Scheme: The Murder Trial Excuse

"Wake up, we're moving."

It was 3am on a Friday night and I had been torn from whatever nice dream 12 year old's have only to be thrust into the first moments of my life's freefall to oblivion.

"Moving where, downstairs?" I said trying to blink myself into reality because the empty bedroom made me feel like I was still back in dream land.

I may have been a bit groggy but I definitely remembered crawling onto the bottom level of my bunk bed several hours before to dream about the fun and eventful day I had at school that day.  Yet, here i was standing in the middle of an empty bedroom with only a pillow and a blanket laying on the floor.  My dresser, bed, lamp and posters had all vanished.

When I stumbled down the hall to the TV room as we called it back then to find that room to be empty as well I woke up immediately for something was up.  I peeked over the bannister to get a glance at the landlord's part of the house and sure enough there was my dad pulling the TV down the last stair to the front hallway where all the rest of our belongings were stacked in front of the door.

"Get dressed let's go" he barked up at me somehow knowing I was watching him.

"Go where?" I cried out.  I remember instantly starting to break down into tears because I had been through this before, being evicted in the middle of the night by the landlord because the house was being terrorized by that security company.  Except this time the landlord wasn't home and there had been no loud bangs, no window smashing, no phone calls in the middle of the night.  All that nonsense had ceased years ago, so why were we moving?

We had lived in rooms for rent all around the block so my school was within walking distance and I couldn't imagine who would accommodate us moving all our junk in at 3am.  Were we going to a hotel then?  Where would we put all our stuff?  My limbs were trembling when I put my clothes on, I remember having to sit down on the floor to put my pants on because my knees were shaking like I had Bambi legs.

The only thought I had in my mind as we pulled out of the driveway of 615 Old Weston Rd. for the last time was 'how would my friends find me?'  The school, General Mercer I could do without, the teachers had tortured me enough there for 5 years that I was happy to not have to go back but my friends, especially Roberto, I couldn't live without them.  I was told 'no phone calls, no letters, no communication' we were going to live like we had vanished off the face of the earth.  But live where?  We had been driving out of the city following the moving van in front of us for quite a while however I still recognized that we were on Dundas St. W. heading west for Mississauga.  I knew that from our drives out to Mississauga's home hockey arena Dixie Arena Gardens when we played the Mississauga Reps and when we passed by the all night burger joint that I had eaten at before this trip at 4am now seemed like I was going to play a hockey game.  Until we drove right past Dixie Arena and continued out into uncharted territory, then I sunk back into my seat in silence secretly wishing Roberto was with me so we could make fun out of all this.

At 4:30 in the morning we pulled into a driveway, yes THE driveway that my dad would infamize later on and I saw our house for the first time, except my dad hadn't told me he had bought a house I simply figured that we'd be staying in one of the bedrooms for rent.

"Unload the stuff quickly, quietly." he ordered.  There was no ceremonial unveiling of this great surprise he had bought for us, no hugs or time to explore anything, it was shrouded in mystery as usual.

My dad watched the moving truck take off down the street from behind the living room curtain and he remained there motionless just peeking out and scanning the roads until dawn broke an hour later.  I was too much in shock to sleep and it was too dark to explore ... naturally I wasn't allowed to turn the lights on ... so I just sat huddled against the corner of the living room wondering what the hell was happening with my life.

The next day my dad went into 'work mode' where there were 'things to do', there were always 'things to do' with him and I suppose occupying a new house made him the happiest he had ever been for he now had an endless list of 'things to do'.  As he unpacked and did whatever he had to do I spent most of that day in the upstairs washroom looking out the window at the kids playing on the street, two girls and a boy specifically.  I wanted to play with them badly but I had been forbidden to show my face outside yet.  It was for my safety, "the followers" might take pictures of me and then my life would be in jeopardy too.  That's the kind of reasoning my dad threw at me and I figured he was just a little bit paranoid.

Finally I called out from the bathroom window to get their attention and next thing I knew they came over and knocked on the door asking me to come play.  Dad derailed that quickly ordering me to my room and then chasing the kids away telling them that I wasn't allowed outside.  I'm re-telling that little slice of my life because it was that very moment that I first lost respect for my father as someone who was rational and whom I could trust.

That evening he hooked up the television and I watched a very blurry Hockey Night in Canada by myself in silence and began to wonder what was going to happen on Monday when I had to go to school.  Sunday took away any doubt as to how hellish my life was going to be at the new school.  My dad had this idea in him that with a new home and new school I had to put forth a new image so he took me shopping to Towers to buy me my new look.  That new look involved bringing a briefcase to school wearing $5 dress pants, a white shirt and tie.  Why bother taking me to school, why not just drop me off in the lions cage at the local zoo, at least there I'd get killed fast.

Monday morning I was walked to my new home room dressed like Pee Wee Herman complete with the Brylcreem'd greasy hair thrown in for good measure.  I was tallying up who I'd have to fight first as I took my seat in the front row and had barely sat down when we were asked to rise and bow our heads for the lord's prayer.  The lords what?  Man, I came from an inner-city school where the only time you heard the word Jesus Christ was from the kids talking about a kid who got bloodied up in an after school fight.

"Would you like to lead us in the lord's prayer please" the new teacher asked me politely.  I looked at the kid beside me and mouthed to him "what do I say?" and added a shoulder shrug to get my plea across.

Say "our father who farts in heaven" he whispered back.

I knew he was messing with me but I thought it'd be a great way to break the ice so I lowered my head and said that exact line.

It's possible I hold the world record for the fastest time a new student has been sent to the principal's office from that little joke of a line.

I rejoined the class some 30 minutes later after being lectured about respecting the school's routine and at the top of the hour we all headed down to French class in the basement of Springfield Public School.

Following the conclusion of that class we headed to the stairs and I had no sooner stepped through the basement door leading to the stairs that I felt something crack me in the back of my skull.  Instantly blood began gushing out of my nose so fast I felt like somebody had turned a faucet on inside my mouth.

I didn't even have time to turn around, the crack to the back of my head dizzyd me so much that i slumped to my knees and I never saw the follow up kick that split my eyebrow open.  Looking at the double faucet of blood leaving a lake of blood on the tiled floor I went into Carrie mode.

That kid, the smallest in the class was trying to make a name for himself at my expense and he almost died because of it.  At the time I was a green belt at Northern Karate Club under Sensei Cezar Borkowski which was a school who's reputation was being built by winning tournaments.  Sparring was encouraged and the line up of kids to kick the shit out of daily was endless.  Fuck, I can't remember the name of the kid who was the best in the school and since I was about his height, age and body weight I was always his personal punching bag every day when I would arrive before class.  I was also on the best hockey team in the country at the time and wasn't afraid of any rough stuff in the corners so being hit at this age wasn't entirely new to me.

What was new was seeing a pool of my blood on the floor and choking on it at the same time.  I threw a front side snap kick not expecting it to do any damage whatsoever.  Well bloody hell the thing never worked in class, not even once.  And other than a flying front kick it was the only kick I felt comfortable throwing as that was the one they always let me break the twig boards with to get all my belts.

It connected and he went down in a heap.  I took a pencil out from my pocket and tried to stab him in the head but the pencil snapped in two.  Three or four kids pulled me off of him and by now both of us were bleeding so much the entire floor as covered in blood as was my briefcase, my white shirt and my $5 dress pants.  Hell of a first day, I wasn't intending to stick around for many more.

Now my dad had moved us to Mississauga because it was close the the Gateway sorting facility where he had begun work as a mail sorter thanks to his unbelievable test result the month prior.  However he had asked for the day shift as at that time it was the only shift that offered 4 hours of overtime, 2 before the shift began and 2 after.  So he'd head off to work at 8 in the morning and wouldn't return until after 8pm at night.  I had hockey practices and games 4 nights a week and the team's goalie lived on Orion Crescent just down the street so I rode with them in the car on those nights.

