From Tabusintac to Tokyo | Page 4

times when I wish I had a couple, made with love by
Mom, to give me a little boost for the day. And I know that Mom loved
me…it's the last thing she said before she and Dad ran away from
home.

Catholic and French
In this confessional age, TV, radio and print rely for much of their
content on the 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,