I rarely think about the past, partly because there is no point in hoping for a better one. As it turns out, I can’t actually think of a better one. I was a social misfit but because of my daughter’s and Julie’s personalities, the career I chose, and the few good friends I met along the way – it didn’t seem to really matter:
1. As a parent: if the universe were designed such that children were passed out to parents based on their particular parenting skills it would have been: “luckily we have this one child in the universe that will be fine under the care of this parent”.
2. As a husband: all I can say is that I thank those lucky stars that were aligned in such a way that I met Julie.
3. As a career: “lucky he has a job doing that because there is no way he would get a job doing anything else”.
Most people have a variety of skills. As an example some of my friends are very skilled at building things. I recall as a teenager building a back porch for our house, except that I also remember that the porch eventually fell off the back of the house.
Social skills: I kept low profile in high school – so much so that when I bumped into one of my high school classmates the first week of university, they had no idea who I was.
I took electrical engineering at university for the sole reason that I was comfortable using a small soldering iron and long-nosed pliers. Unfortunately, Carleton University didn’t specialize until 4th year so most of the courses involved civil and mechanical engineering and none of the courses involved either a soldering iron or long-nosed pliers. I didn’t do well, barely passing most and failing one (surveying – a course that is almost impossible to fail).
After that first year of university I got a job in the summer as a boilermaker’s helper on a hydro project near Baie-Comeau Quebec. I remember working on a 3 ton servo-motor that opened the sluice gates to run the turbine and jotting down a trigonometric solution to the problem of accurately placing the servo-motor. I showed it to the foreman who immediately got red in the face and told me where I could put my trigonometry.
My immediate boss was a “pusher” (the next level below a foreman) who also had a dance band. When he heard I played the clarinet, he asked me to come and play in his band. I showed up with the clarinet and did my best but realized immediately that it wasn’t going to work out. I only played by reading music and they only played by ear. Without any music score at hand I was struggling to keep up with them so I never went back.
At the end of the summer I was given a sort-of report card which said “lacks initiative” from which you can read “unemployable”. That was fine because I hated the job anyway. It paid well though, enough for me to stay in residence at a university in some other city. I decided on U of A in Edmonton where they specialized in 3rd year instead of 4th.
3rd year at U of A turned out to be disappointing (still no soldering iron or long-nosed pliers) so when a faculty member came up to me and offered a different option for 4th year, I took it. The 4th year option involved no engineering courses – only maths and physics. Four other students were offered the same option with the idea of grooming us to do a graduate degree in plasma physics and fusion.
Half way through 4th year I started questioning the idea of doing a graduate degree. I needed a break or I was going to become even more of a misfit than I already was. As a result, I applied to teach high school math and physics with Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO). I was told I would either end up working in the Caribbean or Borneo. In the end, I was posted to a high school in Arima, Trinidad.
That summer after university, I took a 6 weeks course in teaching given by CUSO at St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. We took courses in the morning and went to the beach in the afternoon. At the end of that course we spent a further week at an orientation course in Jamaica. On the weekend four of us rented a car and toured the island. I drove. A few hours out of Kingston we realized we had a slow leak in the radiator. We didn’t go back. We just kept stopping every once in awhile to fill the radiator. There may have been chewing gum involved as well, I don’t exactly remember. I do remember stopping at Negril Beach which in those days was devoid of hotels – only a few shacks along the beach. We had the entire beach to ourselves – the most beautiful swimming beach I have ever seen then or since. We arrived in Montego Bay as the sun was going down and stopped at the Canuck Motel for dinner. We had planned to sleep on the beach but the hotel owner thought that was dangerous and offered us cheap accommodations.
The final leg of the journey involved only the CUSO volunteers who were posted to Trinidad. When we arrived at the airport in Trinidad, a representative of the department of education met us. He let me drive his mini-minor into town. We had a further few days of orientation in Port of Spain. In the evenings the same department of education representative would take us to various places around Port of Spain including a steel band practice yard, rum and coconut and raw oysters beside the savannah etc.
I’ll cut it short at this point. I had a very interesting time in Trinidad; I may post something about that in a few days. The short version though is that I met my first wife Marilyn there. When we came back to Canada, I took a masters degree at UBC and got a job at BNR (Nortel) in Ottawa. One of the first people I met there for whom I am forever grateful was Carmine Ciancibello. Carmine ended up having a huge impact on my life/career.
My daughter Kim was born soon after we arrived back in Ottawa. Eventually Marilyn and I split up and she left for the states. I probably would not have met Julie if it weren’t for the fact that I eventually found myself sitting alone in front of the TV set on a Friday night while my teenage daughter was out with her friends. I sat there thinking “what happened” and “what next” but then Julie came along and here we are – 36+ years later.
WR Foster 