I like to write because it is only on paper that I have the time and the real estate to make my case, capture a thought and describe a feeling. On paper is the only place I can communicate without being interrupted, or shouted down.
I grew up with a tremendous respect for language and I grew up surrounded by people who understood the power of words.
From elementary school I can still remember the teacher's example of a misplaced modifier: "Wanted a piano by a woman with fat legs." From watching The Two Ronnies on TV, I remember the importance of proofreading.
All through school, I was gifted with teachers who loved language. They introduced me to the poetry of Shakespeare and the precision of Wilde; the craftsmanship of Shaffer and the ruthlessness of Albee.
My favorite characters in books, on television and in the movies always had the right words and said them without having to think about them, search for them, weigh them for their potential impact.
My favorite people in real life spoke without stammering; their words arriving fully formed and without reservation. There may have been a time when I could say what I meant without first undergoing extensive research and development, but that was so long ago that I do not remember what that felt like.
In the following example, I am Shaw in a world full of Whistlers and Wildes, not because I liken myself to Shaw--he always seemed to have more than enough words--but because whenever it came to being put on the spot, I never felt up to the task.
Writing is an experimental medium where you can write, erase, re-order and repeat as often as needed in order to get ideas across just as you intend; real life is far messier, far less precise and much less forgiving.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently because I have been processing the deaths of two significant influences on my life. It is important to me to record their passing and catalog the impact they have made on my life. What skill I may have and the perception that guides it are, in no small part, a tribute to these people.
Both are teachers and guides, oracles and sentries: they enriched my world view, took an interest in my development and treated me with respect. I am simultaneously greater for having known them and lesser for having now lost them and that is how it should be. It is the nature of life to always have more questions than answers and to appreciate benefit primarily in the light of loss.
Only rarely do I open the alumni magazine from my undergraduate school. I do not have the fondness for college life that so many do. I have no social skills, no taste for beer and less than zero interest in sports and so, needless to say, I was a theatre student. The magazine is always full of stories of graduates who are far more successful than me, living lives to which I cannot relate, or were in programs with which I had no contact. I did, however, open the magazine recently to discover that my high school English teacher, Mr. Gilbert Plaw, had died.
Two lines: apparently more than enough space to record his name and year of graduation, but are in no way sufficient to capture his influence on me and generations of students who passed through his classes.
Mr. Plaw was one of those characters that are far more common on the page than real life.
He was a large bear of a man with a full beard, animated eyebrows and eyes that could quickly size you up and cut you down.
He took full advantage of the luxury of small class size to introduce his students to the power and the subtleties of their own language.
This is the job of the English teacher and he obviously took a great subversive pleasure in it.
Against a backdrop of seemingly endless conversations and legislation about language and culture, Mr. Plaw delighted in teaching the works of everyone from Shakespeare to Ferlinghetti; Stephen Crane to T.S. Elliott; Alice Munro to Leonard Cohen.
Teaching English to high school students is a thankless task, particularly in what is now a post-literate time, but I am certain it was no fun even then. But the thing is, Mr. Plaw made it seem like fun. He had what I came to discover was an all-too-rare talent among teachers: the ability to make words and ideas come alive and illuminate the writer's work in a way that made me want to read it.
I remember reading "The Recruiting Officer" a Restoration comedy by George Farquhar. It was a revelation to learn that the play is almost exclusively about sex and that nothing that was said could be taken at face value alone. It was a whole category of theatre that was like the improv game "If You Know What I Mean."
I immediately connected with this less out of prurience than a keen appreciation of words and their multiple meanings--I just didn't understand that one of those meanings could be sexual.
Did I mention I was shy?
Mr. Plaw was in his element teaching that play because all he had to do was raise an eyebrow, or hold a look for an extra beat and everyone in the classroom knew exactly what he was talking about. In those moments, everyone--student, teacher and playwright--was on the same page, literally.
For four years, we read all manner of material and Mr. Plaw and his colleagues, brought the same creative energy to every page we turned. We read modern plays "Equus" and "The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel," classics like "Henry V - Pt. 1" and "Sister Carrie," essays from The Sunday New York Times and extracts from the Norton Anthology. I am a painfully slow reader, but what grounding in literature I do have I got in those classes and from Mr. Plaw and it has served me well to this day.
But perhaps more importantly than the education, Mr. Plaw served as an object lesson in a kind of cautious joy. He always struck me as a very open person who enjoyed people and seemed to take a real interest in his students.
Many of the graduates from my high school went to school in the States and so American Thanksgiving was a time when we were in school and they were not. Year after year, former students would return to the school during the day just to reconnect with him.
And he always seemed genuinely happy to see them. He would never miss an opportunity to hug the females and make some remark that would evoke a smile, at a minimum, and a blush at best.
It was enviable, the impact he so obviously had on students and he made me want to be a teacher. I am certain that, even then, I had no misapprehension that I could do as he did, but he made me want to try, to share the power of ideas and the impact of great writing.
