dieser text erklärt warum es notwendig ist zu lernen - besser als wir ale hier das sagen können
lerne englisch so zu lesen - zu sprechen, damit du lebst
der mann war 93 als er startete lesen zu lernen
viel spass bei diesem text
100 years old and a man of letters ROY MacGREGOR
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
E-mail Roy MacGregor | Read Bio | Latest Columns SPRUCEDALE, ONT. — When 100-year-old Clarence Brazier decided, at 93, that he'd have to learn to read his junk mail if he ever hoped to shop for himself, it was a matter of necessity — just as taking over the family farm had been when he was barely old enough to tie his shoes let alone shoe a horse.
He had spent most of his life in Timmins, Ont., where he and his wife Angela had retired to their own farm. They were married 64 years, but when she died after a long illness, he suddenly had no one to keep his great secret any longer.
His beloved “Angel” had always taken care of the written words. Clarence was the family talker — “I could bullshit,” he laughs — and he had even been head of a local political constituency and farmers' union while she had served as secretary, faithfully covering his tracks. No one but the immediate family, Angela and their four daughters, ever knew the truth.
Seven years ago, however, there was no longer an Angel to watch over him. He had to eat, but he didn't even know how to shop. He took knife and scissors and cut labels off boxes in the pantry and went down to the store and tried to match colours and symbols, but that proved only frustrating and embarrassing to him.
Related to this article
Clarence Brazier, who recently turned 100, reads a book in a cabin at his home north of Huntsville, Ont. (Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail)
Latest Comments Re #6, Glenn Hawley - a typical moronic comment that I see everyday... There's a book in this. An idea for some enterprising author... Wonderful story! Mr. Brazier you reminded me of my late Grandfather... Jak King from Vancouver, Canada writes: 'What a great story and... 65 reader comments | Join the conversation “I had used tricks my whole life to get by,” he says. But now the tricks were failing him.
The only solution, he finally concluded, was to learn the words.
“I started with the junk mail they delivered to my house,” he says. The mail would come and he would spend hours out on the stoop of the farmhouse trying to pronounce words he knew were on the flyers. He knew the Canadian Tire symbol and tried to work through the letters to see how the word formed. He knew “pizza” and “hamburger” and “fries” from the pictures and memorized those letters. Rug cleaning, snow plowing, real-estate listings, grocery specials.
“It is difficult for me to stress how hard and tedious and frustrating those hours were,” he says.
Knowing her father was now alone, his daughter Doris Villemaire, a retired school teacher, asked if he would like to come down south and move in with her and her husband, Jim Villemaire, a retired Ontario Provincial Police inspector, on the small hobby farm they keep near Sprucedale, deep in the Central Ontario bush.
Clarence agreed, even though he was still perfectly capable of caring for himself, the shopping excepted. He was still working his woodlot, cutting and splitting 100 cords of wood each winter. He had even treated himself to a brand-new all-terrain vehicle at age 95, figuring it might last him a lifetime.
But the move made sense, so he came south, bringing his ATV and chainsaws along.
Doris couldn't help noticing how her father was picking through the newspaper for the flyers. He would trace over words now familiar, still trying to figure out how all the words in the newspaper made sense. After years working in mines and running chainsaws without ear protection, his hearing was rapidly deteriorating to the point where he wasn't watching television and listening to the radio the way he used to. Clarence had always been a man who kept up with politics and world affairs, but now the only way he could get at that information, he figured, was if he learned to read that newspaper he'd spent a lifetime avoiding.
Doris asked her father if he would like help. She was volunteering for the Muskoka Literacy Council and had access to material. She brought him home some primary readers, Grade 1 level, and together they worked through the alphabet and words so simple he laughs now to recall them.
“C-A-T, cat! R-A-T, rat! They were not very interesting.” He had higher ambitions. He wanted to read the newspaper to find out what was going on today. He wanted to read books to find out what had gone on in the North Country in his day.
And he wanted to get the education he had never had. He didn't think he was stupid. He just had no schooling.
“I had a lot of education, actually,” he says.
“But, you know, I stole it.” Clarence was five years old when his life turned upside down.
