

Halcyon Daze

Growing up Canadian

by

N. A. Dalbec

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the author.

Making copies of any part of this book for any purpose is not permitted.

For information, contact N. A. Dalbec, Author, Suite 707, 555 Jervis Street., Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6E 4N1

ISBN: 978-0-9730714-4-3, issued by Library and Archives Canada

All characters and situations in this book are fictitious

Tricycle Tribulations

One of the things I remember most about my childhood is that old, big tricycle. To whom it had belonged before, I'm not quite sure, but I certainly thought that it was neat to ride.

As I rode along the sidewalk one day, traveling south, as I can now confirm, I came upon a large garbage can. It was one of those corrugated things, a precursor to the aluminum ones. They didn't rust, but they weighed as much as anything you would put in them. From my lofty seating position, I peered into the open can. Suddenly, and without warning, a flood of tears came into my eyes, and a level of pain overcame me as I had never felt before.

As it turned out, I had fallen into the garbage can. Actually, my head had made it in, but my left shoulder had caught the rim of the can. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the examination table at Doctor Morley`s office. He supposedly helped my parents bring me into this world, back near the middle of the century. Anyway, there I was being taped up like a hockey stick. Dr. Morley was making a big X across my shoulders with bandages and gauze. It turns out that I had fractured my collar bone.

On the way back home, my father, also known as Pop, stopped by a corner store to buy me a sucker. It was a big one, I remember. Then he carried me back home. Nothing was really far in the town we lived in, mostly because we lived in a little town, and we happened to live pretty close to the center of it.

I can't say that I remember how the whole thing turned out, but I do know that my shoulder is okay to this day.

The Right Wagon

Of course, a tricycle is neat, but when you're a kid, there's something special about a wagon. Not just any wagon, but a wooden wagon. I'll tell you, there's something innate, a special knowledge that makes you know what's right about something. For example, a steel wagon just wouldn't do when I was a kid. Had someone bought me a steel wagon, I would have been very disappointed in their lack of knowledge about such things. For example, steel wagons did not have the cargo capacity of a wooden wagon; steel ones also rusted where they were scratched; the wheels were often of inferior quality. However, wooden wagons were often larger, sleeker, faster, and more rugged than their counterparts. They were made of good Canadian hardwood, probably Maple.

One day, when I was no more than four years old, Pop brought me over to my uncle's sporting goods store. I quite frankly can't imagine why all of this was happening, because there was no evidence of the day being of any special significance. What did happen truly thrilled me. I was informed that the reason for our visit to my uncle's store was to pick up a new wagon for yours truly. I didn't know what to think, but I knew what I wanted.

It was beautiful. Long, sleek, smooth, red wheels with gobs of black rubber, a good long handle, and lots of bright red letters and stuff.

There was only one way to ride a wagon when you were alone. You knelt one knee in the wagon, held the handle with one hand, the wagon with the other, and pushed with the outboard leg. It was fantastic. When someone was around, you could take turns pushing, and that was great also. I remember a little hill, just in front of the house where we lived, and I loved being pushed up that little hill, and then zipping back down. Doesn't take much to thrill a four-year-old.

Mrs. Dertrand

I guess I was still too young to go to school, and my parents were sometimes too busy to take care of me. So, they would some-times drop me off at the neighbor's, which happened to be one house down from our place. The woman who lived there was rather old, as I remember, and she wore long skirts with lots of slips. This although quite in vogue in some eras, was certainly out of favor in the place and time that I was growing up in. I was probably three when this incident took place, and the reaction of the adult was, as I would later find out in life, quite typical.

I was playing in the kitchen at Mrs. Dertrand's house, in a typically childlike manner, sometimes walking, other times crawling. As I slid along the floor, on my back, I happened to slide right under Mrs. Dertrand's skirt. Well, this solicited a reaction that I did not understand. Mrs. Bertrand looked at me from what seemed way up, actually peering around her own belly, and exclaimed that I couldn't do that. Why not, I wondered. I was only trying to satisfy my curiosity, and frankly, there was nothing more to see than a lot of ruffled material. My observation at the time was that she must have been very hot with all of that clothing. What I did find out from her that day was that it was not proper to look up a woman's skirt. Okay, I thought, but deep down, I felt that that answer was not satisfactory. I also found out that I would get this type of answer to a multitude of questions in the course of growing up, and again in adulthood.

Crushing Experience

The backyard was really big. There was no lawn to speak of, and most of the space was used to park cars. I don't remember spending much time in the backyard, but I do remember one episode that took place one summer evening.

I'm going to plead innocent on this one, because I just can't remember all the details of the incident. I do however remember the sound of something being violently transformed in the backyard. My uncle was on his way out for the evening. He was backing out of the driveway in his white 50's Chev, when all of a sudden he stopped the car. The noise of crushed metal resounded throughout the neighboring area. It seems that my inherited tricycle had been transformed into a mess of pipes, and broken spokes. Someone had left the tricycle behind my uncle's car.

Well this was rather disturbing, more to my uncle than to me. I sort of thought that the trike looked neat in its transformed shape. My uncle happened to be a plumber, and he volunteered to repair the trike. This I also thought was neat of him.

I guess that was the summer that we moved to the larger city, because it felt like an eternity before I got my trike back. As a matter of fact, my uncle came to visit one day, and I think it was the summer following the incident, and with him he brought the repaired trike. I was very happy to see my transportation back in one piece. Unfortunately, the moment turned out to be short-lived. The welding job was not enough to keep the machine in one piece. If my memory serves me well, my uncle brought the trike back to where we used to live before, and attempt to revive the trike, but to no avail. I understand he was a good plumber, but I guess tricycles aren't exactly plumbing.

A Brush with Death

I can't remember his name, but he was one of my early childhood friends. He lived just down the street from where I lived.

One day he came to me and said that he had discovered something absolutely amazing about cars. I was naturally curious and excited about the whole thing as it had been hinted by my friend that a feeling of magic and power were involved. What could it be that he was talking about. My curiosity was truly piqued.

The front of the house faced a reasonably busy street and actually, there was a traffic light at the corner. What I was about to see truly amazed me. My friend confidently walked into the street, stopped right in the middle. and proceeded to lie down. Cars just stood still. Those that were rolling came to a stop. The world had frozen before our very eyes. A few moments later, my friend got up, and casually returned to the sidewalk. Well, I was amazed.

So my friend suggested that I try the same thing. Why not. Having seen that it was so easy, I just had to try. So I walked into the street, and proceeded to lie down in front of the traffic. Sure enough, the cars stopped, and really, the world felt like it was at my command. I had never felt that before. In retrospect, it is probably one of the most stupid things that I have ever done in my life. But then again, I still have many years to live.

Nonetheless, the experience was an exciting one, and neither of us was run over by a car, bus, or truck. I don't remember ever repeating the experience. Thank goodness for that! But I have to wonder...there must be someone looking out for each and every one of us most of the time. Although, that entity does seem to take the occasional break, as we all seem to have experienced at one time or another. Is it selective saving, or random saving that we are benefiting from?

The Dog I sort of Had

Sometime after I was born, or maybe even before. our family had a beautiful dog. It's name was Milou. It was a Collie, and quite frankly, I remember it more through my brothers' and sister's remembrances than my own. I do however remember that it was not long into my life that the dog disappeared, and I recall missing a dog that I hardly knew. It seems that its fate was directly affected by my presence and that my life was being directly affected by its presence.

I found out later in life that Milou had been given away sometime after my arrival because its long Collie hair caused me to suffer from asthma. Nonetheless, I thought then, when being told this story that asthma was not such a large price to pay in order to have such a wonderful beast in the family. My parents did not agree with this, of course.

As I grew up and learned to read, I remember going through the classified ads in the newspaper, in the DOGS AND PET STOCK section to see what was available. I was astounded to find that many people were ready to actually give away any variety of dog that you could imagine if you promised to give them a good home, the dogs that is. So on occasion I would try my salesmanship, and try to convince my parents to get a dog: "They're free, and all we have to do is pick one up, and I promise to feed it, and take good care of it, and take it with me wherever I go, and it can sleep with me, so can we get one?"

The answer was the same every time. You guessed it. That didn't stop me from trying though. I did however meet a very sympathetic fellow who owned a Basset Hound pup named Emma. His name was Dieter, and Dieter's wife was about to have a baby when all this was happening, so Dieter was very happy to let me take Emma for walks, and take care of her in general. Dieter himself was a lot of fun. He had a British accent, and spoke to me like an adult. I learned a lot about other parts of the world with Dieter, and I learned a lot about dogs from Emma.

Going for the Ride

This is a late-night story, mostly because it occurred late one night, many, many, years ago. Back then, we lived in a two-storey house that felt pretty big for someone my size. It also had an attic, so that made it even bigger to me.

For some reason, now unknown to me, I woke up one night, and also woke up my father. I probably woke up my mother also, because she had always been a light sleeper. I guess it was my father's turn to get up that night, and so he did. I can only assume that the reason for my waking up was that I had had a nightmare, or something. It was very dark in the house, and all of my brothers and sister were asleep. For some reason, Pop and I had to go downstairs to get something. I was very young then, and very portable. So Pop took me in his arms, and proceeded to head downstairs. We made it to the landing all right, but then something happened. All of a sudden, we were flying through the air. No stairs were touching my father's feet. Thank goodness he was versed in judo, because we were falling at a rapid rate, in the darkest of darknesses. You can believe that this was high adventure for someone my age. But I don't think my mother appreciated what was happening. As you can imagine, all of this activity made quite a racket, and yes, it woke up the entire household.

Well believe it or not, my father and I had managed to cascade down a flight of sixteen or so stairs, in each other's arms, and came out of it unscathed. Let me qualify that. I came out of it okay, but my father got a late night earful from my mother, who understandably was concerned.

After all, we did make it downstairs, and eventually back upstairs. Amazingly enough, even to this day, when I take one of those all too frequent winter spills, I still feel like I'm in my father's arms.

The Discovery

I was still quite young when we moved to the bigger city, and there always seemed to be a lot to do, especially for a kid. Then again, it doesn't take a heck of a lot to entertain a kid.

The new house was a bungalow. It was situated in a newer part of the city. There was lots of room for expansion, and consequently, lots of room to play. There was even a large vegetable garden in the yard. Things seemed to grow quite well in it. One day, in late summer, I found myself standing in the middle of the garden. It was a pretty neat place to be, for a kid. Everything was so large, bigger than life, as they say. If I remember well, my job was to pick out some carrots from the garden. I knew what those were, but to my surprise, when I looked down at my feet, there was a large, very large white rabbit, with big, big red eyes, just sitting there. That's when I discovered that rabbits can be very discrete. I guess I didn't pose much of a threat to the rabbit, because it did not move. I yelled out to my brothers to let them know of my discovery. They came running, and in turn, alerted my parents. This was some big event.

The family proceeded to build a pen for the rabbit, all the while making sure that it had plenty to eat. The pen was fabricated of wood, and chicken wire. I have no idea where the chicken wire came from. The whole experience was so magical. I really felt privileged to have been in the right place at the right time. I also inadvertently discovered one of life's great lessons at an age when I could make very little conscious use of it.

The next morning, I woke up very early. I was excited about the rabbit, and wanted to see how it was doing. Well, I was in for a bit of a disappointment, because when I got to the cage, I noticed that the rabbit was gone. I immediately notified the entire family of the loss. I was informed that rabbits were quite cunning, and that when pressed were very good at running away. I found this to be a good explanation, and sorrowfully admired the rabbit's talent for escape, although I found it hard to believe that the rabbit was not convinced by our hospitality to stay.

Years later I discovered that the big white rabbit had been let out and given its freedom. I was then old enough to agree that the course of action taken at the time was indeed the noblest and most humane, which said a lot for my elders.

Ted

Christmas was rolling around one more time. Now I had not seen too many of them yet, but I knew I liked them. For one thing, it was truly a magical time of year when mysterious and unexplainable things occurred. It was also a time for wishing for things. The one great thing about being a kid, of course, is that what you wanted was usually affordable and, available. Something I grew out of as an adult, unfortunately. Anyway, at the ripe old age of three or four, my wish list was short. As a matter of fact, I was more in the reactive mode, so to speak, in that I gladly took whatever came my way.

I can't recall which Christmas it was exactly, except that it was one of the ones spent in the west end of the city. I think that accounts for one of three spent there. The whole family was up early that morning, but my father was nowhere to be seen. As we stood in the kitchen, it was suggested that I go to the living room fireplace to see if anything was different. So I went, and to my surprise, a beautifully wrapped gift lay there. I picked it up and brought it to the kitchen. The gift was for me, and I was prompted to open it. This was fun, lots of fun, I thought. As I returned to the fireplace, I discovered another gift. I brought it back to the kitchen. This time it was for someone else. Fantastic! Well the whole morning seemed to be like that, and everyone was having a lot of fun.

If ever I believed in Santa, it was that year. Of course, all of this had been orchestrated by my parents, probably by my mother, who was a real lover of Christmas. My father had been absent from the scene to play the role of Santa, of course, but a mysterious, and magical Santa who would anonymously leave gifts at the foot of the fireplace.

That was probably the year I received my long-time companion to be. That was when I befriended my teddy bear. Ted was great! He was a beautiful gold color, and his eyes were big and deep, with a knowing look to them. Ted's fur was plush and warm, quite soft to the touch. Ted stayed with me for many, many years, as any of my brothers or sister will tell you. I actually kept him with me until I was relatively old.

Our parting was sudden, but by my choice, and not due to pressure from my parents. I was the youngest in the family, and I think they liked to think that I was going to stay that way longer than would be physically possible.

Ironically, Ted came to me via the chimney, and that's the way he left some eight years later. I still miss him sometimes.

Things that Disappear

Houses are certainly not built like they use to be. Is that an understatement. Yes, I find that the ones they build today just won't cut it as time works on them. The older houses look like they will stand up to just about anything. However, one area that the older places seem to lack in, is their capacity to remain warm in the winter, unless of course, they have been insulated properly.

The house we lived in was big. What I really liked about it was that it had an attic, an unfinished one at that. There's something special about attics. If you put mothballs in them, the smell seems to permeate the wood, and create a whole new smell. This particular attic was made of rafters, and so was easy to get around in. One of the things that I really got a thrill out of, was finding alleys, as we called them, and dropping them down the outside walls of the house. I don't think they were using batt insulation in those days, so anything that you dropped between the studs would eventually make its way down to the basement. The sound was echo-like, and I couldn't get enough of it.

You might be wondering what alleys are. They're marbles. Don't ask me why they were dubbed "alleys". I often wondered how they got all the neat colors and shapes in those things, and how come they were so tough. You could chip one if you really tried, but you really had to work at it. They also served well as projectiles in slingshots, and also worked well in firecracker cannons. Having all these alleys disappear on you makes you wonder if the expression "loosing your marbles" came about from such activities.

Suited for Winter

They were real winters, when you could expect a lot of snow. It started in late November, and lasted until early April. Freezing rain was not even invented yet.

Being a kid in the winter was great. No circulatory problems, no real awareness of the cold. When snow would come, you'd find out about it by looking outside. No such thing as a weather report when I was young. Oh yes, they had them, but they were not important. It's not as if I had to drive anywhere at that age. Snow was the

magical thing that made you want to get out to play all day.

Once there was enough of it, you could go sliding. I was very fortunate because our house faced a long hill that was ideal for sliding. My mother would fit me into a one-piece snowsuit that was made of who-knows-what. We were living in the age of synthetics, and clothing was a natural for experimentation, I suppose. Once bundled up, she would send me out to play.

I must have climbed that hill a million times. The best part of course, was to go down the hill. I did have access to a toboggan, but I preferred just plopping myself down on the ground, and letting my snowsuit slip its way down the hill at great speeds. It often amazed people that I could go sliding without a sled.

The sport was sometimes hazardous. I remember once stopping halfway down the hill, turning around to look up the hill, only to be run over by a sled. Now that really hurt! Face first with a cold hard metal thing trying to peel off your face. Even as a kid, you have off days. To add insult to injury, I got run over a second time while getting up from the first hit. That was enough to cut my afternoon of sliding, short. I guess that was one of life's many lessons that you sure could do without.

The Toy that Wouldn't Do

Watching big machinery at work was truly a joy for me. I could watch anything that worked, and moved, all day long. There was something about it that was mesmerizing. Men and machines, coordinating and orchestrating change in the landscape. All of this change occurred as you watched closely, and quietly.

I was most impressed by earth-moving machines. I really liked steam shovels. I don't know why we still call them steam shovels, because in our part of the world, these things haven't run on steam in ages. But I loved the enormous capacity that these machines had for endless work, and the amount of change that they could bring about, seemingly without much effort. I wanted one. Not a real one, but a toy one. I loved to emulate and imitate the action of transformation. My parents knew this well.

One day in late spring, or early summer, they took me downtown to a place called Toyland. I'm not quite sure why they brought me there at that time of year, because there would have been no special occasion. Anyway, I was not about to analyze their motives. We entered the store, and what a store it was. There was just about everything a kid could want. We were on a mission though, and that was to find a toy steam shovel. Now I knew exactly what I wanted. There were two kinds of steam shovels in the world. One type pulled the earth away from itself and upward. The other type pulled the earth downward, and toward itself. In our part of the world, there was only one kind of machine...the one that pulled downward, and toward itself. The other kind, as far as I was concerned was not real.

We found the steam shovels in the heavy equipment section of the store. Guess what kind of shovels they had in stock? You guessed it. The other kind! I wasn't going to take this lying down. I promptly asked if they had any of the other ones. To my dismay, they had never seen one of the other ones. I couldn't believe that they would bring in less than authentic toys.

You won't believe what I did next. I turned down my parents' offer for a steam shovel, and explained that a substitution was just not acceptable. I don't think they minded too awfully much. They didn't have to buy me anything that day. Instead of using a toy to do my digging, I used a large tomato juice can with one end opened up. It was a great scooper, and I could simulate the digging action of a REAL steam shovel. Thank goodness for imagination.

Why Cars?

I've always loved cars. I love to look at them, drive them, buy them, watch them race...the list goes on. Why do I like cars so much, I'm not quite sure.

I do remember that a long time ago, when I was very young, four or five, I woke up one morning, and was greeted by my mother. She was smiling, and was making me feel pretty good about waking up, I thought. As it turned out, it was my birthday. You don't always know these things when you're a kid. She had something for me. Actually, there were two things, both simply wrapped, as I recall. I quickly unwrapped the first item. It was a Dinky Toy race car. It was blue, French racing blue, open wheeled of course, and very fast looking, even standing still. I know now that it was a Formula One car, and was probably a late-fifties model. I loved it.

There was another car to be unwrapped, but I don't even remember it now. I do remember that those two little cars probably started my love affair with cars. Although sometimes the love affair would wane.