Though my nights seemed fine it was the daytime hours that made me feel horribly lonely.  The fights didn't stop at school and I had made an enemy out of pretty much everybody at the new school by the end of the second week.  Worse than all that was that I missed my friends at the old school so much that I had to do something about it.  I needed to get to my old neighbourhood in Toronto and I needed to do it on a school day.  I also needed an excuse that was brilliant enough that they wouldn't call my father at work so whatever the excuse was going to be it had to include him so it looked like my father had kept me from school.

Now about the time that we had moved police had found a body in a ravine fairly close to my old house on Old Weston Road and I knew that ravine very well as Roberto and I had always taken our bikes down that trail which led out to the CN Railway tracks.  After my dad would jet off to work at 8pm I'd have about 45 minutes to sit and listen to Tom Rivers on 1050 CHUM's morning radio show and I fell in love with his program.  He was funny and I loved his comedy, some of his jokes I still remember to this day.



Answer: UCLA
Question: What do you see when the smog rises in California?

Ah but one morning he was making a joke about the suspect they had picked up in the investigation of that dead body, and for the life of me I don't remember what the joke was ok, but I do remember him saying that "the trial kicks off tomorrow" and through his lips to my brain a new scheme was hatched.

I spent the day in school in a very sombre state avoiding conversation or eye contact with anyone.  Just before the last class of the day ended I casually brought it up with the teacher that I 'unfortunately' wouldn't be able to attend school the next day.

"Oh, why not?" she asked.

"I have to go with my dad to that trial about the dead body tomorrow." I said all dejected like.

"Why do you have to go?" she wanted to know.

"My friend and I had seen the body too and we told the police about it this week."

The look of concern and shock on her face was priceless.  I still wasn't too sure if the excuse would hold water but I had planted the seed.

As soon as my dad took off the next day I took off right behind him on my banana seat bicycle.  He was headed into the middle of Mississauga and I was continuing on to the middle of Toronto ... destined to see my friends again.  I had planned on two or three hours to get there and then would wait until school finished to see my friends as they came out of school.  I could hang with them until 5pm I figured when I'd have to race back to be home before 8pm.

My dad had put a lot of faith in raising me to be an individual, someone who could go out on his own and survive on his own.  By 6 years old I had memorized all the subway stations in order on the TTC and all the bus routes and street names around my house as well.  At 8 years old I was going to swimming classes by myself taking the bus to Keele station, the train to Islington, and then walking 20 minutes across the park to get to the swimming pool.  Then I'd reverse all that at night when it was dark without even thinking about being scared.  So to peddle into Toronto on my own from a neighbouring city wasn't that much of a stretch, I just had to follow Dundas street straight in to my old neighbourhood and figure it out from there.

It worked like a charm and even today remembering the smile on Roberto's face and thinking about how happy I was to be able to tell him my phone number and get his ... something which we never needed to exchange before as we lived on adjascent streets ... that was a happy moment indeed.  My legs were so sore peddling back home and I got back just after 7:30 in the evening when it was pitch black outside except for the street lights.

Waiting for dad to drive in to the driveway was unnerving, I thought the school would have called him for sure and I'd be in a heap of trouble but to my surprise everything had gone exactly as I had planned for it to go.

So hell, if it worked one time, why wouldn't it work again?  I mean it was a wrongful death trial, those things last weeks, even months.  This wasn't a school for the gifted after all, would they even miss a little schemer like me?

A month off of school would be great, especially a school I hated.  All I had to do was write a letter from my dad and since they hadn't seen my father's handwriting yet anything would pass as long as it looked better than my chicken scratch at that young age.

That weekend at hockey practice I got my defence partner Bobby to ask his older sister to write such a letter for me and she wrote a masterpiece.  Then Monday I pulled another rabbit idea out of the hat.  I went along with my dad at 8am telling him to drop me off because I had to do something important in the library before school.  However, when he pulled into the circular driveway at the front of the school office to drop me off I told him to hang on for a couple of minutes ... I don't honestly remember the excuse I gave to make him wait while he had to go to work but it worked.

I went in the front door and tossed my backpack against the wall so I could walk into the office empty handed and gave the secretary the letter that would get me out of school.  She wanted me to wait to talk to the vice-principal but I waved her attention to my dad sitting outside saying that I was late to get to the trial and that my father was waiting for me outside.  It froze her just long enough for me to back out of the office, go pick up my backpack and hightail it back to my dad's car.  From there I told him he needed to drop me back off at home because they didn't have the book I needed to finish my homework assignment and I needed to use a book in my study room.

It worked.  We dove off looking like we were off to court and he dropped me off at home not even saying goodbye as he was now a little late to get to work.

Not wanting to ride my bike into Toronto again I turned Tom Rivers back on 1050 CHUM, got a box of cereal out of the pantry and watched game shows all morning long while chugging down an entire box of cereal.  Fun times.

At noon The Flintstones and Spider Man were on back to back to get me to 1pm and from there I had quite a lull trying to survive soap operas to get to the 3pm cartoons.  I'd watch those until 5pm and get my hockey stuff ready for the practice or game I had that evening.

The next morning was the morning that I was the most tense.  I didn't go into the school as I was depending on the letter and word of mouth to carry the message that I wouldn't be able to attend school ... and at the same time hoping they didn't call my dad at the Post Office as well.  At any moment I expected the phone to ring but it never did.  I was in game show heaven.

I pulled this off for two weeks straight and on the second Friday 1050 CHUM news announced that the trial in the wrongful death suit had come to a conclusion.

A conclusion?  But I was having fun.

This was me getting back at the world.  If I was going to be dragged out of my old school in the middle of the night, be away from my friends, and have to wear Pee Wee Herman style clothes with greased hair so I could fight every person in the 5th grade then I was going to extend this vacation as long as I could.

I refused to report to school the next Monday.  I knew that I was on shaky ground as far as my excuse went and I should have just gone in.  But I stayed home and right in the middle of The Price is Right with a half eaten bowl of Froot Loops in my lap the phone rang.  I ignored it, but it didn't stop ringing.  When it did a couple of seconds later it would begin to ring again.  It was a wall phone and there was no way to make it stop ringing so I took the whole thing off the wall.

I had just finished doing that when the front doorbell rang.  I froze in my tracks.  On my tiptoes I crept towards the front door only to be frozen in my tracks again as the door bell sounded off once more.  I peaked through the eyehole right into the eyes of a police officer!  Wow, I knew I was in some big trouble at that point.

I backed away slowly from the door the way a cat might back away from a snake and crouched down on the kitchen floor hoping they would go away.  Eventually they did and I started pacing the floor thinking of what my next best move would be.  I had paced for less than 5 minutes when I hear the engine of my dad's car screaming as it approached the house from down the street.  No word of a lie, he was going about 120km/hr on the little street that runs perpendicular to my court.  He laid rubber coming to a stop outside the house and I was about ready to shit my pants.

"What's going on ... why are you home ... why did the police call me ... are you ok?" he fired off four questions at once.  From somewhere deep within I came up with a pretty resolute reply,

"I'm no longer going to that school, I want to go back home."

I was sure he'd hit me for that reply.

"This is your home, I bought it for you." his answer was so pure and so kind hearted that it caught me off guard.

"Why would you do that?" I cried out, "I never asked for a house, I never asked to move, I never asked to come here."

Then he told me that at the beginning of the year he was watching from the window the first day we moved into that small room for rent and saw my friends at school laughing at me because we lived in such a small place.

I remembered the day he was talking about and he was partially correct, they had joked with me about it but they hadn't done it in a mean way.

"So you bought a house because of that?"

"Well yes, I'd do anything for you to make you happy."

Those words made me confess right there and then that I hadn't been to school and I let him know about the fights and the early stages of the bullying that would haunt me for the next 7 years.

All was forgiven and for the first time that house felt like a home.

