In grade seven, I started going to a new school, a junior high school which sat immediately north of the hydro field. I lived immediately south of the hydro field and could see the school from my back yard if I climbed on top of our tree house. Every day, I did the five minute walk underneath the high-tension transmission lines that crackled when it rained and otherwise hummed at a frequency I’ve come to regard as the mantra of our industrial life (ohm). Along the sidewalk was a fence of wooden posts the thickness of a man’s thigh—or Hulk Hogan’s arm. The posts were as high as a man’s waist, and threaded between the posts was a single steel cable. During the cross-country running unit in our gym class, we would run alongside the fence and do scissor jumps over the cable. I was terrified of doing this. I’d seen too many of my classmates catch an ankle on the cable and flip face-first into the grass, or land astride the cable and topple over in agony.
Gym class was an alienating experience for me. We had to buy a uniform and keep it in an ugly purple duffel bag. That included a jock strap—a piece of clothing shrouded in mystery. Apparently my body was going to change soon. That’s what it said in a book my mom bought at the drug store. I loved to read and my mom took advantage of that fact to avoid “the talk.” For me, “the talk” went like this: “Here’s something for you to read, son.” I read the book, looked at my new jock strap, and felt reassured that one day my genitalia might be big enough to fill this mysterious piece of clothing. As it was, we did our running in the cold and I was so shrivelled up, the jock strap would have seemed pointless no matter how big my genitals. I did my scissor jumps over the cable and prayed I would make it without suffering permanent damage.
I used to walk home under the hydro wires with a friend, another David, another geek. We were like-minded in our view of gym class. In elementary school, we had often stayed late to play chess. Now, in junior high, we stayed late with two other friends and played bridge. That’s not to say we didn’t entertain fantasies of one day becoming track and field stars or celebrated Tour de France champions. In fact, we both enjoyed healthy imaginations. But mostly, we exercised our imaginations with math puzzles, word play, and tall tales.
One afternoon, as we walked home from a game of bridge, we found one of the fence posts uprooted, hovering just above the ground, suspended by the cable strung from the neighbouring posts. It was obvious a car or truck had jumped the curb and collided with the post, snapping it where the wood had rotted below the ground. Now, it hung like a decayed tooth held in place by a mouthful of braces. This was an opportunity. Minds at play. Fantasy life at full throttle. We stuck the post upright in its hole and acted out scenarios where one or the other of us would break the post and knock it over. We were famous wrestlers. We were giants. We were aliens. We were oblivious to the neighbours walking their dogs and approaching on the other side of the street.
I recognized the man because I often saw him out walking his dog, but I didn’t know where he lived. The woman lived across the road from us and a few houses down. She had a dog named Lady that looked like a husky, but smaller. I had always been wary of these two. They wore sour expressions and never spoke to kids. Except this afternoon. They watched two pre-teens break a fence post on public property. Vandals. Hooligans. Wanton destroyers of stuff they had paid for with their hard-earned tax dollars.
The man lit into us with a fury. We were a couple of useless punks up to no good. He was going to call the police on us. He was this. He was that. It didn’t help that we started to laugh at him. It was absurd to suppose that two skinny twelve-year-olds had snapped a solid post with their bare hands. We did the only thing twelve-year-olds can do when faced with the absurd logic of the adult world—we ran away.
I recall a professor once observing that children have an innate sense of justice. I don’t think that captures it. Children have an innate sense of injustice. Children are as stymied as you and me when asked to explain what justice means. But flip the question on its head and ask a child to identify an instance of injustice and a child will slay you with her honesty.
We all remember moments of injustice from our childhood. The moment I’ve shared is benign, but it illustrates the elements of a kind of injustice. Call it procedural injustice if you like: the jaw-dropping pause at absurd assumptions, the feeling of impotence, the sense that no one is listening, the inability to give actions a context.
