Chicken Soup for the Canadian Soul (33 page)

Today our job was maintenance patrol—a nice name for cleaning up after someone else. It was a never-ending routine of repairing damages or replacing materials stolen by the desperate local population. The men kept grumbling about the constant cleanup. I kept hearing, “Just let the two sides go at it and sort it out. Isn’t that what they want?”

I was a sergeant in charge of an eight-man section responsible for a defensive area in the corner of the village. This defensive area was a couple of houses that we had previously cleared of glass and other debris born of conflict. We had then fortified the buildings with sandbags, chicken wire and lumber. We would routinely check on its sturdiness, then grudgingly clean up more debris and replace stolen corrugated iron, wire, plywood and sandbags.

“Look at the bloody mess,” someone cursed. “Let’s just . . .”

I cut him off.

“Let’s just get the job done,” I snapped. “The day’s not getting any cooler.”

I had left Canada months ago, full of high ideals about helping Second- or Third-World countries, protecting the downtrodden and saving all the homeless children. We were going to set everything right and make the world a better place. Now, I was not so sure. I was no longer the noble liberator I had first envisioned myself. Every report I heard of torture, infanticide or execution was starting to wear on me. Every time some drunken villager pointed an assault rifle or pistol at us, or told us to “Get out of my country,” I thought how pointless this was getting to be. To top it off, our own Canadian media back home was relentlessly criticising us every step of the way. I wondered if there was anyone benefiting from this misery.

I was numb to the loud griping I was hearing today as the soldiers hauled the sheets of corrugated iron. Other days I would tell them to keep it down. But today, between the constant cleanups, restacking sandbags and make-work projects from headquarters (such as making flowerbeds), I really no longer cared.

I turned my attention back to the unloading of the APC. The men were starting to get careless and were flinging off the supplies. There was so much flying metal, dust, spit and swearing, I was about to shout something. Then suddenly this young woman appeared. I had never seen her before, and I had no clue from which shell-ridden house she had come. But there she was, carrying a tray of small ceramic cups.

Right here, amongst the crumbling buildings, bullet-holed walls and broken glass, was this young Serbian villager with a tray of what smelled like coffee. She approached us just like she was serving up some friends at a tea party.

She was a slim woman with well-kept dark hair, but the lines on her worry-etched face, along with her missing teeth, made her look older than her probable late twenties. Despite the sadness in her dark eyes, she spoke cheerfully, in Serbo-Croatian, as she offered the tray to me, hostess-style. It was a curious sight. Well, my mother had always taught me that it was rude to refuse hospitality. The “show no favouritism” rule could bend some.

“Over here,” I hollered at my section. “C’mon for a coffee break.”

“
Hvallah
(thank you),” I said, gratefully accepting one of the small cups full of floating coffee grounds. I sipped it carefully as, one by one, the soldiers in my section each grabbed a cup, like kids after candy. The stuff was warm and bitter, and I don’t even like coffee, but I drank it just the same.

I replaced my cup on the tray with another
hvallah
, followed by some theatrics to describe “delicious.” Some of the guys gave a humourous performance of “mmmmmm, coffeeeee” that rivalled Homer Simpson with a doughnut.

She cheerfully said something, flashing that sweet, missing-tooth grin, and then she walked away, amongst the rubble. Her head was held high and her walk was proud. I wondered how she could be like that when she had likely lost everything.

For all we knew, that might have been the last of her coffee—something that she normally reserved for her own family’s meagre meals. And there we were, six healthy, fit Canadian soldiers, with food in our bellies, money in the bank and a few thousand dollars of dentistry in our mouths. Back home in Canada we had our homes and our families—safe and waiting for our return.

We all must have been thinking the same thing. For the next few hours, sweat poured off us like running water as we worked hard into the late afternoon. Only now, there wasn’t a single gripe coming from anyone.

Doug Setter
Winnipeg, Manitoba

9
SPECIAL
CONNECTIONS

A
ny relationship of love and respect is to
be cherished in a dark world where only
such things give meaning and warmth,
understanding and hope.

The Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson
Governor-General of Canada

Granny’s Rosary

M
iracles do not happen in contradiction with
nature, but in contradiction with what we know
about nature.

Saint Augustine

When I was a young boy back in Italy, I used to love to sit on my granny’s lap while she recited her nightly rosary. I would snuggle up in her arms as she sat rocking in an old wicker chair by the fireplace counting beads and whispering prayers in a soothing foreign language (Latin, I later learned). Sometimes she’d let me hold the rosary and keep count for her until I fell asleep. And although by age eight I felt a little silly about this awkward nightly routine, I continued because I knew how much it meant to her. She was old and frail, and so it was that in 1966, when my father, brother and sister immigrated to Canada, my mother and I stayed behind in Italy to care for Granny, who was too old to make the trip.

Two months before my twelfth birthday, Granny shattered her hip in a nasty fall and became bedridden, never to sit in her rocking chair again. She passed away ten months later.

The afternoon before her departure, when I returned from school, she called me to her bedside. The long months in bed had not been kind to her. In the dimness of the room, she looked so incredibly small in that big bed, her face drawn, her long white hair wispy and dull.

Extending one of her long, bony hands she beckoned me to her side. “Come,” she said in a voice that seemed to travel miles before reaching me. And when her hand closed around mine, I noticed that it was cold and waxy— almost lifeless. “Oh, you’re such a wonderful boy,” she whispered as she stroked my face. “And you’re going to be a handsome . . . handsome man one day soon!”