Dad Stories: Memorizing 20,000 Postal Codes

I'd give my left arm for a picture of what our house looked like when my dad was studying for a Post Office job because even now my best memory cannot do justice to what a house looks like with 20,000 flip cards dangling from every ceiling.

I realize I've presented my father as somewhat of a lunatic so far but truth be told for all intensive purposes he was.

However, he was also a genius.  As troubling as it was growing up with him I always recognized how brilliant he could be at times and the event that stood out the most was watching him study for the post office exam.

"Really?  A post office exam?  How hard could that be?" I can hear you asking yourself those questions now.

It was an astonishingly hard test.  Much harder than the doctors MCAT or lawyers LSAT tests that I'd buy for him on holidays.  Those were like tic-tac-toe level questions for him and I only resorted to buying those because he had read and answered every single text book in the Math and Sciences department of my University book store by the time I reached the end of year three.  The man should have been a surgeon, a mathematician, a scientist, he could have helped the world in some magnificent way had he a desire to express himself that way.  I wish he had left a legacy like that.

Instead, I remember him for doing something more heroic than saving the world, I remember him for saving our little family of two by pulling off the greatest memorization feat I have ever seen with my own eyes.

My dad's job was in jeopardy at McDonnell Douglas for a number of reasons.  The schemer reason was that he was involved in a nasty union strike.  I want to focus on his feat of accomplishment with the Post Office in this story and leave the full story about my father's fight to a more serious Scheme of Schemes book that I intend to write soon.  If however, you would like to know the back story of his troubles there you can read this article and when it talks about the harassment of the Shop Steward's know that at that point they are talking about my father.

To be specific, I believe (through my dad's stories at a time when i was quite young) that this person they are talking about .... "One Bargaining Committee member, whose case was heard separately, was suspended without pay for three months and was returned to work by the arbitrator"  is my dad.

I also believe that the root cause of his dementia and paranoia of being permanently followed, harassed and investigated stemmed from this action taken by his former employer...

It was revealed in a court case not related to the happenings at DACAN, that the company had employed a private detective agency - - Centurion Investigations - - to infiltrate Local 1967 and cause trouble. Three episodes were revealed in that case:
1. They had placed a bomb, with no fuse, in the Plant Chairperson’s car;
2. They assaulted a black member of the Local’s Executive Board and tried to blame the Plant Chairperson;
3. Fights were deliberately started on the 1971 picket lines;


Though that detective company won in the end I believe my dad's scheme to fight back and secure a better life for us was a greater victory.

In short, my dad had been suspended and I remember him being at home for a long time in a state of duress.  We were being constantly followed, there were cars parked outside the room we were renting and there were middle of the night attacks where the windows would be smashed and the door would be pounded upon.  We were constantly being evicted and I was living under war-time like rules with orders not to appear at the window, not being able to turn the lights on at night time, and having to keep the thick carpet-like drapes closed at all times of the day.

Meanwhile, I have to think that my dad was planning his escape from that job because one day I remember him starting to write what turned out to be postal codes on flash cards ... the kind he would flash at me with arithmetic problems to make me super fast at my multiplication tables.

On one side of the flash card he would write a postal code while on the other side he would write the location of that postal code by street name and city.  Then with a piece of duct tape he would hang the postal code from the ceiling or stick it to the wall grouping all the postal codes by city together.  Thus, eventually, every wall became a city.  Our kitchen space was Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge.  There was no wall showing after a while, every square inch was filled with these flash cards from floor to ceiling.  The living room was now Oakville, Burlington and Mississauga ... remember we are talking about back in 1974-75 when these cities were very small relative to today.

Our little 2 bedroom, one hallway, one kitchen, and one bathroom apartment that he was renting had turned into a freak show.  It was like something somebody would set up for a halloween party only to have it all torn down the day after.  But this preposterous set up lasted for a year.

Though (again, if I am correct) his suspension was only 3 months he knew he was a marked man and that at the first chance he would be fired from his job working on the wings of the DC9 and DC10 aircraft they were constructing in that plant.

Now this is where I start to question the depth of my dad's scheme.  An unanswered question that will forever haunt me is this:  Did my dad purposely cut off his hand in order to get job protection from the Workman's Compensation Board of Canada?

I'd like to know what machine he worked on.  I remember one time asking him to buy me a slinky ... "it goes down stairs, alone or in pairs, every one loves a slinky ... a slinky a slinky it's such a wonderful toy ... a slinky a slinky it's fun for a girl or a boy" ...that toy.  Instead, he brought home a rectangular slinky type replica about the length of a brick and as tall as a kid's thumb.  When extended, this slinky type metal would stretch out infinitely it seemed and unlike the 'snap-back' effect a slinky has, this thing would retain it's stretched out position.  I know it was used somehow to support the wing structure of the DC9 aircraft but i'd like to one day know what machine was associated with that metal ... and eventually i'd like to find out if it was possible to severe one's forearm in that machine purposefully.

I know I sound as crazy as my dad but I now realize that there was absolutely nothing my father would not do to protect our lives.  Attempting to cut off his own hand from the forearm is something i wouldn't put past him as an attempt to ensure job security through a time of plant layoffs.

Regardless of whether it was purposeful or not the result of the accident was that my dad's hand was severed from the midway point of his left forearm down to the fleshy part below his thumb and he permanently lost 80% of the feeling in his left hand as a result.

Being off work due to an industrial accident secured him both an unemployment insurance check from the Government of Canada and a Workman's Compensation Board check that kept him afloat long enough through his rehabilitation to begin his memorization of every postal code in southern Ontario.

Approximately six months later my dad was cleared to return to work but it was a workforce that was dwindling fast and it was only my dad's injury which had prevented him from being laid off as well.



"...many new components for McDonnell-Douglas airplanes were assigned to MDCAN until the Boeing Aircraft Company of the U.S.A. bought McDonnell-Douglas and began phasing out the McDonnell-Douglas product line. This served to reduce employment at the new Boeing Toronto Ltd. (Malton) location"


My dad knew that his return to work would be very temporary so he devised another scheme which he openly admitted to me at a later date.

On the very first day back to work he faked a back injury by purposefully slipping on an area of wet floor that had just been mopped.  He went right back onto Workman's Compensation and UI checks and knew that this was the final time he would have to do what he had to do.

I have never seen such commitment to a task as my father did to memorizing those postal codes.  I kid you not, every day he spent no less than 20 hours putting memory 'hooks' to each postal code.  Every letter in the alphabet he assigned to a word as did every number between 0 and 9.  Thus, every postal code had a story.

L5C 2E5 would now read something like this in his brain ... "Leopards Find Claws  Tornados Eat Claws" and he would add the city ... "Leopards and Tornados exist in Mississauga".  He would then memorize an adjacent postal code and find a reason in his mnemonic to correlate them all together within the city they exist.

Like a crazy man muttering to himself my dad for the better part of a year walked around our window drawn apartment without hardly ever leaving reciting little songs to himself the represented the postal codes of every city in Southern Ontario.

At the end it was a wonderful thing to watch.  He would start at one end of the kitchen and looking up at the postal codes dangling from the ceiling he would begin to recite a nonsensical story linking every hanging postal code to one another.  His song would travel along the ceiling and then down and around every level of all four walls until he was eventually crawling around on his knees looking at the postal codes sitting an inch from the floor.

I remember it to be somewhere close to Christmas when my dad told me to get dressed warmly and to bring my Tom Sawyer book along with me so that i would not be bored.  Again, I cannot confirm this because of my age but the building he took me to that day is now what I believe to be the Air Canada Center in Toronto, the home of the Toronto Maple Leafs.  I've always since I can remember looked at that building when it was an abandoned post office building and thought about the day I believed I sat in the front office and read Tom Sawyer for the first time almost from cover to cover.

