“This is not going to work, Joel,” I said. I was teaching my grade 11 geography class and Joel was just not cutting it. He just could not function in a normal class. He came ill-prepared and never did his assigned work. He either stared out the window or read his latest issue of Scientific American. “Why don’t you go down to the library? I’ll see you there in a few minutes.” Joel skulked out of the room as I prepared the class for a lab activity on topographic maps.
Joel was an enigma to me. The guidance counselor told me that Joel had been given an IQ test, but his score could not be calculated. They just knew it was well over 160. His music teacher said that on a test of musical ability, Joel had attained a perfect score on all four musical attributes two of which are pitch and tone. The music teacher had never had a student score perfectly on all four musical attributes until Joel. Joel seemed to be blessed with remarkable talents, but they did not reveal themselves in any obvious way in a school or class setting.
I learned from his Mother, some time later, that he had at one time expressed interest in the violin. His parents bought him a violin and arranged lessons. After a few lessons, the renowned maestro, who had agreed to take Joel on as a student, made a special visit from the city to talk with his parents. He exclaimed with great excitement and animation that young Joel was a prodigy and that in all his years he had never taught a more gifted student. Joel never returned to the maestro for another violin lesson. He never picked up the violin again.
Joel was not easy to talk to. He would not look you in the eye. With his shoulders hunched, head downcast, he always seemed to be staring off to some point off the tip of his shoes. He was absolutely exasperating to deal with.
I left the class to work on a lab assignment and made my way to the library. In what was essentially a one way conversation, we made arrangements that he would work in the library to do his own research on various aspects of the course instead of coming to class. He chose to start research on glaciation. As I checked in on his progress in the library from time to time, he was doing some excellent work. I gave him resources I had used in my university graduate courses in physical geography.
I was planning a field trip on glaciation for my classes, and had planned to spend some time on the weekends scouting a suitable route. I asked Joel if he wanted to come out with me on one of my trips. I would hardly call his response enthusiastic, but he did say yes. It got to be a pattern over the next few Saturdays that we roamed the back roads of southern Ontario climbing eskers, digging into kame deposits and sketching drumlin fields. The silences were as vast as the Pleistocene ice sheets. Occasionally we had brief technical discussions about certain features of which he was now as knowledgeable as I. “Yes” and “no”, however, were still the main words in his vocabulary.
Joel had a job sweeping up and dusting at a local commercial art gallery He came to school one day claiming that he had inadvertently created “drumlins” with his broom and dust-bane. Drumlins, those beautiful inverted teaspoon-shaped hills scattered all across Ontario, still posed a research problem for geographers. There was no real understanding or agreement as to how they actually formed under an ice sheet. Joel could reproduce them at will on the floor of the gallery. I was so excited about his discovery I called Dr. Putnam at the University of Toronto, the leading Canadian authority on the Pleistocene era. Joel had some interesting discussions with Dr. Putnam. For the firs time, I overheard him in animated, politely argumentative, discussion with my renowned professor.
2.
On night, from a dead sleep I was awakened by a telephone call. When I lifted the receiver a hysterical female voice said, “Come now! We need help.” In the background I could hear high pitched screaming. She started to say something more but the phone was slammed down and the line went dead.
What was that? I checked my watch. It was after 2 a.m.. I wasn’t exactly sure who it was, but I decided it wounded like Joel’s Mother. Over my pajamas I put on a pair of trousers, jumped in the car and drove to Joel’s house. The lights were all on. I stepped in the back door. There were terrifying noises all over the house, screaming, sobbing, slapping, and smacking noises. With the taste of bile on my tongue, I stepped up the stairs, turned on the landing and there on the stairs above me was Joel’s father cowering on the stairs with his arms up protecting his face. Joel, who was half his Fathers’ size stood above him with a belt raised ready to strike another blow. Joel’s face was frozen in a rigid tormented glare. As soon as our eyes met, he dropped the belt, lowered his arm and scurried past me downstairs. His father retreated upstairs to his own bedroom. I entered the living room where Joel’s mother and three sisters were sobbing uncontrollably . As best I could, I settled them down until they began to doze off. Joel and I never talked about that night.
As well, the school was in a terrible state of anxiety at this time. The principal, “Dimples”, as the students called him was incapable of decisions. On the other hand, Nigel Barrick, the vice-principal who was an ex British army commando, shot from the hip, firing off a hundred decisions a minute, – usually the wrong ones. He roamed the halls like General Montgomery, – hands behind his back, forehead creased with furor, and lower lip furled. Only the swagger stick was missing. You could hear Barrick’s voice in every corner of the building, “You there, stop that! To the office, now”!
