I could have been a poet in Paris
How I didn’t become the next Charles Bukowski
Canada is like Belgium - we’re not bilingual, we have two languages
I grew up in Canada so a lot of people seem to think I should be able to speak French.
To be honest, I should be able to speak French.
I wasn’t paying attention during the four or five years of language classes I endured at school and I didn’t take the time or make the effort to learn during a decade of life in Brussels either. I’m silently ashamed of both but “c’est la vie”.
When and where I grew up, “no one” spoke French. You could easily pass four years of high school French without learning anything. Sometimes classes were great and if you could nail the pronunciation of “une Maserati rouge” in the ears of a car-crazy but less-than-French-fluent substitute teacher, you were certain to pass. If you could draw “une Maserati rouge” or one of any “couleur” you might even get an A. I couldn’t draw and ended up with a C+.
In the early seventies, research showed that less than 1% of the population spoke Canada’s second language in our region. It was conducted as part of a feasibility study for a new radio station. Due to our size and saturation of stations, we had two AMs and an FM station at the time, federal law stipulated that the next new station would have to be French-language.
Despite the < 1% conclusion, we got a new station. It was affiliated with the national broadcaster, Radio Canada. (CBC to us). We listened to Montreal Expos baseball and Montreal Canadiens hockey in French but the novelty soon wore off and we switched to music and DJs on the English language station that was added as soon as the French quota was filled.
Don’t judge me. It was the 70s, I was a teenager, and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours were better than listening to a game we didn’t play or suffering through yet another Stanley Cup win by a team we didn’t cheer for.
A Frenchman in hospital does not a language teacher make
Six months into my four-decade-long gap year, I met a real Frenchman from France. It was a first for me.
He was ill or injured or something, (I can’t remember) and landed in hospital in the rural Norwegian town where I was going to school. Being Canadian meant people assumed I spoke French so I was sent to visit him. The locals thought that because we were both foreigners in the countryside far from home and we shared a common language it would be good for both of us. I didn’t speak French and hardly understood Norwegian so I had no idea why I was being sent to the hospital to talk to an unfortunately ill or injured stranger.
Luckily, we hit it off. As it turned out we did share a common language.
It was English…
Even if I had been French Canadian, the bedridden Frenchman would have spoken English to me. He was not a fan of the French that was spoken in parts of Canada. He was, in fact, a very outspoken non-fan of French-Canadian. Or Canadian-French. He probably would be swearing at me for using the word no matter which way I wrote it.
“They don’t speak French in Canada! Their language stopped developing in the 1700’s”, he said. “Then it was bastardized by English and the accent makes me nauseous. I’ve met Quebecois in Paris. I tell them to speak English or shut up.”
And thus a short-lived friendship was born between a hospitalized Parisian and a homesick, English-speaking Canadian in remote Norway.
We had a couple of good chats until he was discharged and disappeared. Another opportunity to pick up a bit of French had passed me by.
The CEO chose to stay, so I had to go
As I “celebrated” the 10th anniversary of my career, I was a less than happy camper. According to my boss, Safety and security were still “not important enough” to be a full-time corporate role and the other three or four areas of responsibility I had were growing at an extreme pace.
We had millions of members in our loyalty program, we were honouring other airline loyalty programs, “database marketing” was going online and evolving into something much more than sending flyers out in the mail, and we were struggling to keep up the speed and accuracy of our travel agent commission payments.
I was working 15 – 16 hours a day trying to keep up and growing increasingly schizophrenic trying to focus on the different subject matter. One of the tactics I used to shift my mindset from loyalty programs to security to marketing was to write a short, silly rhyme while making the switch.
When you work such long hours, there’s only one thing to do when you finally leave the office…. you go to the bar.
Colleagues had heard about my poetry prowess and soon enough, I was charging workmates a glass or two of Brandy to write lyrics to songs they could sing about each other at Christmas parties. That was fun, but inside I was still frustrated and fed up.
June 1, 1997, on the 10th anniversary of my employment, I made myself a promise. If I wasn’t working on safety and security full-time by Christmas, I would hand in my resignation.
I lobbied to the best of my abilities. I was told that I was doing a good job, and everyone in management was happy with me. There was no need to change.
