Bacon Scrapins are the little bits of meat left in the greasy fry pan. They’re tasty, but the ‘nutrition’ needs searching for. This tale is a bacon scrapin.
One of the jobs in our ‘9-stop-signs’ sized community is to take down and store the 500+ metres of snow fence along the main entry road, ready to be put back up again in the late fall. The dozen or so volunteers work in 2s or 3s spread out as we work along.
Conversation moved smoothly and cheerfully from one-thing-to-another in our group, and the topic of destructive demonstrators and, ‘When are we going to learn to talk to, and listen to each other?’ somehow came up.
Tony said, “For some reason, we seem unable to learn from the symbols left for us by those before us. There’s good and bad in most folks who have done anything big and important in any country, and for some reason we can’t find a way to keep and use those symbols in creative ways so that we can learn about our past, and how to treat each other better in the future.”
George said, “We need less confrontation, and more listening to each other.”
Tony added, “And, we also need to learn how to talk to each other. Not just yell, stomp, pout and throw stuff. You know, the ‘playing nice in the sandbox’ stuff!”
I suggested, “We need more Mrs. Ebys!”
Tony asked, “What? Who’s Mrs. Eby?”
“Let me share a ‘Mrs. Eby communications’ situation.” I said. “In a previous life, I taught grades 6 – 8 in a small town beside the lake. Over 40% of our students were from Saugeen First Nation. They were mostly Chippewa and had Ojibway language classes instead of French at school. Most came in on a bus, and some walked with the rest of the ‘townies’.
“The school’s back yard had a long slope, which was good for sliding down in winter, and which overlooked a large playground shaped like a large L. If you stood at the top of the slope, you couldn’t see around the L to the far corner of the yard. The students were all over the place, of course, but the oldest kids tended to gather in the hidden back corner to ‘hang out’. There was a clump of trees about 15 feet tall and it was a good place to test the rules, one of which was no smoking.” I continued.
“What about Mrs. Eby?” probed Tony.
“Teachers would be on yard supervision duty, in pairs, to be able to cover all the area. My regular partner on one of the days was Mrs. Eby. She had been there so long that she had taught many of the kids’ parents, and they knew they’d get no sympathy at home if they had a run-in with Mrs. Eby.”
“So, what about the ‘learning how to listen and talk’ bit? pushed George.
“One recess I had the top of the hill and the lower pavement, and Mrs. Eby took the lower section around the corner with the soccer field and the corner trees. Mrs. Eby related this incident to me after we came off the yard together that day. It seems she saw smoke rising above the heads of a group along the far fence by the trees, so she wandered over. She was stealthy and they saw her too late. Here’s what happened, as she related it to me.”
“Mr. Ritchie! Mr. Roote! Miss. Mandawoub! Are you smoking?” she demanded.
“No!” blustered Lester Ritchie quickly, “We were just calling home!”
“Well,” said Mrs. Eby firmly, with an invisible smile, “come over here, and give me all your matches. But first – HANG UP!”
With adolescent grins, they ‘butted out’. All walked back to the school together.
“Yup!” said George, “We need more Mrs. Ebys as model communicators.”
“And,” concluded Tony, “we’d only lose the frictional matches, but we’d keep our symbolic smoke signals!”
NOTE: The characters’ names in the Bacon Scrapin tales are fictional. Except for the first person singular, AND Mrs. Eby. Mrs. Eby really exists, and I’m pleased to know her.
You may send appropriate email comments to the writer at thisiswilmot@gmail.com