Swing Low (14 page)

The other thing that was bothering me was that I hadn’t told her I was on medication for manic depression and would be, in all likelihood, for the rest of my life. I realized that if we were to be married she would have to know about it, but I simply didn’t have the nerve to tell her then. I suppose this marked the beginning of my “quiet” life, the first phase of my plan to remain silent when it came to matters of myself.

Normal school. Do you remember that time of life in the autumn of one’s adolescence when a thousand hopes and dreams seem to clash with the realities of the world? That’s what I think of when I remember normal school. Before I started normal school, I had big plans for my future classroom. When I finished normal school I still had big plans, but I realized how difficult it would be to see them through. It seems, as I think about it, that every step along the way of my career I had to beg and fight and pay to teach the way I
wanted to. I would begin lessons from the texts provided, but as my students expressed interest in various topics or issues, we would veer off the beaten track and create an entirely new and innovative course of study. In my classroom this type of activity was officially known as trailblazing, and it was, by far, the students’ favourite time of the day. They would lead discussions and come up with questions they thought were relevant, we would write many letters to members of the federal and provincial governments asking them to tell us about their jobs and how they hoped to help Canadians, we would run mock elections, we would work together on group projects (my favourite teaching activity), we’d build replica trading posts and reading lofts with big cushions and publish a class newspaper to let the entire community know what we were up to. We’d be kind to each other. We’d build birdhouses in the spring. We’d write and produce plays and memorize poetry and play a lot of baseball in the month of June!

I would prepare my students for the world outside, beyond our little town, and I would teach them to express themselves. In this way I could stay put and remain silent, in self-defence. There’s no secret here, not really. Any psychiatrist worth his or her salt could tell you: my students’ accomplishments would be mine. They would take my dreams and make them real.

In normal school, the emphasis was on discipline, how to control a group of thirty or more students, and structure, how to teach a varied group of individuals with little or no deviation from the standard textbooks provided. Basically the focus was getting them in, keeping them in, and getting
them out. There was no emphasis on the joy of learning or the flexibility required to teach young children or the art of bringing a textbook to life. There were no discussions having to do with self-expression, or world-readiness, or group projects, or the necessity of sometimes having to veer from the text or write one’s own, which I eventually did, or of the social relevance of all-day baseball tournaments in the month of June. There was no fun quotient, as they say, in normal school, and I hated it.

My write-up, however, in the 1954
Mirror
, the normal school yearbook, reads as follows: “Melvin is interested in Sunday school work … enjoys most sports … a conscientious fellow working hard to do his duty.” I was very pleased with this assessment.

I’ve thought of something. I will write my way out of this mess! I will fool myself. If I can continue to remember right up to the present, then I will know why I’m here. Slowly, I will creep towards the present, step by step, memory by memory, and my mind will then be eased, gradually, into a place of understanding. It will be very natural. Am very excited with new strategy. Pens, paper, must have, and to begin, now.

After graduating from normal school, I moved back home to Steinbach and began my teaching career at the little two-room
school in Bristol. I was nineteen years old, six foot two, one hundred and forty pounds, terrified, and proud. Elvis Presley, also nineteen, was about to change the course of history, but Elvira and I had never heard of him, and wouldn’t for years to come. Our lives consisted of church, school, nurses’ training, and planning our future, which had nothing to do with rock and roll.

My parents, particularly my mother, were not entirely pleased with my choice of girlfriend. Elvira came from the wealthiest family in town, and one with a colourful reputation. They were the first family in town to own a piano, for example (frowned on by conservative Mennonites at the time), and Elvira’s father, C.T. (his brothers were J.T., P.T., I.T., and A.T.; the T. stands for Toews, their mother’s maiden name), encouraged his sons to sow their wild oats before settling down into the family lumber business, which would eventually turn them all into millionaires. Elvira and I are second cousins, a typical occurrence in Mennonite couples. Her dad’s mother was a sister to my dad’s father, and it’s a common Mennonite practice to give a child his mother’s maiden name as a middle name. My daughters’ surnames, if we hadn’t nipped that interesting practice in the bud, would have been Toews Loewen Loewen Toews.

