... remembering Spencer Bernard

Updated: Here is Spencer's obituary

I had just moved back to Canada after three years in Barbados. The four things I was looking most forward to were:

1. Not having to wear a uniform to school
2. Not having to take history anymore
3. Skipping a grade, essentially going from 9 to 11
4. Girls (three years in an all-boys school...yeah...)

On my first day back at Minto Memorial High School, feeling oh-so-rebellious in jeans and a black jacket, I tried to find my home room. I guess between re-enrolling and being bumped up, I was not put on any homeroom sheets (so begins the G Valentino Adolesence of Obscurity). I ran into the principal and told him my predicament. He walked down a hall, leaned into a room and said "Spence, can you take an Italian student?" "Well, does he make good pasta?"

And that's how I met Spencer Bernard.

Now everyone has that one teacher at some point that they idolize and write navel-gaving epistles about, and Mr Bernard was mine. I'd love to say that it was he was a great educator, that his classes were insightful and pushed our boundaries, that he challenged us. But really, he didn't. He was a high school teacher of history and biology who from time to time forgot he was a teacher and would basically act and think like a student.

But he did teach something very crucial for a boy who was back in a hometown that he didn't quite remember, experiencing a bit of a culture shock, and going from 12 to 15 in terms of some basic human interactions overnight. He taught me that it was okay to be myself.

We both soon discovered that we had a shared fondness for Fawlty Towers, which I had watched in Barbados. That's how he introduced me to Monty Python and a whole other realm of British humour and satire. He was a Star Trek fan, something that I was becoming at the time, and he was the first adult I had met with that interest and who took it seriously. He had a keen knowledge of pop culture. He was also a sharp observer of people, and had an eye for the little absurdities that most would ignore going on around them, those little rules of behaviour and etiquette that created a social fabric, but made no sense. He would then pepper a lot of those in his interpretations of history. We would talk about these things before and after classes, and probably during them most of the time (which I'm sure annoyed a lot of people in the class).

The more time I spent in his classes and in conversation with him, the more I saw that those little things that I had classified as "weird" or "nerdy" (obsessiveness with books and the details of stories, little hidden connections between disciplines, distrust of popular opinion) weren't things to be kept out polite conversation, but were the things that made me who I was and conversely made others who they were. I came to see that all of us, in our own way, are a little bit nerdy. As humans we are creatures of irrational obsessions and odd passions. If you could recognize those in yourself and celebrate them in others, than the world was going to be a far more interesting place. The more I talked to Mr Bernard, the more I came to believe that the two greatest traits we as humans have are empathy and curiosity. So long as you never lost those, you'd never lose the wonder of life.

When I came back to Canada, I was ready to leave History behind. When I went to University, it was my minor. I went from seeing it as a bland progression of dates and causes and effects to recognizing that it's a story of those things that make people who they are only writ large, filled the same ambitions and pettiness as the rest of our daily interactions are. As trite as it sounds, that all started with Mr Bernard asking if the new kid could make good pasta. From anyone else, it would have been offensive. From him, it sounded like a little note that said "Don't take the story too seriously, because in the end the story sure as hell ain't gonna take you seriously."

The last time I was back in New Brunswick, about two years ago, I opened the paper and saw his picture in the community notices section. They were having a party to celebrate his retirement from teaching. I was one of the first people to arrive, and hadn't seen him in almost a decade. I walked in and he looked across the room. "Giuseppe," he said (it was the name he loved calling me in the hallways at MMHS) "I can't believe it, how in the hell are you?" and he threw his arms around me. We talked about his retirement, about the things he wanted to do, and what he'd probably wind up doing, and I'm pretty sure both were just going to be sitting on his couch, watching Star Trek.

Spencer Bernard passed away today. He once said me to "When I die, I want them to bury me with a credit card and a bottle of whiskey, because if I can't buy my way into heaven I'm gonna drown my sorrows in hell." Maybe I'm idealistic, but I think if what I learned from Spencer could be applied to more people, we wouldn't need to worry much about either.