Walter had been living by his wits for a good many years. He was, by his own account, proud to be a proper tramp. A right proper tramp. What he meant by that was that his head was clear, and his choices of how and where to live were his own, and hadn’t been thrust upon him by anyone or anything else. He had an impressive list in his mind of every good safe place to sleep, every place to warm up, places where he could sit unmolested and unjudged, and the best transit routes to grab a rest and perhaps a nap.
Walter was also a nice guy. He was friendly to everybody who would give him a chance. He lived in a storied old flophouse hotel downtown, but he got tired of all the shenanigans and erratic things that happened there, so he always cut out at first light, and set out on the city. His basic route was from the downtown eastside to Stanley Park, and he loved to meander there in any number of ways, depending on each day’s circumstances and his own impulses. When he rode the buses with his senior’s pass, he was chatty with people. He was tall and had a big white beard, and he could come across as either an out-of-season Santa or a hobo.
Walter was always helpful wherever he could be, doing things like turning off a dripping tap if he walked past one, or checking to see that a person who had nodded off was okay. He liked being of service, and generally people liked seeing him around. He formed good, if distant, relationships with people along his various traplines. The guy at the fancy doughnut store, for example, knew him, and knew that if Walter just happened to be in his alley when he was about to leave the day-olds by the dumpster, that Walter would indeed appreciate a few treats. Likewise, the doughnut guy knew Walter would alert someone if anything amiss was happening around the store. It was symbiotic.
Not everyone knew how to take Walter. He was saddened when mothers would hold their kids back from him on the bus when Walter tried to strike up a conversation about a toy or something. He understood that they were just being prudent, and though he made an effort to be clean, he was aware that he came across as a tramp, however dignified. Nevertheless, he couldn’t seem to avoid offering what he hoped were helpful suggestions. Walter was a true autodidact. In another time and place, he might have been identified as gifted as a child and streamed into traditional academia, but he didn’t have that kind of childhood, and was, by his own admission, a handful to manage. He taught himself both deeply and widely over the decades, and was often in the group of men waiting for the main library to open in the mornings.
More than people, though, Walter liked animals. He made friends with birds, squirrels and any other creatures he got to know along his desired lines through the city and into the park. They often had rough and short lives, and Walter maintained a small animal cemetery deep in the park that he would carry the fallen to, have a small memorial for each one and bury them. He wasn’t religious, but he’d always liked the saying about god seeing every fallen sparrow, or however it went. Walter tried to as well. He carried a waterproof ditty bag he had found near the marina, and used it to carry any deceased critters he found back to the park. When he would have his small burial ceremonies, park animals like squirrels would come to watch, and Walter knew he was among friends. He treasured the living animals also, and Daryl, his friend at the grocery store always set aside any ripped bags of whole peanuts for Walter to take away from the back alley. Daryl made sure there were always torn bags of peanuts.
One particularly rainy Saturday, Walter made a pit stop at the city college, which was on the edge of the more financial part of downtown, but still nestled in Walter’s hotel end of town. Walter really appreciated how it was always open, and appeared to welcome everybody, regardless of how they looked. The college had a reputation for being the gateway out of the poor end of town for many and focused on vocational and retail kinds of training. Walter enjoyed the atmosphere there and feeling like a student. Friday nights were often especially tumultuous at the hotel, and Walter was frequently tired on Saturdays. It was a major downside of his cheap accommodation, but he accepted it. This Saturday though, he knew he could really use a bit of extra sleep. He slipped into an empty classroom and lay down under a table at the front of the class where he was out of anyone’s eyeline.
After an hour or so, Walter awoke feeling much refreshed. To his delight, the classroom was still unattended and he reckoned he had done no harm by having a bit of kip. He settled into the instructor’s chair at the front, while he finished waking up. Looking out at the rows of tables and chairs, he realized that he really liked the view from the front. He’d never been to formal college, and had certainly never been the person at the front of the room. Looking around, he saw there were markers for the white boards, and on a lark, he started pacing at the front as if he was giving a lecture. He wrote ‘A tramps-eye view of the universe’ at the top of one of the white boards and underlined it. He free-handed some drawings of animals and planets. He started to talk, pulling from his wild collection of knowledge. When he looked back at the room after a while drawing on the board, he was surprised to see two people sitting there, enjoying his talk. Walter apologized, but they urged him to carry on. After a while, the two attendees said they had to go, but asked if Walter did this class every week. Without overthinking it, Walter said sure. They said they’d see him the following Saturday.
When the next Saturday came, Walter was ready, and he was glad to see the original two students waiting for him. As he was getting ready to start, a few more people joined, including a young woman with a big coffee. When she saw Walter looking at the coffee, she apologized for not bringing him one, and asked if she might. Walter didn’t normally like to accept charity unless something was already bound for the garbage, but her smile made him think he may as well relax that rule, and accept a kindness. She returned a few minutes later with a coffee for him and a pastry, which he gratefully accepted. Pride was pride, but kindness was kindness, he figured, trying again to not overthink things.
He began his lecture, starting with an overview of time, and the start of the universe, working forward to the present day, and how collections of particles have coalesced into the miracle that is the everyday squirrel. When he was done, he was surprised by a round of applause from the students, who came up afterwards to say it was the best class they had ever attended, and that they wished their other ones could be like his. They took photos of the white boards with their phones, and Walter said he would see them next week. Feeling a bit mischievous, he decided to leave his scrawlings and pictures up, even signing the bottom corner with a stylized ‘RPT’ which was his special alley tag that stood for Right Proper Tramp.
Word spread, thanks both to word of mouth and to a blog article and social media posts one of the students had made, and subsequent classes were even better attended. At one point Jennifer, who worked at the college during the week, had sat in before she had taught her own continuing education class that Saturday. Jennifer had recently completed her masters degree with a thesis on autodidacticism, and had been toying with the idea of trying to get a grant to reach non-traditional learners. When she sat in on Walter’s lecture, she realized that what she was hoping to encourage was blooming organically right there, and just needed some support. The VP of continuing education was able to provide some release time for Jennifer as well as a few thousand dollars in seed money to make a proof of concept pilot in support of a possible larger grant later. The idea meshed well with the college’s mission of providing opportunities for all learners.
After class one Saturday, Jennifer met up with Walter and shared her thinking. He loved the idea, and said he had been having a great time. She asked if she could offer him an honorarium for his lectures, and he was leery at first. His old age pension and street bartering were sufficient, and he’d always been wary of employment, and feeling owned. He said that perhaps the college could support some of his favourite things, like animal dignity. He was thinking of his animal cemetery in the park, as well as the living animals he fed on his travels. They agreed that Walter could receive a small amount for each lecture that he could pass along in the way he felt was most meaningful to him. Bouncing around ideas, they decided to call the program PEP, for People Educating People, and so it was born. Knowing that it might rankle him but feeling a bit mischievous herself, Jennifer had college business cards printed up for Walter a couple of weeks later that had Walter’s name and the title Lecturer. As he left with the box of cards, Walter wondered if he could use them to line the animal graves in the park, but at the same time he was smiling very broadly to himself and feeling quite pleased.
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Robert David Duncan is a Vancouver-based writer, filmmaker and actor.
Image design: Kalyee Srithnam.