By Jim Hagarty
2007
When I went away to university in 1969, I felt lost in a sea of suave young men from the city, many of whom drove sports cars and for whom the flow of funds from home was so strong they never entertained the possibility that this wonderful and steady bankroll would ever cease to arrive. On the odd occasion when their benefactors were late coming through with the dollars, it was not unheard of for one of these city slickers to sell a beautiful stereo system to get together the pocket change for a weekend in the pub. They knew another stereo would not be that hard to come by.
Being one of seven kids who was raised on a farm, this was quite a shock to think that there were people in the world so wealthy and privileged that, far from meaning everything to them, money meant almost nothing. They had known nothing in their lives but never-ending plenty and they could pretty much count on this good fortune continuing throughout the rest of their time on Earth.
I met several young men and women back then about whom I would read in the papers for years later as they climbed the various ladders of corporate, governmental and even political success and the strange thing was, they knew full well at 18 years of age that all this success awaited them in their lives. So they partied like crazy while they could, to get it out of their system before they settled down.
In the midst of this crowd, I felt understandably insecure. I had never owned a stereo nor lived in a house which had one so I couldn’t have pawned it off if I’d wanted to. And I certainly couldn’t seem to look down the years and see a life of privilege awaiting me.
I didn’t begrudge these guys any of this, really, but it did make me question what I was doing in their midst and whether a university education would be wasted on me. I think now that our need for food, air, shelter and love is sometimes overshadowed by another necessity we humans seem to struggle with at times: No one wants to feel insignificant.
Surrounded by guys who spent more on their shoes than I did on my first car ($35), it was hard to get noticed. Hard, that is, till the day I gave up any notion of being one of them and began to accept the facts of my own life. And so, in my small room at my college residence, I began to regale my fellow students with stories from my past, which, while totally unremarkable if shared with anyone in my hometown, were a big hit around guys who grew up with a fireplace in their bedroom at home and a car that was made in Italy. No embellishment was ever needed and I can honestly say I never resorted to that.
To tell them you went to a one-room schoolhouse where all the students in the eight elementary grades took their instruction in the same room from the same teacher was to be thought a major fabricator of colossal untruths. To say you had the same teacher for every subject for all eight grades. That your father and your grandmother has gone to the same school when they were kids. To recall that there was no running water in the school and that the most sought-after honour was to be chosen by the teacher just before recesses and lunch to take a big pail out to the well in the yard and pump it full of cool water, then hoist the pail onto a shelf at the back of the room from which all the students would take a drink using the same tin ladle. To describe how you had toilets and toilet seats located in the “cloakrooms” but they were simply placed over a deep hole in the ground a la outhouse was to be looked at like a kid who’d been raised in the bush by wolves.
Somehow, however, that did not seem to be an undesirable outcome.
The stories, it seems, were endless. From using various methods for sending groundhogs off to their reward to using huge, heavy clippers to lop the horns off cattle. From driving a car on the road at the age of 13 to sitting all afternoon in a cherry tree, trying to beat the birds to the fruit. I suppose I was, as I’ve heard myself described, a snob in reverse. Using my local yokel shtick to make the city guys’ lives look a little dull by comparison.
I don’t know if any of them wished they could have traded all those times they spent in their Ferraris for a few golden hours on a John Deere tractor, but there always seemed to be someone who wanted to hear another story.
