Telling Me About Myself

I am always a little reluctant to write about myself. That is for a number of reasons. I worry that people will think me an egomaniac. Or there may be some secrets that I wish to hug to myself because I may be ashamed of them, or because I don’t want to share them with others because I hate to admit them even to myself; they hurt my self-image. Finally, why should other people even be interested in stuff that has nothing to do with them? We want to know about things we can relate to, that affect our personal needs. So I try to focus on things that I hope my readers may be interested in.

But today I was reading a book that was all about the personal doings of the author, and I thought to myself, why don’t I do that? I am probably not at all as interesting as the author who happens to be a film star and famous, but what the heck!

I have always wondered why I have so little recollection of my younger years when other writers can wax interminably about such stuff. Why is that? Why was I not paying attention? There are only a few bright flashes illuminating those times. I always thought of myself as having a rich internal life, but it seems I spent a lot of my time just hugging myself, passing the time until I could get to stuff that I considered interesting. Only my life in jeopardy seemed to register in my brain.

So I remember lots of stuff about occasions when my schoolmates were trying to beat my brains out. That always made an impression. Whether it was down and dirty in the street or the schoolyard, the detail is there. After a good start early on, I did what I had to do to get to the University stage. After that, it was doing what I had to do to earn the labels that might qualify me for a job as a professional. I never went for the PhD. my mother craved.  

As a young man I dreamed of becoming a Foreign Service Officer for the Canadian government, but I did not succeed in achieving that ambition. I settled for a job as an Economist with the Canada Department of Agriculture in Ottawa. Working hard, I rose rapidly. By year five I had achieved the rank of an Economist 4. My superior was an Economist 5, and further advancement was blocked.

I decided to transfer to the Department of Finance, the heart of civil service power. When I was called for an interview, to my surprise, the interviewer was the Assistant Deputy Minister of that Department, the individual close to Prime Minister Trudeau, the man who negotiated the NAFTA agreement with the U.S. After a short discussion, I was offered the job, but only on condition that I accepted a downgrade to an Economist 3. Without a word, I rose and exited the room, slamming the door on my way out. I determined to leave the Civil Service.

Shortly afterward I accepted a job as an Assistant to the V.P and General Manager of a large supermarket chain in Quebec. My first assignment was to make the employee cafeteria profitable. I was with that company for twelve years, rising through various positions until I was a Director, Marketing, then Division Manager, stores yielding over $250 million in annual sales.

Unfulfilled in that company, I resigned to take a position as General Manager of the Canadian Egg Marketing Agency, an organization in crisis. In six months the crisis had been eliminated to the surprise of all. This act saved the livelihoods and futures of thirty thousand family farmers and stabilized the egg industry in Canada, ($600 million in annual sales). I left after six years. The Agency continues to function today as I organized it some forty-five years ago. GET CRACKING!!

I then worked for ten years as a management consultant, implementing programs for aid agencies to improve the lives of communities in Canada, Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. Eventually, wearying of the travel, and finding the work more self-serving than aid-provoking, I took a job as a V.P. Ontario for the Canadian Council Of Grocery Distributors, as a lobbyist. In that role I pushed through a resisted change in the government regulations on chicken processing. That benefitted supermarkets, but also saved Canadian consumers one billion dollars in grocery bills, each and every year since 1990.

I retired after six years to manage my spouse’s interpretation company, she, succumbing gradually to breast cancer.

The threats to my existence are what I remember the most sharply. Crossing borders in Africa, bribery rife, on tenterhooks at barricades, threatened by armed soldiers in the Congo, being assaulted in the street and robbed in Senegal, facing a gun in the hands of an intruder in Jamaica, an unfriendly environment in Mauretania and Kenya, flying in a single-engine plane over barren Darfur in the Sudan, to deliver Canadian food aid, those pictures remain solidly in my brain. There are only rare flashes of ordinary life, classrooms, family interactions, particularly with the kids, job experiences, highs and lows. Most of my thrills, aside from at last capturing my Bride at age 71, came from overcoming obstacles in the job market.

I have been married three times, twenty-one years, twenty-eight years, and now seventeen years with the love of my life. It can’t have been much fun for my previous partners when I was just concentrating on getting through those times. And there were four kids raised. I do remember some good times with them. I wonder what they remember? I remember more about the jobs I held that were so much more the focus of my attention.

The thrill of winning against impossible odds cannot be beaten as an aphrodisiac, with just enough success to satisfy me.