Vern's uncle

My friend Vern taught me how to love maps years ago in Rocky Mountain House when we'd smoke a doobie and browse that Reader's Digest Atlas with the maps of the ocean trenches. Vern and I met when we'd been assigned to teach Math/Science (him) or Language Arts/Social Studies (me) to two grade seven classes at Rocky Elementary in 1975. The day before classes were to begin that year, Vern hadn't shown up for a pre-term staff meeting. "Trekking in Nepal," the principal told me. At quarter to nine on the first day of classes, me near death with panic, Vern still hadn't shown up. First bell, students lining up to come in, no Vern. I flee from my classroom for the staffroom and there's Vern, standing on a chair, stuffing paper towel into the bell.
Students loved him, I found out, but he wasn't one for the straight and narrow of the teaching life. He was a lot quicker than I to translate his map love into ongoing travel of the kind he pursues to this day.
A year or two ago he visited me in Regina. He'd stopped on the way to visit his old uncle, one of those prairie bachelors, who still lives south of Moose Jaw in an old house Vern had helped him paint when he, Vern, was 12 or so. "Uncle said to paint the outside of the house as far up as I could reach," Vern told me. These decades later, that's still the only paint job the house ever had, a band of blue about six feet high around the base of the house.