His father, George Brazier, had purchased a 100-acre farm property bordering a small lake near the village of Magnetawan in the rough country north of Muskoka. George had paid $450 and was so heavily mortgaged he took on any odd job that was available, from driving the Parry Sound veterinarian around by buggy two or three days of every month, to helping other farmers clear fields.
He was using explosives one day to blow out a stump, and when the charge failed he went to inspect the fuse. It exploded as he knelt over the stump, blowing his right eyeball out and blinding the left eye.
Fanny Mae Brazier was left with a husband who could not see a thing, six children and the mortgage. “She applied for widow's allowance,” Clarence says, “but they sent her a letter back saying she still had a husband. But she had to feed him — she was worse off than a widow.” Fanny Mae found work cooking for a nearby logging operation. Little Clarence was third-oldest but also, by far, the most capable one when it came to taking care of the cattle and horses. Within two years, by age seven, he was running the farm operation on his own.
“My mother used to come back and check three times a week,” he says, “but eventually she just came in from the camp on Sundays to check. We were running everything on our own.” In the winter months, the children did go to school, but Clarence — sprouting fast to his eventual six-foot-two — was both tallest in his class and furthest behind. He was humiliated by appearing so dull and being ridiculed. He never even finished Grade 1.
He took care of the cows, mucked the stables, led the horses to drink, shoed them, did the haying and repairs.
“There was nothing I didn't do,” he says.
To help meet the mortgage payments, the family picked berries and young Clarence kept up the wood lot. He would lead his blind father out into the woods by the hand, select the trees and then position his father on one side of a tree while they worked a cross-cut saw to fell the timber.
“I had his life in my hands,” Clarence says. “I was seven years old, but I had to know exactly how that tree would fall so it wouldn't hit him.” He also learned, with his father guiding him verbally, how to pick up some of the tricks George had learned from the veterinarian. He learned to file the teeth of older horses. He learned the art of delivering calves, clipping sheep, de-horning cattle.
He was imaginative. Farmers disliked the way blood would spray over the snow during the de-horning and Clarence devised a system using old socks to stem the flow so the cutting could be done in the barn, with the blood flowing down into gutters where it could be washed away.
“It was a simple thing to think of,” he says.
He was inventive and a quick learner, but he felt totally inadequate in that he had no education whatsoever and could not even read a sign. “It was always on my mind,” he says. “I knew if I didn't read that I had better learn to do something else to replace it.”
He was hardly alone, though he certainly felt alone. ABC Canada, the literacy organization, estimates that more than 40 per cent of adult Canadians come up short when it comes to being fully functionally literate. A number of high-achieving people in the hockey world, including Eddie Shack and Tie Domi, have gone public with their difficulties in reading. The most dramatic was former National Hockey League coach Jacques Demers, who last year produced a ghost-written book, En Toutes Lettres, that told the story of his own illiteracy, something he had managed to hide from his employers, the media and even his own children.
“When you hide the truth, you suffer inside,” Demers told the Ottawa Citizen. “I had to protect my job, my family, protect myself. If ever the hockey world had found out, they would never have hired me.”
There were months when Clarence figured he would never live long enough to worry about work. He was 12 when the Spanish flu raced through Canada at the end of the First World War, killing some 50,000 Canadians, and he was hit hard by it. He lay in bed, his chest burning from mustard plasters and onion poultices, all one January, February and March. He recovered, but was so weak it took him until the middle of May to walk again.
At 14, he became a hunting guide when a couple of local men, eager to help out the struggling Braziers, said he was 16 and old enough to apply for a guide's licence. At times he even used his blind father as a rower when he took city hunters across the lake in search of deer and moose, the father being guided by the boy's eyes.
In winter he took to the logging camps, and in spring worked the river runs where his quickness and strength soon made him a valued employee.
He and an older man, Earle Molten, were nursing logs through a jam one day when their pointer boat got caught in the current and over they went, the long boat splitting in two on the rocks below. Molten, a good swimmer, jumped into the current and began swimming to safety, only to be crushed by another log coming behind them. Clarence stayed with his half of the pointer and made land safely nearly a mile downstream. By the time he got back, the other men had already picked Molten's body from the water.
