Kids Are So Clever

Our village had a diner where I grew up.

The owner dipped ice-cream cones behind the bar. One scoop for 5¢. Two scoops for 10¢, and if you were really rich and feeling like a pig, three scoops set you back a whopping 15¢.

The owner had a soft spot for my little brother and me, so he'd sneak us two scoops for a nickel, provided the the little woman cooking in the kitchen didn't find out. But when she did, she yelled so the whole restaurant could hear.

"Don't you give those kids two scoops! We'll go broke doing that! Five cents is one scoop!"

He'd be busted.

The bar counter had a rack that held small bags of peanuts that sold for five cents each. It took a lot of penny-saving to buy one bag, so that's what we did.

One day, the owner had a vending machine parked on the counter, about four feet from the peanut rack. He said a man put it there, when I asked him where it came from.

These peanuts cost only one penny. I figured we'd only get about two peanuts for a penny, so we stayed away from that contraption.

The beauty of the machine though, all red paint and shiny metal, eventually wore us down that summer, so when we found a penny on the gravel parking lot on one of our meandering-through-the-village days, we took the treasure and went inside the diner.

The peanut machine was magical. Put a penny in the slot, turn the handle, lift the metal flap, and out would come the peanuts. We tried it. Tons of peanuts tumbled out of the shoot! We whooped with joy.

"Count them! Count them!" I yelled to my brother.

"Now I'll count the peanuts in one of those bags," I said. "We'll see which one has more peanuts, okay?"

We couldn't believe it! The bags held about one third the number of peanuts that had spilled out onto the counter from the peanut machine.

I whispered to my brother, "Whoever sells the peanuts in this machine is stupid. He'll never get rich."

We told no one of our clever secret. If we did, I knew the peanut man would charge more for them if he found out how dumb he was, selling so many peanuts for only a penny.

From then on, every time we found a penny, my brother and I would run to the diner and raid the peanut machine, and giggle ourselves silly over how clever we were to outsmart the peanut man.

You'd have thought we'd have grown up to be lawyers, being that smart, but we didn't.

Actually, I ended up marrying the peanut man in Toronto, and died laughing when I discovered who he was. He wasn't stupid after all. He was a smart businessman, who made his money dealing in peanuts, pennies, nickles, and dimes.

In gigantic quantities, I might add.

The Teacher Was No Saint

I'm certain that every person out there had a bad teacher at least once in their lives, and for those of you still in school, you know what I'm talking about.

The taste of a bad teacher stays with you forever, like pond scum in a swamp.

I was advanced to the senior room when I was only eight because somebody thought I was smart. The senior room had a female rooster for a teacher. She crowed and fumed at us kids day in and day out.

I was scared to death of her. She reminded me of a scrawny little Bantam horror of a rooster we had when I was really small. That rooster made it his job to terrorize my tiny brother and me whenever we went outside to play, by landing on our heads and pecking us. Of course, he always hid until he could fly out and get us.

The teacher had her sneaky habits too. I don't know anyone who liked that woman.

Mom made me give her a birthday card the year I was nine. That was the last thing on earth I wanted to do. Mom said it might soften her up a little so she'd be nicer, but hey, wishful thinking usually never gets you anywhere. And it didn't that time.

A kid can't learn when they're scared of a teacher or don't know what she'll do next to them. Nor can they learn if they're being screamed at half the day.

So for all of you bad teachers out there, take note.

We beheaded our rotten rooster.

Sunrise Service - No Fun For A Kid

Every darned year when I was a young girl, the county Baptists picked a church to hold a sunrise service for girls in the CGIT groups. CGIT stands for Canadian Girls In Training.

I was forced to go to the group in our little church, and I hated it. I like Sunday School, but not CGIT. It made no sense to me at all. Whenever I asked anyone what we were training for, the only answer I ever got was "to be a good person in society." I already was one. I didn't need some women at Church telling me I needed to train for what came naturally.

Anyway, the Sunrise Service was a nightmare for me. Not for my older sister or any of the other girls. Just me. I have a weak system and tend to get sick easily. So having to get up at 5:30am when I was used to rising at 8:00am always threw me off.

I at least needed to eat something when I got up, but oh no, they would serve us breakfast after the service, so I was never allowed any food before we went. That right there made me sick.