Much later in my life I worked at the post office briefly doing the same job my dad had done many years prior.  Innovation had computerized the entering of postal codes of envelopes by the time I worked there and my machine would send the letter off to the correct sorting sub-facility of the plant.  I imagine the purpose of having such an incredibly hard test back then was due to the whole sorting of letters by postal code to be something that was still manually done.  I'm guessing, but it makes sense to me that the post office would want workers who could remember as many postal codes as possible so that the mail could be sorted both quickly and properly.  To get such people they had to have a test to test one's memory.

Here's what I remember as a 9 year old boy.  I remember sitting down in a rather uncomfortable chair in a big bland front fourier of a building with a towering ceiling above me.  I took out my book and began reading it early in the morning i'd say at about 8am.

I was very hungry when I saw my dad again in the afternoon and in that time I had read a great portion of that book and it helped me survive that day without being a nuisance.  My dad had left me alone so many times in my life out of absolute necessity that I had become quite good at staying out of trouble and letting him do whatever he had to do to get us ahead in life.  This had been one of those days.

I don't know why it took so long to write that test.  I don't know how many questions were on it or how many people wrote the test with him.  What I remember is that my dad got near perfect on it.  From how he described it, the test as just pages and pages of postal codes and/or streets and he had to write down either the street or the postal code to match whichever of the two they had provided.  It was just as he had memorized and he had prepared masterfully to ace that test and hopefully get the job.  But there were obstacles for him to overcome still as always.

They did not accept his test and instead asked him to re-write it which was a sneaky way of accusing him of cheating.  Nobody had ever scored as high on the test as my dad had done.  To them it was simply not possible for somebody to have memorized every single postal code in our area of the province.  It was akin to asking somebody to memorize a number 20,000 digits long, who could accomplish such a feat?  My dad could!  Honestly, fairly, for the sake of our family.

On the re-write my dad scored perfect.  I ask the Post Office right here and now ... has that feat ever been duplicated since?

He was given the job and he had the security he so desperately needed.  The very day he returned to work at McDonnell Douglas he was called into the office and laid off.  What foresight!  My dad in recounting the story to me was always so happy to tell me how much he didn't 'give a rat's ass' when he was told that he had been let go by the company due to cutbacks.

He was let go on a Friday and started work at his secure postal working job on the following Monday and remained there until the day he retired some 25 years later.

My dad was a great man.  I love you dad.  I am so happy I finally told this story of your greatest accomplishment for us and I will do you even more justice when I tell the entire story of how you provided for me and you all alone throughout my years as a baby continuing right through to this story.  It has to be told.

Scheme: How I Schemed a University Scholorship

Sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.






My grade 12 final grades:

Calculus 32%
English   62%
Accounting 65%
Industrial Arts 51%
Phys.Ed. 68%
French 51%

My grade 13 final grades:

Calculus 81%
Chemistry 90%
Business Mathematics 74%
Accounting 75%
World Geography 74%
Functions & Relations Math 92%


My grades as there were when i submitted them to University of Toronto for enrollment consideration (and a nice scholarship to boot):

Accounting 100%
Business Mathematics 100%
World Geography 92%
Functions & Relations 92%
Chemistry 90%
Calculus 81%

or an average of 92.5%

Cha-ching! All 3 Universities that I applied for offered me a full scholarship if I would just please sign the paper agreeing that I would choose them.  Thank you very much.


So how did I scheme that?  Well to pull a page from the movie Fight Club ...

The first rule about scheming your way into University is:  there are no rules when trying to get into University.

The second rule about scheming your way into University is:  there are NO RULES when trying to get into University.

Did I manage to hold on to the scholarship into my second year?  No.  Did I care?  No.  I had a seat reserved for me at the University of Toronto and thousands of others didn't, that's all I cared about.  When I applied for my first job as an English Teacher oversees they asked me simply "do you have a degree?"

"Why yes I do" I replied.

"Is it from a reputable University?" they asked next.

"Why yes it is!" I remarked, "arguably the most reputable University in my country."

Did they ask me how I got in to that university?  Nope.


Which just goes to prove that you only need a ticket to the show, you don't have to be the best once you're there.   It's just that getting there after I nearly failed half of
my courses in grade 12 and was told by my Metal Working teacher Mr.Inglis to give up any hope of going to University kind of left the whole idea of going hanging by a thread.  My life was ending one minute at a time staying in that horrible High School and for the life of me I couldn't see a way out.  Every day I was being bullied and beat up by both students and teachers alike.  For four years, well five if I include middle school I didn't anyone call me by my name once, I had been labelled with the name Spock and it stuck like glue to the lips of everybody who spoke to me.  That included Mr. Baysarowich my gym teacher in Grade 12 who one afternoon came up to me and booted me in my ass while I was sitting down putting on my running shoes in the hallway.

"Move your ass Spock" he said as he hoofed me in my butt.

Hey Mr.Bay you 70 year old prune, come to my Jiu Jitsu gym and fight me for saying that to me 30 years ago, i haven't forgotten you prick.

I didn't attend my 2pm class that day, nor did I go to school the next day or for the rest of the week for that matter.  He crossed the line that day and coupled with Mr. Inglis telling me earlier that I would never see the inside of a university I had had enough of Woodlands Secondary School.  For a week I had quit school with no intention of ever going back and the only reason I did go back was to meet with my school Councillor who had requested a meeting.

He suggested I attend Ind-Ec an acronym for Individual Education where you study by yourself and have a meeting twice per week with a teacher to show her your progress and pick up new assignments.  It didn't work out, but it did show me that there is life outside of high school and that the place I was in was not the only option available to me to get my diploma.  It was a very valuable lesson to pick up at age 17 I wish somebody had told me I had options available to me before that.

I began to think, 'hey what else can I study by myself?'

That's when i picked up "find a way, any kind of way" as my motto and I started to research University requirements, how screwed I was, and if there were any ways out of the hole I had dug.

I found out I wasn't that screwed at all.  I needed 28 credits to get my Grade 12 diploma and since my dad had made me attend Summer School every year to pick up one extra credit on top of the 8 yearly credits awarded for passing I had the credits I needed to graduate already.  I felt relieved.  Then I realized that I had been blessed with time, I had almost a year and a half to get my 6 credits needed to pass grade 13.  Since I had to stay at IndEc for a whole semester to get a grade and I had already enrolled in Grade 12 Creative Writing which was a subject I didn't need to graduate I looked for a better way to spend my time.

The same day I quit IndEc I discovered I could get credit for a Grade 13 subject by completing it through a correspondence course.  By 4pm I had driven downtown, registered and picked up my first lesson of Functions & Relations math.

But you have a 30% in Calculus ... how many of you are saying that?  On top of that I never had a mark above 65% in any of the math courses from grade 9-12 either.

Ah but see, Woodlands requires every student to take 8 classes a year and attend four a day alternating between the two.  Combine that with a hockey schedule that demanded 6 nights a week of commitment and there was precious little time for homework so my marks suffered across the board as a result.  But I still understood everything that had been taught, of that I was confident.  Besides, I had my ace in the hole at home... my dad.

I present my dad as a character, an eccentric, a comic relief figure in my Dad Stories blogs.  But I have to give credit where credit is due my dad was a genius.  I knew I'd have to withstand his condescending manner of speaking to me but I knew that he would ensure that every lesson would be sent in without a mistake.

By the start of June I had completed all 20 lessons of the course with not losing a mark and had to sit for the final exam at a teacher's house with 50% of the final grade resting on the result of that exam.

There are no rules, remember that.  I had enough cheat sheets stuffed up my shirt and pant sleeves to write a small book with but I had no idea if I would be able to use them or not.  I walk into situations prepared for anything so that if the opportunity presents itself i'm ready to capitalize.  As it turned out, the teacher left with his family 10 minutes into my exam to go shopping.  There weren't any spy cams around back then like there are now so I whipped out my cheat sheets and aced the exam.  My final grade was 92% and I knew I was on to something, yet another schemeofschemes was brewing.  If only I could trick my way through 5 more courses like that i'd be golden.