For the longest time, I thought everyone, every student, gets at least one really talented teacher. Surely, over the course of thirteen years of continuous education, everyone gets the teacher they need at some point. It can make all the difference in the world in shaping the future: in opening it up, or closing it down.
As time has passed, I have come to understand that not all teaching occurs in the classroom and not all teachers have the same talents.
Good teaching is like art: it reaches the student where they are and guides them along a personalized path toward understanding. A good teacher gives you a compass and a map and tells you what time dinner will be served.
Learning how to navigate in a world of ideas turns out to be far more valuable than learning how to follow directions.
I remember visiting London. I had been there before, but I wanted to show it to my girlfriend and so we took a guided tour bus ride that stopped at all of the major landmarks and gave a ninety-minute summary of hundreds of years of English history.
On this bus, along with the photographers and the videographers and the pointers and those who had to read every sign they saw, was a man sitting by himself with his head buried in the register of his checkbook. He was not interested in what was passing by his window so much as he was in writing down everything that the guide was saying, as though there were going to be a test.
Perhaps that check register was a more valuable souvenir for him, a way to document his experience and remember the historical significance of the places we visited, but I still can't help thinking about what he thinks about when he thinks about visiting London. Does he see the Tower of London, or does he see the check register?
About once a generation, Hollywood makes a movie about a teacher who have a transformational impact on their students. "Goodbye Mr. Chips" and "The Dead Poets Society" are two examples that come to mind, but I am sure that you can think of others. These are the movies that leave you with a lump in your throat thinking about the one or two gifted teachers who may have crossed your path. Watching Robin Williams teach English and see the impact he had on his students made me think about the time I spent with Mr. Plaw and all that I have learned from him.
My Aunt Janet lived through the inauguration of fourteen American presidents and thirteen Canadian Prime Ministers, including Arthur Meighen. She was the toughest, most resilient person I have ever met, but Donald Trump proved to be too much even for her.
Like Mr. Plaw, the life of my Aunt, its reach and impact also cannot be easily recorded. As I write this, I am aware of how difficult it is to be both accurate and fair. Her life must be accounted for and her loss recorded without hyperbole, or cliche. She was a complicated woman who, with her warmth and hospitality, could make a house full of strangers feel like friends; and, when she was hurt, the world was not big enough. I keep coming back to the idea that she, perhaps more than anybody else, taught me how to be an adult.
Much of my world view was, and is, mediated by television and the movies and their over-simplified ideas about the ways of the world. The hero's journey and that of the audience is to set off on a quest and overcome obstacles en route to a resolution. All is resolved and the murderer is revealed before the final fade-out. Love is absolute and unquestioning, all families like each other all the time. All endings are happy.
Those were the movies and TV shows that I watched growing up and so when Mr. Plaw had us read work that did not conform to this world view, I neither liked nor finished them. They felt somehow wrong.
It is the lesson plan of adulthood to learn that absolutes are more the exception than the norm, a bug and not a feature. Good and evil, love and hate, right and wrong do not exist as opposites, but as end-points on arc that is described by a swinging pendulum.
I spent about the first half of my life being afraid of my Aunt Janet.
She could be incredibly warm and generous, and she could also, in what seemed like an instant, turn on people and say the most vicious things.
I have many memories of family gatherings that seemed to go on for hours that began with drinks and laughter and ended in anger and hurt feelings.
It took years, decades really, before I had something close to a full understanding of what was going on. All I knew was that we would go to parties at her house and my parents would come home angry and hurt. My mom would be deafeningly silent and my dad would be drunk and all I knew was somehow my Aunt was responsible for this.
And yet we kept going back. Christmas after Christmas; Easter, Thanksgiving, we would go to her house and the play would begin again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
In between these family gatherings, my Dad would make regular visits on his own. These too would end with him getting drunk and upset. He often came home from these visits and it would be as if we had all gone because the effect on the house was the same: my mom was not talking, and my brother and sister and I would retreat to whatever corners of the house we could find until my dad finally went to sleep.
As I got older, I came to understand that Janet had an accupressurist's skill to find the right nerve to press to elicit a response. It seemed as though she could see right through people and identify their weaknesses, their hopes and their fears and then press on them until they squealed. I described her to others as "my aunt with the sabre-toothed fangs."
It could be very funny when she used her powers on others and devastating when they were turned on you.
It was at her house that I learned the importance of weighing my words, of measuring the risk versus benefit of what I said. I would try hard not to say anything that I didn't want brought back up. Feelings and opinions were equally dangerous things to have where she was concerned because they could come back to you when you least expected them and were not ready to defend them.
I used to think that she lashed out because she was a mean person, but I no longer believe that. I think she roared at people because, like the lion in Shaw's "Androcles and the Lion" she was hurting. She roared because she could not find anyone who could remove the splinter from her paw.
She had many splinters and they came in many different sizes. I don't pretend to know what they all were, or where she got them, but I know that she hurt.