I remember my parent's '53 Chev. It was white, with gray interior. One day, I was playing in the side-yard adjacent to the driveway. I wandered over to the car, tried the door, and discovered that it was unlocked. So I opened the door on the driver's side, and climbed in. I was pretty short in those days, and standing on the seat while holding the steering wheel gave me a good vantage point. Lots of dials, lots of switches to play with...better than a lot of kid's toys. I also discovered the horn. Now that was neat to play with. When you think about it, a horn on a car's steering was probably a fundamental form of remote control. Get something to happen from some place else.

Well I had an awfully good time while inside the car, but I didn't want to abuse the self-granted privilege, so I proceeded to get out of the car. Once out, I proceeded to shut the car door. As I did that, I proceeded to leave some of my fingers inside the car door. I distinctively remember PAIN! PAIN! and more PAIN!

Luckily, no fingers were lost, and no bones were broken. I quickly learned not to shut car doors that way. If I remember well, I wasn't allowed to go play in the car any more, but I once again fell in love with cars once the pain went away.

The First Ride

I was began to wonder if I'd ever get one of my own. Many of my friends had one already, and this was, after all, an important item for a kid to have, It was part of one's development and all that stuff.

I wasn't very old when my good friend lent me his bike to learn on. The first thing I did when I got on was to ask him for a push, just to get me going. Good plan. I didn't have to concentrate on pedaling and steering at the same time. Good plan until I started heading for the ditch. That universal feeling of panic overcame me. Everything stiffened up. No more steering capability, no more balance, no more anything...and of course, the lesson on using brakes had not been taught, or requested. I ended up in the ditch. My pride was hurt, my confidence shattered, but my will remained. So, of course, I tried again, a few times, and got the hang of it. I thought it was mighty nice of my friend to let me wreck his bike, seeing I didn't have one to wreck.

How good a salesperson are you when you're five or five-and-a-half years old? Pretty good I'd say. Matter of fact our best sales talents seem to be with us at birth, and go on to diminish as we grow older. I started bugging my parents for a bike, explaining that I had outgrown the tricycle that never worked very well since it had been run over, and pointing out that my peers were already riding bikes.

That summer, late that summer, I got a bike. Let's qualify that. I got a two wheeler, of sorts. This thing was something else. To begin with, it had a rubber chain, sort of like a belt you would find on a washing machine. Not only that, it had tubeless tires, made of some kind of petrified rubber. As a matter of fact, you could run a gap into the middle of the tire, through all of its circumference, and still be able to ride the bike. Now I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but where on earth did this thing come from? I seem to remember my parents offering to take it back if I didn't like it. I was so desperate for a bike, and believe it or not, had developed a sensitivity to rejection in that I didn't want to hurt my parents' feelings, or was it that I figured I would never, ever get anything again if I didn't accept the gift as it was.

Well, I rode the darn thing. And in retrospect, I should have turned the thing down. The belt would slip if it got wet, or loose. The ride was enough to give you kidney problems. The whole thing was a joke on wheels. I never did get to like that bike. I, or no one I know, has ever seen a contraption like that.

Thank goodness we grow out of things. Fortunately, I grew out of that bike into a real bike, with a real chain, and real tires that you could get a flat with, and brakes that worked. The friend who taught me how to ride a bike, whom I've known for decades, still remembers the bike with the rubber chain, and every so often when I bump into him, he still gets a laugh out of the thought of that bike.

The first One

As we go through time, we find ourselves going through many firsts. Very philosophical, but what does it all mean? For one thing, it means that you end up living a lot of different experiences, some good, some bad, some good for you that feel bad, and so on.

One first that I still enjoy thinking about, is my first girlfriend. We're not talking about a teenage love affair. We're talking about a major pre-teen thing...the summum of innocent love. Hell, at that time, I was unaware of the existence of any other kind.

She was my parents' long-time friends' daughter. She and I shared our first years on this planet, and I considered her as good if not better a friend than any other human being that was my age. She was very pretty. Her hair was golden brown, her eyes were clear and blue, and she had lots of freckles. She was very smart, I remember, but she was not meticulous in class. This was confusing to me. If someone was smart, then they should also be able to pay attention to detail.

We often walked to school together, and I would place my arm over her shoulder. We used to get teased a lot about that, but usually by older kids. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what the fuss was all about. We were in the same class for two years. It was at this point in time that I became aware of that so unattractive feeling, the one of jealousy. I would become all fired up inside if I knew that someone else was vying for her attention. And I remember going crazy thinking that someone else would win her over when we moved away, and I went to another school.

I saw her from time to time, up until the age of twelve or thirteen. By that time she had developed beautifully, was at that point taller, more mature, and all the things that young girls are at that age, while I was shorter, had more zits, arms and legs that were growing faster than the rest of my body, and generally not so appealing as I may have been when I was five years old. Ah, life can be cruel.

Well, I made up for all of that. I grew to be taller than her, I'm sure. The zits went away, and I regained some appeal. But I must confess, there will always be a soft spot in my heart for my first love.

Wrong Time, Wrong Place

Going to church regularly was a very important part of growing up in our family. It was a regular thing, and as far as I knew then, everybody in the world went to church regularly. That's how things were, and had always been.

One day, on the way home from school, a friend of mine and I were talking and walking. Nothing special. We did this every day, except that this day would be different. As we came upon the local church, we stopped and looked. It was a weekday of course, and we wondered what happened in the church the other six days of the week? It seemed sort of silly to have this structure in place, and have so little use for it. So we decided to go inside to see if anything was happening there. The front doors were open, so that was easy enough. We walked in to have a closer look.

There were very few lights on, but the candles were burning. We both thought that this was strange, and quite frankly, a bit of a waste. Who on earth took care of the candles during the week? How long did candles burn anyway? We walked down to the front of the church, close to the altar. Now during a regular visit, this was as far as you could go. Only the priests and altar boys got to see what was behind the altar. Well curiosity got the better of us, and we decided to take a closer look. We whispered our comments out of respect for where we were, and even this was risky, because one never talked in church...one listened quietly. We were still into old fashioned altars in those days; everybody faced the altar, including the priest. We walked up to the altar, and had a look around. It was neat to have this new perspective. Now we didn't think that we were doing anything wrong, but we also didn't want to push our luck. The whole episode probably lasted five minutes, and we made sure not to disturb anything. Once our curiosity was satisfied, we left, once again, quietly. As far as we knew, no one had seen us, and as far as we were concerned, no one went to the church, except on Sundays.

Well this did not turn out so innocently once the adults got into the act. Not that we were ever able to confirm it, but it seems that our visit had not gone unnoticed. I can only guess that someone had been watching us all along, and had reported the incident almost immediately to our respective parents. All hell broke loose! You'd swear someone had been shot or something. Not very many questions, mind you, but a lot of quick implementation.

It was announced to me the very next day that I was no longer allowed to see or speak to my friend. We were not to associate in any way forever, or something like that. Hard to believe. I do seem to remember speaking to my friend again, but you can rest assured that we never went back into that church together again.

A New Channel

When I was a kid, TV was not yet a really big thing, at least where we lived. We could receive two, count them, two channels. Color was nothing more than an inventor's dream, and reception was at the mercy of the infamous antenna. The best show on TV was "The Friendly Giant", preceded by same channel colleague "Chez Helene". On Chez Helene there was the pretty assistant, Louise, who would help out daily. Funny how we are naturally attracted to beauty, even at a very young age. And of course on Friendly, there were Rusty the rooster, and Jerome the giraffe. I always liked that show, even when I grew up. There was a sedating quality to it. Never did things get out of control in Friendly's castle.

Now all of this controlled peace and calm was to abruptly, and for most people welcomely come to an end with the advent of a third TV station. The new station would be more commercial, and would aggressively seek to sway the television audience. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel.

People were ecstatic. New programs, more variety, and all that stuff. I still remember my brothers trying to pull the new station in, playing with the antenna, pleading with the tuner, one of those endless loop tuners. It was wild. They finally managed to pull in the station, which happened to be less than a mile away, and the first thing we got to see on that station one Saturday afternoon, was a football game. I preferred Friendly.

Tasty Bits

It would certainly be nice if our taste buds remained as sharp and sensitive as when we were young. After years of assault, they seem to work, but not quite as well.

There are a few special tastes, the memories of which, have remained with me since my youth. The first one is a combination of taste and texture. This combination comes from something that is still popular today...Rice Krispies' squares. The first time I tasted these, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. There was something about them that was addictive. The only problem with them was that they were very abrasive if you ate too many of them, and your mouth would retaliate by making everything else taste like garbage for the next couple of days. The one good thing about those squares is that we didn't make them at home. This turned out to be a form of control.

The other incredible taste experience came from egg rolls. One of my older brothers used to pick them up once in a while, and once, he let me have a taste. I think the plum sauce was really what did it. Try an egg roll without plum sauce and you'll see what I mean. The combination of taste and texture once again, was indescribably delicious. I noticed upon traveling in latter years that some of the best egg roll makers had settled in our part of the world. I've always considered myself lucky for that. It was years between my first taste of an egg roll and my second taste. Egg rolls were ten cents apiece. Very expensive for a kid.

Another taste treat came in the form of popcorn rolled into caramel. I was introduced to this delicacy at a friend's place. It was very messy, just the way kids like it. Hedonistic, really.

Firecracker Day

I could tell you a lot of stories about Firecracker Day, and I'd probably be spanning a period of at least ten years, if not more. It was always a very special day, and as kids we always looked forward to it. I don't know why I'm referring to one day only, because depending on how good you were at sourcing out firecrackers, it could easily stretch out to a week. Yes, those were the good old days. There were less laws and regulations. For example, you didn't have to wear a helmet when you rode a motorcycle, and you didn't have to wear seat belts, and if you had the cash, you could buy firecrackers from any store that sold them, no matter how young you were.

You could buy tiny ones that you would let off as a string. They weren't expensive, and were too small to light up one at a time. Although if you wanted to impress someone, you would light one up, and let it go off in your hand. It didn't hurt, but your fingers would really hold the smell of gunpowder. Sometimes we'd have contests to see how big a firecracker you could light off in your hand. The "barber shop" striped Rockets were very powerful, and they were about the biggest you could hold without blowing off a finger. You would get this very numb feeling in your fingers when you did that. Now the cannons were the biggest. They were also very expensive. You didn't hold one of those in your hand. They were about six inches long, and about three-quarters of an inch in diameter. If you had big boots on, you could probably hold one down as it exploded, but you'd risk the possibility of a sprained ankle, and a very numb leg.

There were often duds. Those you would break in two, and make flares with them. You could hold them in your hand, but you had to be very careful.

One of my favorite activities was to stick a Rocket firecracker in the hollow body of those great little plastic planes that you shot off into the air with an elastic slingshot. Those airplanes flew beautifully, and you could get them way up in the air before they blew up. They blew up very well, sort of like in slow motion. Blowing up tulips was also a favorite activity, as well as blowing up plastic model cars. One of my brothers had made a very neat cannon at school, and he would send large marbles across a small river that runs through the city.

We were lucky. None of our friends ever lost any body parts, although most of us probably don't hear as well as we should. We were supposed to be celebrating Queen Victoria's birthday, but I'd rather think that we were celebrating the freedom of Firecracker Day.

Not Feeling so Good

When you're a kid, you usually feel pretty good. The rule of thumb seems to be that you're in a good mood just about all the time, unless some external factor comes into play. And it also seems that mood swings are rapid and sudden. It also seems that as adults, we have a tendency to lose some of the spontaneity and general good humor that are so typical of youth. And what ever happened to getting up without an alarm clock?

I remember going to school one day in the middle of winter. It wasn't especially cold out, but the sky was filled with clouds. I walked to school, even when I was in kindergarten. There may have been school buses, but as far as we knew, school buses were for kids who lived in the country. We didn't live in the country. I don't remember ever minding the walk. It wasn't that far to school.

But one day, I think I was in grade one, things were different. Going to school was okay, but as the day wore on, I wore out. I seemed to grow more and more tired. As the school day ended, I felt a greater than usual urge to get home. I put on my winter clothes and boots, and started walking home. For some reason or another, I walked home alone that afternoon. The walk felt like it was taking forever. It felt like one of those dreams where your feet are stuck in molasses, and everywhere you want to go just seems to get farther and farther away from you...a little bit like going up the endless stairway. I really thought that I would never make it. I had never fainted, but that day, I was sure that I could, if I were to let myself go. On the edge. If I were to compare it, it would be like swinging yourself in a circle until you got so dizzy that falling down wouldn't even matter to you.

Well, I made it home. My mother could see something was wrong. She took my temperature, and sure enough, it was through the roof. Turns out I had contracted chicken pox. Just another youthful rite of passage that lots of chicken noodle soup would no doubt fix.

Just Desserts

I never met a kid who didn't like to eat. But a lot depends on what you want to feed a kid. Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, not likely. Gum, candy, chocolate...now you're talking.

I remember being particular about some foods, but at particular stages in life. For example, I couldn't stand green Iceberg lettuce. For years, I wouldn't touch the stuff. Then, all of a sudden, I was asked to try it again, and lo and behold, I was converted. I've liked it ever since.

Now one thing that I always loved, and probably always will, is strawberry shortcake. Although I don't have it often, it's still a big favorite. It's also a desert that I will never forget!

We were now living closer to the center of the city. The house was enormous. It sat on an elm-lined street with a whole bunch of other enormous houses. It was also a very old house, with lots of beautiful woodwork inside. There were all the requisite rooms from another era: foyer, boudoir, sitting room, dining room, etc. You actually had to go through two or three doors, just to get inside the house. This house had tons of windows, stretching over three storeys. There were probably fifty or more windows. In the fall, fifty or so additional windows would go up, and in the spring, they would come down. I was fortunate enough to be too young to help put up those storm windows. One handy thing about these was that they went on from the inside, which was quite innovative, considering most of the neighboring houses did not enjoy this feature. I remember one fine Fall evening, after all the windows had been put up by my father and older brothers, Mom had decided to treat the family to strawberry shortcake for dessert.

This followed a great dinner, whatever it was. I was having a second serving of dessert, when all of a sudden, a great crashing sound occurred. It was deafening. I opened my eyes only to find that I was surrounded by broken glass. It was everywhere! The storm window in the kitchen had fallen from its anchors onto the kitchen table. No one else was hit, and apart from the surprising shock, I seemed to be all right. My mother was more worried about all of this than I. She was also not very happy with my father, to say the least.

It was off to the hospital we went, so that I could get checked out. Got my first ride in a wheelchair. I thought that was pretty neat. They took X-rays, and bandaged up my head. I felt like a mummy. The doctor told my parents to check for dizzy spells, vomiting, or fainting. The nurse wheeled me out, and my parents brought me home. As it turns out, I didn't get any dizzy spells, I didn't vomit, and I didn't faint. I guess my head was okay. I did get a day off from school, and the other kids thought the bandages were neat looking.

As far as I know, my head is still okay, and I still like strawberry shortcake.

More Things to Eat

It's a darn good thing that we get two sets of teeth, when you think about it. It's one of the rare second chances in life. With teeth, you get the opportunity to ruin the first set, if you're not careful, and by the time you come to your senses, the second set comes along.

I had an incredibly bad thing for candy when I was a kid. It was more than a passion, it was a way of life. There was no better way to spend money. Money was probably created for candy. The next best thing to candy was toys. But as a kid. you rarely could afford to buy toys. You got those at Christmas, and your birthday anyway. But if you happened to get a nickel, dime or quarter, it was time to go to the corner store.

In those days, a penny would get you three blackballs, or three blackbabies, or three jube-jubes. A penny could get you Bazooka gum, or any other type of "a la carte" gum. Although a nickel would get you a pack of Thrills. Back to pennies for a moment. A penny could get you a Pixie Stick, or a package of Lick-Maid. There was no difference between a Pixie Stick and a Lick-Maid. It all depended on how you liked to eat the stuff that was inside. It was rather sand-like and tart. It also came in a rainbow of colors, and supposedly, flavors, but I get the feeling it was the same stuff in a whole bunch of different colors. For a few cents more, there were jawbreakers, a gum shaped into a ball, and covered with sparklies, a form of candy on candy if you wish.

A nickel got you a pack of gum with collector cards, your pick of hockey, baseball, football, Civil War scenes with cannonballs flying through soldiers' bodies, and of course, monster and horror cards. Same gum, different reading material. You could also get a roll of Bazooka gum. If you ate all the pieces at once, you could make enormous balloons that would blow up in your face and get into your hair.

Now all of this stuff went on top of the nutritious stuff you were being fed at home, including whatever desserts were being offered. It would be an understatement to say I had cavities as a kid. The dentist could actually look into my mouth and count the good teeth as opposed to the bad teeth. Even if his math was bad, he only needed the fingers on one hand to count the good teeth. I learned my lesson when the second one was pulled out. It was an adult tooth. The sound of it coming out was horrible. It sounded like a branch cracking off a tree. I also didn't like what the dentist had to do just to get that sucker out. I didn't like the instruments, I didn't like the smell.

Soon after that experience, I decided to quit being a candy junkie. and I actually managed to curtail most desires for sweet stuff. What control! It was after all, quite a number of years before I would discover beer.

Flights of Fancy on the Reservoir

The second house we lived in was in a rather unique setting. If you can imagine a house lying at the base of a tall L-shaped cliff. The cliff surface was climbable, and forested. Part of the cliff had been eaten up by a quarry operation. This exposed area showed a rather thick layer of sedimentary rock.

At one point or another, the part that remained at the base of the L had been transformed into an underground municipal water reservoir. The top of the reservoir had been turned into a park that overlooked the city. It was an interesting place to go to, as a kid, and a lot of neat things went on there.

I remember playing outside one day. and hearing these strange buzzing sounds coming from the top of the reservoir. I decided to investigate. As I climbed the side of the reservoir, the sounds became louder and more distinct. I still didn't know what was creating the noise, but I certainly wanted to find out.

A few moments later, I reached the top, and noticed to my great surprise and delight, a collection of remote control airplanes of all shapes and sizes. There were beautiful replicas of all types of military and civilian aircraft. And some had wingspans of three feet and more. I was simply mesmerized by the beauty and detail of these flying machines. The owners were quite skilled at maneuvering their planes through the sky. There would sometimes be five or six of them in the air at the same time. Most were using remote control panels, but a few were flying "by wire", which was not as exciting to watch. There seemed to be a lot more freedom involved with the remote control planes. For one thing, they didn't have to fly in a circle. They could fly straight up, and dive, or fly away to a point where you could hardly see them any more.

I remember seeing one of them flying so gracefully, and all of a sudden, falling from the sky at an alarming rate, only to bury itself, nose first, into the soft ground. The plane must have sunk about ten inches into the ground. I remember the look on the owner's face. He was rather despondent. I did not realize at the time the cost or work that went into building and maintaining one of these little planes. I did realize, however, that these were not the types of toys that kids received for Christmas, although I'm sure some richer kids would probably get one of the fly-by-wire ones on occasion. This was more of an adult thing, and I was quite surprised to see grown-ups entertaining themselves this way. I did find it refreshing though, to see that there was something great to look forward to when I grew up.

