How the Number Two Did Me In Once

Picture yourself in the following scene. You’re a teen playing charades with your classmates in class as part of a learning activity. You’re up. The teacher hands you a slip of paper. You look at the phrase written on it and decide how you’re going to get your peers to say the phrase - and you are confident that you will succeed. Part way in, you want them to try to guess the second word. What do you do?

In retrospect, it would have been easier to give the peace sign and explain that it had nothing to do with peace, but was in fact a sign that I was about to demonstrate the second word of the phrase. Instead, moments later, I was ordered to walk down the hallway to the vice-principal’s office (AKA assistant headmaster). How did that happen?

When I was in his office he became visibly upset when I showed him the sign I had made with my hands, but he was the thoughtful type and jumped straight to asking me what I meant. I meant the number two.

“Oh, so you mean this,” he said as he made a hand gesture.

“No,” I replied. “That means peace; this means two.”

He was visibly upset again, but didn’t vent. “So this means the number two to you?”

“Right.”

“And you’re not offended by it?”

“Nope,” I said as nonchalantly as I could. (In fact, he was the one who taught me the meaning of nonchalant, but I digress.)

He exhaled and gave me a super brief history lesson of how the UK was once renowned for its archers, who would use their index and middle fingers to loose arrows. If captured, the enemy would slice off those two digits as torture/punishment. Fast forward to the present and now that is the British equivalent of the raised North American middle finger.

Well, that explained why over a dozen teens all simultaneously lurched back when I gave them the number two! In that instant, I knew I had stepped on a landmine, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was. This took place in homeroom.

In the previous British school school I attended, something similar had happened in biology class. I had never before heard a certain word before the classmate who sat next to me whispered it into my right ear. He was nice enough to explain zebra crossing, but not this other word. And I really wanted to know what it meant! So I asked the others around me, but no one would tell me. The biology teacher even got curious about what I was going on about and he asked me. So I flat out told him that I didn’t know the meaning of the word ___.

Suffice it to say, he got pissed off and red-faced pretty quickly and promptly kicked me out of the class right then. I was later told it had to do with female genitalia, but hey, my ears were virgins at that point as far as the Brits were concerned!

Don’t get me started on the hour-long bus ride home one day where I and a younger student had a stubborn difference of opinion of the pronunciation of the word awkward. But then, I was “from a wild country”.

In fact, that was probably the saving grace of my reputation. You would not believe how hot and bothered the female students got when I told them I had actually seen a live bear outside of a zoo. It’s true! In southern Canada, except for a few very large cities, bears can be a nuisance and get into your garbage, so you have to chase them away.

Yes, I was point-blank when explaining that and I am glad I attended that school for only a few months. After all, line-ups (for anything) at that first British school were getting way too comfortable by then.

But the icing on the cake took place at a dinner party where we were hosting colleagues from the British organisation my dad was working in at the time. It was the first of two large regional offices in Germany my dad worked at, but anyway. Dinner at our place with lots of Brits. They, of course, made comments about us being colonials, but my dad took the crown at a certain point of the conversation where one of the guests said:

Wow, this is a huge table.

to which my dad responded:

Yes. All colonials here are issued one this size.

Truth be told, it was the standard table offered, only we had put a large, flat piece of wood on top of it and covered it with an extra-large tablecloth. Still, watching their jaws hit the floor still makes me chuckle a bit. Truth be told, that was also the point when I learned something special about my Canuck side.

Ever hear of the International Comedy Festival? Or have you ever paid attention to the country-of-origin for a lot of hugely successful Hollywood stars of comedy movies? Well, as it turns out, Canada has one of the highest rates of comedians per capita.

My point here is not to take any mortal human being and combine that with the power of laughter, no. I am talking about combining something uniquely Canadian with the need to direct it towards a light humour. What is that something uniquely Canadian?

Well, we understand the futility of shouting when standing outside in a genuine winter blizzard. Winds at least 30km/hr (19 mph), blinding snow storm where you cannot see more than 30cm (1 ft.) in front of you, and the temperature is colder than -30C (-22F). And yet, we weather it just fine. In fact, it’s our cue to break out the shovels and snowblowers (it’s our way of throwing snowballs right back at Mother Nature)!

And hockey - ok, I have to take a brief step back here. There are actually three types of hockey, which is something I did not know until I was schooled by the Brits. “The other type of hockey” I had always known was floor hockey - same thing minus the ice and skates. The third type is called field hockey. It is kinda like ball hockey, but the biggest difference are the sticks - it is just like playing with candy canes they are so tiny!

While French was technically the first language I spoke, that in and of itself should have granted me a shot at playing goalie in (ice) hockey even though I was not born in Quebec, but nope. I always wanted to, but hey, apparently I had to go to Europe and play field hockey to play almost a full season in that position. Now why would teenage Brits graciously offer that position to yours truly?

Well, apparently, in field hockey players are supposed to be afraid of the ball. That was a completely alien concept to me and I had no problem getting in its way. As a result, the team I was on won nearly every game since scoring against me was actually difficult and the others knew how to direct the ball into the other team’s net.

The goal I really scored over there, though, was realizing what to do with my ingrained culture that translated adversity (e.g. bears and hard balls) into mere nuisances.It is neither just about refusing to back down nor is it about being direct and honest. It’s about standing without wavering and carrying oneself in a way that completely dispels the original negative notion while making everyone around you feel lighter. Find a way to share the humor by showing what can happen when both perspectives of the original incident are equally applied. So, if a room full of people, colonial or otherwise, suddenly lurch back in their seats in response to something you do, well, you can do what the Chinese did and number-one me, but they use that finger to point since it is typically the longest finger after all….

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