TRADITION! (It's kind of a big deal)

An Anglican aquaintance of remarkably good humour once related his frustration with serving on the board of a local “Non-Denominational Bible College” (NDBC). “We were spending all this time talking about bringing in more students by broadening our appeal. And I finally spoke up and said, ‘You can’t. It’s already too broad — you’ve got no specificity of direction. You’re not offering any particular theological or intellectual tradition for potential students to integrate and build from. At best all you’ve got is an emphasis on piety, and that’s less a tradition than it is a posture. You need something with a deeper historical embeddedness to offer students, otherwise all you’ve got is a vague offer for a parentally sanctioned finishing school. And it reads.’”

I thought back to my single, academically disastrous, year at a NDBC in Toronto. Piety as posture, in the absence of an integrated intellectual tradition — I could not have come up with a more spot-on summary.

Not that I could have identified any sort of intellectual tradition had it bit me on the ass.

Now this is more like it!

The deal with our parents was, upon graduating high school, one year in a Christian post-secondary school — geographical and denominational concerns were moot.

My siblings and I focused on geography. Our choices as 18-year-old kids offer a surprisingly enduring thumbnail of our temperaments. My sister flew to the UK, my brother to a remote island off the west coast. In 1983 Toronto still had the remnants of a punk scene, so I went there.

I didn’t see a single punk concert. But my intellectual tradition took root in Bakka Books and Silver Snail Comics, and an independent record store whose name I no longer recall. As well as my aunt’s basement — she and her husband, a United Church minister, had a VCR and encouraged me to charge movies to their account at the local video store.

I don’t know what else to say about the school, except that I felt like an alien there — a feeling that went away, temporarily, on Saturday mornings when I had a dormitory lounge to myself where I could turn on the b&w TV and watch Star Trek reruns.

Toward the end of the year I came to know a guy down the hall from me. We shared an appreciation for Talking Heads. He returned from a weekend at home and presented me with a tape recording of The Name Of This Band Is. He became That Guy In College Who Introduced Me To Music. David Lindley, Ry Cooder, Laurie Anderson, Weather Report, T Bone Burnett, and a reconsideration of Steely Dan that flipped the switch for me.

A lifelong friend who introduced me to other lifelong friends.

Anyway, courses were failed, and home summoned. I boxed up my belongings, said goodbye to the roommate, and returned to the prairies, leaving my textbooks behind — except for one.