“He had no kin to send him back to,” Clarence says. “They took off his boots, wrapped him in a blanket and put him in a hole underneath a pine tree. Then they took a couple of six-inch spikes and hammered his boots to the tree. That was his tombstone.” He worked the winter lumber camps for years, felling timber during the days and spending his evenings darning and knitting for the other men.
He picked up a monthly bonus for calling Sunday square dances, the red-faced loggers who played the “girls” dancing with towels tied around their waists. He can still sing dozens of shanty songs from those days, every word perfectly memorized.
“I could once sing fine,” he says at the end of a full rendition of The Old Brown Pants, “but my voice isn't very good any more.”
He worked in the Timmins gold mines, the Sudbury nickel mines, as a travelling brush salesman and as a security guard. “I had schemes in every place I worked,” he says. He tried to befriend someone who could read who might cover for him.
As soon as a promotion would come along that might involve paperwork, he quit. He had dozens of jobs, quit dozens of jobs, yet was never short of work.
His best-paying work was in the McIntyre gold mine, but he left that because he saw so many fellow workers falling ill from all the years of breathing in silica dust. He once told northern historian Charlie Angus why he left: “When I quit the mine, the manager came up to me and said, ‘What's the matter, Clarence, didn't we treat you good?' ‘Oh, the very best.' ‘But what's the reason you're quitting?' I said, ‘To make it real plain, before my family is grown up, I'll be spitting blood on the streets of Timmins and I'd like to leave before that happens.'”
His shortest job lasted one day — almost. He had been doing security work in Timmins and landed a job as a guard at the infamous Don Jail in Toronto. He moved down, showed up for work and was told that, at the end of his shift, he'd have to fill in a report. He quit on the spot. When Clarence was well into his 20s, a new family, the Boudreaus, moved in from New Brunswick. They had a young daughter, Angela, who was quickly noticed.
“I'd take some wood over to them and look at the girl,” Clarence says.
“She was 13. I knew her father was a drinker and he could be mean if he was upset. So I just minded my business. I watched her until she was 16 — and then I married her.” He was 28.
Angela was very bright. She would later earn a college diploma, but at this point she had already dropped out of school in Grade 6.
The Boudreaus spoke French and there was only an English school for her to attend, so she quit in frustration.
“She was very, very smart for the education she had,” Clarence says. “She was up to mark on everything.”
Angela was behind him when he worked for the local New Democratic Party; she helped him when he headed up the farmers' union. She handled the bills, the applications, everything that involved paperwork.
Together they raised their four daughters, all pushed to get higher education, all successful in their own careers. And all moved away, leaving Clarence and Angela in Timmins to grow old together.
But then, one day, Clarence no longer had his crutch.
“I learned to read,” he says, “all because I lost my wife.” “He was a very enthusiastic student,”
Doris remembers those first months with the primary readers.
“His eyes would actually sparkle when he'd recognize a word. It was just as I'd seen with my students, but it was also kind of funny, too. I was seeing this same thing in my father — and he was acting just like the children I'd taught.”
From junk mail he moved to primary readers, and from primary readers to children's books and then into youth novels.
From fiction he headed into non-fiction, and today sits surrounded by books on history, books on mining and logging, books on Northern Ontario and hockey and Canada. The newspaper is at his feet, the various sections dropped as he has read through them.
He reads at least two hours a day. Often, at night, he will wake and read himself back to sleep.
His life has changed dramatically. No longer hiding his inability to read, he now brags about it. He goes to the area seniors' homes — “visiting with the young lads,” he says — and tells those who are well into their 60s and 70s and do not bother with books that. “They've got 30 years of good reading ahead of them.”
“I can't hear the television or listen to the radio to keep current with events and politics,” he says.
“Had I not learned to read, I believe I would have slowly become isolated from the world beyond my home.”
Instead, as Clarence moves into his second century, that world is opening up.
This fall, Canada Post presented him with the National Literacy Award for 2006.
At age 100, he has just become the poster boy for the very thing he spent nearly a century avoiding.
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07.10.2006 20:54
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