I know because after my father died, I used to stay at her house whenever I came back to Montreal and she talked to me. I know because I collected the wine bottles and emptied the ash trays. I know because of the way she talked about the important people in her life who had left her behind. I know because the wounds never scabbed over and when she even hinted at them, they were as vivid for her as if they had just happened.
It was in these conversations that I understood how much she loved my father. She could reduce him to tears when he was alive, but they also laughed and enjoyed one another's company.
When I was younger, I used to think that my father's drinking was a way to bury the hurt done to him. He could forget the pain and that made it possible for him to go on and also to keep going back to those people who hurt him. He didn't remember what had been said or done so it could be said and done again and again.
That's what I used to think.
What I learned from my Aunt Janet is that you don't forget, or forgive, for that matter. Life is more nuanced than black and white. You can hug your enemies and hate your friends.
Like the lion, Janet was limited by her circumstances.
A fiercely intelligent woman, Janet was born into a time when there were few, if any, opportunities for such women outside of the home. She was expected to get married, and she did. She was expected to have children, and she did.
And that was about it.
Her brothers, on the other hand, were expected to do the same and also to be successful in business. They got married, they had the kids, but successful in business? I know my father never considered himself to have been successful and I am pretty certain that my Uncle George never was. Where Janet was limited by the conventions of the times, her two brothers had opportunities and never seemed to capitalize on them. They were passive and Janet was not. She wanted more for them than they wanted for themselves. I know that had their genders been reversed, Janet would have thrived in business in much the same way that my sister has proven to be the son my father never had.
As was noted at her standing-room-only memorial service, Janet was advised by the minister who married her and my Uncle Bob, to make her home a source of "constant refreshment." The line never fails to get a laugh as those who knew her recall that her door was always open and the liquor cabinet was never locked.
Janet's connections to the world beyond her doorstep came in many forms and she welcomed all of them. The refreshment provided was bilateral: for every glass poured, she seemed to drink in her visitors, their stories, their lives. She was the Priestess of Grosvenor: she took confession, offered advice, dispensed absolution.
Over the years since my father died, she began to reveal more of the pain she endured and the depth of her feelings on many topics. Like Tiny Tim trapped on the wrong side of the toy shop window, she could clearly see the present and future she could not have, the pathway to it so clear and yet the barriers unconquerable. It was in these moments that she would often remark, "It's a long road without a turn."
In my family, we talked a lot about family and our Scottish roots. My grandfather and his two sons were presidents of the local St. Andrew's Society and proudly wore the kilt. We paid a lot of lip service to the extended family and the cousins, aunts and twice-removeds, but Janet actually did the real work of staying connected to them. She was the last one who understood the connections and ties to the farm in southwestern Ontario and back to the "old country." She often represented the "Montreal cousins" at the hatchings, matchings and dispatchings when no one else could, or would.
I did not understand until quite recently how important family was to Janet. Stuck as I was with the powerful images of pain and hurt caused to my parents, from my childhood, it took a look time to appreciate that she and her son thrived on those connections and the sense of rootedness that they provided.
This is not to say that Janet was all-forgiving. She wanted the family relationships, but on her terms. She was never so desperate that she would be taken for granted, or disrespected. Like the other members of my family, she had a long memory and was often reluctant to forgive. Janet was often strategic in her forgiveness; it was often given in the interest of preserving a connection. She would call to remind you that you should have called; she would take an action in order to reset the conversation.
As we struggled to find the right words to mark Janet's death and freedom from the splinters that had plagued her in this life, it seemed important to me to move beyond platitudes. To talk about Janet and not at least try and capture some of the complexity of her personality and the dimensions of her impact on others seemed to marginalize her impact on the world and I choose "impact" on purpose.
I mentioned earlier that I had been a theatre student in college. I was never an actor, or a designer, but I made the stuff that designers drew and actors used. As a result, I spent a lot of time watching artists trying to give life to words and, most often, falling far short of the mark. I took it into my head that I could be at least as good as many of the directors I had worked for and so set about finding a play I could put on its feet.
There was only ever one choice and that was Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" This is a marathon piece for four actors who say and do horrible things to one another during a long night of drinking. I knew this play and these characters and with a certainty that has eluded me in many other aspects of my life, I knew I could get college students to get to the heart of the story.
It's facile to dismiss this as a drunken brawl of a play. It's a romance; it's a love story built upon ruins and disappointments, regrets and recriminations. It's a romantic story about grown-up relationships in all of their complexities and nuances.
I knew that story because I knew my Aunt Janet.
Janet taught me about words and the importance of those that are said and those that are not. She taught me that life is not a spectator sport and, no matter where you sit, you are going to get some on you.
It is the writer's job to find the right words to describe and document the world as they see it, but words can disappoint; they often cannot capture feelings and the lives that evoked them. Sometimes it can take a whole other life to gain the distance and the perspective from which to choose the right words.
I count myself lucky to have learned from great teachers who helped to appreciate good stories and the drive to keep looking for the right words with which to tell them.
