Doing what he loves at last

Your article Too many students [Report on Education, Supplement to the Anglican Journal, Nov. 2011, p. 2] brought back memories of my youth.

In the 1940s, after completing elementary school in Toronto, the school principal (a Grey Nun from Loretto Abbey) recommended that my parents send me to a vocational school where I could study architectural design and take voice lessons. Instead, my father sent me to a private boys’ school, where sports were the major activity. There was no art or voice music on the curriculum!

At the age of 15, I escaped the family home to live with rural, market-gardening grandparents near Windsor, Ont. Alas, a university degree was still being pushed, although there was a smattering of drafting and choir singing at the institution I attended.

Eventually, in Montreal, I obtained a teaching degree and began 31 years of highschool language instruction (French literature and composition; English literature and composition; Latin translation and sentence structure). Teaching pen-and-ink drawing became extracurricular.

Today, at the age of 83, I have completed 10 Bargello-Parisian wool wall hangings of the Canadian provinces, which I designed on the computer before applying them to needle and yarn. As my personal signature, I wove, in the International Code, flags for each province. These emblems can be deciphered easily by sailors and seamen.