3. Grammar Lessons

At seventeen, I had figured it all out; a man walking on the moon only cemented my belief that everything was possible. I eagerly left home to attend university in Ottawa, seven hundred kilometres away—the furthest I could go within the borders of the province.

Despite my determination to leave Smalltown and my parents’ orbit, I remained a dutiful daughter. I made sure to phone home weekly—long-distance calls on Sunday because it was cheaper—undertook the pilgrimage across Ontario a few times a year, and never missed a Polish Christmas. I usually took the train, making a connection in Toronto, and even hitchhiked once—the driver dropped me off right at my parents' door. The rest of the time, I was on my own path.

Carleton University was an eye-opener. There were people in my classes considerably more knowledgeable than me or anyone I had ever met. Despite this, or maybe because of it, academic studies took a backseat to partying until dawn and hanging out with friends. It was a time of expansion, no boundaries, and permission. I was carefree enough to embark on a road trip, with absolutely no fixed plans or cares about crashing on a strangers’ floors, in a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle, with a man who resembled Cat Stevens and was a lecturer in the French department at my university. We travelled across the country down the west coast to Los Angeles and across the United States back to Ottawa.

I muddled through, doing the minimum amount of work required, and got less-than-stellar grades. At the end of four years, I had just one more class I needed to take to graduate. All I wanted was that diploma and a future I didn’t have much of a plan for to take shape.

My decision to enroll in Professor G. Peter Browne's history class was about as random as drawing a name out of a hat for the office Christmas gift exchange. It had to be a night class because I had just begun working full-time on Parliament Hill for a Member of Parliament—my first real job.

By day, I attempted to solve constituents’ problems with their unemployment insurance or pensions and responded to the letters they sent expressing their displeasure with government policies. By night, I planned on completing my history major, by taking the Wednesday night seminar on Confederation, which I was sure would be a complete bore.

Browne was a slight, bespectacled man with a hint of a British accent. He could have played an Oxford don in a 1950s movie. Of indeterminate age, he always wore the same tweed jacket with patched elbows over a crisp white shirt with a stiff collar. And he invariably sported an unfashionably skinny tie, ignoring the bolder and wider ones that were fashionable in the day. He referred to us formally. I was Miss Switocz, which he pronounced correctly on the first try. And he was demanding. Two major papers were required, as were weekly written assignments called gobbets.

Browne defined a gobbet as "the digestion of a tasty morsel." In reality, it was a structured commentary on a short text from a historical document—in our case, one related to the enactment of the British North America Act of 1867. He expected us to consult multiple primary sources—this was an upper-level history course, after all—and deduce the context and political relevance of the passage we were "digesting." Every week our analytical skills were challenged, as were our abilities to be concise and exact in the written word.

Each student examined a different passage for their weekly gobbet and presented their work to the class. Every time, I felt like I was presenting an oral argument in front of a judge and jury. We had to submit the written interpretation to Browne, and he returned the tasty morsel to us the following week, full of red marks and slashes. Every grammar failure was meticulously corrected, numerous sentences were enhanced, and sloppy thinking was critically challenged with pointed comments scribbled in his neat handwriting in the margins, leaving all of us with a sense of inadequacy and insecurity. The damn gobbets took over my life that semester. I considered packing it in multiple times, but I needed the course to graduate.

While Browne loved discussing the British North America Act and was a well-regarded scholar of Canadian constitutional history, he relished debating the finer points of grammar even more. He was a self-proclaimed prescriptive grammarian whose bible was Fowler's Modern English Usage. He referred to it religiously as the final authority on everything written in English.

Particularly passionate about the correct use of the semicolon, Browne maintained that the Supreme Court had misinterpreted the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments because they misunderstood the correct usage of this important punctuation mark in the British North America Act. According to him, the nation's fate was altered by a semicolon.