The Big Race

The park was nearby, and I used to go there all the time. It's not what you'd call a pretty sort of park. It was rather flat, had very few trees, and no particular charm. But it did have a wading pool, and some pretty big swings, the kind that could give you a real thrill, if you had a strong armed person to push you. In the winter, they would put up a hockey rink, with a skating rink around the hockey rink. Good planning. You could increase your chances of getting a puck in the head from someone's slapshot just by pleasure-skating around the hockey rink.

One summer day, I found out that there would be a series of competitions at the park. One of those competitions was a tricycle race. There would be prizes, and everything! Well it didn't take me long to sign up for the tricycle race. I was a confident rider, and I knew I was fast.

In preparation for the race, I found out what the circuit would be, and began practicing. The circuit was to be run around one city block. There were no sidewalks in this part of the city, but there also wasn't much traffic either. I must have run that circuit a thousand times. I really wanted to win, and I knew I could. I also had a pretty good idea of who would be competing.

Race day came. It was a warm summer day, quite beautiful really. My trike was oiled, and I was ready to go. A new feeling came over me, one of nervousness. Quite natural of course, but new, nonetheless. My confidence level was still high.

The race began. I pedaled like a little devil, giving no quarter to my tricycle, or to my body. The sweat started pouring off my body, and I remember neither the other competitors, nor those who were cheering us on.

All of a sudden, something inconceivable happened! As I rounded a corner, I felt my trike tipping. The whole balance of things was falling apart before my very eyes. I could not believe what was happening. The trike continued its unwieldy trajectory sideways and downward, taking me along with it. My body scraped along the chipseal surface causing me pain. The pain was secondary to the humiliation that I felt, knowing that I had lost control of my trike. Injustice was the thought that was filling my mind. How could this happen?

I was not one to lose control of my trike, and I was livid, thinking that if I were to lose control of my trike, that it would happen on this day of all days. Not much philosophy was going through my mind that day. My ego was bruised in a big way. Not only did I fail to win the race that I was sure of winning, I didn't even finish the race. No prize, no glory.

Life is like that, sometimes. When you feel most confident, it seems to be a good idea to remain somewhat humble, just in case...

Close Shave

She wasn't the girl next door. She was the girl across the street. She liked animals a lot, and I remember her once giving me a chick. I don't remember the chick lasting too long, but I appreciated the thought. She also had rabbits, but she never gave me one.

One summer evening, she came over to play. My parents were tied up with either her parents, or with some other adults. The push-mower was sitting there, and I wanted to show my equally young friend how this machine worked. I loved playing with the mower, mostly because it had so many moving parts. It was also a very interesting orange color. The push-mower could also be pulled, and that was just a bit more fun, because it was easier to move this way.

The game we devised was rather simple. One person would pull the mower as fast as they could, and the other person would chase the mower all over the place, and try to throw things that could be cut by the rotating blades. I would be the puller for a while, then she would be the puller for a while. It was very entertaining, to say the least.

It was my turn to pull again, and I started off in a great flurry. She ran behind, laughing and giggling, as playing kids do. The lawn had recently been mown, and grass clippings were flying into the air. My young friend ran behind the mower, throwing things into the path of the whirling blades. Somewhere along the line, one of her fingers came too close to the blades. The cacophonous action of the blade assembly covered her scream, and I continued to run with the mower. When I looked back, she was no longer chasing the mower. She was just standing there, holding her hand with the other. I let go the mower, and went to her to see what was happening. The adults were not far behind, and you could sense great concern from everyone. I started feeling pretty bad about the whole thing. It had been such a neat game.

You can imagine that the game was no longer to be played...ever again. Thank goodness the wound to the young girl's finger was superficial. Nonetheless, the feelings of guilt were disproportionately strong. I realized at that point the potential severity of the situation.

A Moving Experience

I don't remember our first move as a family. I was quite young at the time. So the transition was for all intents and purposes, very smooth. I don't know how my brothers and sister felt, but I'm sure it was more difficult for them. They had developed friendships, of course, and they had to let them go, moving on to new ones. I developed my first series of friendships in the bigger city. There were lots of other kids around. Seems that everyone was making kids at that time. I learned that people were unique in many ways, and that they had their own particular talents. I developed my own set of friendships, and was quite taken aback when I discovered that we were moving to another part of the city, a part of the city that was far enough to make it difficult for a kid to continue those established friendships. Not impossible, but difficult.

The new house was in fact a very old house. It was big, very big, and had tons of charm. There were three storeys, eight bedrooms, two of which comprised an apartment on the top floor. This place was great for a kid like me. It sort of took the sting out of moving. The area was also very neat. It was chock-full of big old houses, many of which were held by embassies. There were also lots of alleyways and hidden streets, even a place called Lover's Lane. It was a walkway that cut right through the center of a city block. Had they not put in this walkway, people would have had to go a long way to get to the other side.

So there were many new things to discover, but I still missed my friends from the other part of the city. I adjusted, of course, but to this day, I can't understand why kids get so screwed-up when there is a change in their lives, because as kids, we are so good at absorbing newness. We seem to thrive on it. We seem to want it all the time. But a psychological line is drawn when it comes to certain changes, and one of those is moving. I guess it might have something to do with the fact that as a kid, the only real feeling of control that you have comes from being able for the most part to choose who you want to hang around with. And it brings to mind something that adults often say: "Well, I'd go, but I won't know anybody." The first thing that comes to mind when I hear that is: "Well how on earth did you make the friends you already have?"

Who Needs to Talk?

Summer was upon us. It was a real summer. None of this modern day stuff, no sir. You could count on freezing your butt off in the winter, and sweating your previously frozen butt off all summer. No freezing rain in the winter, no snowstorms in the summer.

I was out riding my bike along the sidewalk, not too far from where I lived. The cicadas were singing, and the air was thick with humidity. I liked it like that, because there were absolutely no cold spots to be found anywhere. You could wear a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and a pair of running shoes day in, day out.

As I was ambling along, I noticed a kid about my age across the street. He was riding a leg powered go-kart. It was one of the neatest things that I had ever seen. It was orange, and looked like a blast to ride. The kid riding the kart looked at me as he drove slowly along the sidewalk, and I looked at him as I slowly rode my bike on my side of the street. I made my way across the street to get a closer look, and I told the kid that I liked his kart. As it turned out, he didn't speak anything that we spoke here, so I gathered he was from some far away country. So instead of talking to each other, we made hand signals to each other. He did tell me his name, and I told him mine. We looked over his kart together, and he offered to let me try it. I was as thrilled as a kid could be.

It was amazing how well we could communicate, without words, and have such a good time, and it amazes me how today we stress talking to solve problems, but rarely do we emphasize communication. The kid from across the street and I became very good friends, and I ended up teaching him a lot of English. He turned out to be the son of an ambassador, and had a great number of wonderful adventures to recount, even though he was only six or seven at the time. He had already been halfway around the world, and had lived in South America and Western Europe. He spoke Portuguese, and Italian. He was a pretty special kind of person.

As you can imagine, it didn't take him too long to learn English, and we had gobs of fun during the process. I'll always remember him confusing push for pull. I don't exactly know why because the words did not seem to be part of his mother tongue. Anyway, you knew that when he said push the door open, you had to pull it open. The words were less important than the communication.

Things One Shouldn't Do

I still can't believe some of the things we used to do as kids. There are many adults out there who should thank their lucky stars that someone other than we were looking out for their interests.

Of course some of the devices used on adults were devised by adults, so I guess there is some kind of poetic justice there, until you become an adult yourself.

One of the things I remember doing, with friends of course, involved the use of pea shooters, a device whose popularity has never been the same. Maybe the powers that were decided that the things were dangerous. The plan consisted of placing ourselves behind a decorative cinder block wall that bordered a busy street in our neighborhood. This was done under veil of night to protect the guilty. The idea was to load up your mouth with a handful of peas, and send rounds of these out through the end of the pea shooter at an alarming rate onto the sides of passing cars. Now imagine yourself driving along at night, in the fall, in the dark, maybe a little frazzled from your day's activities, and all of a sudden hearing the sound of little pellets hitting the entire side of your car. You have to consider the exponential factor here. We're talking about six, maybe eight pea shooting kids, all zealously trying to outdo one another. And don't think you could catch us. We knew every nook and cranny of a ten square block area of the already labyrinthine older part of the city. As an adult, you just went home and probably poured yourself a large stiff drink, to try to forget what had just happened to you.

Another rather entertaining thing that we enjoyed doing in the fall was to gather up piles and piles of elm, oak, and maple leaves near the side of the street. There are very few elm leaves left, so you would have to rely on oak and maple leaves if you were a kid doing this today. The stately elms have succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease. Once the piles were arranged, we would set up teams on both sides of a one-way street. When traffic lulled we would quickly place a line of leaves across the street, then when a car came close, we would pretend to heave a rope at either end. This usually caused the driver to lock up the four wheels of their car. As soon as that would happen, we would scramble.

In the winter, snowballs were all the rage, and we would throw them at anything that moved...usually cars. One day a friend of mime threw a snowball at a car. Nothing unusual there, except that the snowball went flying into the driver's side window, just missing the nape of the driver's neck, and continuing on into the rear passenger seat. This really made the driver of the car understandably angry, and us scared. The idea was to hit the side of the passing cars, not the side of the occupants' heads.

Well the chase was on, and the driver of the car would not give up looking for the perpetrator of the act. We all ran to hide, and I really don't know why my friend gave himself up, because the driver would never have found any of us. My only guess is that he felt guilty about the incident, and in good Catholic fashion, wanted to somehow pay for his wrong-doing. He was brought to his parents by the driver of the car, and duly punished. After that we collectively agreed not to throw snowballs at driver's head height.

I can't remember anyone else ever getting caught for doing things like that, and indeed, my snowball pitching friend had not been caught. He had given himself up. In retrospect, many of those things, one should never do.

Things We Liked to Do

One of the great winter things that we liked to do was jump off garage roofs, and other high places. There seemed to be more snow then, and I would be hard pressed to try anything like that today, unless I knew a really good chiropractor. In any event, we rarely get enough snow to do that sort of thing today.

It was just a great adrenaline rush to just let yourself fall from heights, and it probably helped develop bladder control.. One daring maneuver involved doing backflips onto the snow below. My greatest fear was that of being impaled by a fence post or picket. It would not be a pretty sight, I'm sure you would agree, to have to pull one of your friends off a picket.

Something you discover about yourself, and others, when you do these things, is that character is intrinsically linked to the order of activity. There is always one person that is ready to try something first. It must be some kind of pride enhancer, but it is truly only worthwhile if none of the participants have never undertaken the challenge. The big question is, and always will be: "Who will be the first?"

Now when it comes to teenage dating and sex, everyone seems to want to be the first. As soon as someone clues you in to what is happening, usually an older teenager, everyone wants to get in on the act. Jumping off a garage is pretty daring, and you need prompting and motivation, but have someone stick their tongue into your ear like a Q-tip and the rest becomes history.

Before puberty, boys don't seem to have much use for girls, and girls seem to have less use for boys. Then the hormone factory start churning out carnal desire, and even a zitty-faced partner of the opposite sex starts to look good, and all of a sudden, the things you liked to do, things like jumping off garages, don't seem to be as much fun as other things any more.

A Fine Residence

It belonged to a country, not an individual. I suppose when it was first built that it had belonged to an individual, a wealthy one at that. Sometime in the past, it became an ambassador's residence.

I still have a very clear mental picture of the place. Of the outside, I can be reminded of anytime I drive by, It's a very elegant and stately looking place, set deep in a city lot. The grounds take up nearly half a city block, and are very well kept. There's a long half-moon driveway, and a separate building houses the garage. The exterior of the house is made of brick, and there's a long green awning that greets visitors at the front entrance.

The main hall is very impressive, and is surrounded by a wide stairway to the mezzanine. To the right is a solarium that if followed, will lead you to the main dining room at the back of the house. The rest of the floor is dedicated to the kitchens, where the chef worked her magic. The servants could also be found rummaging around.

Most of the basement was made up of reception halls that, when not used doubled as the judo-lesson area. The best part of the basement is that it housed the soft drinks, wine and spirits supplies. As kids, we would sneak in and drink warm Coca-Cola from the small six ounce bottles. The far end of the basement area was usually darker, and had a wonderful fragrance all its own, and it just seemed to be there. A beautiful black piano also adorned the room.

The second floor had a combination of bedrooms, a sitting area, and an office. All of the rooms were beautifully appointed, and exuded a particular atmosphere.

The third floor contained yet one more suite at one end, and the servants' quarters. There was also a storage room for furs.

You could communicate from any room in the house to another by using those wonderful marine-type blow tubes or whatever you might call them. They were a lot of fun to play around with.

The whole house was really special, and it supplied us with plenty of room to play around in when we were kids. I'm just glad we didn't have to pay the bills.

Things You Had to Have

It doesn't matter when you were born, or where you grew up, you will remember those things that were special to you and your friends. If you were lucky, you got them first. If your parents didn't have the cash you got them later, maybe. In any event, the unrelenting advertisement of these products geared to kids made it impossible for you not to want anything at one time or another. When I was growing up, there were no advertising restrictions on programming geared to kids. Advertisers could, at their leisure, bombard the airwaves relentlessly in order to get kids watering at the mouth over their products.

Late fall into December was the time for tried and true products, and a lot of big ticket items. So you'd get a lot of advertising for board games, the venerable G.I. Joe, his more attractive counterpart, Barbie, and a variety of other Christmas tree staples, such as train sets, erector sets, race car sets, guns, lots of guns, more dolls, dolls that cried, peed, talked, and so on. I always wondered why G.I. Joe or Ken had no penis, but Barbie had breasts.

Then there were the novelties that came out at other times of the year. These were seasonal, and probably quite a lucrative portion of the market. Once again, advertising was non-stop, and very repetitive. You could easily see the same ad four tines during a half-hour show, and then see them again another four times during the following show. Slinky was one of the first ones that I remember. Somebody out there had a bunch of extra flat stringy metal that they knew exactly what to do with. At ninety-nine cents, it was all the rage, and everybody had to have one. What a stroke of genius, a sexless toy, and who couldn't scrape up that kind of cash. The magic price point. With tax, which as kids we always forgot to factor in, the thing came in at a dollar and five cents. Many a retailer ended up biting the bullet on the tax, especially when the kids would put on the long face. Anyway, the things did go down the stairs, just like in the ads, and they made a neat sort of noise when you used them. And sometimes, they would get all tangled up, and you'd end up throwing them away.

Yoyos were a really big item too, especially when they came out with the ones that "slept" and had zircon diamonds encrusted into the wooden lacquered sides. I got pretty good at using a yoyos, but I remember having to take breaks from using them because the circulation from the first joint to the tip of my middle finger was cut off too long, and the finger looked like it was dead. The other hazard came from overzealous yoyoers sending their instruments into space, which just might be your head or a sensitive part of your body.

One item that really captured the imagination was the Frisbee. Now that has to be one of the best performing novelties that was ever put on the market. I hope the inventor had well protected his/her idea. Ninety-nine cents got you a projectile that did everything they said it did. It hovered, it boomeranged, it skipped. You could bob it on the end of your finger, your nose, or just about any other appendage that you cared to use. The first ones were made of rather thick non-pliable plastic, but they lasted forever. As time went on the plastic improved, and the rest is history. If the edge got scuffed from sliding on the pavement, you ended up removing a very important layer of skin from, you guessed it, the side of your middle finger.

Hula hoops were introduced way before Slinkies and Frisbees, but were also very popular. They certainly were good for those who were, shall we say, large in the middle. That is, they helped those people become small in the middle. Now these didn't do anything to your middle finger, but they could induce one hell of a cramp in your side, just like you might need to have your appendix taken out. Wonder if they ever used them in Medical School?

Bat-A-Balls were very popular with the girls, although it was very acceptable for guys to use them too. The really proficient players would add three or four extra elastics to the things and that would allow them to send the ball clear across the schoolyard. They also made a great weapon, and you never lost the ball.

Lest we forget Indian rubber balls, and their offspring, Super Balls. Where on earth did they get the material for these things? How many people had one of their eyes see the inside of their heads when pushed in by a rebounding Super Ball? Then some genius figured out that you could attach a Super Ball to a Bat-A-Ball paddle.

+Boomerangs were for the true aficionados of novelty items. They were not ninety-nine cents. As a matter of fact they cost a lot more. It helped to be a doctor or lawyer's kid if you had such tastes, because the boomerang would come back, only if you knew how to pitch it. Otherwise, you got the thrill of seeing it fly once, and if you happened to be in anything but an open field, that was probably the last time you saw your boomerang fly.

There were many more novelty items of course, and all of them began life by being able to stir the imagination, for a while anyway. The fact that they were ninety-nine cents also helped a lot, especially when you just had to have one.

More than One Bargained For

A birthday would come along, but before it did, my parents would ask me if I wanted anything, or I would volunteer the information. More likely than not, I would volunteer the information. I remember spending an entire fall season hinting that I would like a train set. I would do the usual stuff that kids do, like make train sounds while going through the kitchen, drawing trains at school, and bringing the drawings home, and so on. My older brothers had received a train set, but it had long outlived its usefulness, and had been disposed of. It was a rather unique electric train for the day. It was an American Flyer. and unlike most of the other trains that you could get, this one ran on two rails, just like real trains. Three-rail sets like the Lionel were infinitely more popular.

I wasn't looking for anything special. I just wanted the regular Lionel freight train. Nothing fancy. An acquaintance had a full-blown train setup including the table, the village, the switching mechanisms, and a room used exclusively for trains. I knew my parents couldn't afford something like that, and so I resigned myself to hoping for a simple setup.

After what felt like an eternity, my birthday rolled around, and yes, I got a train set. It was a Lionel. It wasn't a freight train. It was a special high-tech one with a rocket-launching device on one car, a freight car with opening roof panels that launched a helicopter, and all kinds of other stuff. The locomotive was a steam-type locomotive, which looked great, but didn't really match the types of rail cars it was pulling.

I also remember getting an erector set one Christmas. They were new at the time. They were like a Meccano set, but you used plastic girders, and braces to build skyscrapers. I got the chemical-plant set with just enough skyscraper parts to build not-so-high skyscrapers.

Quiet Time

It was a busy household, no doubt about it. Four teenagers, six boarders, most of them university students, all in a big old three-storey house.

My brothers and I slept in one large dormitory-type room in the basement, and my sister had her own room, also in the basement. It was a big basement, as you can imagine.

I was the youngest, and much younger than anybody else, so naturally I went to bed much earlier than anybody else. To give you an idea of how big this room was, there were four beds, a few dressers, a full-size pool table, and an immense counter with a sink that was used by one of my brothers to do his photographic work. So off I'd go to the dungeon to get some sleep, and every night it was the same thing. From upstairs I would hear the stereo going, with all the best tunes of the era, everything from the Rolling Stones, Paul Anka, Roy Orbison, the Beatles, the Ventures, Gene Pitney, some occasional Mantovani, and other classical stuff, depending on who had the controls to the stereo. To give you an idea of how loud it could be when my parents were away, someone managed to blow up the stereo. It actually produced smoke, but of course that was when most stereos and televisions still had tubes in them. On top of the music was the sound of ten or twelve feet running about the house, a telephone that wouldn't stop, and doors that would open and shut just like in a hotel lobby.