One morning, a news-sheet called VICE was stuffed into the doorjamb of every student locker. The VICE logo depicted a hand squeezing a fistful of students. Some were dripping out below the fist. The paper was a brilliant expose of life in the school and contained some scathing satire about the administration. No one knew who had crafted this underground paper. “Dimples” retreated to his office and was unavailable and Nigel Barrick, the VP, rampaged around the school trying to ferret out the instigators of this inflammatory diatribe, which viciously satirized his role in the school. I never asked Joel whether he had anything to do with it. I think that deep down, I was afraid to know.
The Beatles were the rage at this time and Joel and a small group began to grow their hair long. By March, Joel’s hair was as long as Paul McCartney’s. He and the others were warned by the vice-principal that they had to cut their hair, “or else”. Joel ignored him and came to school the next day. He was locked in a room for most of the day with several other resisters. Other students called CBC and CFTO television news departments, who sent camera crews to the school. There was a rumor of a massive student protest planned for the next morning. A strategy meeting was called by the Superintendent for the administration and all department heads to attend at 7 a.m., the morning of the expected rally. The department heads were all assembled behind a closed door in a front classroom overlooking the entrance to the school. Finally, the door opened and in strutted Mr. Barrick, the VP, inflated with military presence, followed by “Dimples”, with terrified eyes darting every which way. They were followed by the Superintendent, whom I dubbed “the grey man” because he always looked the same, – gray suit, gray shirt, grey tie, grey hair, grey eyes, and grey skin. “The grey man” ( a WW 2, army vet) began discussions by listening to ideas on various student scenarios, while V.P Nigel surveyed the scene below. In the early morning misty light, I remember feeling like I was at the last planning session for the-Day landing. I could almost hear the sound of flack guns going off in the distance.
At one point Nigel Barrick excused himself to go below and check things out. He returned a few minutes later looking a little shaken.
“Give us an update, Barrick”, the Grey man requested.
“The students are starting to gather, sir, and they are carrying placards.”
“And what do the placards say,. Barrick?”, the Gray man pursued. Nigel froze, he looked at the Superintendent and tried to speak, his furled lip furled further. His eyes watered and grew red. Hi said nothing.
“What do the placards say Barrick?”, the Grey man asked again, firmly and somewhat impatiently this time.
Nigel’s lip began to quiver. “Hang Barrick, Sir”, he said, his voice trembling.
The battle unraveled in the media for a few days. Joel kept his ground and never backed down. He had a meeting with the Superintendent and was told he couldn’t return to the school until his hair was cut. He apparently said in his defense that Jesus had long hair, not that Joel was a Christian. Joel never returned to school again, ever!
Ironically, a few weeks later, in a blitzkrieg move, the Superintendent called a staff meeting. Neither, Principal “Dimples” nor Mr. Nigel Barrick were there. He told us that “Dimples” had been transferred to the board office to work in purchasing and that Nigel Barrick had accepted a new position in another School Board.
Joel and his family moved to Winnipeg a year or so later and we lost touch.
3.
Several years later my family and I moved to Germany, where I was seconded to the Department of National Defense Schools in Europe. One day, there was a knock at the door of our quaint house in a small village in the Black Forest. When I answered the door, there stood Joel. He asked if he could stay overnight as he was on holiday trip around Europe. He stayed with us for over a year. He lived in our trailer in the driveway whenever we weren’t travelling ourselves. He was fond of our daughters, one year-old Kate and five-year-old Lindsey. He frequently baby sat them. They loved “Jobol”, as Kate called him then.
Joel was still a very frugal conversationalist, but over time I was able to piece together what he had done since we were last together. He had a job as a mail clerk at Carleton University. Frequently, however, Joel went AWOL and could not be located on the job. He was brought into his supervisor’s office for a “terminal” discussion. When interrogated as to his regular disappearances, he admitted to getting side-tracked by the computers in the university computer center. When on the computers, Joel lost all sense of time. It just so happened that the university Computer Services department was looking for a clerk to take the key-punched cards from the data-processing room to the computer room, as well as answer the telephone. Joel was reassigned to Computer Services.
Within weeks, he was in trouble again. He was not doing the job. His supervisors called him I to dismiss him at the Department Head’s request. She sought an explanation from Joel as to what he was doing that interfered with carrying out he’s simple tasks. I could picture the conversation vividly, with Joel staring down at a point just beyond the tip of his shoe. He told her that when he was at a terminal he just seemed to forget time. “What do you do at the terminal?” she inquired.