By the time we arrived at the designated church in the cold and dark, I was ready to throw up. Which I promptly did. Every stinking year.

I was weak and pale and exhausted from all that throwing up, and then I had to sit through a solemn service in the church for an hour and try not to heave some more. A whole hour of boring, I might add.

Down in the church basement, tables were set up with place settings for all the good little girls and women after the service.

I liked cornflakes, but these came in tiny boxes, and I think we were supposed to be awed by this. Actually, the other girls all were - year after year.

The boxes had a perforated opening at the top, like two little doors. You poured the milk in and then ate. Picture it. Soggy cornflakes in a soggy cardboard box - so disgusting to me at any time, let alone when my poor stomach was sick already.

I went hungry. One bite of that horror and I wouldn't have made it to the little girls' room a second time.

After another half hour of noisy girl din and even noisier eating, I finally got to go home.

No amount of begging ever made my mother change her mind about forcing me to go. A neighbor lady even said I should stay home because my system couldn't handle it. She was probably tired of having to clean me up every Easter morning before dawn in somebody else's church.

Once I got home, I ate a little and then I had to go to Sunday School at ten, and then Church at eleven, and the smell of those powerful Easter lilies in the sanctuary sent me running for the washroom again.

I doubt that Easter Sunday was all about making a little girl sick in those days, but that's all it ever did for me.

Thanks to CGIT and my mother.

Cuba In 1981, Log Ten: Naughty Men

Our hotel had a rooftop terrace that surrounded a swimming pool. Nothing unusual about that, right?

Whenever we had nothing to do, we'd go up to the terrace and stretch out on padded loungers in our swimsuits and catch some Cuban sun. A lot of us went swimming, then stretched out to dry. I guess word got out that a bunch of female tourists were worth a trip to the pool terrace, so our second time up there, we noticed a bunch of young men - swarthy skin, black hair, and grinning faces - across the pool from us, and their grins were aimed at us. We were on display.

Of course, some of the girls started giggling. Some flirted. Some hid behind their paperback novels.

Sure enough, the men ambled on over and parked themselves on the terrace in front of us. They were fully clothed in slacks, shirts, and shoes. And they never stopped grinning. I couldn't figure out why they were even there.

The giggling girls got even gigglier. The flirting ones, the ones over twenty-five, got bolder, and the paperback hiders were shrinking into their loungers like melting ice cubes.

The men spoke Spanish, but their eyes said more than their foreign words. One reached for a bottle of sun tan lotion and began to rub it on one of the over twenty-five's legs and shoulders.

It became uncomfortable when the ogling men moved even closer, and when one tried to kiss a giggler, the male tourists yelled at them to leave.

There were so few of the male tourists who wanted to lie on the loungers up on the roof, so they were out-numbered. Plus, the Cubans spoke no English, so ignored them.

The Cuban men then tried to coax us girls into the pool, with grins and words and many gestures. Again, I thought that was strange.

One of the Canadian men, a friend of mine, had gone swimming, and then had dried off and disappeared. When he returned, he said, I should follow him, so I left the volatile scene of tourists and Cubans, and went with him.

On the staircase, he said, "You won't believe what's under the pool. Wait and see." He was laughing, really laughing.

I was telling him about the outrageous, flirting young Cubans on the terrace and he just kept laughing.

We went through a door, and there stood a bar, a huge place, dark and cool, lots of tables, a big selection of bottles behind the bartender, and a handful of men sitting around drinking.

My friend whispered, "See anything unusual about that wall to the right of the bar?"

I looked, whispered, "It's a funny color."

"It's a glass wall. Look closely. See the bubbles?"

I nodded. "Don't tell me!" I whispered.

"Yep. That's the pool. Those Cubans up on the terrace were watching the girls swimming from down here. And trust me, they had quite a view."

He couldn't stop grinning. I thought it was terrible.

He said, "Stay here, and I'll go swimming."

Sure enough, I saw him dive through the water. The pool was really deep and he had been a competitive swimmer on his high school team in Toronto, so he was fun to watch.

The men in the bar looked over, then seeing that the swimmer was only a man, went back to their drinks.

Watching my friend do his show-off antics in the water was hilarious. I started to laugh, so the men looked over at the swimmer. He was so entertaining.