During every class, we were subjected to the latest developments in Browne's ongoing project for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. He was writing a short biography of an obscure lieutenant governor, and every word, phrase, and adjective was subjected to repeated and exacting scrutiny and then tested on us—was it better this way or that way?—until each sentence flowed to meet his uncompromising standards of perfection.

A few weeks into the semester, he extended an invitation to everyone to his apartment for a glass of wine at the 10 p.m. conclusion of the class. He lived alone in Centretown, and looking back today, I might assume he was a closeted gay man. But in the late 70s, the thought didn’t cross my mind, and the topic never arose among our student group. Twenty minutes after the class had ended, we were comfortably ensconced in his book-filled, dimly lit living room, feeling like we were on that Oxford University movie set.

A second bottle of red wine was opened only twenty minutes after the first, then a third, and a fourth. New wine glasses were laid out each time Browne opened another bottle of wine. And he asked about our wine preferences—something we lowly university students were unaccustomed to. A large piece of Brie appeared. The discussion became more animated, and before I knew it, several hours had passed. The others were still debating the state of the world when I left at around three in the morning. I had to be at work in a few short hours. I walked home through the deserted Ottawa streets and rolled into bed.

These soirées continued week after week. The only difference was that Stilton sometimes replaced the Brie. We were penniless students, thrilled to be plied with free wine and cheese. We thought Browne lived a monastic existence, his solitude broken only by us, his beloved students. That he was the most eccentric person I had ever met was confirmed a few weeks later when he let down his guard.

First, he unveiled a box filled with identical wire-framed John Lennon spectacles. Several frames had been well-worn, but there were just as many brand-new ones without lenses. The frames were his signature model, and he wanted enough to last his lifetime.

Following the eyeglasses came the detachable collars. He wore white shirts to which he affixed heavily-starched, white, detachable collars. He demonstrated. So British, we thought.

Then he brought out ten identical tweed jackets with already patched elbows. Some worn, some new.

He showed us items from his childhood, including a small tin bowl he still used to pour water over himself when he bathed. Miss Sorenson, the other woman in the class, and I exchanged an uncomfortable glance. Why was he sharing this? But all we could muster were nods and polite smiles.

One evening, he divulged something astounding. He confided that he had become a member of the newly formed secret Hemlock Society, an organization supporting assisted suicide.

His explanation was chillingly simple: "No one would ever suspect."

Between the classes and our evenings drinking wine, I sweated over every gobbet, sneaking in time to work on them during my office hours on Parliament Hill. I struggled with the final essay, completely stressed out because I had spelled the word input as imput on the first—an embarrassing mistake I had made more than once. I couldn't even say it was a typo.

As anxious as I was about the work the course required, I came to look forward to the class, the late night of wine drinking, and the supportive camaraderie that quickly developed with my fellow students. I was proud of my hard work, a first in my university career. And I was awestruck that anyone could be so passionate and rigorous about language.

When the grades were sent out at the end of the course, I was elated to receive my first A. I had measured up to Browne's expectations. He gave me enough confidence to apply to graduate school, something I had not previously contemplated. With my new-found self-assurance, I wrote an exceptionally persuasive letter with my application to the Canadian Studies department and convinced them that although my grades were less than average, I really was an A student, and they should take a chance on me.

Six years later, Professor Browne was found dead in his apartment after he failed to show up for a class. He was fifty-three. We were shocked. The autopsy revealed he had died of a heart attack, but we had our suspicions. I will never know what his state of mind was. It felt like maybe I didn’t really know him.

Not long after his death, his furnishings and books were auctioned. Miss Sorensen, who had married Mr. Kent, another student in the class, bought the wine glasses, all one hundred of them.

Our group held a few reunions in the years following our graduation. Whenever we met, we exchanged “Professor Browne” stories and our firm conviction that his was our favourite class.

From Professor Browne, I learned to appreciate the sublimity of a perfectly constructed sentence with a semicolon. It turned out that if you could write a gobbet, you could write almost anything else. I never had another teacher like him; his ultimate approval remains indelible.