I made a final pitch to the CEO just before Christmas but the response was “someday, perhaps, but not just now”. Days before the end of the year, I handed in my resignation to my boss in Oslo. Moments later the phone rang. It was the CEO in Brussels.
“What’s this about a resignation? Are you trying to put pressure on me.”
I told him my lobbying, my pleas and my begging had gone unrewarded. I had to make a decision. We disagreed on the direction things should be taking and one of us would have to take the consequences, I said. My guess was that it wasn’t going to be him. He laughed and agreed that he wasn’t going to quit because I disagreed with him. He then said:
“I accept your resignation. Whatever I say from now on, it doesn’t matter, you can’t withdraw your resignation. Maybe things will be different in a year, but I don’t want you to be miserable for a year hoping things will change, because maybe they won’t. I’ll tell you why we can’t make any changes now and then you can go off and do what you want and we’ll see what happens. I know one thing for sure. It’s better to leave as on good terms and be welcomed back someday than to stay and become so frustrated that we either fire you or you storm out and slam the door.”
He then gave me two really good reasons why no changes could be made. I promised not to share them and accepted that I couldn’t withdraw my resignation.
Poetry, Paris and me, the story was not to be
What does all this have to do with me not becoming a poet in Paris?
I had been writing poetry to keep me sane in my schizophrenic struggle to manage multiple disciplines at work. Reality check. I was doing most of it for free drinks, and I was becoming “world-famous” in our local bar under the fan-chosen pseudonym “PsykoPoet”. (My friends just called me Psyko)
Colleagues that had seen the film “Barfly” said I was the next Charles Bukowski. I’m not sure if it was my poetry or the fact that I preferred payment in Armagnac that made them think that.
I was hardly Charles Bukowski, nor was I close to Mickey Rourke’s “Henri Chinaski”.
Another movie that had gained a cult following at work was “Les Amants du Pont Neuf” (English title: “The Lovers on the Bridge”)
It was about an affair between a painter who was going blind and an addict in Paris.
I wasn’t going blind (in Norway, I was careful to only drink quality moonshine during my student years), I’ve never done drugs, and I can’t paint, and when he learned I had handed in my resignation, a friend came to my aid.
The friend, who years later would be best man at my wedding, said that I should dedicate myself to being creative.
He offered to buy me a bottle of brandy a day for a year if I would live under Pont Neuf and write poetry. After the year, we would share the profits of my writings.
I’m not sure how serious he was or how close I actually came to accepting his proposal. Knowing him, if I had said, “Why not”, he would have done anything to make it a reality, something that no doubt would have made my grandmother’s prediction come true. She had two porcelain figurines of balloon sellers. “You’re going to end up as one of these”, she had told me when I was a child. (She was quite conservative in her ways, so I believe she meant the one on the left.)
After she passed away, my parents found my name written on the bottom of each figurine. I inherited them.
They say that when one door closes, another one opens. In my case, two doors opened. Another colleague, who’d advanced in his career and become a General Manager, offered me a job. He wanted me to manage a reservations office. It was an offer driven by sympathy and he really went out on a limb because I knew nothing about running a reservations department.
I had a Richard Branson moment, said yes, moved to Stavanger and tried to figure it out. I chose a city of oil over the city of lights.
What would have happened if I had accepted the offer to live under Pont Neuf?
A few things probably.
I’m confident I wouldn’t have lasted a year.
I’m equally confident that the poetry profits wouldn’t have covered the cost of a glass of brandy, let alone a bottle a day of it.
On the other hand, I’m also confident that I would have learned French.
I’ll let you be the judge of whether or not I passed up possibly my best opportunity to learn the “language of love”.
When he saw me for the first time after my short-lived departure from the company, the CEO laughed and said:
“I told you the good ones always come back!”
“Maybe so”, I said, “but I came back too!”
Stay safe, Always Care
Thanks for reading 87 Stories - Lessons from the University of Life!
I’m Paul. Written with the clarity of hindsight, the accuracy of a faded memory, and countless creative liberties, 87 Stories is a journal of life lessons learned and how my “gap year” made me an emigrant, an immigrant, and gave me a life I’d never dreamed of.
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