Ah, but how to knock off Calculus, a subject that had overwhelmed me while trying to manage 7 other courses and left me with a mark of 30% before i dropped it?  I was highly skeptical I could pull off any decent mark in that course.

The only schemer knowledge I had in my back pocket that I could draw upon was all my years of summer school my dad had forced me to take.  Though I still thought of it as a waste of a good month of vacation I hadn't forgotten that every course I ever took in the summer had gotten me no less than 80%.  Not because I was suddenly brilliant in the month of July but because the course was so short.  How can anyone not get at least a 70% on any quiz when that's the only thing you are given to study 5 hours a day every day for 6 weeks?

Of course I had my dad back at home to help me in the evenings but he couldn't help me as much as he did in the F&R course as this time I actually had to go to school.  I knew I needed another bag of tricks this time and that bag sat down right beside me the first day of summer ... Helen.  Like all girls up to that point in my life she didn't acknowledge my existence but with my dad helping me at home the first quiz came a short three days into the class and i scored 100% on it as did she.  I was ecstatic.  Me, the failure, the kid who thought   had something to do with Aids just a few short months ago nailed a 10 question quiz to perfection.  I just had to show off a little bit and I let Helen have a peak at my 10/10 score.  It was the best flirting I have ever done with a woman in my life.

Suddenly I existed to her, and not only did I exist but she moved her table closer to me, she flirted with me, she went on breaks with me and by the time Friday came I was in love for the first time in my life.  I was learning a new life lesson, people will cling to those who can help them get ahead in life and I was just that for her.  As long as my marks held up I was able to flirt with her as much as I wanted which got a little excessive.  Okay, it got very excessive.  After school finished each day at 1pm we both went off to our lifeguard jobs at different locations.  Saturday afternoon I quit my job and rode my bike to her pool with my Calculus books under my arm.  In my bank i had $9,000 from the previous two summers of work that my dad never let me spend so working made no sense to me now that love was on the line.

Every day from 8-1pm we'd sit through Calculus in summer school and then i'd pedal over to her pool and we'd study together until 8pm and then we'd be on the phone to one another by 9pm working out derivative problems like all young love birds do.

By the time the second week ended I was falling behind her a little bit as I couldn't wrap my head around logarithms and how the derivative of ln(x) could be the letter e, for me e is for egg just like i learned in kindergarten.

The damn log test was coming on the Friday and even with my dad trying to make me understand at home I just wasn't getting it.  My two short Cinderella-like weeks were about to come to an end and I was about to be turned into a pumpkin unless I thought of something fast.

There are no rules!  As luck would have it our class did not take place in a regular classroom with one door.  It was at the classroom at the end of the hall and was adjoined by an adjacent classroom separated by swinging doors.  The teacher's desk was right beside those doors and I just happened to notice on the Wednesday that he didn't bring any of his teaching material home, he simply put it in the metal desk and left at the end of class.

Now it's the janitors duty to lock all the classroom doors after school was let out at 1pm and given that it was summer school unlike regular school the place was a ghost town 5 minutes after the bell rang.  Thursday afternoon at 1pm I took a 1 hour poop in the second floor teacher's washroom.  When I came out at 2pm sure enough the school was deserted and every classroom was locked except of course for the two at the end of the hall.

The desk was unlocked and there in the top folder was Friday's test. My heart pounded as I took it and tiptoed back to the teacher's washroom to the same toilet where I sat and copied all the questions into the back of my notebook.  I sneaked back into the classroom to return the folder and then made my way down the stairs and ran for my life once I hit the side door of the school.

I presented the questions to my dad and that night he made me sit at the kitchen table and listen to him work the questions out.  It was hard, my dad teaches in a way where he will start writing the solution out and then leave me to figure out the rest of it while he went off and did something else.  It was getting close to time for him to go to work at 11pm and there were still about 6 questions left so I begged him ... I actually begged him to solve the questions for me before he went to work so I could study how to do it while he was at work.

Since I hadn't moved since I sat down at the kitchen table from 3pm when I had ran in the door I guess he must have been impressed with me for once.  He did exactly what I was hoping he would do and answered the remaining questions for me then drove off to work.

Now earlier that year in French class I had been teamed up with two of the smartest students in the class Frank and Steve and only because Steve had become a close friend from being on the same soccer team that season.  I was a 65% student at best while they were upset if they ever received a mark under 95%.  To them I was a nuisance being in their group as we had to study a 12 page French story for a quiz the next day in a little study group.  We had 45 minutes to read the story to one another and prepare little questions that we thought would be on the test the next day.  That was the assignment given by the teacher, but Frank and Steve sat telling jokes for the whole time we were together.  I asked them why they weren't interested in reading the story and got a life lesson for an answer as to what sacrifices have to be made to be a champion.

"We'll have it memorized by tomorrow" Frank said and Steve nodded in agreement.

"Why memorize it?" I asked looking at the 12 pages of tiny printed French sentences in the book.

"Because then it is impossible to make a mistake, it is the only way to guarantee getting 100%."

When my dad left for work I knew that in front of me on the table were the exact answers I needed to write on the test the next day to get 100%, I just had to memorize the answers like Frank and Steve did back in French class.  So I pulled an all night study session just repeating the same questions over and over until I knew exactly what to write.  Right up until the last minute the next day I kept repeating the answers and when my dad came home he asked me in shock

"Have you been up all night?"

It was one of those moments where I should have felt proud by saying yes and letting him feel like his son was going to be brilliant one day but instead i felt like a schemer so i just nodded in the affirmative.

The hardest test of the course up to that point in the curriculum came back with 100% written on it and I was jubilant until Helen called me on it right away.

"You're not that smart," she said looking through my eyes and into my soul, "are you going to let me in on your little secret?"

Goddammit if that wasn't the scariest moment of my life then I don't know what was.  Could she see I was a fraud that easily?  Or was she just guessing?  I managed to swallow hard and keep what I had done a secret, until it wasn't time to keep it a secret.

The next two tests the teacher must have brought them in the day of the test because every night after class I hid in the washroom waiting to check his desk and I found nothing.

But two days before the final exam we were doing review sheets in class and I saw him put another folder inside the desk and he freaking locked it.  I saw him lock it with my own eyes and it really pissed me off.  I felt I was over my head and on our break I let Helen in on what I had done to beat her on the first test and told her that a similar opportunity was sitting in his locked desk.

"We have to get that exam" she said unknowing that with those words I wanted desperately to marry her.  A partner in crime of the opposite sex that beautiful and that willing doesn't just come along too often.

At 1pm that afternoon we were both pretend pooping in the teacher's bathroom.  Why the teacher's bathroom?  Adults want to get out of school faster than kids do in the summer.

For the life of me I couldn't pick the lock to the desk and instead tried to access it by removing the bigger bottom drawer and climb my fingers up the back while Helen stood guard and watched.  It was no use and 30 minutes later I told her we had to give up.

"Keep watch," she said, "I'll go give it a try."

She took her hairpin out and went to work like a pro while I nervously watched from the hallway.  It took her all of two minutes to open the desk and take out the folder and she screamed when she saw the exam.  She spit the pages in half and gave me 4 to copy and gave herself the others to copy and back we went to the washroom to copy everything down.

We returned everything and as soon as we got outside the school she turned and screamed at the top of her lungs.

"We have to study this all night you know that right?" she said to me and it was time I let her in on my other little secret.  "Your dad's that smart?" her eyes glistened as she saw another opportunity.  We went to a payphone to call her mom and I don't know what she said ... she was from Yugoslavia ... but it was nasty, mean and she wasn't taking no for an answer.

"Ok we're going to your house"

I think my dad was so happy that I wasn't gay because I finally had brought a girl home that he was willing to help with anything.  From 3pm until 11pm the three of us studied Calculus and she called me immediately at 11:30pm when she arrived home to send a shiver down my spine

"What if he changes the questions overnight?"

It didn't matter.  On the one hand, just by studying so many days with my dad including the all day session that had just finished I felt like for the first time in my life I could get a decent mark on my own in such a hard course.  In a way, it was the best 6 weeks my father and I ever spent together.

