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Living History

Rita Y. Toews is a Canadian writer who took up the challenge to write seriously at the age of 50. Several of her children's stories will be available at CrossroadsPub.Com later this year as well as two novels which she has co-authored. She has been published in Zygote, Western People, Mysterical-E and Coming Home magazines. As well, one of her stories has appeared on the Winnipeg Free Press web site.

Rita is currently working on a mystery novel set in her hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba, with Hungarian author, Alex Domokos.

"The Problems of "IT""

Rita Y. Toews

George was a guy with a problem. As I entered the room I found him slumped at his desk, his hands toying with a ragged eraser, a look of misery on his face. Who could he turn to for advice? All knowledgeable sources of information seemed closed to him. George's problem, he confessed to me, had started earlier in the day when we had arrived at school.

School was quite naturally the center of the universe for the children of Taylor, a small town in the Peace River District of British Columbia. Taylor's main claim to fame in the early 1960's was the oil processing plant which employed most of the men of the town. George's family was different because his father worked on the railway.

There was another odd thing about George's family: all the clocks in the house were set with a one-hour time difference from the rest of the community. The first time I had ever visited at his house I had been warned to be home at 4:00 o'clock. Later in the day when I had checked the time I was stunned to see that the clock showed 5:00 o'clock, indicating that I was in trouble at home. It had come as a big relief to learn that because his father worked on the railway the entire household ran on "railway time."

Although his family was different, George himself was just one of us kids. And now my friend had a problem.

George and I had arrived at school that morning just as the bell rang. Our teacher, Mrs. Dubois, who was also the principal of our tiny school, lived in a neat little bungalow right beside the school grounds. Most mornings she would walk over at 9:00 to escort the pupils into the school. This morning we had watched as she rushed out her door pulling on her sweater. Trailing close behind was her fat black and white spaniel, Molly. Now Molly was a mystery to both George and me. She had been fat, like she was going to have babies, for a long time now. Getting up my courage, I asked Mrs. Dubois if Molly was going to have her babies soon. She had told us that no, Molly wasn't going to have babies.

"Well, why is she so fat then?"

"Molly can't have puppies anymore," she told us with a touch of sadness in her voice, "Molly is an 'it' now. Poor Molly." She stooped to stroke the little butterball's head.

George and I had looked at each other and had wisely kept silent. After all, Mrs. Dubois gave us our report cards and it wouldn't be wise to have her think we were so dumb that we didn't know what an "it" was. As far as I was concerned dogs came like people did: some were he's and some were she's. Where did an "it" enter the picture?

As we slipped into our respective seats in the classroom, one behind the other, George and I had decided that Edward Reilly had to be an "it" because he was fat and also the weirdest boy in the classroom, even if his parents did run the only movie theatre in town. The dumb movies they usually showed and the fact that the movies only ran on weekends proved that they were a whole family of "its."

Unbeknownst to me, George had a major problem with the conversation about Molly being an "it." It was easy for me to laugh and tease when there was no stake in actually knowing just what an "it" was, but it soon dawned on George that he had a very good reason to know exactly what an "it" was.

The previous week the grade fives had learned how to administer CPR. At least we had learned the basics of the technique, and had been instructed to practise on a family member at home. There was no way George was going to do mouth-to-mouth with his snotty little sister so he had been practising CPR on his black lab, Lucy, by clamping her muzzle shut and blowing into her nose.

George's reasoning was that if being an "it" was something that was contagious in dogs and his dog Lucy had it, then maybe he also had a problem after administering "the breath of life" to her.

Now just who did George go to with this problem? Not to his mother or father, that's for sure. His mother had screamed like a banshee when she caught him kneeling beside the dog, its snout in his mouth, practising his technique. Lucy had bolted in terror, her nails leaving long gashes down George's arms. His mother had given him one of her just-what-do-you-think-you're-up-to-young-man lectures and had threatened to bring it to his father's attention. Luckily the antics of his sister had later driven it from her mind.

He couldn't bring it up with Mrs. Dubois because she was our teacher and would think he was dumb if he didn't know what an "it" was. After all, she had talked to us as if we already knew, which meant that we should know. I had to confess to him that I didn't really know exactly what it was, although it sure sounded like something that Edward Reilly could be. That only made matters worse for George, because to resemble Edward Reilly was like the end of the world.

I hit upon the idea that we could look it up in the dictionary, so we delved into the huge classroom tome. Unfortunately after the first line of "it (it), pro., nom. it, poss, its or (Obs. or Dial.)" we knew we were in way over our heads and gave up. There was only one source of wisdom left: Mr. Konofsky, the janitor.

Mr. Konofsky was a gray, stooped little man who talked out of the side of his mouth because of the roll-your-own cigarette that was perpetually wedged in the other side. We found him trailing after his wide mop as he worked his way back and forth across the scuff-marked gym floor, his eyes squinting against the cigarette smoke.

Strictly speaking, no children were supposed to be in the school over the lunch hour but Mr. Konofsky didn't always play by the rules. As long as we didn't tear the place apart, the kids who stayed at school for lunch usually had free rein when Mrs. Dubois went home for her lunch.

We kept pace beside the janitor and George got the conversation going. He decided to approach the subject rather obliquely.

"So, Mr. Konofsky. Did you know Molly's an "it?"

"Yup," was the reply as he sucked wetly at the glowing cigarette. We continued our slow journey across the gym in silence.

"That's kind of weird, huh?" George continued, desperate to get to the bottom of the matter. "How'd that happen, I wonder?"

"Had a horse once that did himself in." Did I see a hint of a smile as he talked? "Misjudged the height of the barbed wire fence, I guess. Gotta be careful going over fences."

George stopped dead in his tracks. "Oh my gosh!" he blurted as his face turned red. Obviously everything had become crystal clear to him, but I was still in the dark. No amount of badgering could pry any information out of my friend. "Ask your mom," was all that he would say.

Forty years later when I hear of a dog being an "it" I am still reminded of a young boy practising CPR on a patient black lab named Lucy.