filled with elk (we stumbled into one herd
while out walking two kilometres from our campsite), deer,
grizzlies and wild horses.
Before I met Deborah, I had already travelled
in Morroco, Egypt, Israel, Zambia, Zaire, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya,
England,
Wales, Scotland, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain,
Portugal, Switzerland, Austria, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka,
Korea, Japan and the U.S. - some countries more than once. My international travels,
beginning in childhood, were a strong foundation for my skills
and insight into the needs of my ESL students (as they would
have been for my army service, if that had been an option). My
North American travels have included most of the west and
south of the U.S.A., much of the east coast, numerous trips to
Florida; back and forth across Canada east to west a couple of
dozen times, and into some northern communities - including a
ten day canoe trip down the Nahanni river in the Northwest
Territories with my brother Peter and nephew Dylan in 2007, to
mark Peter's fiftieth birthday and his son Dylan's eighteenth
birthday. On this map you can see the places I've visited (black
dots) and lived (tiny houses: six cities across Canada, plus
Zambia, Austria and Japan):
Recreation:
Music: I play keyboard,
trumpet, guitar, banjo, melodica and harmonicas, and
clarinet. During the pandemic lockdown of 2020 I
developed chops on fiddle, alto sax and accordion. I
played and sang in an ever-changing collection of groups:
big band, two jazz combos, dance trios, ukulele choir,
guitar circles, classic rock jams and for a while, a
Caribbean dance band. I twice resurrected a guitar
circle at Highland Yacht Club which met weekly for four
years. Deb and I sang in a couple of different jazz
choirs. Music fills my week with medicine for the
psyche: songs that become ear-worms through the week are an
antidote to anything that might dampen your spirits.
Gardening:
We plant and
maintain a huge kitchen garden every spring and summer, with
the help of frequent young Helpx and Workaway guests.
I call it "my own private Jumanji", especially when the
winter squash vines cover the archways, ropes and step
ladders that I set up for them. We eat well, share the
fruit of our labours with our young helpers, and donate
excess produce to a local food bank. Deborah also
volunteers at that food bank one day of each week.
Sailing: Deb and I sail out of Highland Yacht
Club. Some of the boats we've owned in the past
can be seen here.
Now we sail a Mirage 27 which Deborah has
renamed No Egrets - perfect size weekender for an older
couple to handle together. We cruised the North Channel in
2004 on our CS22, and plan to
return there some day. We took the Cruising Trophy two
years in a row at the annual C&C Regatta at the National
Yacht Club in our 25' C&C Redline, which now sails out
of North Rustico in P.E.I., and I've crewed on larger
racing sailboats for three seasons in previous years.
In the winter of 2010 we towed Tiger
Moth, our trailerable Hullmaster 22, to the 10,000 Islands
just north of the Everglades in Florida, to Cayo Costa near
Fort Myers, and to the Atlantic side of the Florida Keys:
Marathon, Big Pine Key, Bahia Honda, etc - the "Middle
Keys", as they're called. I described the three months
in a travel
blog, with photos that you can click on to enlarge. We
stayed for two months at a marina in Marathon, which has a
wonderful small town atmosphere, and we also "boat-sat" a
Union 36 in Boot Key Harbour, commuting to shore by dinghy
each day.
Tennis
and Fitness: I play tennis all summer at the Scarborough Bluffs Tennis
Club, and use a barbell and bench in our
basement. I used to try to keep in shape through the
winter by occasionally jogging, weight-training and
swimming at Variety
Village, and by curling in a mixed league at East York
Curling Club every Friday; but now that I'm retired and able
to winter in places without snow, my fitness regime is more
commonly limited to hiking
with my backpack to the next destination, walking
about in the towns we visit, or playing Badminton or tennis
with young Vietnamese English students, for example.
There's a weight room in a nearby community centre that
I can join for one month intervals whenever it is convenient
to my schedule of travel and other activities.
Scuba: I
enjoyed scuba, and I trained to PADI Rescue Diver level. I have about 100
recorded dives in my log book. I have explored many
wrecks in Parry Sound, Tobermory and Brockville, as well as
many tropical dive sites - Cozumel, Grand Cayman, Bali,
Malaysia, and others. I've enjoyed some wonderful diving off
the coast of Victoria, and near Nanaimo, in British
Columbia. Deborah became certified in Singapore, and she
dives with me occasionally when we're in warm southern
waters, but she prefers to snorkel. I took a hiatus from
diving during my years in school administration, and haven't
returned to it, but I hope to some day.