Anything but Normal, Tribute by Lawrence Pentland

Lawrence Sinclair: Anything But Normal

Although it was in the last century, it hardly seems like yesterday that Lawrence graduated from Aldershot High School in Burlington along with about 170 of our classmates.  

While all of us graduated that day with a body temperature of 98.6 degrees Farhenheit, Lawrence also graduated with an academic average of 98.6 percent.  Even by today’s standards of grade inflation, that is quite a remarkable achievement.  It is for this reason that I have entitled my comments today: “Lawrence Sinclair: Anything But Normal”.

My earliest recollections of Lawrence were of the two of us trying out for the Grade 9 Midget basketball team.   The tryouts were at 630 AM each morning.  We had a crazy coach who somehow felt that conditioning was important to the game of basketball and, so, had us doing suicide drills back and forth up and down the lines at that unpleasant hour.   I remember us joking about who would be the first to chuck up their morning bowl of Cheerios. 

Lawrence wasn’t the tallest on the team.  Nor was he the fastest.  He didn’t even have a great shot.  But he was tenacious and of all the drills we did in practice, you didn’t want to go up against him in the one-on-one drills.  He simply kept at you, back and forth, never giving an inch and preventing you from taking a decent shot. 

Thus began a long and recurring pattern of seeing Lawrence as the hardest working guy whether it was on the athletic field, in the classroom, in the workplace or ultimately in his fight against cancer.  Lawrence was anything but normal.

In later years in high school, the pursuit of athletics for Lawrence was slowly replaced with the pursuit of academic excellence.  I didn’t have the natural intellect that Lawrence had.  Nor did I have the inclination to work so hard.  But I figured out that being his partner, particularly in the sciences, was a pretty smart thing to do. 

So, on the first day of each of those classes he was my first pick to be my Lab Partner.  Now, in hindsight, it’s not completely clear to me at all that I was his “first pick”.  But, being the easy-going guy that he was, he never said otherwise.  So, we became Lab Partners in biology, chemistry and physics.  

I think I knew at that stage in my life that I wasn’t going to be a doctor, or an engineer, or a scientist when I grew up.  So, my primary objective in each of these classes was to do whatever was possible to disrupt the lab experiment we were expected to do.   This meant that Lawrence had to put up with a constant stream of hi-jinks from me, whether it was tying a knot in the gas line so the Bunson burner didn’t work, or secretly putting a pin prick in the balloon we were meant to blow up, or depositing a foreign substance in the piglet we were dissecting (it took him a long time to figure that one out) it was all meant to make him laugh.  Which it did.  

And I knew it didn’t matter much whether we completed the experiments since I knew he’d read ahead and already knew what the experiment was supposed to demonstrate.  In fact, I often thought he knew more about each of those subjects than our teachers did.  I knew this, in part, because I knew he often borrowed text books from his older brother Doug, who was in university at the time, in order to “brush up” on a few of the finer points in the subject.  That was Lawrence.  Always working hard to learn just a little bit more about a topic.

One year Lawrence competed in the Halton County Science Fair.  I remember him being so very proud of his project and of him inviting me to see his display boards.   I probably didn’t fully appreciate the significance of the work he had done.  There is a picture of him in our Yearbook hunched over some crates and boxes and in the background you can see the title of his experiment: “An Environmental Control Chamber for Plant Growth” whatever the heck that was.   There were very few kids in all of Burlington who could dream up a topic like that, let alone spend the countless hours, on top of normal class work, to do a great job.  That’s just the way he was, anything but normal.

Lest you have the impression that Lawrence was all work and no play, I can attest to the fact that he was willing to “play” just like the rest of us.  We had many dances and parties over the years and it didn’t take much to get him away from his books to go out and have some fun.  The legal drinking age at the time was 18 and, with the existence of grade 13, this meant that there was lots of opportunity in high school to do so.  More than a few times we hung out at a local joint called “Sir Pizza” and left several hours later without having ordered a single slice.  We’d talk and laugh about our teachers, our sports teams, the girls in our class and a hundred other topics.   

It’s well known that the teen years are filled with anxious concerns that years later seem trivial,  But, at the time, they seem all-important.  Having a buddy to talk things over with and, equally important, to know they’d keep your deepest, most embarrassing moments to themselves was an invaluable attribute in a friend.  That’s just the way he was.  And if you needed to talk late at night, or when he was in the middle of something important, he wouldn’t hesitate to drop everything and make himself available.

Most other guys fit into one of 3 categories:

- the ones who couldn’t wait to tell everyone about some secret they’d heard,

- the ones who would tell one or two other guys who then told everyone else your secret, or,

- finally the ones whom you simply had to razz a bit until they spilled their guts. 

Not Lawrence.   I wasn’t the only one who came to know that telling him something was like locking it up in Fort Knox.   Lawrence was anything but normal. 

I kept in touch with Lawrence quite regularly over the years after high school, sometimes to ski, sometimes to meet for a beer, sometimes to just talk on the phone.  Like most longstanding friendships, it only took a few minutes together before we got laughing about the old times, which caused the time since we’d seen each other last  to melt away.  Almost always our conversation would drift to talking about the old times of Aldershot High School.  I have a quirky memory for trivial things and could draw upon my memory banks to regale him in laughter about some incident from those happy days.  He loved it.  But we also almost always discussed the serious matters of the current day.  He always listened well and always had a word of wisdom for me regardless of the topic.  

Lawrence has left his 169 Aldershot High School classmates behind and has gone onto what can only be a better place now for him.  Nobody knows about what happens after death but something tells me that, with him there, it will be anything but normal.

It was a privilege to have known Lawrence, to have been inspired by his sense of hard work and to have shared in many moments of youthful happiness. 

As I think back on all of those years I am reminded of something someone once said:

“…that age appears to be the best in four things —- old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read”

I will miss Lawrence.  He was a great friend.

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