I have no memory of graduating from Grade 7. One clear memory I do have however is the anxiety that I felt about the idea of entering high school in Grade 8.
At the start of the Grade 7 year, our English teacher Mister Morrish asked us to write a brief essay on our feelings and hopes for the future, and about high school in particular. As we began writing at our desks, Mr. Morrish assured us that when we read our essays again at the end of the year, we’d look back on our initial perspective and feel differently about it. He was telling us that we would mature in some way.
I liked the exercise of just writing out what I felt about something; it felt liberating and it was nice to be able to express myself. I was really anxious about leaving Grade 7. MacCorkindale Elementary (“Corky” as we called it) had become my school home since Grade 5, when I first came to Vancouver from Victoria. Those two years were the longest time I’d remembered ever living anywhere, and it felt good to be anchored down to a place for a while. I knew the school well, there were no fears for me there and I didn’t want to leave the relative security of the familiar.
The thought of starting Grade 8 in a new, big school was a scary prospect. I actually remember using the words “I am terrified” in my essay. Mister Morrish wasn’t wrong though. I would adapt to the idea in time.
The prospect of the end of Grade 7 seemed especially hard for one of my classmates too. I’ll just call him Tim. Tim seemed to have a tendency to make people dislike him. I remember him talking back to people in a kind of smug way, or revealing a hint of cruelty in his attitude where sympathy ought to have been. It’s hard to describe, but he just didn’t seem to get along with anyone, rubbed almost everyone the wrong way, and seemed to revel in any attention he did get, whether positive or negative.
Tim lived in the co-op next door to the townhouse development where I lived – just on the other side of a chain link fence that separated our two communities. During the Grade 6 and 7 years, we became friends for a little while.
When my grade got to go to Camp Squamish, Tim and I were paired up in a room, with separate single beds in diagonally-opposite corners of the room. Camp was a really fun experience for me: the fresh air, sunshine, and sense of exploration really appealed to me. My class did a lot of activities, but the only one I remember was hiking up some beautiful snowy trails, and I took in all the cold fresh air, the smell of pine and cedar, the songs of little birds, and the cry of an occasional hawk.
Near the last day, the Teachers brought all the kids together in the camp’s main hall, and everyone was given little cardboard badges to acknowledge them for something. Because I had said “Aw, nuts!” every time I fell wearing snowshoes (and I fell down a lot), I got the “Aw, Nuts!” badge. Because Tim and I were quiet at night, we each won the “Quiet as a Mouse” badge.
What was disturbing was that one night as I was trying to fall asleep, Tim started talking about hell. I couldn’t believe he really thought he was going to hell. I thought about what a burden religious belief seemed to be, and what Tim’s parents must have done to his mind to make him feel so fearful of an afterlife. My parents had tons more problems than most of the families I knew, but none of my family worried about going to hell. I already felt like heaven and hell were here on earth, and I felt pity for Tim that he really feared going to hell.
After that trip, when hanging out at Tim’s place, I wore a t-shirt with a hole under the arm (feeling certain that everyone else could see it too), sitting with Tim in his bedroom listening to music. Tim had tons of vinyl, and had recently given up on liking the band Kiss, and was now getting into Abba. I couldn’t understand how one’s musical taste could so easily transition from devil-performance rock to glittery disco love ballads, except that maybe Tim had more money than taste and was just following the Top 40 radio fads. At the time, I remember thinking “This kid seems kind of rich. He has tons of albums, and a big bedroom with his own stereo”. As an only child, I guessed that Tim got all the parental attention too.
Tim asked me how much allowance I got each week and I told him I got two dollars. He scoffed at that and said that he got five, or maybe he’d said ten. That sounded like a lot of money to me, and I asked him what he had to do to earn that much. He said “nothing”. I reflected in my head that I usually had to haul a lot of garbage bags full of empty wine bottles out to the dumpster to earn my two bucks each week. My Dad might have been tight with his money, and being a good twenty years older than all my friend’s dads, probably had an out-dated idea of how much allowance ought to be. I wondered if I deserved a raise at home, but I could not raise that issue with Dad. I didn’t tell any of that to Tim either; I just sat there with my underarm shirt hole, feeling pretty damned poor, and suspected that Tim was actually looking down on me, and pitying me.
