From Tabusintac to Tokyo | Page 4

sad stories of those "victims" of life. The story goes something like this: There is the future "victim" getting on with their quotidian activities and whoosh, they are whisked into a life of gambling, drugs, sex or junk food addiction. After years of struggle, they finally find redemption and become good people again.
As in any good tale of redemption, there has to be a "reason" for why our "victim" fell off the rails. Take your pick: they were molested, their parents ran away from home, they were denied desserts except on Sundays.
Just thinking about it brings a tear to my stony face. How can you not be moved by tales such as these?
What is the precipitating cause of the misery in my life? Well, my mother was French and my father was English. And to make things worse, I was brought up Catholic! Yes folks, in today's shorthand of grievance, I'm a half-breed straddling Canada's great language divide and a religious bigot.
My hometown was a mixture of French and English-speaking people and the results of their miscenagation. You could never tell by someone's last name who spoke your language (For instance, my good friend P. Arsenault spoke the Queen's English and my cousin Sean Doyle wouldn't have recognized an Oxford Dictionary if you shoved up his nose).
As children, we were segregated by language; all the French-speaking kids went to one side of the school where they spoke French all the time. I was fortunate enough to be sent to the English side of the school and got to speak my native tongue.
My parents decided my brother and sister wouldn't be quite so lucky. In an effort to bridge the great language divide, they both spent six years learning everything in French and mingling with the French people (My parents did this because it was the firm belief of all forward-thinking families that whatever road you took would be much smoother if you could speak both of Canada's official languages. As it turns out for my siblings and I, this was not to be the case. After I left my home for the big wide world, I never had the occasion to speak French unless I was swearing. As I understand it, only the government requires that you speak some version of French. This applies even to military officers, something I never really fathomed; after all, "Kill that motherfucker" is readily understandable in most languages).
In an effort to ensure both sides got a fair shake, signs were in either or both languages. We had "STOP/ARRET", "MEUBLES/FURNITURE". Some people would ask for a "hot dog", others a "'ot dawg", still others "un chien chaud". My mother would speak to us in English and yell at us in French when she got so mad she'd forget her English.
Even worse than living in the language chasm, we were also Catholic. In the first few years of school, we were taught by nuns. Women went into the convent presumably because they felt a vocation to spend their lives being close to God and serving Him in whatever capacity He deemed best. And the understanding was that they would be happy in the work He gave them.
We must have gotten the ones who didn't want to teach. You've never seen a more bitter group of people outside of the post office. Dressed in their black habits with stiff white bits around their heads, they stalked the aisles of the classroom armed only with a cloying piety and a yardstick (this being before the meter hit the schools).
Exuding a stench of disappointment mixed with the odour of starch, they instructed us in all manner of useful things like writing and reading and a few useless things like Catechism. Every week we'd get a dose of the superstitious drivel that made up the core of the religion we'd been born into. I'd sometimes feel overwhelmed by all the rules we had to learn about being Catholic. And the worst part was that, like the Mafia, the only way out was feet first.
This indoctrination put a harpoon deep into our psyches. We weren't incited to Holy War or anything, but it was abundantly clear that non-Catholics (These were Protestants; we'd never heard of Jews or Muslims or Zoroastrians or Hindus or Buddhists), not being a part of the true Christian religion were definitely not going to be taken, you know, up there. Not that they were bad people, you understand; they just didn't get born the right way and were unlikely to see the error of their ways.
If you weren't Catholic, you went to the Public School and we didn't understand a thing about those aliens. It was only after I got out of elementary school that I realized the Public School kids were as human as me.
When I