The teacher ended up keeping 3/4 of the exam the same with the exception of the 3 long word problems at the end of which we only had to choose one for 20 marks.  The one I chose was a variation of a question I had worked on earlier with my dad and was the hardest question by far on the exam.  Helen and I had agreed to answer some questions wrong so as to not raise suspicion ... but that hard question at the end I did by myself and got perfect on it.  The teacher even wrote "excellent work" beside his check mark and the 20/20.  In a life full of failed schemes, answering that question correctly on my own is still one of the best moments of my life and the best way I have ever honoured my father.

My final grade was 81% and Helen beat me with an 88% and promptly broke up with me after the last class, not that I had ever kissed her or anything.

I had the month of August to figure out how I was going to scheme my way through 4 more subjects to get into University, but at least getting into University was starting to look like it was a possibility.

There was a new determination to me and I absolutely did not want to go back to the same high school and not only have to fight every day but also have to carry that stupid workload of 4 or 5 subjects for the whole year, there had to be another way.

Then a friend on my hockey team, Bobby, told me he wouldn't be playing the upcoming year because he was going to be working.  "Well what about school?" I asked him thinking he was quitting high school and he told me he was just working the first semester and would return to school the second semester.

Semester?  What's a semester?  I had never heard of it I just assumed that every school in the city operated the same way my school did.  No they did not and not only that but some schools were ranked differently in terms of how tough or easy the school was.  This was all news to me.

"Well what's my school rated as?" I wanted to know and went off to research it.  There it was ... Woodlands was #3 right behind Lorne Park and Clarkson as the schools with the toughest curriculum. (times have changed heh)

My next question to myself was "where is the closest yet lowest ranked school to my home?" and the answer was T.L. Kennedy Semester School for the Retarded.  Well that wasn't in the school name but it was at the bottom of the list and was only 20 minutes away from me so I paid the school a visit to inquire about enrolling.

Ambitiously I asked to sign up for the remaining 4 courses that I needed to graduate Grade 13 with so that I could finish and be in University by January.

"Oh it doesn't work like that" the Councillor told me.

"Why not?"

"Well you see, everybody applies for University at the mid-term break in the second semester and they accept you sometime before school ends so you can choose the university you wish to attend before you leave school."

A light bulb went off in my head.  I asked to see the school calendar.  True enough there it was ... March 7th Spring Break.  I felt like Indiana Jones after he found the holy grail except I had found something even greater ... I had found my scheme to get into University.

Why on earth would I endure a whole year of school when all the University's allowed students to submit their marks for consideration at the beginning of March?

An even better idea than that was, why attend school at all in the first semester?  All I had to do was enroll in four courses for January and survive 8 short weeks until March 7th.  Could I survive that?  I asked to see the course selection booklet and i took that home to iron out the rest of my scheme.

I scanned the booklet looking for weaknesses, a hole in the system, something that I could exploit.  But my thinking was all wrong, I was looking at the courses griping about how boring this course would be or how much writing that course would be.

I started to refine my thinking.  Nobody at T.L Kennedy knew me from Adam.  Any course where marks were subjective to teachers opinion were dangerous.  I had to take courses where there were only right and wrong answers.

The first course that jumped off the page at me was Accounting because I had taken it in grade 11 and  again in grade 12.  True I had only scored 65% in it both times but I remembered the beginning of the course to be laughably easy and then got progressively harder and infinitely more boring from the second month on.  But all I needed was 8 weeks ... and the first 4 of those weeks would be a review of things I had already studied two times before.  I reasoned that with effort I could easily get perfect on my first 2 tests and then hold on for dear life until the spring break.

I ticked off Accounting as my first course for the second semester.

Business Math I had done with my dad when I was younger.  Though I hated it back then I also remembered the introductory chapters to be relatively easy compared to the later chapters.  Surely I could handle Calculus I could study with my dad for 8 weeks and ace the first 3 business math courses.  I ticked that course off as well.

Why I chose Chemistry I have no idea.  I assumed it would be as easy as it had been in Grade 11 and there was no subjectivity to the answers I would either get them wrong or I would get them right.  I honestly didn't think that selection through very well and in retrospect I suspect it was the schemer gods guiding my hand that day to choose Chemistry.

My final selection was Geography because I figured it would be hard to screw up a test in that course in the first 2 months.

The only problem was the Councillor wouldn't let me choose 4 courses that she deemed impossible to pass all at once given my prior school record.  I assured her that at the first moment my grades fell I would come to talk to her and she okay'd my selections.

Boy was I right about Accounting.  I met my first and only friend in that class, a Peruvian immigrant named Jorge and I helped him through the first part of the course as his English was holding him back.  When March came I had 100% still because like I had suspected seeing the same questions early on for the third time made the tests very easy.

Three down, three to go.

Business Math I worked on with my dad and the teacher only gave us 3 tests going into the Spring break.  I got perfect on them all.

Four down, two to go.

Geography, as i had suspected the essays and written assignments which were subjective answers gave the teacher room to hand them back to me with marks in the low 80's but I aced his multiple choice style tests and handed in a not too shabby 92% mark for my next to last mark for university.

Five down, one to go.

Ah thank you schemer gods for Chemistry.  Thank you dad for also being a genius in Chemistry.  Thank you teacher for leaving the final exam in your briefcase unlocked ... again!

Dad helped me survive the first test by studying with me every night.  Even so, I only got a 70% and was ready to drop the whole course as it was getting very hard very fast and I was completely lost by the end of January. That was the only test we had and we were marked on little quizzes and miraculously ... homework assignments which I completed with my dad.  In a course where I knew absolutely nothing about what was going on, dad saved me and come March 1st I had a 90% to submit to the university.

So the day came where we were told to pick up our university selection forms and we were to have them filled out and turned in before March 7th the first day of the spring break.  I didn't think it would work.  I thought they'd see right through my little scam.  Here I was submitting 6 hard subjects with a 92.5% average and only last year I was struggling to get 50% in half of my subjects?

I sent in the forms and relaxed for the week thinking I was home free if and only if they didn't somehow research how I had attained the A+ average.  I had 7 days of rest and relaxation before my scheme was ripped apart like the Titanic hitting that iceburg.

Trying to maintain an A average on 4 courses in a single semester when you're known as a schemer is like pole vaulting into the wind.  I was going to crash it was just a matter of when.

By April my overall average had slipped into the 70's with Business Math getting harder by the day and Chemistry might as well have been taught in Russian as I understood none of it.  I needed to call a time out, fake an injury, freeze time ... anything to avoid having to take any more tests.

So I faked mononucleosis.  Bad idea.

Not only was I dropped out of school faster than a fat kid drops broccoli but I was told I needed a doctor's letter to be able to come back.  This was my introduction to forgery as I went off to see about stealing a prescription pad from my Doctor.  I just needed something with letterhead on it and then I needed somebody with adult like handwriting to write me the note ... ah the guy from Iraq who managed the 3 For 1 pizza store close to my house ... he'd be willing to play doctor if I bought a few extra pizza's from him.

Bingo, a day later Dr. Ali Hakim Hussein the pizza guy cleared me to return to school and I used the week off to study like I had never studied before.  It was the end of April and I could see the finish line now just about 6 short weeks away.

Though they were slipping I knew I could keep Accounting, Business Math, and Geography afloat for the 6 weeks but Chemistry was a lost cause.  I had slipped into the 60's and was fading fast.  Then, the schemer gods intervened again by way of some fool starting an accidental fire in auto shop class.  In Chemistry I sat at the back of the class right in front of the safety sink and the table where the flasks were kept and when everybody got out of their seats to clear the building for what they thought was a fire drill I ducked behind the table.

