Chicken Soup for the Canadian Soul (22 page)

To clarify our uniqueness, we recently changed our name to Kids Can Free the Children. New projects include a Youth Ambassadors for Peace training program in 150 schools across North America and the publication of a leadership manual called Take Action that tells children how to get involved in social issues in their communities and in the world. We believe the sky’s the limit with respect to what young people can accomplish.

Just before Christmas 2001 we sent nine thousand school and health kits to the children of Afghanistan, along with dolls and blankets. Each kit was personalized from a North American child with drawings and letters saying things like, “We love you” and “We want world peace too!”

We’ve learned you don’t have to be a president or CEO, rich or powerful to change the world. Our actions are simple: Anyone can get involved. All you need is the heart of a child. Who knows? Maybe some day we’ll have a United Nations of Children!

Craig Kielburger
Thornhill, Ontario

5
ON KINDNESS

L
ife is a lonely journey if we take only our
bodies on the road and leave our hearts
behind.

Doris Hedges

Farewell to the Queen of Hearts

She was only twenty-one years old, a royal rookie on her first visit to Canada, when I met Diana, princess of Wales. Her style at that time was House of Windsor rather than cover-girl glamour. She tended to fold her fingers inward to hide the fact that she bit her nails. But the essence of the woman was as apparent then as it was throughout her public life. She was vulnerable, compassionate, willing to break the rules, take a risk and do what she thought was right.

When I heard the terrible news about her death, and while photos flooded the television screen and commentators serialized her life, I remembered a story about her that I’ve often shared with family and friends. Although I’d been fortunate enough to meet Diana during royal tours in the 1980s, and later at 24 Sussex Drive in 1991, there was never a story less public or more telling about who this young woman really was. It took place in Halifax in June 1983, just hours after her plane had touched down from England.

The official welcome was being held at the Garrison Grounds, a huge field that on that sunny day was jammed with an estimated 10,000 cheering royal watchers. The crowd was pressed into a U-shape around the edges of the field. The centre was reserved for the trappings of pomp and ceremony. The royal couple was to do a walkabout around the edges of the crowd before proceeding to the centre for the ceremony. I chose a spot near the end of their route and watched what would become a vintage Princess Di walkabout. It turned into a love-in.

Seated near my vantage point were three rows of senior citizens in wheelchairs, who had been positioned to ensure a glimpse of the prince and princess. In the second row, and closest to where I was standing, an elderly gentleman in a pale blue sweater caught my attention. He was watching the princess with enormous pleasure. As the royal couple approached, I thought wistfully,
Too bad,
old man. You’re in the second row. Royalty only stops to speak to
people in the first row.
As Diana approached, he was straining from his wheelchair so forcefully, I was afraid he might tumble to the ground. Like everyone else on the Garrison Grounds that day, he was transmitting waves of warmth and welcome to the young princess.

Then, as if by telepathy, she saw him and apparently couldn’t resist returning the warmth. In a rather unroyal style, she reached her arm in over the heads of the people in the first row to shake his extended hand.

That’s when it happened. Suddenly, his arm began to flail. A spasm had overcome the old gentleman. His arm was swinging wildly, to the right and left and over his own head. Everyone was watching the discomfiting scene. For a split second Diana looked stunned and then, when an attendant rushed to the man’s side and calmed him, she withdrew her hand and returned to her royal walkabout. My heart ached for the old man. He looked so dejected, so disappointed in himself. Now his head drooped down, his shoulders stooped over. It seemed obvious that he knew he’d missed his chance to greet his princess.

Diana continued along the row but kept looking back at him. Was she concerned? Could this young woman who was just days short of her twenty-second birthday have any idea how he felt? Would she dare to risk embarrassing herself by returning to the man’s chair? Surely not. But then there was a space between the wheelchairs and she started moving back toward him. I wondered what she was up to.

You have to imagine the scene: the stiff formality of the entourage, the split-second timing of a walkabout, the royal handlers (aka Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers), the royal household (aka ladies-in-waiting)—all standing around while Diana tiptoes through the uncut grass and takes her royal self to the second row. Although enormously grateful for the bird’s-eye view I was getting, even I was bowled over by her decision. The entourage would be held up. The world was watching. It could all go terribly wrong.

When she got to the woman sitting beside the old man she stopped, knelt down and chatted to her for a long time. By now I was certain that she had a plan. The old man was watching her, wringing his hands and still looking distressed. Suddenly, Diana stood up and stepped sideways to his chair. She put her hand on his shoulder, leaned over close to his face and said, “I’m glad to see you. I hope you haven’t had to wait too long on this hot day. Maybe they should bring us all some ice cream.”

The old man gazed up at her from his chair. Tears were rolling down his cheeks, and his face was wreathed in happiness. She’d touched his heart. And she’d risked a disaster in decorum, not to mention protocol, in the process.

When her life turned upside down in the 1990s, she told a television interviewer she’d never be queen of Britain, but she’d like to be queen of people’s hearts. She already was.

Sally Armstrong
Toronto, Ontario

Walls

’
T
is friends and not places that make the
world.

