During a lull in the poker game everybody else had either gone to the washroom or the bar. I turned to my friend Al Baker, a perfectly happy bachelor then in his early 40s, and asked him why he never got married. “Well, Lyman,” he said, “anybody I ever wanted didn’t want me. And I always figured it’s better to want something I didn’t have than to have something I didn’t want.”
Mabel O’Brien was the best schoolteacher I ever had and for some reason that I no longer recall I had upset her. As this was back when schoolteachers could punish pupils, I knew there could be punishment in store; but she just stood there and stared at me. I finally mustered enough nerve to ask, “Well, what’s going to happen to me?” She replied, “I can’t decide right now; I’ll have to wait until I get over being mad at you.”
When I was about eighteen I was working with a fellow named Brian Williams, a man with a common name but whose character was anything but common. One winter day we were driving down a slippery hill on a country road in an isolated area east of Toronto. Brian was was just inching along but still lost control and skidded into the side of a car parked on the shoulder of the road. There was no damage to Brian’s car, but the driver’s side of the other car was badly crunched. The car he hit was the only one within sight, and there wasn’t a person to be seen anywhere. No house was close enough for anyone to be able to read a license number. Even so, Brian left a note with his name, address and telephone number on it.
Speaking of the word “slippery,” many people in PEI use the two-syllable word “slippy” rather than the three-syllable “slippery.” The great Canadian comedian, Lorne Elliott, while performing in PEI one night mused, “I often wondered where the “r” from slippery went here on the Island. Well, I found it; It’s in “warsh.”
Early in my career I developed the bad habit of continuing to work on whatever I was doing when someone stopped at my desk to talk to me. I always heard everything they said and thought I was being very efficient, multi-tasking before I even knew the term. But it all ended one day when a young co-worker was telling me about a problem she was having that she thought I might be able to help her with. I continued doing whatever I was doing while she talked. Suddenly she shouted, “You’re not listening!” I assured her that I was. “Well,” she said, “you’re eyes aren’t.”