| Shooting the Messenger A Teacher, A Lawyer and An Airman You dropped them, you squatted, and you did your business. In so many words, Rona explained what you did when nature called and you were somewhere in the middle of nowhere and no privacy could be had. The middle of nowhere for Rona was the Gobi desert of Mongolia where she had spent some time on some kind of trek. I don’t know who at the dinner table asked about the proper etiquette when taking a bathroom break with members of the opposite sex all around in a featureless, treeless landscape that is three-hundred and sixty degrees of flatness as far as the eye can see. In writing about Rona, about the people of Pestalozzi and my future in the company of diplomats I would discover that an open-minded adventurous tourist (twenty-something Rona would never have labeled herself as such i.e. tourist) will meet more interesting people, see more and do more exciting things in four weeks in a foreign land, and have more fascinating stories to tell, than a diplomat on a four-year posting. The likelihood of a Canadian diplomat squatting with the natives is remote in the extreme. The diplomats I would get to know were not keen on mixing with indigenous people, let alone relieving themselves in their vicinity without some kind of modesty barrier between them and their inferiors. The situation is even more unlikely considering that when Canada sends a diplomat abroad taxpayers will pay to provide him or her with a Canadian-equivalent lifestyle wherever he or she is posted, a lifestyle that includes indoor plumbing. The Canadian-equivalent lifestyle is guaranteed under what is called The Foreign Service Directives (FSDs). The FSDs “are designed to provide a system of allowances, benefits and conditions of employment that, in combination with salary, will enable departments and agencies to recruit, retain and deploy qualified employees in support of government programs outside Canada” and “ … insofar as is possible and practicable employees serving abroad should be placed in neither a more nor a less favourable situation than they would be in serving in Canada.” And there is the rub: “more nor a less as grown to mean cooks, maids, chauffeurs, expensive private schools for the kids — all paid for by the taxpayer. Dedicated, charming, inquisitive and brave Rona would have made a lousy diplomat; but, if you were a Brenda Martin stuck in a Mexican prison for more than two years on trumped up charges, she is the type of person you would have wanted as your Consular representative (the Canadian diplomat who is suppose to know local laws and customs and come to your aid should you end up a victim of those laws and customs). She chose criminal law as a career. Out of curiosity or out boredom we got together a few times to find out it if we were compatible as more than friends. We weren't. I thought is might work. Huguette (yes, another Huguette), the other young woman in the apartment I moved into after Marina and company, was dating a Jewish guy so maybe I could make a go at it with a Jewish girl. We were just beginning to get know each better around dinner time when Huguette burst in at the most inopportune moment to enquire if I would help with the groceries. That was it. Huguette was the girl I spent most of my time with during my last few months at Pestalozzi. We batted tennis balls at Mooney’s Bay, the beautiful park on the dangerously polluted historic Rideau River where it splits off from the Rideau Canal (the Rideau and the larger Ottawa River beaches are closed most of the summer due to high fecal bacteria count); we shopped together; we spent an enchanting evening listening to Québec legend and icon Gilles Vigneau at a concert he gave in Gatineau Park; we took long walks together... you know the drill. I liked her, and I think she liked me … at first. Huguette had moved to Ottawa to teach at an elementary school in the Ottawa French suburb of Vanier. In the fall she moved out of Pestalozzi into a one-bedroom apartment near the school where she taught. I think it was the first time that I visited her there when she showed him the bedroom and asked him to sit on the bed while she "got ready" that it happened, or more accurately, that it didn’t happened. The Canadian rock group The Bell’s had a hit song in 1971 written by Saint John native Ken Tobias called Stay Awhile. You may remember the following lyrics: She brushes the curls from my eyes She drops her robe on the floor And she reaches for the light on the bureau And the darkness is her pillow once more The operative line here is: "She drops her robe on the floor." Maybe if I had been more familiar with the lyrics at the time... It seemed that "dropping your robe on the floor" was the 1970's woman's way of inviting you to stay for more than small talk. When Huguette made her entrance — à la Margaret — I lost it, and it wasn't because Huguette was a blonde. She remains the most beautiful brunette he did not spend the night with. Women, it has been my experience, don't usually give men a second chance to make a good first impression — there were exceptions, but Huguette was not one of them. She would decide on a career in the Public Service. Go figure. What about Charles, the fourth member of my new small community? Charles was a retired airman with the Canadian Armed Forces. He was recently divorced. It must have been the mother of all divorce settlements for him not to be able to afford “adult” lodgings. He was in his late forties or early fifties. Charles was dating a forty years old virgin. I never met her. Every evening when Charles went out to meet her, he expressed his conviction that tonight would be the night, only to return disappointed, but not discouraged. Charles was planning his next incursion into virgin territory when I moved out of Pestalozzi for good. We did not keep in touch; we did not have that much in common. I moved out of Pestalozzi in 1975, the year that witnessed the fall of Saigon and the official ending of the Vietnam War. One of the last conversation I had with Charles was about the end of that war. Charles argued that the United States should have done more to bring women and children out. They should have saved more of them, he said. "Save them from what?" I asked. "The Vietcong, the communists," Charles replied. "Children are the future of any revolution," I answered, "they would be protected and well looked after by the Vietcong and the new socialist Vietnamese government. There was nothing to worry about." Charles did not see it that way. Maybe he was anticipating the new ideologues, the religious ones, for whom women and children are just more cannon fodder in their fight to establish God’s kingdom on earth. But I digress.
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