When I knelt down to hear her better, I noticed her eyes were swimming in tears, her thin bloodless lips quivering. She sniffled, drew a laboured sigh and then continued, “The time has come for Granny to move on.” Understanding well what she meant, I immediately protested.

Putting a finger to my lips she hushed me. “Nothing to be afraid of, my child, it’s just part of life,” she explained, “merely the completion of a wonderful cycle. When the angels come for me, miss me not, because I will always be here by your side.” She then reached under her pillow and brought out the rosary. “Here,” she said, handing it to me. “I want you to have this. Keep it close to your heart and remember me by it.” Oh, how she loved me.

Again, when I tried to interject she sealed my lips with her cold fingers.

“Go and play with your friends now,” she said. “Granny is tired and would really like to get some sleep.” Then she turned over as much as her broken hip would allow. I kissed the back of her head and left the room clutching her rosary. That was the last time I saw her alive.

After Granny died, my mother and I made the trip to Canada and joined my father, brother and sister in Toronto. It was 1969, and I was fifteen years old.

I never did use the rosary the way Granny had perhaps intended me to, as I wasn’t totally sure how the whole thing worked. Instead, I strung it between two nails on the wall behind my headboard. It hung for many years where I could look at it every day. In times of turmoil, I even took it down and held it in my hands for comfort.

At the end of my senior high school year, my class organized a trip to Heart Lake in Brampton, just outside Toronto. Here we felt five years of camaraderie could be brought to adequate closure; in other words . . . party time!

It was an overcast cool June morning and the beach area was mostly deserted. One of the girls hop-skipped up to the water and gingerly dipped one foot in. “It’s freezing!” she announced, running back.

The biggest and baddest dude of the class, known simply as Ox, shook his head. “Women, ha!” he said, looking at me. “What say we show these skirtsies and the rest of these pansies what real men are made of! Race you to the raft . . . loser moons the principal!”

“You’re on.” I replied, stripping down to my swimming trunks and racing for the water. I plunged in just before Ox. The water wasn’t merely freezing, it was downright galvanizing! As I came up gasping and began stroking, I heard whooping and cheers from our classmates and Ox blowing air like a whale beside me. Ahead, fifty yards or so, the raft awaited the victor. As I halved the distance, a whole body length ahead of my bovine friend, a sudden cramp seized my abdomen, and a moment later both my legs went numb . . . dragging behind me, weighing me down. Ox passed me; someone on shore yahooed . . . I went momentarily under. Using only my arms, fighting cramps that were quickly spreading to every muscle in my body, I managed to regain the surface. The raft now seemed at least fifty miles away. Ox was almost there. I was too proud to scream for help.

As I went under again, it suddenly became clear that I was going to drown, right here, in front of all my friends. When I finally decided to forgo my pride and yell for help, I no longer had breath to do it with. As I slipped under, it was not my life that I saw flashing before my eyes, but my granny’s rosary. If only I could touch it just one last time, I thought as I watched it dangling in the shimmering light just below the surface of the water. I reached for it. I touched it. It broke; beads slipped through my numb fingers and went floating down past me. As my lungs compressed, begging for oxygen, rising from the depth of the lake I thought I heard those foreign whispers from my childhood. With one last desperate lunge, fighting a spreading torpor, I reached for the rosary again, and managed to get a grip of its tiny silver crucifix. This time it was as strong as a rope, and I felt it pulling me up.

I don’t know how, but moments later I was hoisting myself up onto the raft to join my already gloating friend. After a brief rest, without saying a word of what had happened, we swam back to shore without further incident.

When I got home later that day, the first thing I did was run up to my room to check on the rosary. As I threw the door open, I noticed it was gone; one of the nails had fallen out and the other hung askew downwards, as if someone had pulled it down in haste. Then, I stepped on what felt like a couple of tiny pebbles. With my heart knocking in my chest, I knelt down for a closer look and saw in amazement a scattering of loose beads . . . my granny’s rosary.

Vince Fantauzzi
Brampton, Ontario

When I Met My Hero!

When I was a child, I loved the work of Charles Schulz, creator of the famous
Peanuts
comic strip. I read it because it spoke to us as children. It attributed to us common sense and personalities, and the ability to think cerebral thoughts. To me it spoke to real kids, it wasn’t “just a comic strip.” I collected his books, and when I was in my twenties, I had illustrations of his characters all over my bedroom wall. He really was one of my heroes!

I had always known that comics were more than just drawings. They’re a wonderful way of communicating and of telling the truth. Charles Schulz kept me aware of that. Somehow, he accompanied me through my life. Wherever I went, he was there, because no matter where I was, I could open a newspaper and find his work.

I certainly never expected to meet him. So, when the phone rang one day, and I heard the words, “Hi, this is Charles Schulz,” I was so stunned I said, “Who?” And he said, very apologetically, “I do
Peanuts.
”

He called me simply to say, “I like your work.” I was so blown away, I had to sit down. He called me several times after that and we talked about our work. I just couldn’t wait to meet him!

About a year after that first phone call, we finally met in Washington at the Reuben Awards, which is sort of the Oscars of the comics’ industry. I was nominated that year for my own comic strip,
For Better or For Worse.
In fact, I actually won! Charles Schulz came up to me at the meeting and whispered in my ear, “I voted for you!”