Bliss Carman

People often talk about the “walls” that some individuals build around themselves. I was one of those individuals. Long after I divorced and became a single parent, I still wore my wedding ring. To this day, I’m not exactly sure why I did that. I told myself that it was because it was too much trouble to get involved with anyone again. It sure beat admitting that men were not lined up to date me. Maybe it was because I didn’t want anyone to know that I had failed at something in my life. Wearing that ring helped me pretend that everything was okay.

You think that people can’t see through those kinds of walls. But they do. They just know enough to not let you know that they see you are pretending. One day at work, however, pretending didn’t come that easily. I was on my coffee break, preoccupied and worried. My car had died. Suddenly. And I didn’t have death benefits.

I needed that car to hold down my job. Without it, I would have to walk fourteen miles to and from work in North Bay. Even I could see the humour in that. Worse, my boys would get home from school before I did. That meant two things: The house would look like a cyclone had hit it, and Ontario Children’s Aid would be all over us like a rash.

One of the walls I had built around me was coming down faster than Jericho.

Just before I went on that coffee break, the garage had called and said the car repairs would come to $726. That car and I had a lot in common. We had just been kicked in our rear ends. I not only felt sick, I looked it. I didn’t have a credit card, and I certainly couldn’t call the $28 in my bank account “savings.” But every problem has a solution, and in my case that meant I had to ask someone else for something—even if it was only a lift downtown after work. This might not seem like a big deal to someone else, but I was a hard case: It’s difficult to give someone the equivalent of a Heimlich maneuver when they’re choking on their pride (as I was). Nevertheless, I got past my pride, and my colleague Jane volunteered to give me a ride to the garage after work.

I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to come up with bright ideas about how to pay my garage bill. I figured I could borrow $200 from my mom and pay her back at a rate of $2.50 a week. I thought of what I had at home that I could live without and therefore sell. I finally decided the best I could do was to offer to type up invoices for the garage—mine included.

When Jane dropped me at the garage that evening, the owner asked me to step into his office. He closed the door and went behind his desk. He cleared his throat and said, “There’s something I want you to see.” He opened a drawer. In it was a lot of loose change and small bills. “Do you know what this is?” he asked. Before I could say anything, he added, “People you work with have been coming in here all afternoon. Must have been 100 of them. Each one put money in this drawer. The lads in the shop have never seen anything like it!” He cleared his throat again. “They even decided to cut their labour costs in half. As it stands now, all you owe me is twelve bucks.”

I did three things I had never done before: I cried in public; I baked enough cookies to feed an army; and I stopped wearing my wedding ring.

Mary Lee Moynan
Powassan, Ontario
Submitted by Barry Spilchuk

Loretta

A
ll things bright and beautiful, all creatures
great and small: All things wise and wonderful,
the Lord God made them all.

Mrs. Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander, 1848

Wylie Costain seemed destined to save a life.

When I met Wylie in the summer of 1999, he had already lived in British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada, for twenty years. Born and raised in the east, on Prince Edward Island, Wylie knew the harsh realities of a fisherman’s life from experience.

I had flown to the Squamish airport in a light aircraft. Planes were stored in the open hangars, but I saw no one about. The flying club was locked and the airport seemed to be devoid of human life. I was thinking of walking into town when a pickup truck drove up.

“How far is it to Squamish?” I asked.

“Eight miles,” came the answer. “You’ll have a heckuva walk. Wanna lift?”

Without hesitation I said, “Yes!”

“Wait a minute,” I added. “I’ll have to get back to the airport.”

“Oh, don’t you worry about that. I’ll bring you back. Hop in.”

“Sure you don’t mind?”

“Not at all. Hop in!”

That’s how I met Wylie Costain. As we drove, Wylie told me an incredible story, backing it up with a couple of newspaper photographs. In 1988 his company, the Atlantic Lobster Company, a wholesaler in Burnaby, British Columbia, had requested large lobsters from the east coast to supply restaurant clients. When they arrived, one of the containers had only a single lobster in it instead of the thirty it normally holds, but what a lobster it was!

Once in town, Wylie stopped at his apartment and returned with two photographs. They showed the largest lobster I’d ever seen—in fact, it weighed twenty-one pounds.

Wylie estimated seven years for each pound. Her twenty-one pounds translated into the age of 147 years. She hadn’t lost a claw or a leg during her long life, and she didn’t have any scars or scratches from previous battles. In the photograph, she looked perfect.

Someone discovered she had eggs and was still productive. Wylie said that at first he saw only the money the lobster would bring: “Oh boy! That’s worth a bit!” But then he began to fight with himself. He thought of her age and the many offspring she must have had, and she seemed to take on a beauty he could not describe. He named her Loretta.

Wylie went on with his story. “Loretta was so old she really deserved to go back in the sea.” I nodded in agreement as we drove on.

“I couldn’t bear the thought that she’d end her life on somebody’s dinner plate. So I decided to free Loretta.”

I listened in astonished silence. “But she’s an Atlantic lobster and would’ve died here in the Pacific.” He tried to offer her to the Vancouver Aquarium, but the response of the curator of fishes at the time was that the aquarium wasn’t “a half-way house for unwanted pets.”

“I didn’t know how I could pull this off,” Wylie continued. “I only knew Loretta had to go home to the Atlantic, so I called Canadian Airlines to get the price of a ticket. I explained I was taking a live lobster home to the Atlantic Ocean, and the lady said they couldn’t allow it.”