Everybody cleared the school and i ran to lock the door and began to search the teachers desk for a miracle like the one I found in Calculus.  What I found was located inside the teacher's briefcase ... A final exam but it was dated from August so the teacher must have last taught Chemistry in summer school the same time I had been in Calculus.  In fact, there were a few of them all identical stuffed into a brown folder.  As well, sitting there was the test that was scheduled for the following Monday and there was no way I could copy all the questions from both.

I folded and shoved the final exam down my pants and wrote feverishly fast all the questions I could from the test.  I heard sirens outside the window and was begging for the emergency to be a real fire so I could get all the questions copied over.  As it turned out, I had time to spare ... only if I didn't risk trying to copy out the much longer final exam.

Keeping the final exam in my pants I escaped unnoticed but feared he would announce back in class that there was a missing final exam copy stolen from his briefcase.  He never noticed.

This time I simply confessed to my dad what I had done.  Even if he sat down and tried to teach me what a mole was all night long the next day it'd still be the thing under Ronda Rousey's left eye.  Yes I'm skipping time periods there but other than the Austin Power's GoldMember movie can you think of somebody else with a more recognizable mole?

Answering Chemistry test and exam questions for 3 hours is a delightful evening of fun for my dad so at the same table I studied for my next Accounting test while he wrote down the answers like he was doing kindergarten math.  I knew all that evening that I had punched my ticket to University and I kept my head down and studied quietly but with a smile on my face.

Memorizing that test got me two things, a mark of 100% and a note to report to the principal's office.  I played Ostrich and stuck my head in the ground refusing to go see the principal at the prescribed time and i don't know why but nothing more ever came of it.  Maybe it was coincidental, maybe it wasn't that serious a meeting that had been scheduled, but for whatever reason my no-show went unnoticed and June along with it's final exams were upon me.

Before the first final exam ... Chemistry I received a letter in the mail from the University of Toronto.

It was an invitation to enroll in their Bachelor of Arts program with a full scholarship to Year 1 ... under the condition that i maintained my marks through to the end of the current semester.

I went into the Chemistry exam praying to all the schemer gods in the universe that the chemistry teacher was a lazy ass and he'd re present the same summer school exam as this years final exam.

The loudest stifled scream in the history of high school students has to be awarded to me for the moment I turned the exam over and saw every memorized question from the exam I had stolen I shrieked with joy inside my chest cavity.

I had done it.

Without remorse I answered every single Chemistry question perfectly thanks to dad and walked out of that exam knowing i had scored a perfect 100%.

Would it raise eyebrows?  Certainly.  Did I care?  Not a single bit, I had used that high school to get me into university and now I was done with it.

There are no rules.

That's what I learned that year when I turned my life around dramatically.  If you don't like the environment you are in ... get out.  If you don't like the rules you have to work under ... make your own.  Beg, borrow, lie, cheat, steal, ... do whatever it is you have to do to get where you have to go and if you feel guilty about it just recite Captain Kirk's line from Star Trek 3 ...

"the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many."

Dad Stories: The Indestructible Driveway

Dear Present Owner of :

3395 Kelowna Court

Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

L5C 2E5

If all humans disappeared from the earth and 10,000 years from now some alien archaeologists visited the planet Earth to see who had lived here before they would find only 3 clues that humans once inhabited this place.  The only remaining structures not consumed by the planet would be:

• The Pyramids of Egypt
• Göbekli Tepe
• Your driveway

Yes, thanks to my father my old house will one day be consumed by this planet but the driveway (from the sidewalk to the garage) will remain forever.  

Alien archaeologists will one day debate just how the structure was built so I feel it is my duty to create a historical record describing just how the feat was accomplished.  

It started on a Friday morning near the end of June somewhere around 1985 when I was awoken by panicked cries from my dad as he thundered up and down the stairs yelling out "oh no" repeatedly.  I passed him on the stairs on the way to the kitchen to get some cereal before heading off to one of the last days of school for the year.  

"problems...we got big problems man ... we have some big big problems" he kept saying to no one in particular as he clattered down the stairs to the basement once more.  I didn't want to know.  I never wanted to know anything when he was in that sort of mood because it meant some huge task was about to be undertook.  

My dad was a compulsive workaholic and putting in 12 hour shifts at the Post Office was never enough.  If the world wasn't ending in some some sort of manner that required fixing he would make mountains out of molehills and since the house wasn't falling into a sinkhole I figured it was the latter scenario that had him in such a tizzy that morning.  

After my bowl of Sugar Crisps was finished I headed down to the dryer in the basement to get some clothes to wear for school and it was there, in the left room as I walked down the stairs, behind the washer and dryer I saw the "big problem" ... a little bit of water had formed where the floor met the wall.  

Now I am no civil engineer, I don't know anything about structural integrity and i am equally clueless about house leaks.  My educated guess then was and still is to this day that there could have been a crack in the drainage pipe outside the house and some water had managed to seep through the brick and concrete foundation of our house but it wasn't anything that would escalate and cause the house to collapse.  

But dad thought so.  

Fine I thought, he'll have to get down to where the drainage pipes are and find a way to replace one of the sections.  Well at least it'll give him something to do for the day.  I headed back up to take a shower and get ready for school. 

By the time I headed out the back door dad was already knee deep in driveway asphalt and dirt digging merrily away.  

"See ya after school dad."

"Just hope you have a house to come back to, it could all be gone by the time you get back, you hear me?  GONE."

Morning Calculus suddenly seemed not such a bad thing after all, and I headed off to school leaving my dad and his shovel behind.

Coming down Erinmore Drive after school and turning the corner to Kelowna Court that day is one of those images that is captured in my head forever.  

If you position the google map camera to the street corner and looked at my house you would see our house like this and right where the stairs hit the driveway i saw only dirt flying in the air from a massive hole in the ground.  

I remember stopping and not moving for a minute and just watching the tip of this shovel throw dirt from the massive hole and occasionally see my dad's hand or arm throw up a rock.  

This sort of thing was common growing up with dad.  There was always some crazy idea or project that he had going to keep him busy and this was the first sign that a new one had arrived.

So as I walked upto the house I saw that he had dug an eight foot deep trench starting from the back door to the steps beside the house and was about as wide as two outstretched arms.  

Did Noah have a son?  This is what his son must have felt like seeing his dad building the frame of the Ark on the first day.  

"Well good luck dad i've got homework."

"I need your help.  This has to be done right now, it can't wait."  

I didn't want to get into a fight about it,  I didn't want to get hit so I just resigned myself to my fate and grabbed a shovel to help dig.  

Except when I climbed down into the trench I saw that he had replaced all the sewage tubes that ran pretty much under the house, he had dug that deep.  So why in the hell was he still digging?  

"They all have to be replaced now, no sense in just replacing those ones" he said.  

"Are you serious?" I said looking at the distance from the stairs to the sidewalk.  It was equidistant to the trench he had already built.  I'm not even 6 feet tall so the driveway is actually above me by about 2 feet and in front of me is just a wall of dirt and rock.  In the trench he had a pickaxe and a shovel.  The futility of one flinging one shovel full of dirt up onto the driveway was so apparent to me that I couldn't fathom why he couldn't see it as well.  For heaven's sake just hire somebody to come with a construction site digger hoe and the job would be done in a matter of hours.  But noooo ... everything with him had to be done the hard way.

11pm mercifully came some 7 hours later and my dad was all in a fluster again as he climbed out of the trench which had yet to reach the sidewalk screaming that he was going to be late for work.  I too climbed out of the hole completely exhausted.  How could somebody go to work after digging all day, and without sleep from the previous shift as well?  My dad could.  He could work 3 days straight with no sleep if it meant saving the world, or his house.  

He did exactly that.  From Friday morning until late Sunday night I don't remember him ever taking more than a 30 minute nap from time to time.  Not only did he reach the sidewalk and replace the sewage pipes but he had also gone and bought a trailer to hitch to the back of our AMC Gremlin ... then built 4 walls around it with plywood ... and had made over 100 trips to the Burnhamthorpe Bridge which at the time was under construction and was a perfect place to dump all the dirt and rock we had removed.  Then he unhitched the trailer and drove off to work for his 8 hour shift at the Post Office and stayed to put in 4 hours of overtime which he tried to do every single night.  

