But Cheryl had a boyfriend. At the end of the summer, Larry had served his time and had to say farewell to prison and return to school. In a speech of appreciation, he thanked Don publicly for his apprenticeship and Cheryl for her friendship. He gave Don a copy of Barry Broadfoot’s history of the Depression, Ten Lost Years, and Cheryl a bouquet. His time in the prison service, he said, had given him much-needed focus, purpose and direction, for which he was deeply grateful. The summer program had worked its magic. After graduate school, he told the little audience in Don’s office, he would be going to teachers’ college. “I have Don to thank for my decision. His example has given me direction and purpose.” They gently applauded him and the Director thanked him in person. It had been a profitable summer.
Thirty-five years later, Larry was astonished to receive a phone call from Don Wyatt. He was then 91, living in Brockville, and had left the prison service many years before to become a bond salesman. His children were grown, and then in their fifties. He had been downsizing when he had come across the Broadfoot memoir on his shelves, and had found Larry’s number in the phone book. What have you been doing with yourself, Don wondered. Larry told him. He had then been teaching for twenty-eight years, and now his own sons were in university. They met at his condo in Brockville, where each introduced his wife, and reminisced. “You look older than I expected,” said Don. “Teaching today takes it out of you, I guess.” Larry smiled. “And you look too young for your age,” replied Larry. “They say retirement is good for you, and you’re the proof!” If so, Don replied, “It’s all due to my wife. She’s the real anchor of my life!” The long years years had rolled away, but Don was still his genial self. They exchanged Christmas cards for a few years until one was returned ‘unknown at this address.’
And so must have passed quietly one of life’s gentlemen, a kind and generous soul gifted with a sense of irreverent humour and an unquenchable spirit of adventure. Larry’s one regret was that Don had never written down the stories of the ‘good boys,’ the likeable inmates he had met in his prairie classrooms, so long gone now, and unable to be celebrated for the colourful lives they had lived during the ten long lost years of the Depression, that scar on community life that was Canada then, so reminiscent in its malign effect on the lives of so many, of the worrisome coronavirus crisis of the present time.