There were, in the most positive light, a few benefits to all of this activity above my head. I've got a pretty good grasp of fifties and sixties pop music, even though I left the sixties at the ripe old age of fifteen, and I now can fall asleep just about any time of day watching TV. I can also fall asleep on a train or a plane while sitting down. I can sniff out a photo lab a mile away, and I know a good pool table when I see one.

When I think back to that time in my life, it still amazes me to this day that my father could make all the noise he wanted, and I'd fall asleep without a hitch. Not that he was a noisy person or anything, but when he had to rummage around the house, it was as if everything was done in a less noisy way. No doubt I felt secure because of his presence, but there was something else. Maybe it has to do with the fact that he was aware that noise made it difficult for me to sleep. After all, he had the ambassadorial task of telling my older brothers and sister to keep things quiet. The ritual began with a request from me to my brothers and sister to quiet down. That wouldn't work of course, so I'd have to ask my father who would then get everyone to quiet down.

Once everything was quiet, I would fall asleep, easily. And if someone had to make some noise, I was always hoping that it would be my father who'd have to make it.

The Chase

Alone as a kid, there wasn't always something to do. You could get downright bored. But when you had lots of friends around, the collective mind would pretty well always come up with something interesting to do.

One game that we devised was really fun. You never had to prompt anyone to play. The more people you had, the better it was. The game was called Chase. The rules were simple. Two teams were formed. There was the chase team, and there was the chased team. Whenever possible, we would have an equal number of people on each team. The chased team would be given to the count of one hundred to get away. The members of the chased team were forbidden to go out of bounds. The members would usually adhere to this rule, mostly because the boundaries were immense. Imagine an eight or ten acre city block, covered with Victorian-style homes, an abundance of ancient shrubbery, alleyways and lanes like veins in an anemic arm, and you will have a pretty good idea of the playing field.

The game was usually played at night, and the participants were on bicycles. As a member of the chased team, your winning objective was to not be spotted by a member of the chase team. If, however you were spotted, you automatically became a member of the chase team. As the game progressed, the chase team inevitably became larger, and the challenge to the remaining chased members grew.

The action was furious, and you could be guaranteed a number of adrenaline rushes during each game. We all took the game quite seriously, and took great pride in finding new hiding places. I remember desperately trying to find one person and having combed the entire area, concluded that the person must have cheated, or gone home. I knew that area very well. What was stumping me was that you could not abandon your bicycle when you were playing the bicycle version. There are just so many places that you can hide with your bicycle underneath you. As it turned out, there was indeed a spot that had been overlooked by the chase team. It was a hedgerow adjacent to a gate. Proof that there had been no cheating was substantiated by the person hiding, that most of us had ridden by him several times. It truly was a genial spot to hide. I wish I had found it myself.

The game could, and sometimes did get dangerous. As spirits were awakened by the excitement of a catch, overzealous behavior sometimes created accidents. I remember spotting one of our friends walking back with his brand new three-speed in shambles. Another friend walked beside him. The pedal of one bicycle had gone into the wheel of the other, and both riders had taken quite a tumble. Of course, the old bike was undamaged, while the new bike required extensive repairs.

Nonetheless, the game was wonderful. It made you burn more calories than you could imagine, not that that was ever a concern with any of us at the time, and it got everyone involved in a most intense way. I find it hard to match the excitement to this day. One thing that the game taught you, among other things, was to use an old bike that you didn't mind trashing.

Trading and Collecting

There are many commodities to trade when you're a kid. You usually don't have much money but you always seem to have something to trade.

Collector cards were all the rage, but the process of acquiring them may have changed over the years. You could buy them then as you can buy them now, but the real way to get collector cards was to shoot for them. At recess, you would find an opponent to shoot for cards. The idea was to line up a series of target cards against the wall of the school, and step back about six or eight feet from the wall. From that point you would fling cards one at a time, alternately with your opponent, to knock down the target cards. Whoever was successful on each shot acquired the fallen cards.

I was never really good at it, so I would find a good shooter, give him some of my cards, and split the won cards at the end of the recess. One day I decided to get out there and win my own cards. It was a disaster. I felt like a gambling junkie who's on a loosing streak at the casino. The sizable collection that I had built up was quickly depleted. I realized then, that good management philosophy would have been to use better talent than your own whenever necessary.

I sort of lost interest in collector cards after that, but did not lose interest in building collections.

I loved comic books. They were a relatively expensive commodity when I was a kid but everybody loved them, and they were a commodity that could be traded, just like playing the stock market.

Just as with playing cards, I started off with just one comic book. It was a good one though, probably a Superman. It had trading value, and that was important. Yes you could buy a Casper The Friendly Ghost, or a Richie Rich, but the market appeal was narrow. For trading purposes you needed a good copy of a Superman, Superboy, Batman, Archie or Spider-Man, although Spider-Man did not seem to have the print or drawing quality of the other comic books. You had to find a Spider-Man junkie to do some serious trading. Anyway, the idea was to trade one-for-two. It was the only way you could build up a collection without spending the big bucks.

So I began trading. One good Superman for another Superman, or maybe a Batman, and something else, something of more limited appeal, but which could be used in a future transaction. The exponential factor would come into play and all of a sudden, I was becoming a collector and trader of comics.

Some book stores came out with publishers' deletes. These were comics without covers. They were brand new, and came in cellophane packages, so you really couldn't see what you were getting. They were a fraction of the cost of regular comic books, but their trading value was rather limited. Funny sort of thing when you think about it,. All the reading and entertainment value was present, but the marketing appeal was lower. However, they were usable in reverse two-for-one trading. If you really wanted to get a good virgin copy of Superman, or Batman, you could use two of your deletes to get the one good copy with cover intact. And usually, you didn't lose because down the road, you'd get one-for-two for it. I ended up with hundreds and hundreds of comic books. It was truly amazing to be able to build up something out of virtually nothing. I wonder what happened to that talent as I grew older?

You Can't Get Away with It

My mother was very sharp. There really wasn't much that you could get past her. Sometimes I would envy my friends, because their mothers were not as quick to detect a wrong-doing.

One of the first times that I ever remember disobeying is still with me, even though we're going back to when I was three or four years old.

My mother had to leave for a few minutes. She left me specific instructions not to wander away from the house. I even acknowledged that I fully understood. But once she got out of sight, I let myself be tempted to cross the street to have a look at the new construction site. There were some new houses going up, and I really wanted to see what all this was about. It was later in the day, probably after dinner, and the summer sun was still high. I wandered over and began to explore. I loved all the neat smells of the construction materials, and I was intrigued by the whole concept of construction. My biggest concern was not for what I was doing, but for how long I could do it, because the Boogie Man might come out as I had come to learn, sometime around seven in the evening. All the kids knew about the Boogie Man, but no one had the nerve to stay up late enough to see if he really existed. The Boogie Man was, of course, a great curfew tool.

As it turned out, I didn't have to deal with the Boogie Man that evening, but with a rather angry mother. I think she was more disappointed than angry, because I had proved to be a rather trustworthy fellow, even at my young age. Well she gave me a spanking, and a reprimand, and sent me off to bed. I was hurt, as all children are when chided, but I also fully realized that I had been caught red-handed.

A few short years later, a similar situation arose. The short absence scenario was quite similar, except that this time, I had turned on the stove to light a piece of string. String was used to light firecrackers, I had learned. I was very proud to have discovered this technique, but in my excitement had forgotten to turn off the stove.

When confronted, I denied having played with the stove. Unfortunately for me the evidence was looking right at me, there in the kitchen. I had lied outright. The approach to the dilemma was different this time. It was explained to me how dangerous my actions could have been. I was given a chance to tell the truth, and that was it. There was no spanking, and not another word on the subject was uttered.

It was at that point that I realized that there was no fooling adults, especially my parents. I also realized that you had to be really smart to lie and get away with it, something I was evidently not very good at. So I adopted a new policy. Don't lie, but if you don't have to, don't tell. Kids can make up the funniest policies.

Taking Care of Things

A lot of people seem to think that kid's toys aren't tough enough. That may be so. But what are kids doing to their toys to make them break?

When I was young, there were at least two types of kids. There were the ones who had so many toys they didn't know what to do with them, and there were the kids who really loved their toys, and who nearly cherished them. I was one of the latter group. Although on occasion, I remember outgrowing some toys, and purposely modifying them, sometimes with a hammer. Toy cars for example, were often made of strong metal, and you had to be really tough on them to break them. In normal use they would last beyond anyone's childhood. I remember taking a hammer to one of them to simulate a wrecked car. I guess I had seen some wrecked cars in real life, and I wanted to have one of my own. Once the experiment was over, I appreciated the fact that intact is better, and more usable.

I couldn't stand having parts missing on a car, or anything else for that matter. So I usually took care of my things. It usually broke my heart when something would get wrecked, but often the perpetrator was an adult who inadvertently walked on something that they shouldn't have walked on as they traveled through the house. This usually happened because adults don't look at the floor when they are walking, while kids, on the other hand, use floors extensively. I probably lost more toys this way than any other way.

The other thing I had to be wary of was careless friends, and cousins. If I'd had the opportunity to visit these people prior to them visiting our home, then I'd have some knowledge of their toy handling habits. In the case of reckless users and abusers, I would discretely hide the important stuff before they would come in to visit. Was this a selfish thing to do? Hardly. If they were responsible users, I was more than happy to share everything at my disposal. If they were trashers, I left out the stuff that was deemed expendable.

The destructive urge came upon my friends and me on occasion. We were kids, after all. But the sacrificial item would be discussed beforehand, its usefulness debated, and the fun factor in destroying it assessed. Younger siblings' trikes were an easy mark, mostly because they were very hard to destroy, and gave hours of pleasure up to the point of their demise. They were usually about to be replaced by larger trikes that would be spared until their usefulness would become questionable. The old trikes would usually be used for demolition derbies.

Model cars that we had spent rainy afternoons building also fell prey to destruction by fire, mostly because they burned very well, and because we were disappointed with the end product, which never looked as good as the picture on the box.

All in all though, the precious toys were spared, and lasted.

Things they Tried to Sell Us

As soon as you can understand the language and read the language, you become the prey of those who want to sell you something. Of course, when you're a kid, they are trying to sell your parents something by proxy, you being the proxy.

Comic books were a very good venue for adults trying to sell other adults things by way of their kids. Kids usually don't have any money, but their parents do. And kids are natural salespeople. They can take rejection very well. It just bounces off their backs. They are single-minded, and extremely persistent. If they get "no" for an answer, they just try later. So in essence. adults who advertise in comic books, have hired, at no cost to them, a powerful sales force that will do everything in its power to extract money from adult parents. It wouldn't have been so bad if the stuff that was being sold was of any value, but it usually wasn't.

I remember some of the junk we ordered from comic book back covers, when we were kids. There were the ubiquitous Ant Farms, always pictured like a regular farm, but run by ants. There were also those infamous pioneer log cabins, with a kid genuflecting in front of the log cabin, proudly holding a rifle, and wearing a coon-skin hat, as well as a buckskin suit. The frontier cabins were made of plastic garbage bag quality sheets that fit over a bridge table. You then would cut out the windows and doors. I remember placing a lamp inside the so-called cabin, and having it tip over into the side of the cabin. It took about two seconds for the wall to melt.

One of the longest running ads was for X-Ray glasses. For all I know, the ad is probably still running today. None of us ever went for the glasses that, as suggested by the drawing, would allow you to see your bone structure. Maybe so, but how long were you expected to live after wearing the things?

BB guns were an advertising staple. I don't think they ever stopped advertising those. And of course, there was always the story of the kid who lost an eye due to a BB gun. Unfortunately, that story was sometimes true. I remember a kid in class had suffered this tragic occurrence. So maybe they could have advertised something other than BB guns.

The hand buzzer, itching powder, disappearing ink were also very popular, but as it turned out, you could get those things at the local joke shop. Anthropologically speaking, the interest shown by us for these items gave a pretty accurate indication of what stage of development our senses of humour had attained. It also gave a pretty good indication of how far we had left to go. But I also have to wonder about the people that sold this stuff. And where on earth were those government agencies when you really needed them? Caveat Emptor.

Eye of Fire

Summer was in its mighty glory once again, and there was the usual, what to do? A good boyhood friend of mime asked if I would like to stay at the family cottage for a week or so. I thought the idea was great, and so did my parents, once they were informed of the plan. It also took care of the, what to do dilemma.

I was looking forward to this. My friend's parents wee pretty cool, for parents. All the arrangements were made, and suddenly, I found myself at a cottage, not far from town, but far enough to feel like you were away.

At the time I had a thing for inflatable mattresses. I really enjoyed the concept of being able to float around on one of these things. I guess it stemmed from the fact that when we went swimming with the family, it was to go swimming, not floating. We didn't have anything that floated. So here I had the chance to really use one of these floating navigational devices, so much so that at one point the skin was coming off my back from overexposure to the sun's rays. The back of my legs got it too. That sort of took the fun out of using the air mattress.

While I was there, I was introduced to water skiing, and thought that was great fun, after having many gallons of river water run through my nasal passages. My arms also felt pretty sore from trying this new arm elongation technique.

Fishing was also part of the itinerary. I was a little more familiar with this, from many visits to my aunt's and uncle's cottage. I always liked fishing, as a kid, and really got a thrill out of catching anything. I never liked touching fish barehanded though, but I had no problems with impaling worms with hooks. You really have to wonder how much rationalization we humans go through. Do you remember these words of wisdom when you were a kid? "No, no, it doesn't hurt the worm when you do that". Or," No, no, fish don't feel the hook when you take it out". I can imagine a doctor telling you that the kidney stone you are about to attempt to pass will hardly be noticeable, and you won't need an anesthetic.

The week went by pretty quickly, and we had a fair amount of fun. I was always too polite as a guest, and should have learned to let loose as a kid. I would have had even more fun.

On the last evening there, my parents arrived to pick me up. They stayed for a while. My friend and I let the adults yak away as we built a campfire. We had made some stakes to barbecue some marshmallows, and we ate a ton of the puffy things. The whole thing turned rather ghastly at one point though, when by accident, my friend's "stake con flaming marshmallow" ended up in one of my eyes. Thank goodness for quick reactions, those self preservation movements that seem to be actuated by powers greater than ours. The thing really made a mess of my eyelid, but fortunately for me, the eye turned out to be okay.

I was rushed to the hospital to have this checked out. They bandaged me up, and sent me on my way. I had to wear this thing for what felt like forever, and I remember people asking me what had happened to my eye. When I would tell them, they would just about barf. The story probably turned a lot of people off of marshmallows. I should check the sales history of marshmallows in my part of the world for that year to see if there were any anomalies.

Anyway, I turned out no worse for the wear, and I occasionally still eat a barbecued marshmallow.

One Weekend at a Time

It was a ritual. It had gone on for as long as I could remember. The destination was the same every time. The day to go there rarely varied. I usually looked forward to going there, and quite frankly, I usually didn't have any choice in the matter.

We usually had to go to Sunday mass in the morning before anything else happened. Once that was out of the way, the mandatory preparations would be taken care of, including the recruitment of the kids who wanted to join in the day's activities. As the kids grew older, some would opt to stay at home.

So we'd pile into the car, recite a little prayer to St. Christopher, who lived on the dash, and off we'd go to the ancestral cottage that was for all intents and purposes, inherited by my mother's sister and her husband, who lived in the town that was near the cottage. It wasn't a long drive, just an hour from where we lived. The two lane highway that led to the cottage was fairly scenic, but also had become infamous for snatching the lives of many motorists, thus the prayer to St. Christopher upon departures.

We'd usually stop for gas on the way, and usually stop at the same place. Fortunately for those of us who were kids, someone in the village where we stopped for gas had opened up a go-kart track. We would usually be treated to a run on the go-kart track, and that kept us quiet for the duration of the trip. I really loved the go-kart track. I always got an adrenaline rush from driving those devilishly fast machines.

Upon arrival at the cottage, the usual formalities were taken care of:

"Have you eaten, are you hungry?"

"No, we ate before we left, thanks."

"Are you sure, it's no trouble to make something."

Then my aunt would turn to all the kids, one at a time. "Would you like something to eat? Are you hungry? I can make you a sandwich. Would you like a Coke, a tomato juice..."

"Okay."

Then everybody would get into it, and the formalities were over, one more time. It was rather comical to observe all of this as a child. Once the dining was taken care of, the choice of activities would vary. As a kid, you could sit there and listen to what the adults were yakking about, or you could go for a swim, or go fishing, or play with the neighbor's dog.

One day, a bicycle appeared from who knows where. It was an old crate, nothing fancy, a ladies full-size bike. I wasn't very tall at the time, but I was not intimidated by the size of the bike. Besides, I didn't have to straddle the bar. Anyway, I figured that this would keep me occupied for a while. So I rode around the place. There was only one lane that led up a hill, so I'd amble up and down the lane. As I was riding back down the hill towards the cottage, I felt that I was going a little too fast, so I casually applied pressure to the pedals in a reverse fashion, to engage the brake. It worked fine, but as I did that, my foot slipped, and all of a sudden, I was riding this rather huge bike from a new seating position. My feet were now dragging behind me, my arms were stretched out to the sky, holding on to the handlebars, and my scrotum was serving as a seat on the crossbar near the pedals. Needless to say, I discovered the nasty pain that my yet to be instrument of manhood could inflict upon me. The pain was just too much. It felt like some diabolical fiend was putting my parts into a meat grinder. Tears flooded my face as the bicycle conveniently fell at my mother's feet. She was sitting chatting with two of my aunts at the time, and saw that something was gravely wrong. I explained the delicate situation that part of my anatomy was in, through the sobs and stuttering. She looked at me and said that one of my aunts was a nurse, and could she look at the problem? I didn't have to think twice. This was a man's problem, and I wasn't about to share it with a woman, not even my aunt, the nurse.

The pain eventually subsided, and I went on with the day's activities. Later on we drove home as the summer sun began to disappear from view. Upon reflection that evening, as we drove home, I made a wish that that sort of incident would, if possible, not occur too often in one's lifetime.

The Discovery

We were about ten or eleven at the time. Life was simple. We lived in our own little world. We went to school, we played. Play was interrupted by eating, and the whole process was interrupted by sleep.

One day, in late winter, on our way back from school, all of that changed. We were talking and walking. Home was nearly a mile away, so we had a lot of time to talk about things. That day, we would talk about something completely different, something that would change our lives. My friend looked at me and said: "You won't believe what I'm going to tell you. It's incredible!"

"How incredible can it be?"

"Super incredible!"

"Oh yeaa?"

"Yeaa!"

