The Taleswappers’ Porch

OK. It’s time to call this meeting to order. A voice squawked and tried to hush the crowd, because there was business to be organized and carried out. Could I have the executive up here with me, please?

In the crowd, one guy leaned over to his neighbour. Give a guy some power, and he starts sounding so prim and proper! “Could I have the executive up here with me-e, puhleeze?” he ended, in mocking imitation of their leader, as the executive formed an orderly single-file row on the makeshift stage in contrast to the disorganized group below them, where there was stumbling into each other, and some were being struck by their neighbours–purely accidentally, of course, and people hopping over each other to get where they wanted to stand.

Why do they always drag us out so early in the morning for these meetings, somebody asked his friend standing next to him.

The only reason my manager ever gave me was some line about the early bird getting the worm or something like that, came the reply.

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I was fortunate that our family didn’t move around a whole lot when I was growing up. If I walked to the back of the high school went outside and through a little gate in the fence, I would be in the parking lot of the hospital where I was born. When I was born, we actually lived in a small village outside of town, but when I was too young to remember (before I was two years old, I think), we moved to the first house I remember living in. And we didn’t move until I was in grade 7.

That year, we moved within town. We didn’t need to change schools; in fact, we were now living next door to the elementary school I’d attended since junior kindergarten. This had good and bad points, but getting rid of the half-hour walk to school was good. This was also the house where I first had my own room (even though it was barely wide enough for the bed and a path to walk alongside it).

What I remember of this move was a lot of people helping. We had relatives and neighbours offering a hand…and even a priest I didn’t know yet. (I didn’t realise priests could be that young!) But it was only about a half-mile from one house to the other, so we had pick-up trucks and car trips. I don’t know, I may have even pedalled my own bicycle from one house to the other.

Then, my father got a new job, and during my last year of high school, he moved midway through the year, and we followed just a day or two after I finished high school. And I was about to experience living in a different town.

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I was chatting with a friend the other day and all of a sudden, a couple of memories of a single year in school came back to me. It was the year I was in grade 3.

The first memory to come to mind was of discipline gone wrong. I remember my teacher in the middle of a lesson, and I remember somebody was disruptive. This teacher could do the disciplinarian if she had to, but that wasn’t the whole story. In this case, she figured that an effective way to get this student’s attention would be to whack her wooden pointer on the student’s desk. It certainly got everybody’s attention. There’s something about the end of the pointer breaking off and flying across the room which tends to do that! The whole class (the teacher included) had a good long laugh at that!

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I have been fortunate through my life. For, yea, I am a klutz. Despite that fact, serious injury has not befallen me.

I don’t recall how old I would have been, but I was probably in the 8- to 11-year-old range, when one day I was over at the house of a friend who lived just around the corner from me. And we decided to play baseball. And, we had fun (especially because her yard was bigger than ours, though home runs would be hit into the forest instead of over a fence). But it was often hard to retrieve balls, so we’d try to keep them on their lawn instead of ruining the fun by losing the ball.

So, I remember her pitching to me. I remember getting a great hit, and excitedly thinking I had a sure home run. And I started to run. I touched first base, which was probably somebody’s jacket. I ran and kept running as I circled second base, which may have been a patch of sand in the lawn.

Then, as I kept running, something felt wrong.
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