Always Remember... There are no limits...
Either way...
After all, limits are for chicken...
...The Road to Peace...Yukon, Canada
Another Sunday… But not like the
others… It is the last long weekend of the lazy and hazy summer… It is not much
of a concern for me…Since I retired from classroom-confined-teaching last year…So
as they popular wisdom goes… “For me it is always summer holiday.” Lovely! But
I feel with the rest of you… I hated “9 to 5 work” and I was blessed with the
classroom-confined-teaching….It was fun…As if you are in a park with chirping
birds and barking elders…
I see kids in uniform walking in
front of the house in their uniforms and the humpbacks…the bag packs… They are
walking to the nearby private school with $45,000 tuition… The rich segregate
themselves from us the common folk…
I look at the kids and at times memories
come back… I remember students who have stayed with me forever…
·
There was the poet…
I made him read his poetry in my math classes… He was good…I liked his poems…I
wish the muses stay with him…
·
There was the
rapper… I made him rap…the students tapped for him…but he was no audible…He was
still new from Nigeria and not bold enough for North America…
I loved all…They kept me juvenile
at heart and wondering in mind… It was fun and a learning experience every day…
I benefited from them as much as they accepted me … as the discussion leader…
It was a symbiotic community of learners…explorers…of trials and errors… It was
the road to the heavens…
There was this young lady, Rita…
Asian and very hard working…Smile on the face at all times… Very polite and
very preppy and classic…good model…always on the honour roll…and always helping
others … She helped the school Chaplain in all his needs…God’s needs…
She sat at the very front row…right
in front of my desk…and her generous smile was contagious…Kept the classroom-community
happy and thinking too… her kindness was appreciated by all…
She graduated… All graduate after
a certain age… But she graduated with honours…Got accepted to the University of
her Choice… Selected the program of her choice…
Visited we every month and we had
a tripartite chat and laugh…her, the Chaplain and me… It was good and rewarding
too…
In the second semester her visits
became fewer… less and less… and the Chaplain confided in me… “She has a African
Canadian boyfriend … and they are thinking of moving together… She is having
difficulties with the parents… In fact, the parents are kicking her out…They do
not want to talk to her…”
She was studying life-sciences…and
she moved out of the house…lived with the boyfriend… failed few courses…and her
ties with her family got severed…They did not talk with each other… But her
younger sister kept contact with her…she became the liaison between the family
and her elder sister…
I saw her few times more…She was pregnant
and abandoned her studies… later in the summer she had a son… cute little man…smiling
like her and looking very much like his father…with curly hair and penetrating
looks…
She left the university altogether…
“but I am going to return and study again, Sir…,” she insisted to me… She
worked and kept the three of them together…Clean and well fed…
The young man left her…The family
life was too claustrophobic for him… She was alone with her son…
She reconciled with the parents…
Moved back into the house…
The younger sister graduated too…
and Rita visited us again… She had grown up to be a very bitter woman… She
swore like her boyfriend and acted very much as part of his culture… “Mother …”
and the rest of the words were very sad to hear…The Chaplain and I were a bit embarrassed
to hear… not that we were not used to hear these words… The “hallway” people
used them all the time…the movies are saturated by them… But I was embarrassed to
hear it from her…
She and her sister started a
business… They were selling shares and to a non-existent company… It was their
company…It manufactured nothing…The elder was the chairperson of the company
and the younger sister was the head of marketing…She called herself the Head of Marketing …
The Chaplain bought five shares…
He knew what was happening… But he was used to give alms… and charity… But I
did not buy any…I do not like people to lie to me… They were not honest with me…
They were not honest people any
more…
I remember her quite often…When I
see a well-protected preppy student … Rita visits we … and I wonder what will
happen to him and her…
I do not know why she jumped into
bad with the first fellow that kissed her… I do not know the reason… But the
parable of the mother bear and her cub crosses my mind often… The mother bear
loved her cub so much that hugged her and with the motherly hug choked the bear…
I do not know what was the reason…
But I wanted to write about her because of the New Year… Because the new
graduates…the last class that I thought before retiring…will embark upon their
university-college journey…
… I wanted to wish all good luck…
and wanted to warn…off pricks and shitheads and assholes…
Good luck…
...Hike to the Heavens......Yukon, Canada
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