Chapter 16

    In a perfectly ordered world, and especially in the world of higher education, Toby and Jelena's return to the city would have been a notable event. After all, as Toby had been a mystic from his infancy, it stands to reason that an orderly universe would have provided for him to be able to pick up some degree of useful information on his peculiar state of soul at a campus which made all the claims to excellence in higher education that the University of British Columbia was wont to do. He might have taken a course or two, written a few decent essays for interested professors, and perhaps in other ways exhibited an external sense of accomplishment, as did students in the faculties of engineering, law, medicine, the humanities and so forth. Real mysticism is actually more concrete than any other subject that requires an emphatic use of the intellect and imagination, and all other factors being equal, its achievements merit enormous satisfaction in the hearts of men and women. So, although he had spent a full six years on and about the Vancouver campus, and thus owed it an immense debt for her undoubted help in shaping the more ordinary parts of his soul, UBC had no way of officially recognizing what he had been given during his time within her ordinary jurisdiction.
 
     There were, as one would expect, courses that actually touched on religious matters as subjects of history or literature, and he might have made a mark there, had he gone on in arts to the years of the upper class men. But he shunted over to the law school for his third year, in part to avoid more speculative studies, and thus saved himself, perhaps, from being discovered as just the sort of student who could profit the most from a subject his university, and indeed the majority of universities, possessed no professors qualified to teach.
  
    There is, of course, nothing more difficult to come by than a complete expertise in mysticism. It is easier to get dogs to fetch non-existent bones than it is to lead the human spirit to make actual discernible contact with the Divine. The very best an academic institution can do without access to a real mystic is to identify the classic texts, set up a teacher with some theological training who has the humility not to interfere with as much of the plain speech of the books that the students can absorb and re-articulate, and hope for the best. And in fact, to give his alma mater its due, this situation had been to a small extent created in Toby's first year English class, with a reference in his literature text to the English mystics of the middle ages, and a brief but timely allusion to such matters by his professor, who may have had an inkling as to Toby's primary vocation. But there were no classes on contemplation itself in Toby's day, and little of note later, as least insofar as he was able to ascertain. Thus he was pretty much left to fend for himself, or, more accurately, to pay attention when the Lord of the mystics was fending for him, which, even though he was without a properly acquired vocabulary to explain it, was pretty well his daily bread. Unless the soul manages to go terribly wrong, God is the most reliable of investors in its futures, and generously determined to bestow graces miles out of proportion to a capacity for deserving them.
 
     From his earliest days on the campus, Toby was aware that he was as happy, generally speaking, as any student he knew, if not happier, even much happier. He had a certain sense that God was behind most of this, but he was also inclined to credit the natural beauty of the campus' location, or the immense variety of the student body, or the inescapable demands of higher education all based on adequate reading. Then too, the university newspaper had given him a chance to write for an audience somewhat larger than a single classroom teacher, and his mind on its own had also taken up story telling. But the whole truth has an additional element, really the substance and foundation of all these things, for what is said of him so far could have been said of many students who used their time well, yet were not mystics.
 
     The precisely indicative observations come from John of the Cross' Spiritual Canticle, where this incomparable master of the spiritual life is commenting on the significance of his own image in stanzas 14 and 15: "The silent music".
 
     "In that aforesaid tranquillity and silence of the night, and in that knowledge of the Divine light, the soul is able to see a marvellous fitness and disposition of the wisdom of God in the diversities of all His creatures and works, all and each of which are endowed with a certain response to God, whereby each after its manner testifies to that which God is in it, so that it seems to hear a harmony of sublimest music surpassing all concerts and melodies of the world. The Bride calls this music silent because, as we have said, it is tranquil and quiet intelligence, without sound of voices; and in it are thus enjoyed both the sweetness of the music and the quiet of the silence. And so she says that her Beloved is this silent music, because this harmony of spiritual music is known and expressed in Him. Not only so but likewise He is 'The sounding solitude'.
 
     "This is almost the same as silent music; for, although that music is silent to the senses and the natural faculties, it is a most sounding solitude to the spiritual faculties: for when these are alone and empty of all natural forms and apprehensions they can readily and most sonorously receive in the spirit the spiritual sound of the excellence of God, in Himself and in His creatures."
  
    All of this had swept over him and through him as a little boy, when he had not yet learned to read books but could very easily be utterly absorbed by the beauty of the created world, so that simply for him go out of doors anywhere in pleasant neighbourhoods was an adventure of the highest order, and the pleasure of this was so intense that he quickly sensed that there was something wrong in other children who did not get so much out of this constant opportunity to be an appreciative spirit within a local universe of endless satisfactions. And once he went to school and learned to read, that habitual appreciation could thus take in the universe in its entirety. Thus, on at least two accounts, he was virtually never lonely. He made friends quickly - a necessary skill, amongst the regular moving of his boyhood - and when there were no other children about, he had the companionship of nature or a story book.

