Alone in the Classroom Read Online Free Page B

lost their loveliness, their physical charge, and became riddles spoken with too many teeth. “The peevish patient suffers keenly from swollen tonsils.” “The shrewd sentinel visited a Turkish bazaar.” “It is quite probable that he will entrust his mettlesome horse to the reliable hostler.”
    In the same fashion, child advanced to adult, to inscrutable Parley Burns. “The auditor found traces of tactful swindling.” “His ill-humoured demeanour resulted from a trivial dispute with his employer.” “Neither dyspepsia nor neuralgia is conducive to vivacity.”
    This was the future, these advanced thickets for later grades, these complicated burning bushes so tangled and uncongenial. The writers must have enjoyed their cleverness as they laid on alliteration and fancy vocabulary, but peace of mind was the price you paid - pleasure. Loss of pleasure. Loss of a clear view. Why didn’t they realize that a sentence, like a person, can take only so much? But this was school. Lessons carried you from simple to complex, from the everyday to the abstract, as if this were progress.
    Connie had her own ideas about that. For years her father had promised her mother that one day they would leave their eastern Ontario farm and move to Toronto, where she would be able to attend concerts and be close to her sister, who also played piano and had a fine voice. Instead, one winter’s night there came a knock on the door and a man wrapped in furs stepped into their lives, her mother’s youngest brother (my great-uncle Jimmy, who died a long, slow death from Parkinson’s disease), full of stories about the West so enchanting that in the spring her father went with him out to Saskatchewan. At the age of sixty, her susceptible dad fell in love with the prairie and persuaded her mother, twenty years younger, to leave the Ottawa Valley and take up a wide expanse of grassy land near Weyburn. Her mother lasted ten months. Inflammation of the bowel. Dead at forty-one. As she lay dying, she had Connie spread bolts of corduroy and denim on the floor beside her bed, and from her pillow she instructed her on how to cut out trousers for her father and two young brothers.
    What gnawed at Connie most was her role in her mother’s fate, the chronic asthma and bronchitis her father had used as bait. “Connie will be cured in no time. The air out there is clear as a bell.” That’s what happened, too. All her breathing troubles vanished as soon as they got to the prairies. So nothing was simple. But did that mean everything had to be wilfully complicated? She flipped back to:
    7. At night home-made candles gave a poor light.
    8. Our mother fried some eggs for supper. She dried her damp cloak near the stove.
    9. Beech trees and lilacs grew by the school.
    10. My apron is too loose.
    11. Snow flakes do not harm green wheat.
    12. Place a bowl of prunes on the table. Are you able to reach that plain saucer?
    13. In France they waste little.
    Her grades were four, five, and six. Five rows of seven desks. And what a difference there was between sitting behind a small, hard desk and being at the front, chalk at the ready, on view. Various freckled faces and the big boys in the back. To her mild astonishment, she liked seeing each member of her small audience - Molly of the chapped and bitten lips, olive-skinned Tula, black-eyed Stefan, Michael who didn’t take his eyes off her face.
    She wanted to dress well for them, since they had to look at her all day, and so she alternated her three necklaces, the silver locket from her mother, the entwined gold chain from her great-aunt Charlotte in Aberdeen, and the long strand of coral beads from her mother’s sister in Ontario. These last had a gold clasp on which initials were engraved in an old and flourishing script.
AKD
. Her mother’s mother. Agnes Kerr Douglas.
    A generous gift, the coral beads, as Aunt Evelyn had so little. She, too, had been a schoolteacher before marrying a struggling would-be