Joining In: Things CAN Be Different

I’m feeling a little bit melancholy today. I have recently lost treasured friends and am compelled to reminisce about my former life and the things that used to go on in our society that seem to be quickly going extinct as the landscape of our local communities within this country and the world becomes more stark and foreign to my eyes.

The home where I lived for the majority of my years in Calgary was within a couple of blocks of the home of the renowned Canadian scholar, Mayor of Calgary (1963-1965), Lieutenant Governor of Alberta (1966-1974), Officer of the Order of Canada, friendly acquaintance and client of my Father’s veterinary practice, and [far more importantly to me] one of my most humbling personal role models and mentors, Mr. Grant MacEwan.

Every day that he travelled from his home to work at the University of Calgary and back (or wherever else he roamed), he passed in front of my home as he walked on his way down our street. I remember it from as early an age as 7yrs old, shortly after we moved into that neighbourhood.

I remember it quite clearly from those early years because Mr. MacEwan was regularly involved in the Stampede Parade and many charitable events, besides just being the nice man who visited our veterinary clinic regularly to discuss one of his favourite subjects and former professions, Animal Husbandry, while we tended to his cats.

I came to know the fuller scope of work that Mr. MacEwan engaged in and soon realised that he was so busy helping everyone else by creating an educational and social legacy for our country that he didn’t often have much time to spend on himself. In my earliest years I often made it a point to meet him with a cup of tea in the morning at the end of our front walk to aid him in his travels, standing there in my pyjamas feeling like I was serving some former King. After all, I had seen him on the television with Her Majesty – Queen Elizabeth!

Every winter the snow on the sidewalk outside would grow dangerously deep within no time at all when it was really coming down and I would worry about him trudging through it in the dark. I decided to do something about it one day near Christmas as a seasonal favour – since everyone was in the mood to give. I made myself get up at 5 o’clock the next morning and bundled myself shabbily against the cold as best as any young boy can. I carried our BIG shovel up to the end of our street where the bus stop was and started shovelling my way back home, hoping to reach my mark in time to also serve him some tea. Oh, how a child overestimates their abilities and underestimates the difficulty of a task at hand. I only made it about halfway there when he walked up to me and quickly passed by with just a tiny nod and a small gestured wave of recognition. That was enough. He may as well have shouted out the loudest honours imaginable so the whole street could hear. I was thrilled!

That was the first time I made that effort. After a while I could shovel much farther and, thanks to Mr. MacEwan directing our Scout troop in winter survival basics, was always much better turned out against the cold. It wasn’t too long before I could shovel all the way down our street and beyond - all the way to his front doorsteps! The first day I finally made it that far I felt like I had really accomplished something meaningful in my life.

Eventually, as the years went by, I noticed that his home and garden had fallen into quite a state of disrepair. I doubt Mr. MacEwan even noticed as it was usually dark when he would leave home and then again when he would return. Besides, he was always deep in thought about some kind of current issue affecting the greater community. I figured that he probably didn’t have magical night vision capabilities, no matter how skilled he was. Clearly he had a disability that needed compensating for, right?

Instead of just watching the place rot around him as so many people are apt to do these days, I began dragging our lawnmower over there regularly during the warmer months as well. This wasn’t easy since I had to lift it over the metal-pole stiles to get it through the back alley passageway – which was much better than going two blocks out of my way if I wanted to easily roll it down the street. This eventually became a somewhat lucrative form of advertising for me and several people along the way would ask me to mow their lawns for CASH! The idea of being paid for my services had never entered my mind before that. That summer I made over $800 and was able to put $500 towards our Scout group to secretly fund some less wealthy members to enjoy a big local Jamboree and I still had enough cash left over for that year’s early Christmas sales. I never asked Mr. MacEwan for a penny since I always figured that he had paid enough, and was still selflessly paying more with his continuing personal sacrifices.

I would see him nearly every morning for the next 18yrs as I stepped outside to collect our newspaper, or shortly thereafter, while I sat reading it. He was one of those incredible people who you could trust to be more reliable than the clock on the wall. Clearing the path for his success, humbly, became a minor adolescent life-mission of mine. He regularly thanked me quietly whenever he would walk by and I was in the act. One day he stopped in for a cup of tea and a chat to tell me he’d be out of the country for a while, and to ask if I would keep an eye on his home for him while he was away (as there had been a number of break-ins that year). My parents were the local Blockwatch Captains after all, but the job of maintaining all the communications, flyers, and call-outs usually fell into my hands so he came directly to me!

After some time alone in this service another boy I came to know well just showed up out of the blue and started helping me in the MacEwan’s yard one day while I was trimming some trees that had been damaged by a windstorm. He didn’t come up and talk to me about it or ask what he might do, he just walked up and put his hands to the task even though I’d never seen him before in my life. I’m certain that others in the neighbourhood noticed and pitched in over the years, too. The job seemed to get easier and the bags of yard waste I would cart away got lighter all the time. Nobody ever really said anything to each other about it, we just did it because it needed doing. The same as you should do for anyone you see in need, or anything you notice that needs doing.

