‘All the news that fits…’
A sabbatical, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English, is a “paid period of leave granted to a university teacher for study or travel, traditionally one year for every year worked.”
And that’s what my friend, a Southwick College anthropologist, wanted, and probably needed. He’d had a rough few years and figure he’d earned the prize that would rocket him to Britain, a land which, in the day, was not quite as accessible as it is now that every grade school kid seems capable of whipping across the pond for a weekend of West End theatre.
Well, the Cunard conveyance of our man’s choice promptly became loaded down with a steamer trunk full of books and socks, a bit of his librarian wife’s archival paraphernalia, and his golf clubs. To follow behind, at weekly intervals, was a 12-month subscription to the Barra Bay Beacon, a weekly journal once claimed by its editor to cover Hampstead County like a wet blanket.
He wasn’t quite sure why the Beacon, except maybe for protection; he didn’t want to come home the next summer ignorant of his neighbour’s garden club trophies, or his pastor’s elevation to a bishopric. He knew he wouldn’t need it to wrap garbage; there’d be plenty of London tabloid help with that. In truth, he later reflected, the paper was bound to serve a few vaguely personal needs, but likely to go unnoticed at his desk, at his doorstep, at his tube station.
But, as it turned out, he was wrong because, shortly, with dank metropolitan evenings crying out for comic relief, there formed, in his Russell Square flat, a kind of literary society, headquartering all sorts of oddballs, young post-doctoral botanists from Glasgow, junior diplomats from New Delhi and Canberra, expatriate flamenco dancers from Barcelona, all convening breathlessly to learn the latest from Canada’s mysterious east. Friday nights they’d huddle over steaming cups of muscatel and listen to the tidings emanating from distant hamlets like Robinson River and Moser Marsh.
Soon there wasn’t much this strange international set didn’t know about Barra’s little college town and its surroundings. They could first-name most of the Methodists in Boynton and could parrot the gist of their recent sermons; they celebrated almost all the birthdays of Bayside and knew the candle-counts; they commiserated with the man from McGovern’s Mills who was enjoying poor health and hoisted their mugs toward the young couple’s wedding reception in the Blauvelt Settlement Legion; they crossed the strait for bait; they welcomed kin home from the city for Thanksgiving; they flocked to baptisms and wakes; they followed the edgy teenager westward bound to his first job. And they laughed until their infinitives split at jumbled spelling and fractured syntax and, most of all, at a small town’s definition of news. All those cosmopolitans, clustered in the shadow of Westminster, convulsed at how wedding anniversaries and Aunt Maud’s hysterectomy would fetch up on Page One. Quaint, I guess you’d say; uproariously eccentric on occasion, I suppose; real cornpone stuff, you’d have to admit. Well, wasn’t it? Doesn’t everybody chuckle at that sort of thing? Isn’t it funny? Yup. But it’s something else too. It’s a mark of a community’s confidence and comfort in its own skin where the most mundane experiences are shared with the world and where there’s value and perhaps a bit of intrigue in simple acts. The streets of cities teem with the bored and disillusioned, but when Gladys cruises the shopping centre in Antigonish, she’s having fun and wants everybody to know it. Once, in a careless moment, I let drop to my wife that someday I wouldn’t mind owning the Barra Bay Beacon. When she regained consciousness, she asked: Would you change it? I thought for a second and then said: “Not much.”