SO MANY QUESTIONS

                              Part II

     Many of the questions in this list could be talked about all night. So writing brief answers doesn't do them justice , but it does make me think about things. 

• favorite color 

                 Well again I don't have a favorite color. When I was a kid we had 7 or 8 basic colors in our box of crayons we had for school. Now there are hundreds of colors and I don't keep track of them.  

           favorite food/dish/meal?

               I have a good appetite and like food. I'll just be very direct and come out and say my favorite is everything my Mom cooked! Now I hope you don't take offense because I've eaten your food and you're a very good cook. . My Mom , your Grandma was a very good cook. We had meat , potatoes and veggies. She was the best baker in the whole world...cakes, cookies pies, bread, desserts . Oh ya. She always gave us a hunk of bread dough to play with! All this she did on a wood burning cook stove . Not only great food came off that cook stove but it was warm to cuddle up around when we were little kids. I will never forget Mom's Christmas dinners. I will never forget all the baking she did for Christmas. I would like to be able to eat it all again. 

• if you hadn't been a teacher, what else would you have wanted to do for a living?  what did you dream of being when you were a kid?

      When I was a little kid all I ever thought about was being a farmer. It's the only thing we knew about as we hadn't been exposed to anything else.  I became a teacher by accident. Close to the end of gr 12 I knew that I would "pass". I didn't get along with Dad on the farming business. He encouraged me to try something else. His suggestion was nursing.  Nursing did not interest me in the least. . So the only thing that interested me and was doable was to go to Teachers' College. Looking back. I chose the right thing. I really wanted to do something that was outdoors. Working with wildlife interested me. To this day I'm very interested in birds , animals and plants. 

• did you always want to move far from home when you were younger (and went north) or was that just a happy accident?  

              This is really two questions. I am and was an introvert. I didn't want to leave home however, staying at home and farming was not an option. The first year I was away I was very, very homesick. However , you get used to being on your own. Going north was an accident. As I little boy I was keenly interested in the north. I read many books about life in the north. The planning of Inuvik started about 1950 and they started to build in the early fifties. There were quite often items in the paper which I read. I followed developments. However, I never had any thoughts of going there. Years later I applied for a teaching position in Canada's Northland and they placed me in Inuvik.