The Doc duked out the doldrums
I’m not native to these parts and only occasionally do I let it slip that it was from the toxicity of Ontario that I was blown — and hauled by my parents — into this hallowed trinity of seaside duchies nigh on to 70 years ago. Thereafter, this tiny, slightly isolated world has been kind to me, or at least lenient; encouraging, or at least acquiescent; welcoming, or at least tolerant. In various ways it has nurtured me, instructed me, protected me. It was provided me with family, friendship and a certain finance. This part of the continent owes me nothing on which I have native dibs.
Except that I’m going to glom on to one thing more, not counting the unalienable right to grouse about the price of gas, the colour of the water and the fact that we don’t seem to be able to keep our kids from leaving home once they’re 15. What I demand, with gentle eastern tact, is permission to celebrate surrounding odd-balls.
Naturally, there are many, most of them one-dimensional, never actually going beyond being the local drunk, the loud-mouthed cab driver, the dim-witted councilman, the demonstrative hockey dad. Each, of course, is legion.
But the Doc! Now in him there was a kind of catholicity of nutdom, his ever-expanding wardrobe of eccentric mental fashion that brightened a lot of the neighbourhoods that, back in the day, he’d cruise through in his polished red Austen Somerset en route to an academic dais. There, he’d preach various gospels, e.g. according to Karl Marx, Groucho Marx or Elmer Marx, the school’s superintendent of infrastructure maintenance.
With the placid exuberance common to his Ottawa Valley roots, the Doc, for a decade, whirled ’round his scholarly range titillating successive collections of undergraduates even as he enraged elder faculty colleagues and as he’d lead the young in dubious — and probably illegal — intrigues. He dined out on preposterous theories, absurd social, economic, political and religious propositions: he’d foster socialized medicine, he’d strongly favour the abolition of the nation’s death penalty, frequently encourage laws favouring bi- and transsexual realities; he’d have legalized marijuana in a twinkling. Once, at the height of some ancient Maritime Union debate, he publicly proposed a politicoadministrative compromise that would have seen the building of public service and legislative facilities on a raft to be hauled, with legislative authority and at prescribed intervals, to and from strategic locations along the Atlantic seaboard.
Always the politician and, forever, a rose-coloured Tory, he did, for a while, have a swat at running the town where he lived and worked.
He’d begun as an alderman but eventually became one of history’s more unorthodox mayors, a job wherein he was once excoriated for fluoridating the water supply, and pilloried as a “Communist.” It was as that “Communist” that he infiltrated the local Board of Trade and would eventually — if briefly — become its president. Meanwhile, not infrequently, he’d wander in and out of various county jails, dragging friends and students, and taking notes. The Austen Somerset relegated to a garage somewhere, a motor scooter became transport du jour.
Alas, the itchy feet motivated migration and Doc would trundle back west, where, for the next couple of decades, he’d grace other ivied halls with his emerging, unorthodox — if maturing — creeds and cockamamy. He’d walk sacred halls with chancellors and bishops, aid and abet state congresses, occasionally take negative minority positions on matters he had once championed.
And, no surprise, his affinities would evolve. He became lairdlike, prancing the grounds of fiefdoms he would inherit in one or two small liberal arts colleges that would stoke his nascent passion for history, heraldry and fine wines. Tiring of the scooter he would buy a canal boat and, in summers, amuse citizens along British and European inland water systems. He would take up with the Exemplary Order of St. Babar of Belarus. He’d become a knight of the Order of Catullus the Curious and a card-carrying pooh-bah of the Worshipful Company of Cricketeers. It would figure that he’d continue with the classy and quirky, the inscrutable and audacious.
The Doc died 11 years ago — with a satisfied smirk on his face. I hadn’t seen him for years but his very memory continues to conquer the commonplace.
He still drives away the dulls.
“Except that I’m going to glom on to one thing more, not counting the unalienable right to grouse about the price of gas, the colour of the water and the fact that we don’t seem to be able to keep our kids from leaving home once they’re 15.”