My dad maintained a peculiar enthusiasm for professional wrestling, delighting in the antics of gentlemanly Whipper Billy Watson, barrel-chested Yukon Eric, and the dastardly Miller brothers. He sought to encourage a similar enthusiasm in us kids, and we’d sometimes watch wrestling on TV with him, during the course of which he’d remind us that he could have gotten into professional wrestling himself if only he’d been a few inches taller. The only sporting event I can remember him taking me to was an evening of wrestling at Maple Leaf Gardens. In the feature match the Nazi-cloaked and eminently detestable Fritz Von Erich sought to apply his evil hold “the Claw” to the virtuous abdomen of Whipper Billy. In the same vein I recall a much-hyped grudge match involving the preening Gorgeous George, who, if he was defeated, would have his flowing blond tresses shaved from his head in the ring. Compared with the genuine heroics of the Leafs, the artificial nonsense of wrestling held only a fleeting appeal for me.
I look back fondly on those first several years in Weston, days of innocence and exploration, when the new world to which we’d journeyed was still an unfamiliar and intriguing place. I loved the family outings we’d sometimes take on summertime Sundays, to the conservation areas at Caledon Hills, Boyd Park, and Heart Lake, or—best of all—the long drive north to Midland where we’d visit the Jesuit Martyrs’ Shrine overlooking Georgian Bay and do some fishing in the Wye River. I loved the smell of summer heat, the singing of cicadas in the trees, obtaining prize conkers from the horse chestnuts that grew in front of our school, chumming around with the neighborhood kids, the fantastic icicles that hung from our eaves in winter. I fell ridiculously in love with my grade 5 teacher, a darling young woman who made no secret of her preference for Wally Somebody and his pal Harry Curtis, both of them handsome and wholesomely Canadian. Then she broke all our hearts by announcing one day that she was going to get married and change her name and not teach anymore. Shortly thereafter, another rude shock: at the conclusion of grade 5 my brothers and I and a few other kids at Saint John’s would be transferring to a brand-new Catholic school about to open in North York, an adjacent Toronto suburb. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but the days of innocence were already drawing to a close.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember
from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.
OSCAR WILDE, “The Critic as Artist”
THE PARISH OF SAINT BERNARD lay largely in the wilds of North York, but stretched just far enough across Jane Street and into Weston to include our block. To begin with, the parish had neither church nor school, just a small and rather squalid hall that served as the church, and this is where we attended Sunday Mass. The surrounding area included undeveloped fields that were being rapidly turned into residential subdivisions and shopping centers, primarily to accommodate an influx of Italian families. A spanking new and hopelessly sterile brick school was plopped down in the middle of a field alongside an enormous new church and rectory. The school was stocked with kids like ourselves who’d previously attended various other schools on the perimeter of the parish. We were mostly strangers to one another. What was brilliant for the first few weeks was that the schoolyard was a prairie of tall grasses within which various clandestine activities could be carried on. But pretty soon the grasses were trampled down and we had a schoolyard like any other.
Our principal was a diminutive but formidable nun named Sister Rosalie, from the same convent of Faithful Companions of Jesus as the nuns at Saint John’s, but most of the staff were lay teachers. The parish priest, a crusty old curmudgeon named Father Marshman, regularly prowled around the school and did his best to put the fear of God in everyone. But it was an uphill struggle. Perhaps it was the newness of the place, its rawness, the lack of any tradition, the eclectic mix of kids, but there seemed from the outset to be a sulking disrespect simmering just below the surface, a kind of incipient lawlessness that might break out at any minute. Some of the older boys smoked cigarettes and blasphemed extravagantly; a couple of girls were whispered of as known sluts. One lout used to entertain himself by seizing smaller boys by the nipple and squeezing hard enough to cause a bruise, telling them he’d given them “a purple titty.” Sister Rosalie, who brooked no insolence, had her hands full with this lot. A large leather strap hanging in her office warned of retribution for any misbehavior. Only once was I ever sent to the principal’s office for some infraction I no longer recall. When I entered her office and explained my transgression to her, she looked at me as though I’d disappointed her awfully. “Hold out your hand,” she said dispassionately, as she picked up the strap. I pulled up my sleeve and extended my right hand. She lashed my palm hard several times. I felt a fiery pain after each lash. “Now the other hand.” She lashed my left palm the same way. “All right, go back to your desk.” Although my hands were stinging as fiercely as if I’d stuck them into a hornet’s nest, the greater pain I felt was in having let the principal down. I knew poor Sister Rosalie held high hopes for me, and I had betrayed her expectations, shown myself no better than the worst louts of the class. But also, perversely, I experienced a moronic little swagger of satisfaction at my badness and at my courage under the lash of the murderous strap.
However, the infraction was an anomaly for, like my brothers, I maintained my piety even in the unencouraging environment of the new school. I excelled in class and took satisfaction in scoring top marks, winning spelling bees and the like. Singled out as both pious and bright, I was forced into a public-speaking role I didn’t really want, so that whenever a visiting dignitary addressed our class—a priest from the overseas missions, perhaps, or someone from the police warning us about the hazards of train tracks—it fell to me to rise and thank them for their presentation.
Fine literature singled me out as well. So far as I can remember, my first public poem was penned in the eighth grade. It concerned itself with a trout. My imaginative life had by then sashayed away from the Wild West, replacing cowboys with a fixation on trout fishing. I pored eagerly over old fishing magazines. I obtained a fiberglass rod with spinning reel and spent long hours perfecting the techniques of casting. My favorite event when the school visited the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto was watching expert anglers cast plugs into circular targets floating at the far end of a long tank. My tackle box held a jumble of barbed hooks, leaders and lead shot, spinners and flashers, and, most absorbingly, flies. I studied the difference between wet and dry flies, stared longingly at displays of delicate flies in the neighborhood sporting goods store and practiced making my own flies, inexpertly gluing random clots of feathers onto hooks. No wily trout ever would, or did, attempt to eat one of these, though I cast them expectantly into the upper reaches of the Humber and Credit and whatever other streams I could. The thrill of an elusive trout flashing silver in a little brook excited a poetic impulse in me, as it had in Yeats before me. Sister Rosalie read my poem aloud to the grade 8 class. I had become a poet.
But I was still consumed with sports, devoting myself to track and field and fastball. By the time I was in grade 7, playing first base was no longer sufficient. Recognizing that