Lunch with Friends and High School Memories

Photos.

One of my favorite Florida traditions is lunch with Linda and Gerard, who live in Ottawa and winter in St. Petersburg.

Linda and Cath at BJ's

Linda and I went to school together in our hometown of Temiscaming,  Québec. As we enjoyed our excellent  meal at BJ's in Pinellas Park, my pleasant conversation with Linda triggered a long ago memory of our tenth grade class at De La Salle High School.

We had a teacher who hid bottles of booze in the toilet tank in the small bathroom next to our homeroom. By mid-afternoon most days, Mr. D. was very drunk and we didn't learn much math or anything else. We were a rowdy bunch and he kept us in stitches with stories and pontification, especially when he got off on a rant, which was quite often. Once a Jesuit, he was fond of philosophical arguments like how many angels on a pinhead. He had a devotion to St. Joseph Cupertino, patron saint of idiots, and St. Simeon Stylites, who spent many years on some kind of pole. One wild afternoon, Mr. D. declared that the Orient was in the west, and that day I knew we were really doomed if we hoped to pass out of Grade 10 math.

Mr. D. was fired in January after a hospitalization that followed a drunken parade through our town in his pajamas. By then, our class had fallen hopelessly behind in the subjects that counted, and we never really did catch up, in spite of the efforts of teachers at Temiscaming High School who had us foisted on them mid-year.

Linda and I had a classmate, Maureen Brophy, whose dad took of us on, with the goal of bringing us up to speed in algebra and geometry.  I smile as I think of us around the Brophys' kitchen table: Maureen, Karen, Linda and I, all at different levels with varying degrees of interest in the subject matter -- quite a challenge for anyone, but Mr. Brophy was undaunted and persistent.

He was an engineer with lots of patience and a flair for teaching. He tutored us two or three nights a week after work, going  back several months in the curriculum and tackling current homework. By the end of the school year, we had pretty much caught up and were ready to go on to the next grade.

Yesterday's lunch with Linda renewed my connection to that little group of teenage girls and the cheerful dad who got us through tenth grade math half a century ago.