One day I showed up to do the yard work and was shocked to see a whole gang of professional gardeners in the midst of giving the place a well-needed facelift and prepping the house for a new coat of paint. I recognised my helper was one of them as he walked up to me. He said that they’d be doing all of the yard work for him with his Father's new company from now on and that I would only need to worry about the winter snow clearing. That’s when I started mowing lawns all around throughout our neighbourhood, since I was used to a certain amount of work. I tried to figure out who needed the help more and concentrated on our most elderly neighbour’s needs first.

Always clearing the path for Mr. MacEwan became just one of my regular things, like waving at friends, or walking to the store to buy milk. Then one morning as I sat at our dining table reading quietly and watching for him to pass, he didn’t. I read in the paper the next morning, with great sadness to discover, that his precious wife had died. The next time I spoke with him he told me he was going to be slowing himself down and doing other things, so he wouldn’t be catching the bus all the time like he used to, adding that, “You shan’t need to keep on shoveling snow off of every damned thing in the city anymore.” A very odd thing it was, to hear him use even the slightest profanity. He told me that I should do something else now - whatever I might enjoy a little bit more for myself for a change, while helping others too. He was sad, but at the same time he seemed a little bit freer than he had for years as he had constantly worried about his wife being on her own. It was getting home to his wife every night that made him always be in such a hurry as he walked by.

My services were no longer needed by Mr. MacEwan and I felt a certain amount of personal satisfaction knowing that I had not faltered in fulfilling the commitment I had made to myself, and doing what little I could throughout those years to make things easier for him in that small way. I rarely ever saw him after that.

On May 6, 2000, Mr. MacEwan received the Golden Pen Lifetime Achievement Award for literary achievements by the Writers Guild of Alberta. The award has only been given to one other person: W.O. Mitchell. He died a month later and was given a State Funeral in Edmonton, Alberta. (Thanks to Wikipedia and the modern Creative Commons that was inspired by scholars such as this, for providing information freely.)

What brought him to my mind recently and caused me to be inspired to write this passage was simply the mention of the Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton during proceedings at the conference I recently attended. Whenever I hear his name I feel a great deal of pride well up inside of me for him and what he was able to accomplish, not for what little we in the community had done to support his efforts.

I got a big grin when I started writing this and looked up a few dates on his Wikipedia page only to find a quote that I could clearly remember hearing him say more than just a few times. I easily drew his voice from deep within the mists of the past without any effort, to hear it repeating again this common mantra of his.

“If you’re awake, you better be doing something.”

…Damned good words of advice, if you ask my opinion.

I’d like to add to that, as Mr. MacEwan insisted one should always add something beneficial to the good works and words left by others. It should continue on by saying, “…to make our world a better place today.”

  

Conclusion

We must stop viewing the varied assistance we give to others as something significant which we are granting them in meager compensation for skills we believe they lack, and start combining the entire constellation of talents existing within us all towards the creation of a compassionate society built out of joint assistance and support for everyone. Then, maybe we’ll all be able to achieve our mutually intended greatness together. It’s also the way we may build a truly caring family out of the greater community around us.

It’s what most young boys used to do out of the normal course of social habit, not so very long ago.

BTW- It was Mr. Grant MacEwan who presented me with my Queen’s Scout Award. He also made it a point to attend a number of other important award ceremonies, silly little plays and other functions that I was involved in throughout my lifetime, and even visited me in the hospital on occasion as if he were a beloved member of my immediate family - which is something that I suppose he really was, on a grander scale of thinking. His legacy will not easily be forgotten.


Follow Up
“Colonel Grant smiled at me!” I said to my Mother when she got up that first day I tried to shovel the snow and clear his path. Looking back I can imagine just how confusing of a creature I was to her back then. I called him Colonel Grant because; I had always heard him called Grant within our ‘group’, and I knew he was previously a Lieutenant Governor but didn’t know the difference. He always carried himself with such strength and poise that I mistook it for a military man’s affect. I don’t believe that he was ever in the military and see no reference to it in his online biographical references. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have a military life since many people who were drafted into service during those times would rather forget their experience to the point of refusing to acknowledge it. He also looked a bit like Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes to my childish eyes. So, therein lays the source of my childish misconception. For the ensuing history of our interactions I always referred to him as Colonel MacEwan in our ‘group’. When he was coming into the clinic for an appointment my Father would tell me, “The Colonels coming in today.” or some similar variation on that theme. I also seem to think that there may be an error in the data from Wikipedia regarding the date of his eventual demise – Hmmm… wish I had time to check into it, but I’m awake and there are some things that I’d better be doing instead.