Master of the Universe:

Every time I read or hear about how our Ontario School Teachers favor developing self-esteem in their students over teaching them the three Rs I think of my old friend Pete.

The reason Pete immediately comes to mind is because he was one of those kids who had no problem with self-esteem. Far from it. He had it in spades. 

Long ago, when I was in grade school, self-esteem was something you either had or didn't have. Nobody took the time to worry much about it. There were other things to worry about. There was a world war on and winning it was by no means a sure thing. 

You'd think living in the middle of the flat prairie, we'd have been insulated from what was happening away out there in Europe. Not so. Yellow Harvard Trainers from the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan roared overhead. Young men from the neighborhood wore khaki when they came home on leave from the army, and mothers lived in fear of that knock on the door by someone with the dreaded message that their son was missing in action.

Basic necessities like new vehicles, gasoline, rubber tires, liquor and butter were hard to get because of the tonnage of materials destined for the British Isles that was being sent to the bottom of the Atlantic almost daily by Nazi U-boats.

What we kids missed most of all was chocolate bars with real chocolate and peanuts instead of some half-baked soybeans or other barely edible fillers.

The news was full of heroics on those rare times early in the war when something positive was achieved by allied forces. One such occasion that comes to mind was the see/saw battle when Montgomery finally chased Rommel out of North Africa.  

Besides being fed a daily diet of heroic propaganda from the battle fronts, we school kids got our dose of it from sources more appropriate to our age group. The comic magazines (10 cents) were full of it. Of course, we were being programmed to join in as soon as we were old enough, and we could hardly wait to get out there and join in The Great Adventure.

So we had our heroes and our villains. Besides airmen, soldiers and sailors bravely strutting their stuff, the heroes included Superman, Captain Marvel (SHAZAM!) Batman and Robin. Of course, we found the time to discuss and even argue the relative merits of what comic heroes we would most like to be. They allowed us to stretch our imaginations beyond the bounds of our less than heroic daily lives.

But not Pete. No ordinary heroes with extraordinary superpowers for him. True to form, his fantasy had to be just a little more fantastic than anyone else's. He would settle for nothing less than Master of the Universe.

Most of the kids in our multi-grade country schoolhouse found Pete's level of self-esteem a bit hard to deal with on a conversational level, and bailed out of any chance of close camaraderie with him. But I had little choice. His family farm yard was along my way to school and he waited for me to come by in the mornings, so I was his buddy by chance, if not exactly by choice.

So, on the days when the weather was dry and the dirt roads navigable by bicycle, it was okay, but on those muddy morns when we wore raincoats and boots and had to walk, making productive conversation was a bit of a chore. Somehow, with Pete, all discussions tended to become arguments.

Pete was not a dumb kid. Far from it. He displayed very real skills around things mechanical and structural around farm machinery and buildings. His bike was always serviceable and in good repair. 

It was school work that was his Achilles heel. Like many bright kids, especially among the young males, he found just sitting there trying to absorb droning lessons a real drag when he could have been elsewhere, doing something real, something meaningful. His mind had the tendency to escape to explore more fertile ground within his imagination. It is possible that most of us can identify with that one.

He was still in grade school when one day he decided he'd had enough. He announced that he would go out and get a job and make a shipload of money before the rest of us were even out of school. He decided that he would pursue his fortune in Winnipeg, so getting there was his short-term goal.

Besides having high self-esteem, Pete was also resourceful. He set up a proper trap line in the winter and harvested enough ermine, river otter, beaver and muskrat furs to finance his expedition to the Big City.

He found work in Winnipeg, which was not difficult in the immediate post-war era when a hungry world bombed into the stone age needed all the goods it could get. This meant all the goodies a country like Canada that survived the war with infrastructure intact was able to deliver. 

All of Hitler's U-boats were now safely on the bottom of the Atlantic among all that cargo they had sunk early in the war. Now it was possible for all food and supplies for the hungry and tattered survivors to make it safely all the way to the other side. 

In the years that followed, Pete came home from time to time to visit his family. He drove modern cars, mostly with more horsepower than ordinary mortals would require. He dressed well, but no ship load of money was in evidence. He might have been banking it, but no one took the chance to ask.

Then, one year he came home with his new bride, a tall, easy-on-the-eyes blonde with a strong foreign accent. That marked her as a Displaced Person, obviously a survivor of the war in Europe. 

Those of us who knew Pete figured that this well-constructed woman, who appeared to have no problem with his overwhelming self-esteem, was probably from Germany where, over the years, they had been conditioned to tolerate jackboot diplomacy.

It was a good time to set up farming on the prairie frontier, and that's what they did. Soon, they began raising grain, farm animals and family. 

As the years went by, they became parents to six beautiful children, who, at the early growth stages before they entered their teens, no doubt regarded their parents as heroic, all-knowing, God-like beings.

They set their farmyard well back from the grid road where Pete could enjoy a bit of privacy and insulate himself from the pointless blatherings of lesser mortals. His wife appeared happy just to be alive and well living in a peaceful country setting with her family.

Presumably, Pete obeyed traffic rules, paid off his debts and his taxes on time. It should have been easy for anyone interested to conclude that here, at last, he had indeed become master of his own little universe.