Charlie’s Line

Many years ago, I had a senior high math teacher named Charlie Read: a very capable teacher, highly respected. He made math interesting enough that I made an 85 in Geometry, with very little effort. That was convenient, since very little effort was what I gave studies at that time, and most of my other subjects showed it.

Charlie started some geometry courses with flair: he would stand at the back of the classroom and without warning fire a piece of chalk at the blackboard, hitting it with a snap that made students jump, leaving a single yellow mark on the board.

Striding up the aisle to the board, he would bellow, “Take a point!” He would go from there with the basics of geometry: you have a point in space. String points together, an infinite amount of them, and you have a line. With lines, you form shapes: triangles, squares, and more.

Geometry always fascinated me, still does I suppose, which must be why I seldom want to ask for directions when we travel. I recall chuckling to myself in early geometry when students struggled with the concept that a line three inches long was formed by an infinite number of points. Then, how many points on a six inch line? Infinity again. Theoretically the same number as on a line a mile long (to stick with the British we used then).

Our lives are much the same as Charlie’s line; an infinite number of points, strung together. We decorate our lines with the large and memorable events, but we could break them down to the fineness of breaths, of heartbeats, to the thin slices of our existence.

As we get older, some axioms become obvious about our life lines: they only go in one direction; we can never go back. As in the famous Thomas Wolfe quote, “You can never go home again.” Though we might have points on our lines we would like to return to, either to once again feel the happiness of that time, or to do things differently, that won’t be happening.

While there may be an infinite number of points on our life lines, no two are really the same. Just as we can never go back, we can never duplicate experiences. We realize this too late. Every sunrise is a little different. In a small way, I was conscious of this Tuesday evening while watching an Anne Murray special based on her Duets album. At the time of the initial album release, 2008, I managed to win seats to the Halifax performance of her final tour, complete with hotel and limo, and copies of about every album she ever produced. Following the performance, Ellen and I met with Anne, spoke for a few moments, and had a photo taken with her. An exciting night, a memorable one. I thought back to that night as I watched her again on TV. She looked so familiar. “That will never happen again,” I thought. Some things only happen once in a life.

I can tell you how many things happen only once– all of them.

Our lines are dotted with the memorable events, some of them our personal list, some of them points shared by millions. It’s always been a given that most people of my generation can recall the death of JFK. I was in school, grade 11, and can still see the brown cloth covered speaker on the side wall to my right as an announcement was made. The President of the United States, one of the most popular ones, had just been assassinated. I also can recall the death of his brother Bobby— we’re so joined at the hip to American history. It was important to us then, very important, still is. I was in Resolute Bay in 1968 and came across one of our American weather observers leaned into the speaker of a large grey short-wave radio. The sound was scratchy and unclear. I said something to the fellow, and he said, “Shhh… Bobby Kennedy has just been shot.”

I’m an early riser, and so get my news early. I can recall announcing at least two events of worldwide importance to my wife when she arose: “Princess Diana was in an accident and believed to have been killed.” “An airplane has crashed into St. Margaret’s Bay. They think all were killed.”

On September 11, 2001, I told an assembly of our Grade 12 students that many years down the road they would remember just where they were when they heard of the terrorist attacks. I told them things would not be the same. Earlier that morning, I had been passing our graphics arts classroom, and the teacher and a few students were fixated on a television in that room—the first plane had hit one of the towers. I joined them, and as we watched, a second plane hit the other tower. Less than an hour later, unbelievably, the first tower collapsed to the ground.

Our first notion in that classroom was that Palestinians were somehow behind this. They seemed to be the terrorists of the time. We had never heard of Osama Bin Laden, or al-Quaeda, names that are now etched in history.

We don’t realize the effect that blip on the time line had on people, particularly Americans. Just this morning on the news, they interviewed a passenger at the Halifax airport about the current delays from more stringent security. She blamed security staff for failing to prevent a Nigerian terrorist from boarding a plane Christmas Day, and now everyone was under stricter security measures. She just mentioned, as somehow related, that she had lived on the outskirts of New York on 9-11, and then she started to cry. The hurt is still deep, very deep.

Dotted among these shared events are our own personal hits on the chalkboard: our successes, our failures. Each of us our own line.

One thing that Charlie Read indicated was that while a line has its infinite points, and has in theory no width, its length can be fixed. It can be measured. All our lines will end, at least on this earth.

If we could see the entire history of the earth, of it all, summed up in a moment, it might appear like a description used by Annie Dillard: “continents moving and shaping, rivers flowing and establishing themselves, cities emerging, first stone structures, coming and going, smoke of fires. Gradually people moving about, herds of animals moving, cities developing. Along the way, a brief flicker of a life: our life. It comes and just as quickly it fades and goes. The earth spins onward.”

2010 arrives tomorrow. How did it get here so soon? Where will it take us?

“Take a point!” says Charlie Read. “String them together, an infinite number of points, and we have a line. We can create things with this line.”

Charlie puts down the chalk.


9 thoughts on “Charlie’s Line

  1. That brings back lots of memories Francis .. I was not good at math and I can remember Mr. Read standing at the front of the class .. closing his eyes , holding his hand in the air with the chalk in it .. saying ..”Ok Miss Boates, we will do this one more time” gritting his teeth. Thanks for the memory and Happy New Year.

  2. I can imagine that (not with you, with him). Ellen can remember her math teacher making a comment that she had a little door on her brain that was just not opening. (If he could see how well she does with Sudoku’s now!) I always loved the geometry (Geometry and Algebra were separate subjects for us then).

  3. Your blog challenges we readers to consider the ageless philosphical question, “What does it all mean?”, and also the perhaps more important question, “Does it mean anything at all?” It is probably the higher ‘points’ along our life-lines that provide us with answers to these questions, if answers do in fact exist that we can comprehend.

