Austin Bigsby
Austin slipped away peacefully shortly after 3pm today (Sunday).
Burial is planned for 3:30 Tuesday afternoon at the cemetery. His grave will be dug 9:30 Tuesday morning, if you'd like to help.
Gathering afterward at the Community Hall, with music. Please bring finger foods - foods that can be shared and eaten without needing a plate. Coffee and tea will be provided.
Comments
Austin
When I first met and began to know Austin, one of the most obvious things about him was his huge enjoyment and pleasure in making music. This, and his gentle warmth and good nature, have made many of us love and appreciate him. He will be missed, and remembered, by us.
Having learned that he taught school for 37 years, I can not help but think of the thousands of young people whose lives he must have touched, and enriched.
To have a teacher that is enthusiastic about something, anything, is a surprisingly unusual thing - or at least it was when I was in school, both as a student and later for a few years as a teacher.
Part of Austin will carry on in many of these once-young people, and likely some of them are having a similar influence on young and not-so-young people today, and will in the future. Music wants to be shared.
Not all the good that we do is interred with our bones. The joy, and the pain, and the humour, and the other emotions that come from and with music comes from the people who have made it, and who keep on making it.
Austin Bigsby
Mr. Bigsby - as I will always think of him, was my teacher, in Grade 6, at Carlyle School in Montreal. He was handsome, a snappy dresser, and kind, in a slightly remote way, but then this was the 60s and teachers were not your buddies.
We were still at an age where the teachers read us stories aloud. I will always remember the class being mesmerized - you could hear a pin drop - when he read aloud. I remember one time he read a Jack London story, and there was a line about a wolf cub sucking its mother's teat. He paused for a nano-second, omitted the offending word, and carried on. It was only later when I borrowed the book from the library, that I realized how smoothly he had handled the situation. ( I looked the word up in the dictionary first.)
I thank Austin, Mr. Bigsby, for being one of the teachers/professors who fostered my love of literature, which led to a long and happy career as a librarian.
Ian McDonald
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