When I began writing my blog about three months ago, I realized that I needed a title and a login address for my posts. The title was easy, Mike 2.0, as I knew that cancer had begun to transform me both physically and mentally into a different version of myself.
The login, mikeofbrebeuf, was a natural one too. Having spent two thirds of my life at Brebeuf College as a teacher and student (66.5 % to be exact), it seemed the obvious choice, especially in light of the convergence of my family history with the person of Jean de Brebeuf.
I know that lots of family and friends read my blog as well some cancer patients. I’m not always sure why but I do appreciate their support and hope that my writing has been instructive at times about the challenges of cancer.
However when good friend and former teaching colleague at Brebeuf, Anne Johnston, asked me if her Grade 12 biology class could start reading my blog, I wondered what a seventeen year old could possibly learn from a dinosaur like me. And yet, I know that young people have an instinctive curiosity about dinosaurs so let me take you to my Jurassic Park.
Some fifty years ago now, Brebeuf was a construction site opposite some farmland on a narrow and sleepy Steeles Avenue. As I rode my bike past the worksite in the summer of 1962, I didn’t give it much attention. I wanted to go to St. Mike’s for Grade 9, not some brand new school at the outer edges of the city.
A year later, the daily commute downtown to St. Mike’s was taking its toll on me. As the subway only went as far north as Eglinton Avenue in those days, the trek from my home at Bayview and Sheppard was challenging for a puny kid who had earned the name ‘little Mike’ in Mr. Lavelle’s Grade 9 math class.
My dad suggested I enroll at Brebeuf, the Jesuit high school up Bayview. I was more than ready for the change and was delighted to discover that since the school would begin with two Grade 10 and four Grade 9 classes, I would be a ‘senior’ for the duration of my high school career. No more fear of being stuffed into a locker or forced to sit in skid row after one of Father Meaghan’s science tests.
I have a few scant memories of my first day at the ‘new’ school. I was greeted hurriedly at the door by head caretaker Tony Tersigni who warned me to avoid the tangle of wires hanging from the ceiling in the main hallway which was still awaiting its terrazzo finish. The rest of that day is a blur except for my memory of picking burrs off my grey pant cuffs as I sat on the Bayview bus on my way home, the result of trekking through open fields to reach the bus terminus at the foot of Newton Drive.
In a matter of months, Brebeuf, under the leadership of principal Father Meagher and vice-principal Neil Gazeley, assumed its new identity founded on an excellent academic program and a wide variety of sports teams and activities.
We were the new kids on the block and our egos took a pounding on the playing fields and hockey rinks in those early years. In the classrooms, the nine Jesuits and six laymen on staff were masterful teachers and created a structured and dynamic learning environment.
My son-in-law Chris has admonished me for writing long blogs and I fear that many of Miss Johnston’s students have already left my Jurassic Park for the immediacy of Facebook. To those that remain, may I say that you attend a school rich in tradition and well known and respected in academia. No longer a wanabee school as in those early years, Brebeuf is the place to be. Respect it, celebrate it, and grow it.
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