Anger management

Culture shock -

If you're into making New Year's resolutions, here's one you can add to your list: Cultivate Composure (steadiness of mind under stress) and Don't Get Angry.

I took an Anger Management course in Toronto once. I saw the course advertised and decided such a program might help me keep my composure in city traffic. I wasn't in the classroom very long when I learned that some people had been ordered by the court to attend, which made me realize that the topic of anger might be a hot issue. But the peculiar thing about that course was that some people ended up much angrier in the end than when they had signed on, because of the woman who facilitated the course (she wasn't the instructor, just the facilitator). Oh, yeah, at the end of ten weeks, the miracle was that she was still alive to facilitate another! You see, she routinely alleged she'd never been angry a day in her life and took every opportunity to inform the rest of us that anger was a sure sign of weakness. She was more insufferable that a skinny person in a weight loss club.

I'm not sure how effective the course was anyway, because when Len and I retired to Ship Cove a year later, and drove into St. Anthony, we waited at the traffic light and somebody up ahead was a little timid about negotiating a left turn. Anyone who has lived in a major city knows quick decisions in traffic are the order of the day. After three light changes with still no left turn, anger management skills went out the window and the devil flew in. I turned to Len, who was at the wheel and hissed, "Honk at them!" Wisely, he ignored me and eventually we made it through that light.

We visited our second son James this Christmas in Winnipeg, where he had just returned from a six-month tour in Dubai. Two days prior to Christmas James lent us his Sunfire and Len and I drove west to CFB Shilo and Brandon, where we had met 30 years before.

It was a pleasant trip down memory lane: the tumbleweeds still tumbled over the bald prairie and the HQ at Shilo looked essentially the same, although our barracks were gone. What we called the Low Road to Brandon has been renamed the Veteran's Highway. In Brandon, we drove down Rosser Avenue, Princess Street and Richmond Road and ate steak and prime rib at the Keg that evening. As we crossed the 18th Street bridge on the way home we were flagged down by a policeman, who waved us over to a parking lot where numerous cars were idling in the frigid night air. That was when it dawned on us: we were about to participate in a roadside breathalyzer test, our first!

A very large policeman loomed outside the car, motioning to Len to produce a license and registration. He shone a large flashlight through the window and, to add to the confusion, it was dark and we were totally unfamiliar with the seatbelts, the cab lights and the location of the automatic windows and locks. The seatbelt resisted as Len tried to pull his wallet out of his back pocket and the cop was becoming a little impatient. This is the point at which I think I would have abandoned my anger management skills, but not Len. When he finally located the automatic window control, the back window went down first, which I'm sure made the cop wonder just 'how many' Len had been drinking!

I watched a female cop carrying two half-empty 40-ouncers to the police car while a tow truck's amber light flickered as it hooked up a sports car. A young man stood, dejected, watching his car as it was towed away. Len got out and followed the officer to the back of one of the police cars, and blew into the tube. "Error," observed the cop, "You'll have to blow again!"

The whole scene was surreal and resembled nothing more than a tail-gate party with Len and the policemen laughing as they advised him how to blow a second time. When the breathalyzer showed a reading of 0.00, Len was free to go.

I've heard it said that challenging situations don't make us what we are; they reveal who we are. So I think in 2010 I'll keep focused on cultivating composure, and let anger management-and the devil-take the hindmost.