"So what is it?"

"Well you know how babies are made?"

"Yea, well sort of."

+And so he went on to explain the process of making babies, and the instruments used to do so. As he was speaking, I would nod in disbelief, sort of saying yes on the outside, but shaking my head on the inside. Where the hell was he getting all of this stuff? He was quite a joker, and at one point I figured he was just puling my leg. It all sounded so absurd. What a strange way to make babies, and it just didn't seem like an efficient method of doing things. It also didn't seem to be very sanitary.

Well, I got the whole story from him, and he said he'd gotten the whole story from his parents. So I sort of looked at him, and thought he had taken the joke too far, and that he was full of shit, so to speak.

The next day, I happened to be walking to school, or back from school, I can't remember because we often walked home for lunch, if you can believe it, and I started telling a mutual friend what the first friend had said. He, in his incredulity, had approached his parents the night before to find out if our friend's information was accurate. Sure enough, it had been confirmed. My reaction was very profound at the time. I looked into my very soul and said to myself that this was a piece of information that I could have very well lived without. Someone had taken away the very innocence of my childhood and arbitrarily decided, by proxy no less, to discard it without my consent. I felt as if part of my integrity as a person had been unnecessarily moved and that the process for making babies lacked imagination. Truly, some of the magic of living had been taken away.

I had no choice but to accept the truth. One of my best friends had learned it and passed it on, the other best friend had confirmed it. Life would never be the same, but we all got over it.

Getting Good

Every decade sees its share of trends, and the sixties were no exception. As a matter of fact, the sixties probably saw more trends than just about any other decade in the twentieth century. Why, you ask? Probably because there were so damn many kids who were more than willing to adopt whatever might help them define and differentiate themselves from adults. Plus, there were tons of money to be made by trend-setters.

One of the trendiest things to come out of California in those days was the skateboard. I was probably eleven or twelve when the first homemade ones appeared in our city. The store-bought ones were virtually non-existent. The construction was very simple. All you had to do was find a pair of roller skates, the ones that attached to shoes, and dismantle them so that the front assembly could be attached to a piece of plywood, and then the rear assembly attached to the other end of the four-by-twelve inch platform. At that time, we weren't clued-in to making the platform wider, or longer.

The very first time I hopped onto a skateboard, I immediately fell on my butt, and knocked the wind out of myself. There I was, writhing silently in pain, not knowing if my butt was going to fall off, or if I was going to die by auto-suffocation. I still remember the exact spot where all of this happened. It was in front of my friend's place. Their house lay in the middle of a hill, and his dad was a doctor. Where the hell was his dad when I was suffocating? Once I got my breath back, I hopped back on the skateboard. This time, I had slightly better luck, and managed to go down the hill. The experience was quite thrilling, and as we discovered, would thrill an entire generation.

There were some pitfalls to these contraptions. For one thing, the first ones were very very susceptible to tiny pebbles on the road. You could be leisurely cruising down a hill, and all of a sudden, the skateboard would stop dead in its tracks, held back by the smallest of earthly objects, a minuscule pebble. The other skateboard stopper was lawn, any stretch of lawn.

When the store-bought boards came out, they too went through an evolution, a rather quick one at that, to a point where the wheels had grown in width, the board itself was much wider and longer, and the thing actually had a suspension. These improvements made all the difference in the world, and millions of boards were bought by young people. The craze coincided with the advent of Squirrels and Yohawks. Now you're going to ask me what Squirrels and Yohawks were. Suffice it to say that a portion of the youthful population dressed like and behaved one way, and the remainder of the population dressed and behaved another way. I don't even think that Hippies had been invented yet.

Anyway, we were too young to be either Squirrels or Yohawks, but we loved skateboarding on a very popular circular downhill piece of pavement called Yohawk Haven. There were hundreds of skateboarders there, and that's where you could learn all the latest tricks. You'd also get to see some of the most incredible falls. Had skateboards been invented by clothing companies? Did the ensuing trend to wear jeans with holes in the knees ultimately come from skateboarding?

Thank goodness the act of skateboarding was never legislated into having to wear helmets. Sure some people cracked their heads open, but they were the exception. The thrill of taking a chance on a skateboard was very therapeutic. It gave you a chance to take partial control of your destiny, to risk, and to enjoy the rewards of taking that risk, or to pay for your folly. Isn't that what life is all about?

It's sort of neat to see people still enjoying them today. It's truly amazing to see what they do with them, compared to what we used to do with them.

What on Earth was I Thinking?

I was a pretty mild mannered kid in class, not a real bother or anything, just one of the kids, so to speak. There were however, a few kids, and then again, could you really call them kids, who were, shall we say, more bothersome. I'm talking about the ones who already had jobs in grade eight! These guys were old enough to have kids of their own, for Pete's sake. They had evidently not done too well in school, and were repeating the same year until they could legally get out of school. Now I didn't mind these guys, but I made it a point to keep my distance. I was eleven years old in grade eight, and these guys were sixteen.

The teacher, in a teacher's infinite wisdom felt that I would make a great buffer zone between two of these guys, because they were uncontrollable if left sitting adjacent to each other. Good thinking, Teach! Well I didn't get off on this idea at all, but being more complacent, I endured for a while.

Late one afternoon, in the middle of February, things came to a boil. I had one guy sitting in front of me, and one guy sitting behind me in class. They were farting around as usual, and I was in the middle of it. The games were the usual ones. Hide the pencil, tear the notebook, throw this here, and that there. I was an orderly person, and I was also someone who needed quiet to concentrate. None of this was happening. So I blew up. I took my freshly sharpened pencil, and jabbed it into the back of the guy sitting in front of me. Big mistake! It felt good, and got rid of some tension, but now I was in trouble.

"We're going to get you after class! You're going to get it!

I knew what these guys were capable of, and I couldn't rely on them cooling down and forgetting about it before the end of the day. It was already twenty to four and we were out of there at four. Panic. Well I worked out the best contingency plan that I could think up in twenty minutes. I figured that nothing would happen in the school because these guys spent more time at the principal's office than they did in class. So I had to use the crowd as cover to get away. I knew that the house next door to the school had a driveway that led to the backyard, and there I would find a space between the church and the garage that would allow me to escape to the other side of the block. Then I could take the long way around, and avoid these guys.

The plan worked to a point. I was able to get out of the school quickly. I did not have far to run. Although I knew of it, I had never tried to pass through the opening between the church and the garage. I ran to the opening. The opening was tighter than I anticipated, and there were some boards piled up in there. I was standing in the driveway, looking out onto the street, when all of a sudden the side door of the house opened and the lady who owned the house started screaming at me and telling me that I had no business in her driveway. I used more body language than anything else. What I really wanted to do was tell her to shut up and go inside, and that I'd be out of there in a minute or so. Well I still remember the absurdity of it all, me standing in the driveway, the old woman screaming at me, and the guys who were out to get me running past the driveway, not looking anywhere but straight ahead. I felt like I had been enveloped in a cloak, and I felt so lucky and thankful that in their fury the guys went straight by me. I thanked my lucky stars that day, in the driveway.

The next morning rolled around, and I knew I had to go back to school, that I had to sit between these two guys again, and I wasn't looking forward to any of it.

Well I went to school, and I timed it so that I wouldn't have to hang around in the school yard, and I went to my desk, and I sat down, and I pretended that nothing had happened. Thank goodness for short fuses, because it was as if the previous day's events had never taken place. I never tried to explain it. I just accepted what had happened and forgot about it. Shortly after, I asked to be moved to another part of the class.

Walk, it's Good for You!

I'd hate to count the number of miles that I walked as a kid. Not that it did me any harm. Quite the contrary, it did me a heck of a lot of good. I can't help but think that kids these days get a little spoiled by their parents. The kids get bused everywhere by the school boards. When do they walk?

I remember when I was a kid, the first school I went to was about five blocks away. Even in kindergarten, I used to walk to the school. When the new school opened, I had to walk somewhat farther, about eight blocks. That's okay though, I was now going into grade one. Sometime after grade one, we moved, and guess what, I got a break. I only had to walk about four blocks. Then, going into grade five, I had to switch schools. So now I was walking about ten blocks to get to school, but that's okay, I was getting older. But here's the clincher. I would walk to school in the morning, walk home for lunch, walk back to school, and then walk home after school. It had to be really cold to not go home for lunch. So if you do some quick figuring, I was walking about forty blocks a day, just for school. I never saw the inside of a school bus unless we were going on a field trip. In the winter, I would sometimes walk back to within one block of the school to go skating. I'd slap my skates on at home, and walk nine blocks to the skating rink, spend some time there, and then walk back home. The sidewalks usually had snow on them, so you could sort of skate-walk.

One Thursday evening, I remember the cub leader asking me to go home to put on my wooden cub scout shirt on. I hated to wear that shirt because it was so itchy. But I walked back home, and walked back to the cub scout meeting, which took place, you guessed it, one block from the school. I'm surprised my parents didn't move, just to save on buying me shoes. Coming back to the night of the cub scout meeting, if I went home for lunch that day, it means that I walked eighty blocks that day. No wonder I was tired at the end of the day.

Years before, when I was in kindergarten or grade one, we went on a field trip to the Experimental Farm. We went there by bus, and spent a lot of time walking around. At the end of the day, a monitor, who was there just for the day, asked me if I lived very far from the Farm. I said that I didn't live that far away. Stupid me! I ended up walking something like a mile-and-a-half or more after having walked all day. I can't say that I would credit the monitor for too many brains either, asking a five-year or six-year-old to make a judgment call like that.

I can tell you that it was great joy that I felt when I got my first real bicycle. It made the world a little smaller, and a lot more accessible.

Many years later, I met a young woman whom I dated. She came up with a very interesting observation about kids, and adults. She had noticed that there were an inadvertent number of things that adults did to kids that they would never dream of doing to another adult.

How We Got There

Automobiles have been an integral part of the North American way of life for some time now. One of the many reasons for this phenomenon is the fact that everything is so damn far away. North America is a big, big place, with relatively few people, a somewhat cold climate that doesn't lend itself well to waiting casually for buses, or trains, or anything else that might be running late, or not coming at all.

As long as I've been around, our family has had cars. Most of our family cars were not too exciting, but I've always admired their resilience. The first family car I remember was a white '53 Chevy. The only thing I really remember about it is that it bit one of my fingers once, and I didn't like the feeling. The '53 Chevy was replaced by a '60 Pontiac. Now why didn't my parents let themselves be swayed by a '59 Chevy, with those outrageous tail wings. The Pontiac was powder-blue with matching interior, and had four doors. It had two diner-style bench seats. Did diner-style seats that you find in a diner booth influence car seat designs, or did bench seats influence diner booth designs? The Pontiac had a six cylinder engine, and was an automatic. My sister learned how to drive using this car, and my father was her instructor. I still remember seeing them go around in the parking lot that was across the street from where we lived. My father was a very good driver, and I don't remember him having ever been in an accident. My sister turned out to be a very good driver too. Other members of the family learned to drive, using the Pontiac. It turned out to be the teaching car. It also got a pretty good workout from my older brothers. At a point near the end of its life with us the Pontiac began to sag in the middle. It wasn't a manufacturer's defect. The car had been for a little ride in the countryside. But it did last six years, and served a family of seven. Good show, Pontiac.

The replacement for the Pontiac turned out to be another Pontiac, this time it was a '66. It was quite a bit more stylish, and had a V-8 hooked to a two-speed automatic. The car was a four-door, jade green with a tan cloth interior. The seats had a moulded look that made them acceptable as bench seats. The classic touch was the stock fender skirts, and a rakish yet elegant stance that was given to the car at the factory. It turned out to be the first car that I ever drove, after discretely asking my father if I could start the car in a parking lot and drive it around a bit. I think I was thirteen years old at the time. I loved cars, and had watched all the moves for years. I did everything right, and it looked as if I had been driving for years. It was one of the great thrills of my life. This car lasted a long time, and the bullet-proof 283 engine put up with a lot of abuse from my sixteen year old foot.

The '66 Pontiac was replaced by a '73 Chevy Malibu. This time, style prevailed over function. The car was a coupe, with rust colored sheet metal, and a cream vinyl top and opera windows. It also had a split front seat with cream colored corduroy cloth. These were the unfortunate days of archaic anti-pollution, when auto makers really didn't have a clue what to do about incorporating government regulations into the design of engines. The 350 V-8 delivered about thirteen miles a gallon no matter how you drove it. It must have had some kind of thermo-nuclear reactor in it, because you could melt the pavement by staying in one spot too long. A smooth and quiet car it was though, and I loved driving it.

The Malibu was purchased by an elderly gentleman who kept it for years after he bought it. The car continued to look great for a long time. Its replacement was an '80 Oldsmobile Delta 88 with a 350 Rocket V-8 fed by a large four-barrel carburetor. The silky smooth power was delivered to the wheels by a three-speed automatic. The car was yet another coupe, powder blue in color outside and in. It was wonderfully fast, and my mother, who was getting on in years, really loved to boot it. She felt that a car should have lots of get up and go, in case you had to get out of the way of some idiot on the road. She did not take this one up to one hundred and fifteen miles per hour as she had done with the '66 Pontiac on the Florida Turnpike. That's another story. The Olds didn't have a very good factory paint finish, but I don't think it ever saw a mechanic's face in nine years of service.

As you can see, my parents were a GM kind of family. And why not? The cars were tough as nails, and they lasted a long time. I'm responsible for the last family car not being a GM product. My mother wanted a teal colored Bonneville in '89. It was a beautiful car, but it was pretty big, and with age my mother was getting pretty short, not that she was ever tall. Anyway, she was traveling in town mostly, and gas was getting pretty expensive. So I suggested something smaller, but with all the goodies that she liked. There was nothing in the GM line-up that turned her crank, so we went to look at the Fords, and there was nothing there either. We finally got her into a Sundance, and she loved it, although she was somewhat apprehensive about the lack of power. She got used to it, and when she found out how much she was saving on gas, she became quite happy with the car. She discovered that she had all this extra shopping money every week.

How the World Got Bigger

Today's world is getting smaller. We hear people say that all the time. The world isn't getting smaller, but we can now get around it a lot faster than before.

When I was a kid, everything was done on foot until I got a decent bicycle. The bike made my world a lot bigger. I also had a keen sense of direction, and that helped out a lot. For some reason or another, it was virtually impossible for me to get lost, even in a city with a population of over one hundred thousand people at that time. I might have been seven or eight years old at the time, and my sense of adventure was well developed. The bicycle was an ideal mode of transportation. It didn't cost anything to ride, as long as I had the energy. I also didn't need any money. I just had to make sure that I had eaten enough before leaving on my trek.

I used to do this sort of thing all the time, and often on my own. I don't remember telling my parents about how far I was going, because they probably would have worried, or restricted the distances that I could go. I had a very good system to keep myself from getting lost. I would venture out in increments, or I would stay on a street and run its entire length. If the street turned out to be to short, I would try to find a parallel street that would allow me to continue in the same direction. For example, if I was traveling in an easterly direction, to the farthest point out, in the event that I had to use a series of parallel streets to continue eastward, I would consistently pick parallel streets either north or south of the original street. That way I knew that I was always going, for example, east by northeast, and to come back, I knew that I had to travel west by southwest. It was a great system. It allowed me to discover the city easily and quickly. It wasn't unusual for me to travel five or six miles in each direction. Landmarks were very important to remember, of course, and eventually they became familiar sights.

The city was an intriguing place, and my trusty one-speed bike would take me everywhere that I wanted to go. I don't remember ever being stranded because of my bike.

It must be very distressing for people who travel, but have a lousy sense of direction, unless of course they have someone chauffeur them around. A good sense of direction gives you a great feeling of independence, especially when you're a kid. There's pride in knowing that you can do it on your own, and all that stuff.

As you get older, the sense of direction doesn't always seem to help you out in your decision making. One of the reasons it doesn't is probably due to the fact that life is not laid out like a city's streets. In life you aren't always going in one direction.

Off to the Movies

Here's a familiar line:"When I was a kid, movies cost thirty-five cents, and that was for a double bill, a cartoon, and a Pathe newsreel. Then you bump in to some dinosaur who'll tell you that they got all of that and more for ten cents, or even a nickel. Well, beyond that they either paid you to go to the movies, or movies didn't exist.

I do however remember going to the show for thirty-five cents. And I also remember going to what was our favorite as kids, the four-horror hits day at the rat-hole. Why the theatre was called a rat-hole, I don't know. Yes it was old, but it had really neat seats that actually allowed you to sit up a little higher if some tower sat in front of you, or slouch, whichever you preferred. Now a four-horror hit day didn't cost you thirty-five cents. No, a four-horror hits day would cost you a buck. But for a buck, you could walk in at just before noon, and regale yourself in movieland for no less than six hours. If you were lucky, the movies would be long, and you'd get out of there at eight in the evening. You might wonder if people got hungry during that amount of time. Of course, but they had among other things, hot dogs in those days. They also had the lousiest fountain soft drinks that you can imagine. The cola was flat and tasted like medicine. The hot dogs were okay though, and so was the popcorn, the Nibs, the Licorice Allsorts, which should have been called Licorice Mouthsores, the chocolate bars, and all the rest.

My friends and I were very keen on horror movies, and our parents could get rid of us for the whole day. If they had known some of the things we were seeing, they probably would never have let us go. In the course of a few short years, we saw every Vampire movie that was ever made, as well as all the werewolf movies, the King Kong, Godzilla, Zombie, Triffids, Mummy, torture, Sinbad, horror-comedy, cowboy-horror, outer space monster, invaders, body-snatchers, poison plants, killer children with cue ball eyes, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula Meets Billy the Kid, Roman gladiators, The Fly, The Incredible Shrinking Man. Did I miss anything? Yes, The Three Stooges Meet The Werewolf, Charlie Chan Meets Everybody, The Phantom Of The Opera, not the singing kind. There was more, of course.

By the time we got out of the movie house, we were scared out of our minds. We actually had to walk home back-to-back so that we could see what was going on everywhere. We were buzzing on caffeine, glucose, and ten million other additives and preservatives. It was fantastic!

Off to the Beach

Summertime was outdoor time. Occasionally, somebody's parents would drive us up to a lake just a half-hour from town. It was, and still is a beautiful lake, with lots of sandy beaches, clean clear water, picnic areas nestled in groves of tall evergreens. There was also a snack stand for those who'd forgotten something on the way up, or were too lazy to bring up their own supplies. Motorboats were not allowed on the lake, but you could rent a canoe or a rowboat for the day.

We would go swimming, and run around the beach, and do all those beach things of course. We weren't very old at the time, maybe nine or ten years old. But even at that tender age, we discovered an activity that was rather unorthodox, one that we didn't even understand, but one that we would get lots of giggles out of.