Elvira accompanied her father on many business trips and working lunches at fancy restaurants (places I had delivered eggs to) in the city, regularly coming into contact with important businessmen and generally enjoying a worldly outlook on life. Once, when she was fourteen years old, she and her father drove to B.C. for a holiday visit with relatives. C.T. let Elvira do the driving, even through the Rocky
Mountains with their treacherous hairpin curves. She adored her father and he loved her very much and very well. That is, he encouraged her to be herself and told her nothing was impossible. He expected her to be brave and honest and adventurous like he was. The fact that he had buried six of his thirteen children seemed not to have crushed his spirit. I remember an occasion when a rival lumberman was angry with him for some reason and making nasty threats, and C.T. casually telling me on his front porch, “He can kill me but he can’t scare me.”

But my mother was not altogether pleased with my association with the Loewens, of whom I was becoming increasingly more fond as the months went by, especially of Elvira, of course. I think my mother’s reason for not liking the Loewens had to do with money, although I’m not entirely sure. The Reimer clan, of which my mother was a member, had been the wealthiest family in town until the Loewens came along and raised the stakes. It’s assumed by many that Mennonites care little of money and material goods, but the very opposite is true. Anyway, my grandparents’ general store gradually went broke because of the youthful carousing of my mother’s brother, who was supposed to be in charge, while C.T.’s business flourished to become the largest and most lucrative in all of southeastern Manitoba. C.T. was also establishing a reputation as a fair and compassionate employer who took the complaints and advice of his workers to heart.

My mother, rather than placing the blame on her brother’s shoulders for the failure of their family business, begrudged the Loewens for the success of theirs.

But my mother was not the only one to disapprove of our relationship. Elvira’s mother, had she been alive, would surely have found it troublesome that Elvira was planning to marry the son of the cousin of her husband’s first love, the woman who, as I have mentioned, was forbidden by her brothers to marry Elvira’s father because of his rogue tendencies and worldliness. Little did her brothers know that C.T. would go on to become a very wealthy and respected man both in and out of the church and, unfortunately, that their sister, C.T.’s first love, would suffer a terrible accident with some permanent damage and remain a spinster for life.

It seems odd that Helena, Elvira’s mother, such a gentle, pious woman normally, would harbour such a resentment of the Reimer clan, and that my extremely tenuous connection to her rival would have made me an undesirable son-in-law, but we must remember that she had been stood up at the altar by C.T. the first time they tried to get married, all because of this Reimer girl. Elvira’s oldest brother married a girl from the Reimer clan and she and her mother-in-law had, at best, a strained relationship. Why Helena didn’t direct her wrath at her husband, the more deserving target if ever there was one, is anybody’s guess. Although the traditionally submissive role of Mennonite wives may have had a lot to do with it.

Nevertheless, our love blossomed and we were very happy with each other. My home life was troublesome still, but I knew I’d soon be leaving it behind. As soon as Elvira had completed her nurses’ training we would be married and on our own. On the day of our wedding, December 28, 1956,
Elvira would receive her inheritance with which to build our home at 229 First Street, and a new bedroom suite as a gift. By then I would be teaching grade six at Elmdale School in Steinbach, a seven-minute walk from home down First Street, up William, and across Main, a journey I’d make at least twice a day for forty years.

A friendly male nurse has entered my room to tell me that I am not what I said I was, that I am being too hard on myself. Now, I cannot remember what I said I was. What did I say I was? I asked him. You said,
Mel es en schinde
, and that is not true. But of course it is, I say,
schinde
is a Low German expression meaning “lower than low,” originally, I believe, one who tortures horses, a taskmaster, a tyrant. I am personally responsible for Elvira’s demise, I intone rather formally. I drove her to despair. No, says the nurse, you did not. You are ill, that’s not your fault. How naive and kind of him, I think as he pats me on the shoulder. I notice our watches are similar and point this out to him. He is excessively pleased. He is the same chap who informed me that there are unusually high numbers of Mennonites who suffer from depression but nobody knows why. I said, Well, thank you for that! As cheerfully as if I was accepting a plate of homemade Christmas cookies from one of my students.