    At the beginning, of course, it never occurred to him that his fondness for books was not equally shared by everybody, especially not his family. School was all about books, of one form or another, and the challenge of learning to read, which he realized he had accomplished sufficiently at some point after Christmas in his first year at school to be able to henceforth navigate the comics on his own immediately, and before long whatever else took his fancy. There was about his house at that point a little soft-covered book, with line drawings, about two bears who set up a house together. Much of the brief tale was about laying in provisions for the winter. There was one item he had never heard of before, a bag of malt. His Nana grunted something puzzling when he asked her what malt was. He gathered that it was in her mind an unwonted substance, even though it had been featured in the little book as just as important as the bag of flour and the bag of sugar. His father could have told him, but his father was off in England. Besides, if anyone had told him that malt was for making beer, he would still have been none the wiser, for there was no beer around his Nana's house, and at school all the children were served milk, either chocolate or plain, in waxed cardboard cartons at recess. With both a mother and grandmother full of professionally educated smarts about food quality, Toby was never allowed the chocolate variety, which was little more than a sugared composition which covered up the flaws of milk unsuitable for being presented on its own true behalf.
  
    But his school had other compensations, including a seemingly huge school ground to boot the grade one soccer ball all over, or, in the wake of a patriotic film, to soar about, arms outstretched like a Spitfire with a like-minded youthful pilot. And immediately across the road, to the east, lay a fish and chip shop, to which he had access a fair number of times. For some reason, even though no one in the house had any affection for Catholicism, this seemed to happen on Fridays. And then there was the tank that clanked up Kingsway one morning. No one ever explained what it was doing there, although it may have come about at the same time as a drive to collect aluminum pots and pans, in order to stimulate patriotism. Every child who brought a pot was given the opportunity to hurl it at a large poster of either Hitler, Tojo, or Mussolini. Carleton School held eight very full classrooms, if not more in the name of doubled grades, and there was a satisfyingly large pile of the neighbourhood aluminum, and the principal made a speech.
  
    After teaching Toby to read, the other great cultural input from that part of the city was the movies. The "Kingsway", a member of the Famous Players theatre chain, stood just across the road of the same name from the school, and there Toby found his first experiences in being part of a great mob of young laughers, at stamping his feet among the hundreds of feet thumping at the romantic clinches, and at being scared out of his mind without ever learning that stuffing his fingers in his ears made even Frankenstein look funny. (With the sensibilities of a born musician, he was intensely vulnerable to the mood of a sound track.) He quite loved the big screen, especially when the cowboys and their horses rambled into it, but he didn't think much of Roy Rogers' attempt to be a cowboy in the present time, with all its planes, trains, and automobiles. It would be more than a few years before he could feel confident that the opening of the Old West was not actually the noblest and most romantic era in the history of the universe, and even the morphing out of this strange syndrome was only accomplished with the very marked aid of a quite the similar experience of his own. Nor was he absolutely free of temptations to regress.
  
    But it also must be said that his fondness for the combination of horses, grazing animals, and landscape also came from more than movies or books, because with the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbour, Toby's concerned father, too far away to be able to defend his family from an invasion of Vancouver, arranged to have his wife and two small sons moved to the Interior, to the North Okanagan, first to a regular sized farm, and then to a town with a few small farms of its own, so that Toby got to live among horses and cows, and even to ride a full grown version of the former and a little offspring of the latter. Neither of these two adventures were too significant, being very much unlike anything Hopalong Cassidy got to do, but in his mere boyhood simplicity and grateful acceptance of the qualities of rural life, he was stunningly surprised by the beauty and meaning of the necessary alternative to the big city of his infancy. To be dwarfed by mountains and the stream that wound through the valley between them was at least as meaningful as to be dwarfed by endless lanes of substantial and dignified houses. Nobody had to tell him - and nobody did - that for a boy of six he was incredibly lucky to have such back-to-back experiences before he was even out of grade one. In his short life, he had not met anyone else who got to go to three different schools in his first grade. And that was only the beginning, thanks to the war.
  
    Educators worry, legitimately in many cases, about regularly changing schools interfering with a child's education. But this was not the case with little Toby, especially as he was not moved before he had learned to read. After that all he really needed was a reasonably orderly classroom and a well-designed text book, like any born reader, and in most subjects, his schools were well supplied with both. Only once was he knocked off his stride across the heights of primary education, but that is another story. This was not to say that his early education was perfect, by any means. As typical of the Canadian schools of his day, there was little common sense instruction in art, and the music suffered from a long list of negligence's. But his mother sang well, and there was always the radio to give him the necessary something to try to imitate. The first songs he studied on his own were "You Are My Sunshine" and "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town." He got pretty good on both. And there was, of course, "O Canada", and "God Save the King", for those were the days when school mornings got off to good starts on set occasions. There was no religious instruction as such, but the morning also began with The Lord's Prayer and the readings from the Bible, which did much to augment Christ's showing up and speaking to him even before he trundled off to school. One has to wonder at the judgements on modern educational authorities.
  