I soon learned that Tim was widely disliked in our school. Our teacher Mister Morrish had once gotten so angry at Tim’s constant talking during class that he made Tim hold a plastic ruler in his mouth for the whole hour. This was a cold-hearted and embarrassing punishment that would likely get a Teacher suspended today, but this was the seventies. Tim could be a pain in the ass and sometimes cruel to the girls in our class, but Mister Morrish’s punishment was over the top even back then. Tim told me later that the edges of his mouth were very raw and bleeding afterwards.
The last day of Grade 7 came with some serious existential dread for Tim. A rumour had gone round that a bunch of kids were going to jump Tim on his way home from school and get their kicks in. I remembered that Tim had sometimes used a long way to go home which went blocks out of the way, avoiding the streets that many of the kids in the neighbourhood would take. I went home with him that way once. It seemed like being with him would possibly make me a target too.
On this day however, even after all the other kids had left the school, Tim didn’t want to leave. He believed the rumour was true, and was really terrified. He cried for the teacher to drive him home, saying that “they were going to get him” or something. I stayed as long as I could but left by the time he was clinging to the door frame while the teacher tried to pull him outside. Such a ridiculous scene. I never found out if anyone helped him or not, or if his Mom ever came to get him.
Looking back on it now, Tim wasn’t at any great advantage over me, financially or otherwise. He certainly wanted to see himself as being better off than me – that’s how some people bolster a flagging ego. When there are other things that are shitty in your life, it feels good to believe that you’re still better off than the next guy. But Tim was an only child whose single parent was raising him in a co-op, so he wasn’t really all that better off than me and my family in our rented townhouse. Six of one. And he only scored a few more bucks a week than me in allowance. Big deal.
The real sadness of Tim was because he didn’t seem to have any friends. In fact, he seemed to be lonely and disliked by his classmates and only just tolerated by his teachers. That’s a tremendously sad thing to consider now: to know a kid whom other kids do not like.
With my own troubles at home, I ended up feeling a bit sorry for Tim, but I stopped hanging out with him once the extent of his unpopularity became undeniably evident through schoolyard gossip. I don’t remember seeing him in high school the next year, so I guess he moved.
(Years after high school, I did see a guy that looked just like Tim beaming along Terminal Avenue on a little mountain bike, outside the Vancouver Flea Market. He didn’t see me, but I was pretty sure it was Tim.)
That summer that marked the end of Grade 7 started off pretty well for me: with our report cards came free Whitecaps tickets, and I went with some classmates to see our local soccer team play at Empire Stadium, the big open-air stadium next to our fairgrounds. It was “free hat day” so everyone got a cheap white nylon motorman’s cap with a Whitecaps logo printed on it. I loved that little hat and wore it for most of the summer.
I wore my new Whitecaps hat and a black nylon jacket when I went by myself to visit my Mum at Burnaby General Hospital. I was feeling good on a gorgeous sunny day – happy to be off on my own, trotting down our front steps. As I reached the end of our walkway, a girl’s voice sing-songed out “Hi John”. I turned to see our neighbour Cynthia Deanis sunbathing on her lawn with another girl named Andreen Oyama. They were both very pretty, and I remembered Andreen from back in Grade 6, when she’d first been admired by the boys for her very well-developed chest. As self-conscious and shy as I was, getting a teasingly sweet “hello” from two pretty, bikini-clad girls was quite embarrassing. I just blushed and murmured a hello back. My happy skip turned into a frantic loping as I heard them giggle to each other. Later on, I did revel in remembering the brief, awkward attention I’d gotten from two pretty girls.
By the time I was at the bus stop, I was focused back on my goal of visiting Mum. I was proud to be going out to visit her by myself, although each hospital visit carried with it an element of mystery and anticipation, specifically, how would she be feeling and what would she say to me?
Mum was in the visiting room off her Ward on the third floor of BGH’s new section. I was glad to see her, but still not sure what to say. She never expressed a lot of focused attention on me, even if I was the only other person in the room. I asked her how she was feeling and she asked when she could come home. I gave her a chocolate bar I’d bought her in the gift shop, and she replied that she wanted to come home. It wasn’t much of a conversation.
Mum had always seemed kind of in her own head, thinking her own thoughts. It had always been difficult to feel a connection to her at the best of times, but now, with her brain damage after almost drinking herself to death, she was even more single-minded and hard-to-reach. I tried to feel grateful for whatever kind of Mum I still had, but it all just seemed sad and bleak. There was no way to know what the future would hold for her and us.