    Being of the same generation (more or less) as you, I too recall learning of the Kennedy assassination. I was sitting with friends on the curb in front of the Legion in Summerside, having just come from an after-school skate at the Civic Arena. A girl we knew approached, almost in tears, and shocked us with the news, “President Kennedy was killed today! Someone shot him!” All of us, the girl included, would have been 12 or 13 years old at the time, and there wasn’t a one of us who knew anything about politics, American or otherwise. But we did know this was something major. President Kennedy to me was a serious but kind-looking man whose picture shared equal space on our Acadian grandmother’s wall with the Pope, Our Lord and the Virgin Mary. He was, in my youthful mind, “a good man.”

    In the following years, JFK’s brother Bobby and Reverend King would suffer similar fates, prompting American songwriter Richard Holler to pen a song to their memory, (and that of Abraham Lincoln)which contained the simple line, ” It seems the good they die young.” I found that statement credible in my early and mid teens, and its corollary in the circumstances, that bad people hurt good people. Easy to accept, perhaps, for someone raised on Hollywood westerns and cops-and-robbers tv shows.

    And then came 9/11, certainly a major point along the life-line of most of us. I was in my office in Stephenville, Newfoundland, that morning, and the day was just beginning when my secretary, Roz, rushed in to tell me that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center in New York. She had heard it on the radio. We quickly found a live news site on my computer and watched events unfold. She told me they thought it was terrorists and then she started to cry. She herself had a sister living on Staten Island, who could have been anywhere in the Big Apple on that fateful day. Wanting to comfort her, I told her, no, no, it must have been an accident. No unschooled terrorist could aim a huge jet with such accuracy. And then the second jet hit the other tower and my argument evaporated like water. As all of us in the office watched events unfold in near silence, Roz was lucky enough to confirm the safety of her sister and her family by telephone. Within hours, we watched out our office windows as large commercial aircraft started landing at our airport, subject to the worldwide grounding of American planes.

    Almost four thousand people died that day, and initially it was simple enough to apply the maxim learned in the sixties, that bad people hurt good people. However, anyone who thinks about these things even occasionally, knows that black-and-white statements of philosophic principle are seldom entirely accurate. This morning I read an article that described two 8-year-old children, one an Arab, one a Jew, who were each injured by missile and air attacks by “the other side.” They are in neighbouring rooms in a hospital in Israel. The little girl is in a wheelchair for life and can only move her head. The little boy lost about half of his brain and is surprisingly still alive. After being an excellent young student and athlete, he is trying to learn to walk and speak again. The Jewish boy and the Arab girl have become fast friends, as have their parents.

    I’m straying from your ‘point’ here, and even my own, perhaps, but the idea of trying to string ‘points’ together to make a straight line and perhaps give some meaning to one’s life may in fact be nothing more than a tilt at philosophic windmills. I see no risk in declaring the two children I mentioned to be ‘good’ people in the best sense of the word. Therefore, one asks, the Arab missile launcher and the Israeli pilot must be ‘bad’. The pilot no doubt justifies his actions by saying it will deter further attacks such as the one that almost killed the little Jewish boy. The missile launcher claims to be protecting his own people. How many suicide bombers have been brain-washed into believing they are doing something of great good? How many prime ministers and presidents have ordered young soldiers to kill or be killed for what at the time seemed the ‘right’ thing to do?

    What may be the least ambiguous of the Ten Commandments is the one that says, “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. Just as clear is the statement from Jesus that tells us that if an aggressor strikes us we are to turn the other cheek. We were given those two directives, and others, and also given what we have termed ‘free will’ and the ability to create the lines of our individual lives and of humankind’s existence as a whole. As educator Charlie Read would say, “We can create things with this line.” Unfortunately, we haven’t being doing much of a job of it so far.

    Sorry for the length of this comment, but sometimes the inhumanity of humankind really ticks me off.

  4. Great article Francis, very similar to message in the movie “For The Moment”. Life is a bunch of moments , both good ones and bad ones.
    May 2010 be good to you both!

    Ken & Chris

  5. Francis… great writing… and the comments are interesting, as well. This being not only a new year, but a decade, too… perhaps we will change things, but I doubt it.

    When we read of the five Canadians killed in Afghanistan this week, I am given to thinking that the 3,000 killed in the Towers is but the tip of the iceberg when counting… add the 4 or so thousand military killed in Iraq; add the 200,000 civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan; and so on through the many wars ongoing, I have to wonder about the lessons we may learn and decisions we take. We the people, have made the subsequent decisions that have resulted in more death and destruction than the primary… and then we should ask, when will we ever learn.

    Turn for a moment to Scripture and it was the “eye for an eye” that took us into Afghanistan and the Americans into Iraq… when will we ever learn.

    We could take to a tangent and wonder if it is really all about oil… and then wonder what of the oil debacle in Alberta… when will we go to war to protect that, too. Maybe on our own turf, we will learn. But here too, I doubt it.

  6. It’s said that those who are not aware of history are doomed to repeat it, but as you mention, it doesn’t seem that men learn. In our nature, I’m afraid.

    The current loss of four soldiers hits closer to home down here, as Kirk Taylor was a student at the high school where I was counsellor, he graduated in ’99. I know the other members of his family, who are grieving now. Thanks, Bruce… Friend of Ken, I presume.

  7. Francis, Barb directed me to your blog and I must say you are a wonderful writer. I have enjoyed reading your articles. I too had Charlie Read as a high school math teacher. A wonderful man. Summerside High School actually had many good teachers and I enjoyed my time there as an “Air Force Brat”.

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