The whole thing started quite haphazardly, and innocently. My friend and I were on the beach running around when a young lady in a revealing bikini stopped to talk to us. I can't remember what the subject was, but she was very pleasant, and I guess she just liked kids. Now we were considerably shorter then, and anyone who wanted to talk to us had to bend over. When this particular young lady bent over to talk to us she gave us quite a vantage point. We both sort of looked at her, and then to each other silently, and then back at her, trying to look at her in the eyes. It was very difficult, because of the obvious distraction. Anyway, she eventually left us to continue with whatever we were doing, but as she left, my friend and I looked at each other once again with knowing thoughts, and giant grins on our faces. We had both felt the same tingling feeling in our bathing suits, and we liked it. We didn't know what it was, but we certainly knew what had caused it. So there we were, two nine or ten-year-olds with the minds of dirty old men. We had instantly become addicted to the feeling, and we knew where to get more! So we incorporated a new beach activity into our casual schedule of events. We would seek out ladies in revealing bikinis, and go ask them anything at all, just so they would have to bend over to talk to us, and we'd get that addictive tingling feeling in our bathing suits. We just couldn't help ourselves.

When we ran out of ladies that we could approach, we decided to go to the snack bar. Once there something else happened. One of us dropped his money in front of the counter. Unfortunately, the floor in front of the counter was made of boards, and of course the money fell in between the boards. No problem. We were small enough to climb under the platform in order to fetch the lost coins. Once we got there we found more than we bargained for. Not only did we recover our lost loot, but everyone else's. It was fantastic. We couldn't believe our eyes. There was money everywhere we looked. So we gathered up all the money we could find, and shared the proceeds.

What a day of decadence at the beach. Here we were, two nine-or-so-year-olds out hunting for women and free money. We still didn't know what to do with women, but we sure knew what to do with the money.

Getting Shipped Off

We were a fairly big family, and my parents were pretty busy with all the things that parents are busy with. So on weekends, Saturdays anyway, I would be encouraged to do something by myself. This usually meant going some place, and that place usually ended up being the boys' club or the ski hill. Neither place was a bad place, of course. Some kids would give anything to go to places like that.

The boy's club was just for boys, as the name implies. I understand that they've removed that bastion, and replaced it with the boys' and girls' club. The club at the time incorporated a large swimming pool, and a gymnasium among other things. To go swimming, you had to wear a club bathing suit. The club bathing suit, if I can manage to describe it properly, was made of a plain white cloth, and had an open side to it, which incorporated two sets of tie-strings, so that you didn't slip it on, you sort of wrapped it on, and then tied the one side, which left one hip exposed. Who was the genius who had invented this thing? The swimming was okay, and I usually started off on Saturday morning with a swim.

Later on in the day, the gymnasium was converted into a screening room for cartoons, and if you cared to, you could have lunch at the same time. I always enjoyed the cartoons, as did most of the kids.

I'm a little foggy about what else went on there, except that I know I spent a lot of cold winter Saturdays there.

The bottom line regarding the boys' club is that I really didn't enjoy going there. It's one of the few places in my life where I didn't make friends easily. Two of my close childhood friends went to the Y on Saturdays, and I probably would have preferred to go there. We did everything else together, so why not go to the Y on Saturdays together?

The other place I would get shipped off to was the ski hill. To get there was a little more involved than going to the boys' club. To get to the boys' club I just took one bus there, and one bus back. To get to the ski hill, I usually walked about a mile to the bus depot in the market area, and then hopped on a specially equipped city bus or school bus that would take us up to the ski area. It wasn't too bad on a reasonably warm day, but I really hated going up there on a day when it was forty below. First, you'd freeze your buns off walking to the bus depot, then you'd freeze on the bus because it couldn't handle that kind of cold, then you'd freeze on the fully open chair lift going up the hill, then you'd freeze your face off coming down the hill. Some days it was just too much, and I'd just sit in one of the lodges and wait for the day to pass by.

I seem to remember going to the boys' club alone a lot, and I seem to remember going skiing alone a lot, yet it might be a distortion of time on my memory, because I always had lots of friends who went skiing. Maybe it just felt lonely. Not only that, in all of my years of skiing, I never got really good at it. Oh sure, I could make it down just about anything, and I used to get a big thrill out of going downhill through heavily treed areas. It was considerably more dangerous, but you didn't need any style, and that was fine with me, because I never really developed any real style or balance.

In retrospect, the winter Saturdays that I really enjoyed the best during that time in my life were the ones where I didn't get shipped off, and neither did my friends.

Other People's Cars

When you think about it, as kids we're really lucky. We usually don't have to worry about the rent, where the next meal is coming from, what clothes to buy, what's happening anywhere else in the world, plus, we get driven around.

The art of being driven around is not without a need for practice. For one thing, you usually have to behave before you go some place, you have to behave while you are going some place, you have to behave when you get there, and yes, you have to behave on the way back, especially if you are a guest kid.

Some of the cars that other people had were really something. I must say that as a kids, my friends and I were really spoiled when it came to riding in neat cars. One of the best was a mid-fifties Cadillac. It was an ambassador's car, which makes sense, because my friend's father was an ambassador. The jet-black car was beautifully maintained, and cared for. It was washed daily, summer and winter by the chauffeur, whom we called Mr. Doughnut. Sometimes Mr. Ambassador himself would drive us somewhere, and that was just fine too. The Cadillac was fully loaded, and had a very conservative gray velours-like interior. The best part of this car was where the gas filler cap was located. It lay just behind one of the hinged tail-lights. We would sometimes go to the drive-in or sometimes the Towers store. There were no pretentions here.

One of the ambassador's friends had a '63 Continental convertible four-door, with the suicide rear doors. It also was very beautiful, but we didn't go for many rides in it. We got to look at it more than anything else.

When the ambassador's Cadillac died, it was replaced by a navy-blue Buick Electra. It didn't look as funky as the mid-fifties Cadillac, but it was less ostentatious, and allowed the ambassador a little more "incognitoism". We also went to the drive-in and the Towers store in the Electra.

Another friend's uncle had a really old Lincoln four-door. It was also black but was not as pretty on the inside. The slab seats were a sort of sandpaper gray with dull yellowy white borders. This car was not as properly cared for and maintained as the ambassador's Cadillac, but it was still fun to go places in. The major destination seemed to be the Dairy Queen. Imagine six or eight kids arriving at a Dairy Queen in a beat up late fifties Lincoln with one tall silly adult driving? The Dairy Queen owner could usually retire after we had been there.

In the funk department, there was another friend's father's convertible Consul. It was black with red interior. The top was usually down wherever we went, but the destination was usually the country club. The only problem with going in this car was that my friend's father was an avid smoker, and he'd flick his cigarette in the wind. We usually sat in the back, downwind of the flicking cigarette. You had to time it right so that you would close your eyes as the flaming ashes came your way. The Consul was also used as our practice car in the driveway. We would take turns pushing the car back and forth in the driveway as the other person steered. That was tons of fun, and we built up good leg muscles doing that.

One of the all-time classics was a car that one of my brothers bought. He wasn't even old enough to drive legally when he bought it, I think, and quite frankly, you couldn't get away with driving this car today. It was a mid-fifties Buick four-door that had its top lopped off. The thing was enormous, and had not been reinforced after having been decapitated. It also had an enormous engine in it that roared, probably because the exhaust system was not intact. The car was so big in the driveway that I remember the garden hose tap being severed from the house's side as my brother was backing the car up. When you drove down the street, the sides of the car would sway in and out and everything would creak. I think my brother eventually had the rear doors welded shut. Needless to say, this car did not last long. I don't remember going anywhere in particular in this car, but I do remember getting drives in it.

There are more of course, and each car conjures memories and stories. They became an integral part of North American life, and changed the way we live. One of the best parts of being a kid is that you didn't have to pay for the cars that thrilled you.

Land of Palms

I was only twelve at the time, and Christmas was just around the corner. It was towards the end of the week before Christmas break, and my parents were coming by the school to pick up my report card, and to advise the principal that I would be absent from school for a few days surrounding the Christmas break. This suited me fine. The report card was good, and that helped set the tone for our upcoming adventure.

We were off to sunny Florida, by car no less, and we were even bringing along some strangers for the ride, and a quick ride it would be, because we were going to do it non-stop from our frigid point of departure, some eighteen hundred miles away. The car, a recently purchased '66 Pontiac would be the ambling shelter that would carry my parents and me, as well as two paying passengers through the entire east coast of the States from just north of New York State to Fort Lauderdale, in southern Florida.

I had never been to a place that was warm in the winter, or that had palm trees. I was very much looking forward to the experience, and was interested to find out if there really was a fort in Fort Lauderdale.

As we rolled along I had the chance to acquaint myself with our two passengers. One was a man in, I would guess, his twenties or early thirties. He was rather aloof, and had that "What did I get myself into?" look. He did not care to share in the driving, nor the conversation, and I can only guess that he had taken copious amounts of tranquilizers to help him while away the hours in the car. The other passenger was somewhat older, and somewhat more interesting. She looked like someone's grandmother, and she loved to quietly converse. She also did not share in the driving. She was an interesting person to me, as I had never really known my own grandparents enough to remember them, and I found it intriguing to find out what an elderly person's perspective was on life. I learned such things as: older people, in many cases, don't require very much sleep, and that it isn't unusual for a person such as this lady to run quite efficiently on three hours of sleep per night. My first reaction was that this must be very lonely, because most other people are out for the count some eight hours per night. She lived alone, from her account, and no, she didn't feel too lonely about the whole situation. She was very philosophical and had the right to be at her age. I decided to adopt her as my grandmother during the trip.

Going through Pennsylvania was grueling. The weather was not cooperating, and the hills made things worse. Scranton is a name that has stuck with me since that time. I had never seen anything like it in my life. This was neither bad, nor good. I had just never seen any place like it. Beyond Scranton were many more miles of travel. It was fun to feel the temperature rise as we headed south, and the countryside changed dramatically as well. Another place that stuck in my mind was the bypass for Washington D.C. My gosh it took a long time to get around there. Why did they make cities so big? Next flash was Macon, Georgia, at night, in the rain. I had seen, "To Kill A Mockingbird", and it had impressed me in one way. The movie was set in Macon, and Macon was impressing me in another way. This was in the days when Georgia had no four-lane interstate highway, so you ended up going through Georgia proper. No "antiseptic, looks like any other place" highway here. I was really struck by how differently people could live, yet they lived. I had never seen anything like this before, except for those seemingly endless "South Of The Border" signs leading into the Carolinas.

We worked our way south and finally hit the Florida state border. By this time, my parents were getting pretty tired, having shared some twenty hours of non-stop driving. My mother was at the wheel, and being the determined person that she was, decided that we should make some time here. Patience was wearing thin, and the lure of warmth and sunshine was foremost in our minds. The turnpike was begging for speeding cars. It was straight, wide, and quiet. So my mother decided to see what Pontiacs were really made of. She mashed the pedal and had us going about one hundred and ten miles an hour. The car was amazingly stable and quiet, although I don't think it would have been wise to open a window at that speed. We made very short work of driving through Florida, and I think our quiet gentleman passenger's tranquilizers were wearing off.

The car made it to Fort Lauderdale with nary a protest. I'm sure if the G.M. engineers had opened up the engine, they would have been hard pressed to find a trace of carbon in there. We dropped off our passengers at their respective destinations, and went on to our own. It had taken us less than a day to get to Florida, and I was thrilled by both the beauty of the beaches and the wonderful climate.

I was impressed by all the old cars that were still in one piece, as well as by all the old people who were still in one piece. I liked the pastel colors of the buildings, and I thought the trailer parks looked better than some housing projects that I had seen. I thought it pretty amazing to see groves of orange trees and grapefruit trees. They even had oranges there that we never saw at home. The whole place was very exciting, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself discovering it.

The trip to Florida would turn out to be the starting point for many more trips to come, and I'm glad my parents brought me along. I found that I thought differently after going there, and that was good.

Going to the New World's Fair

The mid and late sixties were an exciting time. There was rapid economic growth, job mobility, and all kinds of good things.

In 1967 I was twelve years old. In the winter I had just been to a place called Florida, and the experience had really been the first one to open my eyes to the world beyond. I now knew that there were places better, and worse than where I lived, and in the spring of '67 I was about to discover a world that would come to visit and show itself to me and countless others.

The World's Fair in Montreal was to become a special place for me from '67 and throughout the following years. The site had been reclaimed from the mighty St-Lawrence river by the engineers who built the Metro system in Montreal. When excavating for the tunnels, they decided to take the rock that was taken out and place it on the river bed to extend one existing island, and to create another. On these islands they built a futuristic city that would house the countries of the world during the Fair.

The place was truly magical, with bold and daring architecture, that spoke of sophistication and imagination. The streets were for pedestrians, and served as service roads at night. The lighting and landscaping were very well executed and all of the power and telephone lines were placed underground. The place was naturally air-conditioned by the river that flowed all around it, and the canals that wove through it.

When I first laid eyes on the place, the first impression I got was of comfort and amazement. I instantly felt comfortable with the modern architecture and was amazed that the place was so well done. I was also amazed that we didn't build cities this way, seeing we had the technology. The place made sense. It could handle millions of visitors, there were no cars to speak of, you could get around the place using monorails, articulated ground-level trains, boats, gondolas, helicopters, hovercraft, and so on. All of this in a place taking up just under a thousand acres of land.

Most downtowns in major cities don't take up a thousand acres, but try getting around as quickly and comfortably as you could at the world's fair, and they were moving millions of people daily.

Anyway, I fell in love with the place, and spent enormous amounts of time there over a period of about four years. It was about two hours by bus from where I lived, but I could get there and back for three bucks. I had to pass as an eleven-year-old to get that kind of price, but I looked young for my age, and could get away with it.

The World's Fair was a place of freedom and fun for me. I introduced a lot of friends to what I considered my personal playground, and they too had lots of fun.

Even though I was only twelve at the time my parents were really good about letting me go there alone or with friends. Whatever we did there was our business, and our business only. Not that we ever did anything really wrong over there, but it was stuff that might worry a parent.

We would immediately buy some small cigars, or even a pack of cigarettes, and we must have looked awfully silly smoking those things at our age. And of course we would buy the longest ones available, so that we'd get our money's worth. We'd also jump off the monorail, just for the thrill of it. That often meant jumping fifteen feet through the air, sometimes landing on a peak of a building. We'd also spend hours jumping on and off articulated ground-trains. I remember one of my friend's thinking that if you jumped off backwards, you'd be defying some law of physics. He quickly learned that you don't try to defy the laws of physics. He ended up smacking his head on the pavement. Thank goodness he didn't hurt himself too seriously.

During the official year of the World's Fair, we were too young to drink, but in the following years of the Fair, we did our darndest to look old enough to buy a beer. The guy with the most facial hair was usually elected to try and buy the beer. If nobody had facial hair, we'd elect the tallest guy. It usually worked, and we never gave the bar staff a hard time.

The place also had an amusement park, and one of the big thrills was to smoke something and try out the scariest rides. We'd go on anything, and I don't remember anyone ever tossing their cookies. There were also a lot of great concerts on the grounds, and I remember seeing Chicago there. I would have liked to see Jimi Hendrix and the Cream play there, but I don't think they played that venue.

We even slept over, one weekend, by staying on the site after closing. We found an incredible spot to sleep among artifacts that were being stored from the previous year's displays. I remember sleeping on a meridian lounging chair, all the while gazing at a four or five foot owl that had been carved out of wood. Two of us slept in the comfort of this storage area, while another of our friends spent the night in the Fair's police station. We met up with him in the morning after being caught roaming around the grounds too early in the morning. The police let us go later on that morning.

I remember sleeping under a picnic table the following night, while we watched a couple doing it under the stars.

The place offered adventure and excitement for many of my teen years, and I feel privileged to have had such a place to do some of my growing up in.

Go East Young Man

Summer travel usually occurred in August, mainly because my mother used to take a lot of summer courses that usually ended in the latter part of July. She and my father seemed to enjoy road trips, and I being the youngest in the family was usually elected to be the requisite passenger. This was by no means a chore, as I loved to travel.

This particular trip was going to take us around the Gaspe Peninsula, and the Atlantic Provinces. I had never been to these places, and was looking forward to discovering their particular charm. I had heard about a lot of the places we were going to, places like Perce, where the ocean had bored a hole into the a large mass of rock protruding into the ocean, and other places like Reversing Falls, Magnetic Hill, as well as other attractions.

My imagination would always work hard during a trip, trying to visualize the places before we would get there. I was usually all wrong about a place that I would imagine, sometimes being disappointed, and often surprised. The Gaspe Peninsula had not yet been transformed by the tourist trade. The scenery along the sinuous highway was truly spectacular. Ocean, highway, cliff, and the occasional town or village. But was it ever poor out there. I had never seen such poverty in my own country. The people were a-one, and the food was okay, if you liked seafood. My palate had not taken that particular bend yet, and so the food selection did not appeal to me. I couldn't imagine how people survived in this part of the world. The mainstays were fishing, fishing, and a bit of forestry and mining. The houses looked like they had never been painted, and there was a generally run-down look to the area. Thank goodness prosperity made its way into the Gaspe sometime after my visit there as a pre-teen. Perce, the giant rock with a hole in it really has a hole in it, at low tide, so you sort of had to make it there at low tide for the full impact.

Reversing Falls was a more dubious attraction that was definitely worth seeing, but really should have been named something less pretentious. Maybe Walt Disney, or one of his associates had been commissioned to go around the Atlantic Provinces at one point, to dub natural phenomena with exotic titles, in order to enhance tourism. All to say that Reversing Falls are not quite waterfalls that have water crawling back up the side, but they are an interesting natural occurrence that could be called, Reversing Rapids.

On we went to Magnetic Hill. I remember shaking my head in disbelief when we rolled backwards down a hill, but we were supposed to believe that we were going backwards up the hill. It's supposed to be an optical illusion, and at the time we went, there was a large billboard that gave you instructions on what to do to feel the full impact of Magnetic Hill. Thank goodness they didn't charge for the thrill on the hill. Ah, that Eastern sense of humor.

Notwithstanding the erroneously labeled tourist attractions, I must say that the many places I saw were truly beautiful. Especially the red sand beaches of Prince Edward Island. No gimmick here. Just lots of red earth on the island, and red sand on the beaches' dunes. The ocean was something to see. I hadn't realized that just because it was an ocean, and that it was summer, it didn't mean that the water would be warm. Quite the contrary, the water was bone chilling, but I was hell-bent on going swimming in the ocean, and I did.

The Cabot Trail was an extraordinary place, again quite poor looking, but set in one of the prettiest parts of the world. If you were going to be poor, you might as well gaze upon a spectacular view.

Louisbourg was in the midst of being reconstructed, and I had promised myself then, that I would go back to see the finished project. I haven't yet. Amazingly enough though, I have been back to most of these places since that trip with my parents. I toured on motorcycle and by car with friends. I never thought that I would be doing that during the first trip around. I did think about all of that when I was having a beer with a good friend and a couple of girls that we met there, just letting our feet hang over the cliffs of Meat Cove. That's got to be the most unromantic name for one of the most beautiful places in the world. I guess Walt Disney didn't get a chance to dub that one.

