Dracul Van Helsing

90 Winters: A Poem

October 27, 2017 at 5:12 pm (Biographical, Commentary, History, Life, Obituaries, Personal essays, Poetry) (Alberta, Alberta education, Alberta history, poetry)

90 Winters: A Poem

The Medicine Man Chief of the Blackfoot Nation smoked his pipe
and looked out across the distant prairies at the distant hills
He then began his tale,
90 winters ago
Gitche Manitou sent a wise soul into this world
The same month that talking motion pictures were born
Al Jolson had said, “Wait a minute… you ain’t heard nothing yet”
A few weeks later a baby uttered his first cries under the vast blue dome of an Alberta prairie sky
A child who learned to read when he was 3 years old
Reading the Bible and Shakespeare and Charles Dickens was his fare
When he was 4, his father went away from the farm to work,
that same winter his mother took ill with scarlet fever
And he was raised that winter by a Cree First Nations Medicine woman
She taught him the power of herbs and roots
and how to heal using them
He started his public schooling at the age of 5
in a one room schoolhouse
called Elba
a school built in 1914
on the 100th anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1st exile
his exile to the island of Elba
In 1936 at the age of 9
George had determined that Adolf Hitler
was a bad person
so he was going to build himself an airplane
and fly over to Berlin Germany
and bump him off
like Saint George slaying the evil dragon

He built himself an airplane all right
a Wright Brothers style aircraft
much to his family’s and farm neighbours’ amazement
He wisely sat on the very back seat of the plane
as the plane’s navigator
while his elder brother sat in the front seat of the plane
as the pilot
That way if their lift-off was unsuccessful
as they took off the hill over the
Rosebud Creek valley
and the plane landed in the creek
it would be his elder brother who wound up first in the Creek
George wisely reasoned
while he George would have time to jump off the back seat
before the plane landed in the Creek

Well the plane never made it to Germany
not even to Newfoundland
not even as far as the Alberta-Saskatchewan border
but George’s elder brother Tom
certainly enjoyed a very close up look of Rosebud Creek
right in the creek
as George wisely determined after take-off that the plane
wouldn’t reach its destination
so George wisely jumped off the back seat
as the plane made it to the ground
heading straight for the creek
with pilot Tom in the front seat
cursing and swearing
and prophetically foretelling
the language and dialogue
on most TV programs in
the early 21st Century

The 4-Minute mile was not broken by Roger Bannister
at the 1954 British Empire Games in Vancouver
but by George on that day in 1936
as he sought to escape
his dripping wet and deeply agitated elder brother
who chased after him from the creek

George reached the safety of his parents’ house in time.

In the early 1940s as a teenager, George studied palaeontology under the great palaeontologist Dr. Charles Mortram Sternberg in the Red Deer River Badlands
In the mid-1940s, he studied Science and Engineering at Mount Royal College in Calgary
In the late ’40s and early ’50s,
he studied History and English Literature at the University of Alberta
He finally settled on becoming a teacher
passing on his knowledge and wisdom to future generations of children
In the 1960s at Sherwood Heights Junior High School
he and his students built small rockets
that went soaring high into the skies
above that place of Alberta suburbia known as Sherwood Park
A sight that startled many Sherwood Park residents
who thought they were under Soviet missile attack

The principal of the school instructed George not to build
rockets that soared so high
Among George’s students was future astronomer and physicist
Dr. Paul Hickson
who pioneered work in the reflecting mercury liquid telescope

Among George’s students in the ’70s was future palaeontologist Michael Caldwell
who discovered the world’s first fossil of a flying snake in Israel

In the late ’80s George retired from active teaching
and was hired by the Alberta Department of Education
to give training workshops
to beginning Science teachers

In the ’90s, George began painting pictures
and mastered that medium
In the early 21st Century, George
began research for a 3-volume history of Western Canada
that he was going to write
In June of 2010, he was half-way through the 2nd volume of his 3-volume history of Western Canada
when he died from cancer.

90 winters ago, this man was born.

-A poem written by Christopher
Friday October 27th 2017
on what would have been
his father George’s
90th birthday.

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