Friday, April 11, 2008

The 1990s

Despite the belief Neve Campbell was an American Actor I still thought about my childhood friend during the 1990s.

In 1994, the rock band ‘Our Lady Peace’ released a song called Naveed. To this day, every time I hear that song it reminds me of her. Mostly because Naveed sounds like Nevie, which is what we used to call her before she bit my head off in class that day.



There he's on his knees again

Trying hard to understand

Why Nevie would let a young man, die

Convinced that he might break, he reaches for that phone

And then another day, has gone

OUR LADY PEACE - NAVEED (1994 - Sony Records)


There was also one memory of Neve that stayed with me even when all the other ones faded. It was my happiest memory of that girl. It came about that one day our teacher made arrangements for a guest speaker to come to our class and give a lecture. I remember he was some David Suzuki, environmentalist type guy from Africa.

When the teacher knew he was coming, she asked if anyone would volunteer to give a thank you speech on behalf of our class. Of course we were just kids. Nobody was going to volunteer for that and nobody did. So our teacher decided to have a draw and whoever’s name got picked from the hat would deliver this speech.

There were many times when I did not give the teacher my full undivided attention and this was one of those times. But, I did notice that the kids in our class were ripping squares of paper out of their ‘cahiers’ and writing their names down. So, I turned to the guy beside me and asked him if the teacher was having a draw.

“Oui,” he told me.

Then I asked him what the teacher was drawing for and he replied, “Une plaque de chocolat.”

(I’m pretty sure that kid was Brian and I still want to get him back for that!!)

Well anyway. Excited at the prospect of winning a chocolate bar I ripped half a page out of my cahier and wrote my name down in full using big block capital letters. Then I noticed as the teacher went around the room with her hat that all the other kids had written their initials on tiny scraps of paper and they were rolling them up into spit balls before dropping them in.

“Mon Dieu. Il y a beaucoup d'étudiants dans cette classe avec des allergies de chocolat,” I thought to myself.

I really felt sorry for them. It must be a terrible thing to go through life allergic to chocolate. I loved chocolate!

(Side Note: I found out after the draw that some of my classmates had even written other kid’s names, rather than their own, to get out of that speech)

So our teacher asked one of the students to pull a name and wouldn’t you know…she held up my half page at the front of the class. My name was written so big it was legible to the kids sitting at the back of the room.

I was excited. I was now wondering what I had won. Three musketeers bar? Snickers bar?

“Fantastique,” I said, “Qu'ai-je gagné?”

At this point the class erupted into laughter. They knew what I had won and all our poor teacher could do was shake her head and roll her eyes.

“De nouveau, pour ceux de nous dans la classe qui ne prêtions pas attention la première fois,” our teacher said, “J'expliquerai de nouveau pourquoi arrive-t-il que nous avions cela dessine.”

And then our teacher went on to explain that, because I won the draw, it would now be my responsibility to write and deliver a thank you speech to a guest speaker that would be giving a lecture to our class later on that week.

Now, I may have liked the attention of being class clown. It made me happy to crack jokes in class and bring laughter and smiles to my classmates. However, I was a very shy and nervous kid growing up. The idea of being the center of attention or standing up in front of the class and giving speeches was terrifying for me. I tried to convey this to our teacher as best I could at the time.

Unfortunately, our poor teacher who was at her wits end with me most days was not too sympathetic of my problem. And, with emphasis on the definitive she said, “Trop mauvais M, mais vous donnera ce discours de merci!”

So, I spent the rest of that class thinking about how I was going to get out of that speech. I ran the scenarios through my head: Fake an injury; call in sick from school. I was looking for an out.

When the school bell rang, Neve came up to me after class. She told me she had been thinking about that speech. Then she said, “M, I know you don’t want to give that speech, and to be honest, it wouldn’t be fair to the guest speaker for you to give a thank you speech if your heart’s not in it. So if you want, we can go to the teacher and we’ll tell her that I’ll do that speech for you.”

I was so grateful when she told me that.

“You would do that for me?” I asked.

“Of course I would,” she told me.

So I thanked her. Then we told the teacher and the teacher agreed that I was off the hook for that speech. (Note: It’s quite possible that our teacher was more relieved than I was that I would not be giving that speech)

I never forgot this, because this story said it all for who she was.

Here I am growing up in a world were everyone is looking out for themselves. Kids are willing to lie and trick others to get out of a speech. Kids are writing the names of their classmates on scraps of paper to get out of a speech. A school teacher is willing to provoke a train wreck to teach a lesson to a student that doesn’t pay attention. And I was just as selfish as any of them in the lengths I would have gone to in avoiding that responsibility.

Yet, here was a girl who, at that young age was so completely selfless that in the last few minutes of a class, she had already considered the feelings of everyone. She knew I was a shy and nervous kid that was terrified of speeches. She knew nobody in the class wanted to do it and saw what they were doing to get out of it. She recognized that the teacher was courting disaster by making the class clown responsible for a thank you speech. And she even considered the feelings of a guest speaker, who she had never met, didn’t know from a hole in the ground and would likely never see again in her life. But, she felt that this guest deserved to be properly thanked, for coming to our school and volunteering his time with our class. She took it upon herself to defuse an uncomfortable situation for all of us.

I was always grateful to her for that. And, not only for bailing me out of a speech that I would have been far too nervous as a kid to give. But, also for making me realize for the first time in my life that there are good people in the world.