We all remember moments from our childhood when adults in authority—parents, teachers, neighbours walking their dogs—demanded that we children explain ourselves. We felt their impatience, the pressure of time drawing a close circle around their willingness to listen. We stammered. We coughed up fragments. Our incoherence struck adult ears with the ring of guilt.
Now, as a grown-up, I sometimes forget that the adult demand, “Explain yourself”, requires of children a skill they haven’t yet mastered—the skill of sustained narrative. Look at the story which introduces this entry. Written by an adult, it takes 700 words to establish the context of a broken fence post. At twelve, I was only beginning to learn this skill; I was intimidated and tongue-tied at a grown-up’s harangue and so, instead of telling my story, I ran away laughing.
Sometimes we use story to give context and meaning to our lives. Story roots itself in granular experience. In that respect, it is antithetical to globalism. There is no such thing as a global story. The very idea is incoherent. As story reveals us in our granular experience, it becomes a tool for justice. We explain ourselves to power. We document our context, and once documented, it cannot be taken from us. If story is a tool for justice, then globalism cannot help but aspire to unjust things; for globalism denies the validity of the granular experience we record in story.
I’m suspicious of people who speak of education in instrumentalist terms, people who denigrate the arts and call, instead, for students to acquire those skills which will contribute to the country’s gross domestic product and make it competitive in the global economy. I don’t trust people who can’t see the point of poetry or literature or music or ars gratia artis in a curriculum. I’m wary of their motives. There is no better way to surreptitiously secure social injustices than to strip a people of their ability to tell their stories. Without this ability, they will stand before power—like a twelve-year-old before a blustering grown-up—and stammer incoherently for their rights. Conversely, storytelling is one of the most effective acts of resistance a person can commit. It is inherently anti-global and it gracefully draws power into the circle of empathy it describes. This explains why there is no better way to quell subtle resistance than to strike our primary tools of empathy from the school curriculum.
There are times when we find ourselves in a position of power in relation to others—parents in relation to children, bus drivers in relation to riders, bosses in relation to employees, teachers in relation to students, the healthy in relation to the sick, the knowledgeable in relation to the ignorant. I think it’s fair to say that most people who find themselves in a position of power aspire to exercise their authority with fairness. One of the most powerful tools in the fair exercise of authority is deep listening. When Mark Antony says: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” he demonstrates how the act of listening confers power. He demands it and his inferiors unquestioningly grant it. The corollary is that those with power can empower those who have none through the simple act of listening.
This would be a convenient place to end my entry—a fine message: those without power can assert themselves with storytelling; those with power can exercise it responsibly with deep listening—except I haven’t told the whole story. I’ve told you about me and my friend, the two twelve-year-olds pretending to break a fence post. And I’ve told you about the man who misread the scene and accused us of vandalism. But I haven’t told you about the woman who was walking with him, the neighbour who lived across the street.
Here, I lose the thread because, to be honest, I don’t know the story; I can’t even remember the woman’s name. I offer that as a sad confession. In fact, at the age of twelve, I didn’t have the maturity to know there even was a story. Here’s what I did know: our neighbour was a nurse. She lived with another nurse. Neighbours who spoke of them used words like “spinsters” and “old maids,” suggesting they had moved in together for companionship because neither had found a suitable man to marry. Her “old maid” “spinster” companion died and left her alone in the house they had shared. That probably accounted for the sour expression. How could she grieve? Each day, when she left the house, I expect she clenched her jaws and twisted her face into a steely mask. I think she must have been the loneliest person I ever met.
The woman isn’t such a puzzle to me. There have been nod-and-wink neighbours since the dawn of (un)civilization. Really, the man is the enigma here. What did he think he was doing on those daily dog walks with the grieving “spinster” nurse? Did he fancy himself a gentleman caller? Given his propensity to misread situations, this is a possibility.
But this happened more than thirty-five years ago. Their story belongs to the dead now, which means we, the living, are free to tell it any way we please. It is our right, since the dead hold such power over us.