Last night I watched a documentary about the life of Canadian actor, John Candy*. All I really knew about Candy was that he was a large man, who died at the age of forty-three. However, Trains, Planes and Automobiles is one of my favourite films so I decided to give it a go.
Candy was raised Catholic and, on one of many return visits to his former high school, he said to the assembled students “My success is simply rooted in the values, discipline and respect for others that I was taught at Neil McNeil Catholic High School.”
In September Thea started at St. Peter’s Catholic Primary School, where both her father and her uncle were pupils. Last week we received an invitation to Grandparents’ Day. Two hundred and ten grandparents showed up, posing an unanticipated challenge and creating a scramble for extra chairs. It all got resolved and we were amply compensated with home-made cake.
The head teacher began with a prayer for grandparents – meaning us, but also our own grandparents, who may have played an important role in our lives as we were growing up.
Thea was proud and pleased as punch to walk us around her classroom. She showed us the lion’s head, which is her allocated spot at carpet time, the outside play area with real rabbits, the reading corner and the altar space. She pointed to the three prayers they say each day – the Morning Prayer, the Lunchtime Prayer and the End of Day Prayer. “I can’t remember all the words” she explained “and I can’t read them yet either.”
The O’Connells have not been practicing Catholics for four generations, but I find myself deeply pleased that Thea and her sister, Lyla will be educated at a Catholic school. I appreciate the prayers, not all the words necessarily, but the idea of being truly faithful to something, not every now and then, but every day.
Children, who will one day become grownups, are encouraged to develop qualities such as sharing, caring, gratitude, truthfulness and integrity.
John Candy will have had other defining influences in his life but clearly “the values, the discipline and respect for others” that he was taught during his years at Neil McNeil Catholic High School in Toronto, informed who he became, how others saw him and how they remember him, thirty-one years after he died.
*John Candy: I Like Me, 2025
Blog – The Banished Children of Adam and Eve, June 12th, 2022