The Old Place and the New Place

The river that runs by the cottage is a big one, and was used by the pioneers to transport themselves and their goods for many years. It probably saved a lot of them from starving too.

My aunt and uncle had a cottage on the river. Actually, they had two of them, but not at the same time. The first one belonged to my grandparents, and it had a particular charm to it. I got to see the old cottage, and spent a good chunk of my youth in it, on weekends, and occasionally for a week during the summer. It was located in a rather crowded area, but the front faced the river, and that was as private a view as you would get. The entrance at the back doubled as a bedroom. As you walked up and down the floor, you would make your way into the dining room. It was a square room surrounded by books that people had read and left there over the years. I can only remember one title, and I don't even know why the title struck me, but it did. The book was called: The Natchez Woman. I should try to find it sometime and read a few chapters to see what it was all about. There were three bedrooms that opened onto the dining room, and I remember my aunt and uncle sometimes sneaking off for a "nap" on occasion. I had trouble understanding why adults were often tired in the middle of the afternoon. The three bedrooms had acquired the names of some of my aunts and uncles, probably because they had been adopted, or assigned sometime before I even made it to this planet. Beyond the dining room was the kitchen, a narrow area that opened onto the east side of the cottage. Beyond the kitchen was the closed-in verandah that spanned the entire front portion of the cottage. It was screened-in and contained some of the neatest furniture that you can imagine. There were two couches, one made of burly green material that was not particularly inviting to look at, but was reasonably comfortable, and the other, my favorite, that was made of a smoother material, and wrapped its arms around at the same height as the back. It was accompanied by two similar armchairs that were great to curl up in.

I understand that the old cottage played host to many people over the years. There were something like eleven or thirteen people in my mother's family alone. My grandfather liked to entertain, it seems, and so you can imagine the number of people that could have been there at once. The men would play cards and smoke cigars, and the women would chat and prepare delicious meals.

The old place got to be a little rickety in latter times so my aunt and uncle decided to build a new place, with indoor plumbing. That was quite an improvement applauded by all. The new place was built on the exact same site as the old one, but of course, it was nearly impossible to replicate the charm of the old one. It had so many ghosts that could have told so many stories about the events that took place there. Where do the ghosts go when you take away their home?

They're out There

Whenever the river was calm enough, and the temperature was right, and the time of day was right, we would go on a short fishing expedition with my aunt. My older brother, the next one up from me loved to go fishing, and so did I. So my aunt would get us all set up with fishing rods and our part of the deal was usually to go find worms. That was usually easy enough to do. Neither of us minded looking for worms and the natural contest was to find the biggest ones.

We would then set off in the rowboat to find the magic spot where more fish gathered than any other place. This was an empirical exercise that we went through every time. There were good spots for perch, and there were good spots for bass, and there were good spots for catfish. The list went on but nobody ever seemed to scientifically map out where the good spots were. I was usually tickled pink to catch anything at all, because that was a sign of luck. And it goes without saying, that if you are lucky, good fortune should come your way. It was really amazing to see. In the same boat, using the same worms, one person would get more bites, and catch more fish. We'd sometimes trade fishing rods to see if that would make any difference. But usually the person that was lucky, was lucky with any rod. My aunt had her favorite rod, and she was usually pretty lucky, and so was my brother. I would do okay, but I rarely got the big ones. The idea was to let the sinker drop to the bottom, and then bring the line up a bit, down a bit, but not too quickly. If you felt a nibble, you had to time your upward and sideways jab very carefully. There were some pretty smart fish out there. Some of them would eat up a worm in mo time at all. And you had to make sure that the end of the hook wasn't showing. So if you weren't getting any bites after a nibble, you usually had to bring up your line to see if the worm was on right.

You could catch a fair amount of fish in an afternoon, and the ones that didn't get away were usually brought in and cleaned on the spot. My aunt was an expert at cleaning fish and she taught a lot of people how to do it, including my brother. I, on the other

hand, was not crazy about touching fish, but I did love catching fish, and I didn't mind watching fish being cleaned. I still remember the technique. Cut behind the head, but don't remove it yet, then cut a line along the dorsal, at your leisure, remove the fins, gut the belly, now pull the head and the guts out together, and barf. I'm not quite certain of the sequence, but those are most of the steps, and the final one being the removal of the outer skin. Voila! One filet.

Eating the fish was always better than anything else. Although I may find out that fish taken from the river in the sixties could probably be used to make the juice that runs up and down in thermometers.

Listen and Watch

When I was young, I used to listen to the conversations of adults, mostly because I found them fascinating, and I was curious to see what they would say next. I would want to taste what they were drinking, eat what they were eating, and do stuff that adults did. I remember the taste of a sip of beer. It looked so good yet tasted so weird. Cigarettes were out of the question, but I do seem to remember trying a puff from an unattended cigarette and nearly dying from choking. I couldn't understand how adults could enjoy all of these not so good tasting things.

I also remember adults being rather silly at times and making a big thing out of nothing, usually when they were tired. The classic instance was one that we discussed as kids about our respective parents. Whenever they would go on a road trip with their parents whoever was driving would inevitably miss a turn, and whoever was passenging would have a conniption fit. As kids we would wonder what all the fuss was about. It wasn't as if the missed intersection, exit, crossroad, was about to disappear. Yet the tempers would flare up and volcanic exchanges would continue at least till the right road was found. And as kids, we would listen and watch.

Fun with Kam Long

The house next door belonged to another country, as did many other houses in our neighborhood. Some of the houses were used as residences, and some were used as offices. Security was pretty tight in the area, and unmarked police cruisers were a common sight, especially near embassies whose countries were in the news for some reason or another.

One day the moving trucks arrived at the house next door. A new family was arriving from a country that lay on the other side of the world. There were a few kids in the family, and one of them was my age. Within a short time I got to meet the kid who was my age, and as it turned out we got along pretty well. He didn't speak English very well, but that didn't matter. I knew from experience that kids our age learned language skills very quickly.

My new friend was absolutely crazy about baseball. I guess it was a pretty popular sport in his home country. He would watch just about every baseball game that you could find on TV. He also had a couple of really nice mitts, some bats, hats and baseball cards. He really loved to play catch, and so did I for that matter, although I was not into playing the game with a team. So we would go down to the park a play catch.

One day he invited me over to watch a baseball game and to meet the clan. It was sort of bizarre to go into this big Victorian house that was sparsely furnished in a totally un-North American style. There was also a very distinctive aroma that pervaded the entire house. It was always the same scent, weirdly exotic, yet far from offensive. I remember mentally commenting to myself about the fragrance. and realizing that my young nasal passages had never wafted such a smell. I concluded that it came from the kitchen, and that it was a good smell, even though I never really got used to it. If I stayed in the house long enough, the odor would disappear, probably because my brain would get saturated. The other thing I noticed was that the place was absolutely spotless, and it was customary in the oriental fashion, to remove one's shoes upon entering the house.

About the only thing I remember doing there is watching baseball on TV. We watched a lot of baseball. I wasn't really crazy about the sport, but I watched it anyway. My friend was not free to run around as he pleased, for security reasons I guess, so he had found this passion to keep himself occupied. I sort of felt sorry for him, because I could run around from sunup to beyond sundown. I wouldn't have traded my life for his any day.

The family did not stay as long as a diplomatic family usually stayed, so I did not have time to develop a friendship that would otherwise have developed, but we did get my friend to learn and improve his English, and I improved my knowledge of baseball.

Anything You Want

It's a kid's dream come true. Every year, and for many years, a friend of mine's uncle would treat us to two major events. The first one was Firecracker Day, and the second was a day at the local fair. This was on top of numerous horseback riding days and Dairy Queen days.

The day at the local fair started off early, so that we could take advantage of as many activities as possible. Unc, as he was referred to would pick up the kids in his enourmously-roomy black Lincoln Continental. Six or seven of us would pile in, and he would drive off. It was sort of great in those days, because seat belts didn't exist in most passenger cars, so you could cram as many people as a car's suspension could handle.

The fair was in town, and quite a short drive away. Late August days could be either really hot, or somewhat cooler and cloudy, but we never had a rainy day when at the fair. Once there, instructions were simple and easy to adhere to. If you got lost there was a pre-set meeting point and time, and, you could go on any ride as many times as your stomach could handle, and you could eat and drink anything you wanted, and as much as you wanted. It was like having carte blanche, and the bank could not be broken. I'm sure Unc went through enormous amounts of cash, but his unfailing smile encouraged us to spend, spend, spend. Never once did I ever hear him complain or point out what all of this was costing. It was a kid's dream come true.

We would almost feel guilty from time to time, but Unc would erase any of those thoughts by asking us if we were having fun. If we answered yes, he would just say that that was what we were there for. So as long as the fun continued, the cash would flow. I never in all my youthful years found out what Unc did for a living, and I don't think anyone asked. It all seemed to be irrelevant. I think it was an effort on our part to not spoil the magic of it all.

The day went by just too awfully fast for our taste, and we would have a great time. We tried a lot of rides, played a lot of games, both in the arcades, and under the open tents. We also ate everything in sight: lots of candy apples, caramel corn, hot dogs, and candy floss. What hedonism!

At the end of the day, once everyone was totally satiated, Unc would pile us back into that big old Lincoln, and drive us back home. The only thing he would ask in return, was that we ensure him that we'd had a really good time.

The best part was that we were too young to get zits from all the junk we had eaten.

Rules and Rituals

Growing up in the early sixties was a bit strange at times. The Big One had influenced people's minds considerably, and many hold-overs still existed.

A perfect example was the brush-cut. This was some new phenomenon, when you think about it. I can't remember another period in western humanity's development did something like this occur. Yes, I'm sure that in the past they would shave your head if you had fleas, or ticks, or something, but otherwise you would wear your hair like you had some. Unthinkingly, we would go, my father my brothers and I, to the barber shop for a haircut. I don't even think you had to learn to be a barber in those days, because the ritual haircut was a brush-cut. I remember a friend of mine who was from South America. He had what was considered long hair in those days, and when he would get a haircut, it would be to trim some shape into his hair. I would look at him after his haircut. and he'd look the same, whereas you could prick your finger touching my hair after a haircut. What were people thinking in those days?

Another ritual came every Friday. You couldn't eat meat on Friday. It was a religious thing. It kept the fish market alive. It was a silly rule to follow, but we did. I even remember my father making a beautiful home-made hamburger one day and as he was placing it on the table for me to eat, realized that it was Friday. Guess what? The burger went into the fridge, and I had to eat something else, probably fish sticks or something like that.

Something else that we had to do was go to church every Sunday. Short of being on your deathbed, you had to go to church, otherwise you would, not could, go to hell in the event that you died before confessing this sin of omission. Sounds a bit like a board game, doesn't it? Not only that, you inevitably had friends who adhered to different religions, and didn't ever have to go to church, although some of them couldn't eat pork, including hot dogs, and that sort of evened the score.

During Lent, it was highly recommended that you go to church each and every of the forty days to Easter, including Easter Sunday. This meant that in one year, you would go to mass a minimum of something like just under a hundred times. Heaven have mercy on those who are born into a demanding religion.

Eventually, hair grew longer, and the brush-cut went the way of the history books, along with the big one, WW two., and religion became a little more realistic. Those who sold fish lamented the day when the Friday ruling was overturned. Our population became more and more cosmopolitan, and going to hell for not going to mass didn't make much sense to a thinking person any more. And they invented beef and chicken hot dogs for my friends who couldn't eat hot dogs previously made with pork.

Technicalities

This was my third school, and I was only going into grade two. No, I wasn't a problem student, we just happened to be moving, or the schools were closing. The unusual thing about this school was that they allowed boys up to and including grade three. After that it was strictly an all girls' school.

A good friend of mine got great marks in grade two. So much so that the school officials decided that he should skip a grade. But there was a problem with that. There were no boys admitted to grade four. If you were going into grade four, you were shipped off to the all boys' school. Unfortunately, the all boys' school would not admit my friend into grade four, thereby skipping grade three. My marks were good, but not as good as my friend's. The school authorities decided to put the two of us in an all girls' grade four class. That way, my brilliant friend could enjoy the benefit of skipping a grade, and not be alone with a bunch of girls at a time when boys were not necessarily interested in girls. This also meant that I too would skip grade three, even though I was not as brilliant as my friend.

The whole thing worked out, mostly because the friends we had made were in grade three, so if we wanted to see them in the morning or during recess, we could do so. It was however strange to be surrounded by a bunch of girls, all the while being taught by a woman. That's a lot of female input.

In retrospect, I sort of wish this sort of thing would have happened at the end of high school, when my friend and I could have made better use of the situation.

The strange part in all of this is that after grade four, which my friend and I both passed with flying colors, we were shipped off to the all boys' school from grade five to grade eight, and then again through four years of high school. It had become a feast or famine thing, with the timing being all off. Rather nightmarish when you think of it.

I can't believe they used to have segregated schools. It never made sense then, and it wouldn't make sense now. They were creating a phenomenon that only occurs in prisons, where all the men are together, and all the women are together. Society just doesn't work that way. I'm fully aware of the reasons for trying to separate boys and girls during the hormonal explosion, but I'm amazed that we made it through those schools without going weird. How did they ever expect men and women to understand and get along with each other if they didn't have a clue on how each other behaved?

It's a miracle that men and women can interact at all, after going through a school system like that.

Grad Dance

The school year was coming to an end. We were wrapping up elementary school, and getting ready for the big step into high school. The graduation dance was to be held in the Congregation Hall of the local church. The hall doubled as an auditorium, which meant that the floor was slanted. The event was a cooperative one between our school and the girls' school. The graduation dance was to be one of the first and last events of our grade school lives that would involve members of more than one sex. Yes, we did go to Lent masses with the girls, but can that really be considered a social event?

The idea was to find yourself an escort for this dance. That would make dancing somewhat easier. I knew a good number of the girls from the girls' school, but for one reason or another, I didn't ask anyone in particular to the event. As a matter of fact, I may even have had thoughts of not attending the dance at all, and may have been convinced into going at the last minute, thus being too late in booking a date.

The big night arrived, and off I went to the church hall. I even had a tie on. In those days, kids were pretty straight at our age, so there was no question of drinking, or smoking, and drugs had not been invented yet. You could say it was a cold turkey sort of affair. I entered the hall and saw my classmates. Everyone was looking good, although it was unusual to see all the guys wearing ties. The girls looked really good. They always made more of an effort at these things.

The evening began with a formal address by the principals of the two schools, and one of the parish priests who was heavily involved in kids activities. Once that was over, they presented a few awards, and the party was on. We had learned our social skills from movies, and so there was a mishmash of protocolS being used that bore its roots in everything from Elvis movies, to Bob Hope movies. to cowboy movies. You could actually cut in on someone's dance, and not get an argument. This somewhat formal environment allowed for a variety of feelings to be unearthed and simultaneously stifled. No one liked to be cut in on, but they were left with no choice.

I sort of liked this system. Having no escort of my own, I was left to play the field. I'm sure some girl must have asked me to dance first, because I was always a little shy at the beginning of events such as these. As the evening wore on though, I began to ask some girls to dance. I was having a much better time than I had anticipated. One of my dance steps was somewhat unorthodox and I remember the heel of my shoes sometimes glancing other people's legs. Nonetheless, people seemed to be having a good time, and everyone was bumping into one another at one time or another.

The evening came to a close, and I made my way home, having had a whale of a time. When I got to school the next day, I discovered to my dismay that I had created some jealousies among some of my peers during the previous evening's activities. I was even more dismayed to discover that I was being threatened with being beaten up in the fall at the high school that we were scheduled to attend. I found all of this rather disconcerting and unfounded. I was not one to get into fights, and I cherished having my body remain intact. Now, all of a sudden, the fun from the previous evening disappeared. My emotions had gone from not wanting to go to the dance at all, to discovering that I had a great time by going, and then feeling cheated out of a good memory by some insecure peers whose dates I had danced with. I couldn't believe what was happening.

I must have been just too awfully sensitive in those days. I was also not well versed in psychology. It turned out that I spent an entire summer worrying about the first day of high school that was coming up in September, instead of just enjoying the time off. I even went to another high school to try to get enrolled before September. My parents wouldn't hear of this change, and I dared not mention the real reason for not wanting to go to the high school where they had scheduled me to go.

September rolled around, and I was about to face something that I really didn't want to face, but I had no choice. So I got on the bus, and I made my way to the high school. It was a warm day. I had my sports coat on, and a tie. You had to wear a tie and jacket at this school. There was a big lump in my throat and the butterflies were ready to come out of my mouth. Clusters of kids were standing on the terrace in front of the school, and as I walked up to it, I searched for a friendly face and out of the corner of my eye kept a look out for those who had threatened me in June.

To my utter surprise, not a threatening glance nor threatening comment was thrown my way. As a matter of fact warm smiles and inquisitive faces were all that I saw. Those whom I feared were asking me how my summer was and where I had been. It was then that I discovered that people didn't stay angry as long as I thought they did, and time can be a great healer. I also learned that I was too sensitive to situations, and not sensitive enough to people.

Move it Again, Sam

It was the fall of '67. My parents decided to move, again. We had been at our present address for some seven years, and I, being somewhat typically sedentary as a child, was not crazy about a move. I knew that it involved eventually losing touch with established friends, and setting out to make new friends.

The big house full of boarders had been sold. The move was on. We were not buying another house; we were going to be renting a place near the university. A strange thing happened, though. We moved into the house, only to move back out a few days later. Why? Nobody liked the house, and another one was available on a nicer street, just a few blocks away. So we moved twice.

The new place was to be a temporary measure. My parents were looking for something else but for the time being, the rental place downtown would be, home. The house was a half-double on a corner, facing a park in the downtown area. It was about a quarter of the size of our old place, and I really didn't get off on it. The one plus was that I was getting my own bedroom, and the bedroom was above ground. No more basements, thank goodness. On the down side, the room was about the size of a closet, and may very well have been used for that purpose at one time.

We had only moved about a mile from the old place, but the environment was totally different. However, my older brothers and sister seemed to love the area. It was a lot closer to the action, with restaurants, bars, and cinemas just blocks away. I was old enough to easily ride my bike to the older neighborhood to see my friends, and did so quite regularly. They, in turn would come to the new place regularly also. Strangely enough though, in the nine months that we spent there, I never made a close friend, even though there were lots of kids in the area. There was something about the kids that was different, and my attitude towards them probably didn't help. I just didn't feel any warmth coming off of anyone my age. I even got a paper route to try and fit in with the local kids. It somehow didn't work. I'm happy that my friends from the old neighborhood stayed in touch, otherwise I would have had a lonely stay while we lived downtown.

We ended up staying one winter at the place downtown, and in the spring, we moved away to another part of the city that was about a mile from where we were, and up the river from where the big old house was. You could draw a triangle between the three places, but you could never draw parallels between the neighborhoods. The new place was right on the river, in a very nice part of the city. The new place was also, new.