And then he swam over to the glass wall and waved.

Immediately, the men looked as guilty as sin, and turned away.

I left the bar, laughing my head off.

When we told the girls on the terrace, in English, why the young Cubans were here, and why they wanted them to go swimming, they were mortified.

They shooed those men away like nasty flies at a picnic.

I asked my friend how he discovered the glass wall and he said he'd noticed that that wall didn't look right under the water. Of course, the girls hadn't paid any attention to the walls, which was what the bar men were counting on.

Poor, unsuspecting female tourists.

Funny as heck, though.

United States of America, Chapter Ten: Over The Border

There was a bus tour that said we could go south of San Diego and cross the border into Mexico.

For one reason - to get an hour's glimpse of Tijuana.

I thought, why not? Just this once.

Even back then, in 1975, Mexico held a reputation of being semi-lawless, and the city of Tijuana was no safe place to be.

But on a bus tour, how could you go wrong?

So I went.

And I was perfectly safe.

And I loved it.

The uniforms at the border, and the stern faces of the golden-skinned, black-haired border patrol were like watching a movie.

On the wide open main street, the bus parked, and the driver and guide told us to keep our money safe, our eyes open, and be back in exactly one hour or be stranded in Mexico.

I checked out little shops beneath the street level, some that ran in tunnels under the stores above, dark and loud with bartering Spanish voices.

In the streets, dust from sand swirled in tiny breezes. Citizens crossed wherever they wanted to, dodging old vehicles and donkey carts.

Men and women in colorful clothes walked alongside their carts piled high with their wares, as they shouted out what they were selling.

Small donkeys, dressed in wide-brimmed straw hats, ears sticking out through holes punched there, and colorful shawls draped across their backs, pulled the carts through the streets, very slowly.

The hour was too quick. I had to run to catch the bus, run across the dusty, wide street, dodging vehicles and people and sweet donkeys.

Or else I'd still be stranded in Mexico.

Today, Tijuana is a modern city that attracts a lot of border crossings for Mexicans and Americans, because it's barely fifteen miles south of San Diego.

Tourists can spend a few hours there to shop, eat, or watch a horse race, then head back to San Diego.

Tijuana started out as a village at the turn of the twentieth century, and has grown to over a million people, today, due to the above.

United States of America, Chapter Nine: San Diego

Now that was an experience I enjoyed.

Just driving through the city to the hotel was wonderful. What a pretty city. Hot, though, being in the south of the state. Hot and dry.

The hotel was parked on San Diego Bay, near the naval base; a room with a view of dark, gray, sleek vessels, massive things at their moorings on the blue water. A joy to see.

There is so much water around San Diego, something I loved to be near.

The zoo was so spread out that it took tram rides to see it, unless you could walk steep hills for miles.  The animals had to have been happier there than in a tight zoo of pens.

Even the aviary was huge. Birds landed on my shoulders and my head, without even asking me. Strangers paused to take pictures of me decorated in birds. Why the birds chose to land on me, I don't know.

There was no Sea World then or I would have gone to it, but what a perfect place they have for it now.

One evening after dark, I went to a favorite spit of land to watch the sunset and feel the salt breeze and listen to the locals who came to hang out, to sit atop wooden picnic tables, smoke cigarettes, and talk.

A movement came from the water, a dark movement, silent except for a soft intermittent swish of calm water.

And then a cloud slid off the moon and I saw.

Huge, dark creatures were slipping past the spit of land, as silent as if I was deaf.

I was in awe. There were no sailors visible on these creatures. There were no engines loud enough to be heard.

Silent, secretive, powerful.

The United States Navy.

Canada, As Seen From Above

The land of ice and snow, Indians and Eskimos, igloos and teepees, lakes and rivers and wilderness and bears, boats and sawmills, bakeries and shoemakers. Canada.

No, wait. I'm describing the United States here. Past and present.

Doctors, politicians, teachers and store clerks.

It's all the same. Both countries have a lot of different races, from immigration and migration, marriages and native born.

The scenery is the same.

The weather is the same.

The education and workforce - the same.

United States has Hollywood.

Canada has Corner Gas reruns.

United States has massive armed forces.

Canada has snowballs.