Following are three short stories that seem quite unrelated, but they converge at the end in a wonderfully meaningful way. At least it's meaningful for our family.
Gail and I moved into our house in Waterdown in July of 1997 (the day before my 28th birthday), almost two years after we were married and two weeks before I started working at Sybase (where I still work). The next summer, we hired a landscaping designer to help us do something different with our front yard. We changed the shapes of some of the gardens and planted a bunch of new things including a euonymous bush, a standard pee gee hydrangea (which lasted about ten years before dying), a dwarf Japanese cedar that I loved (but it also died after only a year or two), and a purple-leaf sandcherry tree. The sandcherry wasn't a sapling when we bought it – I don't remember for sure but I have a feeling it was already 5-6 feet tall. It thrived in front of the house and we've loved the purple leaves and pink flowers ever since. But a couple of years ago we started to wonder if it was getting too big. Every year we had to trim off some branches and cut it back and eventually, the only branches left were huge and thick and not many actual leaves were growing on it. It was also maybe ten feet from the house, and we wondered if the roots could cause problems. By this point the top of the tree was up to the second-storey window, so it had grown quite a bit. This spring, it looked pretty sickly with mostly branches and very few leaves so we made the tough decision to take it down. Two weeks ago, Gail's dad came down with his chain saw and we removed the tree.
In Ontario, public schools test all grade 4 students to see if they should be identified as "exceptional", which includes things like autism, giftedness, speech impairments, as well as other physical or learning disabilities. We became familiar with this process when Ryan was identified as gifted three years ago. He continued at Allan A. Greenleaf public school (where he had been since kindergarten) for grade five, but we found he was "coasting" and not trying very hard. He just wasn't that engaged. We decided to move him to a special class for gifted children (at a different school), and he's been there for two years and doing pretty well.
Nicky just finished grade four at Greenleaf, and we received his test results about a month ago – he is also gifted. (Warning: proud daddy bragging ahead) In the Visual Comprehension test, the school VP said that Nicky's score was in the 99.9th percentile "or even higher" across the entire Hamilton-Wentworth district school board. This means that on average, of every thousand kids that took the test, at most one of them scored higher than Nicky. (OK, bragging all done.) We talked to his teacher and the learning resource teacher, and they both thought the gifted class would be the best place for Nicky. We agreed, and requested that he be moved there. They offered him a spot and since Greenleaf doesn't have a gifted class (which is why Ryan moved), Nicky will be attending Dundas Central public school in the fall. For the first time since 2003, we will have no children attending Greenleaf next year.
When Ryan started kindergarten at Greenleaf back in the fall of 2003, Gail decided she wanted to know more about the school and the community so she went out to a couple of school council meetings. You don't need to join the council to attend the meetings so she didn't actually join, just observed. The next year, she decided to join the council and at the first meeting agreed to be "co-chair". The school had had co-chairs for several years and it seemed to be working fine, so they continued having two. She was co-chair the next year as well, and then in the third year, the guy who had been the other co-chair left because his kids had all moved on to high school. Someone else stepped up as co-chair for one year but after that Gail just did it herself, and has ever since. This past year was the eighth year that Gail has been chair or co-chair of the school council at Greenleaf. She knows all the teachers and staff on a first-name basis and is involved in just about every fundraiser and event that the school puts on.
The school has "free family movie night" once a month, where kids and their families and friends can come to the school on a Friday night and watch a movie. The school council sells popcorn and drinks and it's a pretty popular event. That was Gail's brainchild. Every February, the school holds a spaghetti dinner and silent auction, which is very popular and raises thousands of dollars for the school. Gail helped create that as well and until this past year when she was busy with her own studies, she co-ordinated the event every year. Make no mistake, Gail had lots of help from other parents and members of the council, and I've been volun-told myself on numerous occasions when she needed help, but nobody has done more for the Greenleaf community over the past eight years than Gail has. All the teachers love her, and if I had a nickel for every time one of them told me how great she was or how lucky I was, I'd be a wealthy man indeed.
In the words of Bill Cosby, I told you those stories to tell you this one.
On the second-last day of school this year, the librarian at Greenleaf (Nirogi) called Gail and asked her if she would come to the final assembly of the year the next morning. Gail knew that something was up, since parents don't usually go to the end-of-school assembly. But we also knew that this would be the last day we had kids at Greenleaf, and they would likely be doing something to say goodbye to Gail. We were right. They did a little thing for each of the five or six teachers that were leaving, and then they brought Gail up. A grade eight girl who has been involved with the student council also got up and read some stuff about how much Gail has done for the school, how much they appreciate everything she's done, and how the school won't be the same without her. After much applause from the teachers and students, Gail got up and said a few unscripted thank-yous through tears.
But the best part is that in Gail's honour, the school will be planting a purple-leaf sandcherry tree behind the school in the fall. Nirogi knew how much we like the sandcherry in front of our house, so that's what she picked to plant for Gail. She didn't even know that we had had to take ours down.
As much as we're excited about the new opportunities awaiting Nicky next year in his new school, we're very sad that we're leaving the Greenleaf community. But the fact that for the next however-many years there will be a tree at the school that was planted for Gail is supremely cool. We may not have kids at the school anymore, and I don't know if there'll be a plaque or anything near the tree with her name on it, but we'll know. And every now and again we'll stop in at the school for no other reason than to see Gail's tree.
No comments:
Post a Comment