    And then there was the use his Creator, Saviour, and guardian angels made of nature. It too was a book, filled with unlimited adventure and stimulus, especially in the least of things. The spiritual forces seemed always to be whispering to him of the wonderment, the power, the being, that rested most significantly in everything he beheld. He had never heard of Saint Francis in the Baptist Church or the devotional conversations of his grandparents, but he did know the brotherhood and sisterhood of water and fire and forests, the rising of the sun and its setting, the moon and the stars and the rain and fog and sometimes the snow of his coastal origins. These creatures of nature were so impinged on his soul that he was automatically drawn to any writer or illustrator who knew how to celebrate their glories.

    And always, at so many regular intervals, there was that light that seemed to augment what he encountered and beheld, even without his actually knowing it for what it was, like an invisible Gabriel shadowing the Tobias of the Bible. When the little Thomas Aquinas arrived at Monte Cassino, so it is told, he astounded one of the monks assigned to take care of him by asking him not, "Who is God?", but the astoundingly more metaphysical "What is God?" So Toby might have been moved to ask "What is that light?", so co-natural, although not always constant, was it to his daily journey. But he never did ask, then, because the light was never a feature of its own, but was always with the other objects in front of his eyes, so he simply assumed it went with the rest of life and everyone knew it as he did. He would be in his teens before he ever saw it as a separate entity,and it would be many more years before he was taught to see it as the light that disappeared from the eyes of those in mortal sin, and an element of identification in the spirit of a room, without or without people in it. Such weighty and demanding skills God has a patient schedule for bestowing. He has to. Too much of such ability too quickly might simply blow a soul to pieces.

    But that was a long way away. For the moment in the Interior he was simply an appreciative child of nature, with a certain amount of grace thrown in here and there so as to perfect and consolidate and refer to their final and best recollection in eternity, the open-hearted experiences of the here and now in the life of a child.

    It was on this first journey away from the city, for example, that he found out what marvellous things passenger trains are: travelling versions of one's own living room, with the added advantages of making instant friends of complete strangers and watching the country side slide by. And so much new land, and so many trees. He had not been without trees where he had lived up to now, having spent most of his conscious life living a bow shot from the lofty first growth conifers of Central Park, but these new reaches of trees were virtually endless. And how interesting a device, the railway station, with all the fellows in their black caps and uniforms, blowing whistles and trundling baggage. And the steam engine. Oh my. He had been on a steamer once, with his Nana going to Bowen Island for the annual picnic of the department store where she was head cook, and that was a great exposure to the sea, but he was fundamentally a landlubber, because it was on the land where you could find horses and the other animals, so the mighty engines that took you over the land where very noble beasts indeed. And he even got to spend some time in a station, because at Sicamous, with its great stuffed rainbow trout on the wall you got off, and waited to catch the branch line that went south to Falkland.

    And before Sicamous he was led to approach the subject of malt again, in a fashion once removed, by seeing the loftiest of all field plants, acres of them, hop vines on their tall racks. His mother answered his question without evasion. Hop vines, and miles of open fields, so unlike the coastal rain forest, with such opportunities for horses. And Lombardy poplars! Such a tree, and not a one to be found that he had ever seen in Vancouver. They seemed immensely special, and deepest reason for that would remain a secret until he was much older. He thought very highly of the people that had invented this country.

    And then there was the stream that wandered through the village, a creek in the narrowest valley he had ever seen. In the town, beside the motel - did they stay in the motel before or after their weeks at the farm at Glenemma? - there was a bridge over the creek, and he learned about hanging over a bridge rail and gazing at the lively flow of the water.

    And the motel had peacocks, the first he'd seen. Obviously the people who lived amongst cows and horses were not simply content with the unexotic. Probably his newly discovered skill of reading slowed down in these new surroundings, except for school. There was so much new stuff to take in.
It was at the farm, their first home, that he got to ride a horse for the first time. The second youngest daughter, his walking companion over the two-and-a-half miles each way to the Glenemma school, his first one-roomer, took him out on a sunny Sunday afternoon. There was no saddle, as they rode bareback, him behind, along the wooded hill that rose across the road above the farm. With no cattle to round up, bandits to chase, nor Indians to flee, it was all much tamer than what he had seen in the movies, and he also got himself such a sore pair of thighs from straddling a work horse, that he could not walk to school the next day. It was his first conscious lesson in the possibility of difference between imagination and reality, expectation and realization. It had also been a let down not to have the bridle in his own hands. But she was a very pleasant girl, possibly the best mannered of all the other girls in the crowded school, so the time spent was a pleasant memory, although not as pleasant as the hours they spent walking along the North Okanagan road to and from school. It was a memory he always went back to hereafter when the cottonwoods began to put their leaves out in the spring and the unmistakable smell hit his nostrils on a warm day.

    And then his mother found a place in Falkland itself, with a family who would later keep his little brother while Toby and his mother were in eastern Canada.

    It was in Falkland, still a major player in the rodeo circuit, that he not only got to see the broncs and their riders, but tried the skill himself, albeit on a poor defenseless calf belonging to a new friend's father, who owned a small farm at the edge of the town. The episode left him with many things to think about, which is what the spontaneous adventures of childhood are largely about.