And there ya go ... project done right?  

Well that's what I thought.  He had fixed the leak in the house by installing all new drainage pipes what else was there to be done?  

I found out Monday afternoon coming home from school when once again I rounded the corner of Erinmore Drive only to be met by a new surprise.

Naturally I had assumed that he would do what needed to be done to fill in the trench and everything would be back to normal.  But now I found him once again 8 feet deep and this time 8 feet wide in what was not a trench but a full blown crater in the earth.  He had extended the same trench to the edge of the driveway of the house next door and he was intending to self dig this thing all the way to the sidewalk.  Look at my driveway!  You see how long that sucker is?  Listen up you alien archaeologists ... I had to dig that monstrous hole every day for 12 hours for a week to begin my summer vacation.  It was the second most miserable time of my life.  The most miserable being what happened once we reached the sidewalk finally.  

People were coming from miles around to take photos of this massive hole being dug by a crazy man and his retard son.  The neighbour to our right as you look at the driveway called the police, the mayor, pretty much anybody to get my dad to stop his project.  The guy had a van and a car and every day until my dad started his project he had to switch the order that his cars were parked so either he or his wife could leave conveniently in the morning.  Ah Manfred, that was his name, it just came to me after all these years.  

Ya so Manfred was a bit pissed to say the least.  He couldn't shift his cars.  He couldn't drive straight into the driveway as well because he feared his wife would back her car out into the abyss that was once our side of the driveway and be killed.

Nobody could do anything to stop my dad and to him that was absolutely wonderful.  After a lifetime of living in rooms for rent and taking orders from landlords now he was the landlord and by god he was going to do whatever the hell he pleased while he was the owner of his property.  

By mid July the abyss had been dug out completely.  I was woken up the very next morning by the crashing back door of a dump truck depositing a ten foot high mound of rock on the street in front of our house.  

Then moments later another dump truck came and deposited another ten foot pile of rock right beside the first pile.  Then another came, and another.  

Mr.Wicks the neighbour to our left came out and I remember him hollering "that's enough, that's enough" because the new city of rocks had intruded their way to the front of his house as well.  More dump trucks came around the corner and waited.  A large crowd began to gather on Erinmore Drive.  

Mr. Wicks and Manfred tolerated my dad and all his antics I suppose because until that point they hadn't really argued.  This mess of rocks however was the straw that broke the camel's back ... both backs simultaneously and they were screaming at my dad at the tops of their lungs.  To which my dad came inside the house to scream out my name.

"Hurry we have to get these rocks put away. Come on hurry...hurry."

"Put them away where?"  

"In the driveway.  Come on let's go."

"Are you kidding me?"  I remember thinking that had to be an all day project, and I looked at the dump trucks waiting down Erinmore Drive thinking just how many more are coming behind those ones?

So, his plan was to fill in half the hole with rocks, 5 feet of rocks about 25 meters long and 10 feet wide.  With 2 little shovels.

It wasn't a one day chore.  It was a two day chore that had my back twitching out of control the final few hours from the manual labour.  

When i'd fall like a slab of marble into my bed at night dad would be getting ready to zip off to work like a machine.  

Again I was awoken by crashes outside the house.  See I told you waking up to the impossible, the incredible and the inexplicable was a frequent occurrence in my household.  Is it any wonder my mother up and abandoned us in the middle of the day when I was 2 years old?  

All morning long dad would disappear with his car and an empty trailer only to reappear an hour later with the trailer overflowing with every type of metal imaginable that could be found in a junk yard.  Discarded metal bed frames.  I-Frame pieces of iron.  Steel poles.  Pieces of fencing.  It was right out of the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Richard Dreyfus starts ripping up the garden and throws its contents into his living room.  By 10am the pile of metal was as high as the tree trunk you can see in front of the house, say about 12 feet tall.  

He came up to get me just after ten in the morning and it was the first time I made a stand against my dad and said "no i'm not taking part in this any longer."  The movie Close Encounters has stuck with me forever because his wife leaves with the kids in that scene and it closely resembles how I felt at that moment as well.  It was enough.  

He worked by himself that day spreading all the metal over the 5 feet of rocks up and down the length of the driveway.  It was for support.  I suppose he knew that one day the alien archaeologists would visit in their spacecraft and the driveway had to be strong enough to support the weight of their ship.  Well the driveway is thicker than the Space Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center, that baby is only a mere 15 inches of concrete deep.  So if our driveway can handle a shuttle landing for sure it can handle any alien ship out there in the galaxy. 

I thought by making a stand and refusing to help that I had bought my ticket out of the rest of the project.  Wrong!  It bought me a one day reprieve only as I was woken up by ... anyone?  anyone?  

Yes, more dump truck clanging. 

This time 10 dump trucks I kid you not were lined up down the street waiting to dump their payloads in front of the house.  First rocks, then dirt, more rocks, more dirt  ... until there were 10 piles of them taking up half the Court on which we lived.  A Canadian Tire store truck came down the road then and two dudes popped out and began unloading bags of concrete by the hundred's ... laying them right there on the sidewalk 10 stacks high.  The final thing they wheeled out was a manual stirring cement mixer. 

Guess what dad intended to do with the remaining 3 feet of space above the rocks and metal?  

If you said self mix and pour the concrete, you're right again.

It was like pissing into a pool to try and fill it up.  We started about 7 in the morning.  Here's the kicker ... once you start you can't stop until the entire project is done.  

Why you ask?  Well the concrete will dry and not mix with the new concrete being poured if a break was taken thus causing a gap.  

It was back breaking work.  To this day it was the longest I ever worked without stopping.  But somewhere around 10pm I couldn't lift my shovel, nor could I turn the cement mixer, my muscles couldn't take it.  So we had to take a break, or at least I did.  

I collapsed on the grass in front of our house and my dad had to stop to mix his own concrete all the while shouting out for me to wake up as the concrete was drying.  

If you go visit the house, about two-thirds of the way up the driveway, right where the front of the house finally meets the concrete you can see a small gap.  That's the point where I collapsed and dad had to do without me for an hour or so.  Just as he promised, the concrete we were pouring had begun to dry and once I had joined back in the new concrete indeed did not mix completely with the older concrete and the gap was formed.  

At 3am the last bucket of concrete was poured from the mixer and the driveway project had come to an end, thankfully.

I hated that project.  I hated our driveway, it looked and probably still does look odd and uneven.  But by god is it ever strong.  

Then about a good year afterwards, i'd say it was the following June because I remember being home on a weekday when it happened, a team of construction workers and their vehicles arrived on our court to begin their own project of removing the old sidewalk and replacing the entire Court with new tiles.

They had a digger truck drive up the driveway of each house and smashed the concrete sidewalk to pieces.  Then it would scoop up the bits along with some dirt and extra driveway to make room for the guys coming along behind laying new concrete.

"Well this is going to be interesting" I thought to myself.  I went inside to make a kettle of tea and sat down on the front porch to watch the show.  

When they reached my house the digger truck was able to smash the sidewalk without a hitch but trying to dig in to remove the bits of concrete was impossible.  It tried about 100 times to smash our driveway so it could angle the arm to come in and collect the smashed sidewalk but it only chipped the driveway mildly.  Again, if the alien archaeologists or the present home owners wish to see evidence of this you can go look at the end of the driveway and see the divots where the construction crew tried to break through the 8th wonder of the universe.

So there you go.  The story of the world's strongest driveway has been told.  If the owner's of the house are reading this .... if you ever have a leak in the laundry room, or what was the laundry room when we owned it ... then you have the absolute right to repeat what my dad said all those years ago

"We have problems, big problems, big, huge."

Because there is no way anybody will ever dig that baby up.  At least not until the Alien archaeologists come that is :)