Spirits of a Feather

*** I started my first real relationship with a car that same year. It was a 1929 Model A Ford. It wasn’t really mine, but my mother and I had pretty much exclusive use of it, and I could do all sorts of improper things to it. For instance, we just happened to have a wartime surplus airplane in our yard. The airplane had been disabled so the engine would not run (in spite of my best efforts), but it had an endless supply of switches, hydraulic pumps and other interesting things. We also had a war surplus truck (with right-hand drive), a 4-wheel-drive jeep, and a few other things like a flamethrower, all in good working order. It may sound strange now, but at that time many people acquired them for very little money. I installed a pair of airplane headlights on the car and had them work with auxiliary fuses and switches also from the airplane. They provided excellent lighting on dark roads—and a frequently dead battery. It was a marvelous car. Whenever my mother drove it alone we could count on a story. “I don’t know why, but the motor stopped running half way to town,” my mother said. “You mean it wouldn’t start?” I asked. “It wouldn’t do anything. I thought it was ruined.” “So what did you do?” “This nice man stopped and said it was out of water. He went to a farm and got some water for it.” “And it runs now?” “As far as I know.” I checked the car. It was fine. It had run out of water, overheated, and the engine had seized up. All it needed was a drink of water to cool it down. A car with a newer, tighter engine would have been ruined. Another time my mother and I were driving along the highway toward Swift Current. “That’s strange. What is that over there in the field?” she asked. I looked into the field and noticed a wheel rolling merrily across the ditch and through the field. “I don’t know. Maybe you should stop.” She pulled off to the side of the road. We got out and looked around at the car, neither of us knowing what we were looking for. I looked where the left rear wheel should have been. As the old Irish saying goes, ‘there it was—gone’. The wheel in the field belonged to us. I chased after it until I caught it and brought it back to the car. I took one of the lug nuts off each of the other three wheels to attach the errant one, and we were on our way. No damage was done. *** Life was much the same as it would have been in any small rural town in northern Manitoba or Saskatchewan at that time. Working, eating and sleeping took up most of the day because there was were no recreational facilities closer than those in North Battleford and you needed a car to get there. Fortunately, John and his car were usually available for evening fun whenever my shift work allowed, because he didn’t work shifts. So we, and usually two or three other staff, would do the usual things people do: driving around, going to town for a snack, stealing a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, going to a movie, and drinking beer. Oh, so you think stealing a turkey isn’t a usual activity? You are probably right, but at the hospital it seemed everyone except me thought it was a great idea. Being raised on a farm I had some first hand experience with turkeys and the process of getting one from the barn onto one’s dinner plate. It is a much more complicated process than foreseen by their plan. The extent of the plan was to drive to a nearby turkey farm, sneak into one of the barns and snaffle a nice fat bird. Our total preparation for the escapade was to have an empty flour bag to carry the bird. Off the top of my head, I could think of a few possible problems such as: - Our society has a convention of only eating dead and cooked meat—preferably without feathers. I doubted the cook at the hospital would be happy with our request to cook a squawking, wing-beating bird. - Turkeys are not quiet when excited, and they excite very easily. - Turkeys are possibly one of the most stupid things alive. A clap of thunder will panic them into rushing into one corner of the barn and smothering each other, or possibly us if we happened to have also chosen that corner. - Oh, yes. And it is also most likely illegal. My subtle protestations were politely ignored as we sped on our mission. John turned off the lights and we drove slowly and quietly halfway down the lane. The consensus was that it would be best, in the interests of concealment, to walk the last 100 yards. We got partway to our goal when we heard menacing barking from what sounded like several very large and really annoyed dogs. My training as a runner finally paid off. I was easily the first to get back to the car. Unfortunately, it was locked. After we regrouped in the car, we realized the dogs were probably tied up but still an effective deterrent. That night we ate our hamburger dinner without comment. *** However, I do have to mention Phil because he taught me a lot about how to be successful, and I have shared this with many people, including student teachers. He liked me because he was addicted to playing pool at noon hour. No, we didn’t play pool together, but I was his teacher for the first class in the afternoon, and he was usually late for class. I was one of the few teachers who really believed that finishing a pool game could be more important than the first fifteen minutes of a lesson. Several years later, he became a teacher and then a school counselor in Portage. We had occasions to be together in meetings with principals and parents and I was curious as to how he made such a positive impression on everyone (except me, of course). So he told me about his working for the hydroelectric power company before coming to the school system. It went something like this: “The first thing to do after you have driven out to where the repair is to made is to leave the truck doors open, take out your tool boxes and leave them open with tools spread out on the roadside. Anyone driving by, including supervisors, will observe that you are working.” “OK. So what does this have to do with a meeting in the school?” I asked. “When I go to a meeting, I always have a briefcase. The first thing I do is to put it on the desk. Then I open it and take out some papers, and look at them as if I am refreshing my memory about something. Then we can start the meeting. They are impressed because they think I am organized and know what I am doing.”