‘”Oh, I dunno.” He said, “I guess I just write programs”.
“What kind of programs?” she persisted her curiosity aroused. She certainly hadn’t expected a low level clerk to be programming on the mainframe computers. “Let me see what you have done,” she insisted. He shuffled off to a desk and pulled out a wad of computer paper. She looked at his sheets. “What are you doing here”, she asked pointing to one of his sheets.
“It’s a program to generate Fibinachy numbers”, he explained. He had read an article in Scientific American about this abstract theoretical mathematical number and he had developed a program to find them. He also had developed an elaborate program for playing Black Jack which provided the odds on every play of a card and kept a running tally of all scores.
“Where did you learn to do this Joel? his supervisor said.
“I dunno” he replied.
“I didn’t know that you had taken computer programming” she said.
“I haven’t” he answered.
She studied his programs for a while, shaking her head in disbelief. She then walked into the Department Head’ office, apparently she tried to convince him to hire Joel as a programmer, since they were looking for one at the time. He thought she was crazy and exclaimed that Joel had no training and could only program in “Basic”, and that all of their programming was in a more sophisticated language called “Cobol”. He reluctantly agreed to give Joel a trial. If Joel could write a program in two weeks in Cobol, they would hire him. After one of his all night vigils, Joel brought in his new program the very next day, in “Cobol”! He got the job. After a year, he decided to travel for three months in Europe. That is when he ended up on our doorstep. Joel settled in to life in Germany and got a job on the base working in the dairy department of the base supermarket.
One day he bought an antique German motorcycle, reputed to be part of Goering’s motorbike pool. He had discovered, however, that his Ontario Motor League international driver’s license was stamped valid for automobiles only. In order to qualify for German motorcycle license, Joel had to take a six month course. He was not prepared to do this. When I came home late from work one night, Joel was sitting at the dining room table with newspapers all spread out. Assembled on the table atop the newspapers were a bag of potatoes, an exacto knife, and an ink plate and roller.
“What are you up to Joel”, I asked.
“I’m completing my International driver’s license so I can drive my motorbike”.
It took me a while to realize that he was intending to carve a potato to replicate the silver dollar’ sized stamp of the Ontario Motor League and stamp it in the motorbike space on his international driver’s license. I looked at the intricate stamp in his license. It had “Ontario Motor League”, printed in a circle around the outside edge, the OML symbol in the middle, along with the year and the date.
“You’ll never do it. You’re wasting your time”, I said and went to bed. When I woke in the morning, Joel was still at the dining room table, the pile of potatoes had dwindled to nothing. He was still hunched over the table working on one last potato.
“Didn’t work eh?” I said.
“Watch this”, he said and with all of the flair and ceremony of a bureaucrat, he opened his license, squished the potato in his hand onto the ink plate, nonchalantly stamped the motorcycle entry, and handed the license to me. I couldn’t believe my eyes. You could never tell the difference from the authentic stamp.
We eventually moved on to CF Baden Air Force base and Joel remained in Lahr. Joel’s round trip air ticket had long expired. But when he decided to return to Canada, I understand that he doctored his useless airline ticket, all three copies including the carbons, and flew home to Ottawa.
4.
The years passed by and occasionally we heard stories of Joel’s marriage and his career in computer programming with the Canadian Federal Government. One night I turned on “The National “ to watch the news. A journal item was in progress and there was Joel being interviewed, still staring at that point just beyond the tip of his shoe. He and his wife Nancy, had just had a daughter born through in vitro fertilization. Through all of his painful shyness there was glint of the proud father and I thought back to our treks through the Black Forest and the Vosges Mountains, with Kate perched perilously on his shoulders clutching his head desperately, I could still picture Joel with a “ciggie” dangling out of the corner of his mouth, and Lindsey scurrying along beside him hand in hand. I thought of the time he stayed up all night, to bake Kate and Lindsey the biggest ginger bread house I have ever seen. I remembered the hours he spent reading and playing games with them. He always seemed so comfortable with them.
At my retirement party, after the customary speeches by colleagues, I rose to say my final words. As I gazed across the crowd at all of my friends and colleagues, there, way at the back, near the door stood Joel. There, two decades after he last visited us in Germany, and now looking me straight in the eye. He stood there wearing an ill-fitting blew suit and bright red high-top running shoes. He was the proud father of new-born triplets! In a brief moment, I had a flash –a teacher and a student driving silently through the lush spring countryside of Southern Ontario, looking for eskers…