This time I enjoyed the move, and the adjustment was easy. I liked the place, and hoped that this would be the last move for the family.

Opportunity Knocks

It was early spring, everything was melting, and we already had our bikes out. We weren't up to anything in particular, just enjoying the fact that it was getting warmer outside. That itself was cause for celebration. As a kid, you always had more freedom if you could get outdoors.

A friend and I were ambling along the canal. From a distance we could see some kids milling about, just near one of the downtown bridges. The canal was still in winter mode, in that it was not full of water. We got closer to the kids that we had spotted. It turned out that we knew them. There were more bikes than kids, and we thought that someone may have fallen into the canal. As it turned out, this was not the case. The kids had found a bicycle at the bottom of the canal. It was a CCM with an in-hub two-speed. They were all the rage at that time. I think I was more excited about the find than the kids who actually found the bike. We started to theorize about the origins of the bike, and its icy demise. We concluded that it either spent the winter at the bottom of the canal, or had been thrown in recently. The bike was in pretty good shape considering the abuse of the elements. It needed a new rim and a seat. To my amazement, nobody wanted it, so I offered to give it a home. In the back of my head, dollar signs were flashing. I knew that these bikes fetched a pretty good price at bike shops, and in-hub two-speeds were fairly recent models.

I took the orphaned bike home, showed it to my parents, and gave it a good wash. My parents suggested that I call the police to let them know that I had found what could possibly have been a stolen bicycle. The police didn't have time for that type of nonsense, and so I found myself owning the bicycle by default. I located a rim and a seat for the bike, and installed the pieces. Before that I painted the frame. My paint job wasn't the greatest, but all in all, it wasn't too bad. The bike was now looking and running well. I really had no need for it, so I decided to sell it. I asked my parents if they would finance an ad in the local newspaper, and they agreed. Before placing the ad in the paper, I checked to see what the market was like, and priced my bike accordingly. The response was phenomenal. In no time at all I had people coming over to see the bike. The paint job, as I anticipated, made the bike look suspect. I simply explained that the most important thing was that the bike ran well, and that I was a lousy painter. I ended up selling the bike for a little less than I had anticipated, but I recouped my investment in time, effort, and money.

The whole experience turned out to be a lot of fun, as well as being profitable. It had not been my first entrepreneurial venture, and as time told, it certainly did not turn out to be my last.

First Racer

So far, I hadn't done so well on the bicycle scene. Most of my friends had had at least one new bike in their lives, and I had not. On the plus side, I'd always had a bike, and I suppose some kids could not boast of the same. Nonetheless, it was difficult not to envy other kids, especially when they got a Mustang bike, or a ten-speed. These were the new machines that everyone wanted. Mustang bikes were very tipsy from the back, and they have probably contributed to the well-being of many chiropractors still trying to fix what got damaged some thirty years ago. Ten speeds were very nice machines, but you had to be careful not to de-nut yourself on one as the derailleurs had a tendency of letting the chain slip off the sprocket. Speaking of bikes, I'll always remember what happened to one friend of mine, who found himself flying over a car door that a driver had opened, right in front of him as he rode down the street. The bike became part of the car's door upholstery, and my friend became a flying object. Fortunately, he was not hurt.

Digressions aside, those Mustangs and ten-speeds were the bikes to own. I had two bikes at the time of this particular trend. One was a single-speed girl's bike that I had purchased for two dollars from a girl I knew. I used the bike for trashing around. The other was a bike that my older cousin gave to me. It was a Raleigh three-speed racer that I had to buy a front wheel for. It took a long time for my cousin to remember to bring the bike back with him on one of his trips to our city. It was worth the wait, though, once I put a new front wheel on the thing. The bike had been well taken care of, and I continued the trend,

This still didn't supply me with a Mustang bike or a ten-speed. So I went to the bike shop and bought a pair of Mustang bars. I would interchange the bars from the old girl's bicycle to the three-speed, and go back to the stock bars when I grew weary of the novelty. The Mustang bars were very tall, and they looked sort of funny on the Raleigh. The bars were so tall that I had to place the shift and brake levers on, about halfway up the bars. The bike's geometry was all screwed up but my imagination helped me pretend that I had a Mustang bike. I eventually got over this silliness and put the racing bars on the bike. That's what the bike was really meant for.

I never did get a Mustang bike, nor a ten-speed. I was about twenty-six years old when I finally got my first new bike. It was a deferred gift that I made to myself. As a matter of fact, I ended up having as many new motorcycles as I did bicycles. I think I even got a new car before I got a new bicycle. I even got a Mustang car, but not a Mustang bike. I guess new bicycles were just not meant to be part of my childhood and teenage years.

Oh, Those Influences

Being the youngest in the family was a bit of a mixed blessing. Yes, I got spoiled to a certain extent, but by the same token, there was extra pressure to perform. I had no excuses. I, in theory had learned from my older siblings' experiences, and should have been able to avoid any of the usual pitfalls. On the other hand, there was a wealth of influences ready to bombard my growing mind. My older brothers and sister were discovering their own passions for material things, and I would inevitably live those passions vicariously, and inevitably be influenced by them. Sometimes the reverse would happen, and the influence would convince me that I wanted no part in something.

A negative influence that I can think of was the pool table that two of my brothers saved up for. They were really avid players for a while and I would sometimes have a game with them. But I never got the urge to buy a pool table, nor did I develop a passion for the game.

Motorcycles and sports cars, on the other hand, were things that my brothers loved and the influence stuck to me like glue. I remember the two first motorcycles that adorned the family driveway. One of them was a green Honda 50, and the other was an Italian-made 250 Harley single. The two bikes were totally different, and so were the brothers who owned them, but they were nearly the same age, and did a lot of things together. They bought pool tables together, and they bought motorcycles at the same time. My sister and oldest brother learned to ride on these bikes, but did not succumb to the temptation of buying their own at the time. The Honda was a little tamer and more reliable. The Harley was wilder and not reliable at all. When the Harley ran, you knew about it. I remember going for rides on both bikes, and I loved the thrill. In those days, helmets were not required. but my brothers made me wear a leather football helmet. The Harley, even though it was not a big bike, sounded big, fast, and was downright scary to go on with my brother. He was not one to spare the throttle. After a few rides with my brothers I became hooked on motorcycles. It would be years before I could ride one legally, but I knew I would have a motorcycle. As a matter of fact I became the motorcycle junkie of the family and hold the honor for most motorcycles owned.

The motorcycle thing went beyond logic, as passions often do. My sister had burned her leg badly in one spot, from contact with the muffler on the Honda. One of my brothers took a flip on the Honda and walked around feeling sore all over for a while. Come to think of it, just about everyone I know who has owned or ridden a motorcycle has taken a spill at one point or another. If it wasn't a spill, it was a speeding ticket, or a noise infraction that was dampening spirits. Nonetheless the passion overcame, and the influence remained.

No less powerful was the influence of cars that went through my brother's and sister's hands. My sister was the first to rent cars. It was virtually impossible for young men to rent cars in those days, but young women could get really nice cars at great rates. So my sister would arrive at the house with these often new sleds from the mid-sixties that were just beautiful to look at, and fun to drive in. The cars were usually loaded, and had big engines. Ah! the sixties. My brothers bought cars, all kinds of cars, from fifties Buicks to sixties Austin Minis. to Studebaker Hawks, Chevy Biscaynes, Volkswagen Beetles, and so on. The better stuff came in the late sixties with things like Corvettes, Austin-Healeys, Camaros and the like. All of this made me crazy for cars, and motorcycles. These were influences that were so strong, that they defied logic.

And so, as I grew old enough to make these passions mine, I went on to relentlessly pursue them. And my passions became the influences for those younger than I. And as they grow, they will transform the influences into passions of their own.

It's a Job

Two of my older brothers had done this sort of thing before me, and I was well versed in the mechanics of the trade, so to speak. One of my brothers had done an afternoon run, and the other had done an early morning run. They both had delivered newspapers. I had helped out on occasion, mostly with the afternoon run, and on a couple of occasions I had to do the whole thing. I wasn't very big at the time, and my father ended up helping me out.

When I got a little older, and we moved to the downtown area, I decided to get my own paper route. I figured that it would be a good way to meet some of the other kids in the neighborhood. The drop-off point was very conveniently located across the street from our house, so I could see when the papers were being dropped off from the comfort of the living room. That was very handy on rainy days.

Getting a route was pretty easy. You just went up to the coordinator and gave your name. The turnover was high, so getting a route was just a matter of time. I lucked in on a route that ran straight up the street from where we lived. It was an afternoon run for one of the two major papers in the city. The job was straight forward. You picked up your papers when they got dropped off at the corner, placed whatever inserts that were included, and delivered the papers. What made the job weirdly interesting was the kaleidoscope of customers that existed along this downtown run. It was a mishmash street with a combination of businesses, offices, and residences, mostly apartment buildings, without elevators. The route ended just short of one of the most notorious street corners in the city. It was a corner that was considered tough, and the people who hung around there were not always the most reputable.

The strange thing about delivering newspapers was not the delivering. That was the easy part. The strange part was collecting the money for the delivery every two weeks. That's when you met the people behind the doors. That's when you got to put a face to all the sounds that you'd hear coming from behind the closed doors, day after day. That's when things got scary sometimes. That's when you wished that all of your customers would have been pre-paying customers. It's also when you found out how other people lived, or pretended to. On the plus side, it was an occasion to meet some of the nicer customers, and some of the more generous customers.

Sometimes when collecting I'd sort of wish that nobody was home. Some places were not pretty to look at, nor were the people who lived in them. The classic look without a doubt was the guy who evidently had a drinking problem, whose dress code consisted of checkered slippers, maybe a pair of pants but most probably a pair of shorts, and the ubiquitous sleeveless undershirt with a combination of sweat and tomato sauce stains on it. Wheezing, and an old cigar or cigarette were optional. The female counterparts usually wore the fuzzy slippers, a housecoat or better yet a cheesy negligee that promised to reveal everything that you didn't really want to see. Options here ranged from poorly placed wigs to an array of permanently placed curlers.

They were not bad people for the most part, but they certainly were sad looking. Strangely enough, they were often very generous, and appreciated good service. They were the contrast that we all seem to need in life to remind us of how well off we are.

The rest of the customers were non-caricatural, and sometimes non-existent it seemed. The paper would always be gone, but when it came time to collect, the customer was never there. Our instructions were to refer these cases to the coordinator, who would usually know the chronic non and late payers. Somehow, he would get the cash from them.

The paper route certainly turned out to be quite an experience. I learned a lot about people during that time, and I suppose I also learned a lot about myself.

Let's Get the Hell Out of Here!

We hadn't been downtown long. As a matter of fact we had moved there in late summer and with the arrival of spring we were getting ready to move again. Eight months felt like years to me. I wasn't crazy about the neighborhood, and during our stay I made no new friends.

I was all of thirteen years old, and when I found out that we were moving I cheered inside. The new place was just that, a brand new house on one of the rivers that ran through the city. It was a custom-built house originally being built by a developer for his family. The fellow was in financial difficulty and could not afford to keep the house for himself, so he sold it to my parents.

The setting was unique, and the area really had a lot of appeal. Not only that, I could now walk to school. As a matter of fact I could see the school from the house. When we eventually got a boat, I was able to row across the river and walk a few hundred yards to the school.

There was also the potential and promise of making new friends. The area was riddled with kids my age.

The house itself was quite something. It was the largest one on a street shared with four other houses. It was a two-storey affair, with a double garage, and four bedrooms. The windows were huge, and they let in tons of sunlight into the house. The kitchen was right at the front of the house, looking out onto the river. There was an inviting family room on the main floor, and all of the other usual rooms. The backyard was immense and very sunny in the afternoon. The spring snow was melting, exposing the yet to be landscaped grounds. The proximity to the river made it a real nature lover's paradise in the middle of the city. There were lots of Red-winged blackbirds that, as we came to learn, were a sure sign of spring. There were also muskrats and beavers swimming in the melting river's waters.

I was so happy to be there. I really felt at home. The place and setting were easy to fall in love with, and the excitement of the times made it all the better. And exciting times they were. These were the best of economic times. These were the late sixties. Everybody who wanted to work was working, job mobility was very good, going to school and staying in school guaranteed you a good job when you graduated, gas was inexpensive, beer and cigarettes were also inexpensive. There was a sense of widespread prosperity, and most everyone was enjoying the times. You could even let your hair grow down to your butt if you wanted to.

I was still a little young to take advantage of everything that was happening, but I still enjoyed the times. New cars sat in the driveway of the new house, new friendships developed and a lot of the old friendships were maintained, high school was a neater place to be than grade school, girls were starting to look good as the hormones started acting up, zits were made to be popped, and all was well with the world. In my heart of hearts I fervently hoped that this would be our last move and that we could enjoy what we had.

Initiation Day

It was a tradition in our high school. Every year the older students got to abuse the new students for a day. The purpose of the initiation was rather obscure, and the fateful day was met with feelings of apprehension and fear. We had heard the stories of what could happen, and the older students would wring their hands as they planned their various forms of torture. To make the event more sporting, a points card system was used. This was introduced to motivate the novices into performing bold and unorthodox feats in order to gather the most points, in the form of signatures for the honor of contributing to the pride of their respective classes.

I was one to get involved, and I truly wanted our class to accumulate the most signatures. You could get signatures by doing such things as letting a senior paint your face with a magic marker. You could also get points for eating a raw egg, and doing things the like.

At one point in the day some of us had ventured out to the pond which lay within the school grounds. A host of activities were taking place. One point getting activity involved dunking one's head in the pond. One of my former grade school mates dared to be different and solicited many potential signatures by offering to jump into the pond wearing his underwear only, a daring feat that would surely bring him great praise from his classmates, and the seniors. And so he took off his clothes and jumped in. Not to be outdone, I solicited even more signatures by offering to jump into the pond with all of my clothes on, including shoes, jacket and tie. I made sure to get the signatures first, so that I would avoid doing this for naught. Once I got the signatures, I did the deed. Needless to say, I got soaking wet doing this, but my pride was high in knowing that I had gathered a large number of signatures for my class, and gained some notoriety at the same time. But the consequences of the deed had not been contemplated.

There I was, soaking wet, with no change of clothing, my face completely covered in magic marker. I ended up in the vice-principal's office looking and feeling a little bit silly. The vice-principal tried to keep a straight face as he asked me what had transpired. I explained the situation, and we concluded that I should go home to get changed.

So there I was on the city bus, face full of magic marker, and sounding like a giant squeegee as I moved. The bus driver must have wondered what the hell had happened to me. I tried to look straight ahead and not think about how I looked. After what felt like an eternity, I finally got home. Thank goodness no one was there. I quickly showered and changed into dry clothes, and promptly returned to school.

I can't remember whether our class won that year's initiation but I did make the yearbook, and I knew that the following year it would be my turn to hand out the signatures and make the new kids do silly things.

Nine A, Ten A, Eleven D, Twelve D

This place was definitely different. It was bigger than the old place. It was more formal than the old place. There were more priests here than in the old place. You had to move around a lot more than in the old place, and you had a hell of a lot more teachers than in the old place. This was high school. It was run by the priests and if you wanted to get in the door of any classroom, you had to wear a tie and jacket. You had to take Latin, unless they had put you, heaven forbid, in the commercial course. And, there were no girls, except for two secretaries, and a couple of female teachers.

Some of the older students, the grade twelve guys, were really big, I thought. Hell, some of them had beards and drove cars. Some of them were bigger than the teachers and looked older than some of the teachers. Some of the guys were really small. I remember some of the kids in grade nine dragging their suck-sacks stuffed with books on the floor because they weren't tall enough to keep them off the ground.

It was a small school by today's standards. There were only six hundred and fifty students spread out over four academic levels of six classes each. In class, unless you had sight or discipline problems, you sat in alphabetical order. As it turns out, many of my high school friends had family names that started with a B, a C, a D, or an E, even an L. So much for letting fate dictate your choice of friends.

There was no uniform, but as I mentioned, you had to wear a tie and jacket. The smart guys and the poor guys wore the same tie and jacket all year long. There were even a few guys who wore the same suit year after year, or until the cuffs of their pants reached way above their ankles. Some of the guys had their suits dry cleaned once a year. You could see the sweat rings around the armpits of their jackets, and the seats of their pants would reflect light from being so shiny. The vain or rich guys wore sharp looking coordinates or business suits. They looked good, but who were they trying to impress?

The cafeteria also doubled as an auditorium. In the first years, the cafeteria was stocked with a Coke machine, a chocolate bar dispenser, a milk dispenser, and a canned food dispenser. Needless to say, you were better off bringing your own lunch if you cherished your face, and your ego. I remember seeing some pretty bad acne in those days. Blackheads were quite prevalent too. I probably didn't help the situation too much because I used to bring in a thermos full of hot dogs every day. I was the ad hoc hot food vendor at the school. There was good money to be made, and I'm surprised that my parents never complained about how many hot dog packs they had to buy weekly.

The lockers were all in the basement. As you walked by, you could smell the food items that had fallen behind some books and were left to die in the dark. Those who smoked could do so outside, behind the gym, or near the rear entrances to the school. In the winter though, people used to find spots in little used stairwells.

I spent four of my youthful years in that school. Even after all these years I could probably find my way around as if it were yesterday.

Institutionalization and Socialization

Schools by definition are institutions of learning. The process takes years, and it has been found that the younger you start, the better you learn. Concurrently, a socialization process takes place. So we learn, and as we learn, we hopefully also learn to live. A lot of this learning to live is done unconsciously, and often, haphazardly.

I remember in the first year of high school a segregation process began to take place. The grade nines hung around with the grade nines, the grade tens hung around with the grade tens, and so on. One year really meant a lot in those days, and a certain stigma was unfortunately attached to seeking out contact with peers at other levels. Unfortunate it was, because a wise person in those days could establish a much vaster network of friends. This could prove useful in the future, something we rarely thought about in those early years.

Another form of segregation appeared based on brain power. If you were a brain, you were often a suck, and you carried a suck-sack. You could be a brain, and not be a suck, but it was difficult. If you happened to be a good athlete and a brain, the suck label was very difficult to attach to you. You were a person to be admired or despised, but nearly always respected. You probably also entered school politics and got involved in the running of student activities. If you were good looking on top of that, you probably dated the better looking girls.

On the other hand, you might be one of the dummies. You could be good looking, and a good athlete. You would be respected for your athletic prowess, and forgiven for your stupidity. You were probably a car owner, because you'd already been working for a number of years while killing time at high school. Your destiny, probably a trade. The irony in all of that is that the guys who fell into trades probably ended up with a more secure living than the guys who went for the academic stuff.

If you were neither athletic or stupid, you might have been an artsy-fartsy, in which case you might or might not be good at math and science, and you might be dating some girls, but you might not be able to sway them with brains, or pure virility, so that getting the date in the first place might be the biggest challenge of all. You probably had to consult a lot of people and swallow your pride in doing so. The girls you dated probably were the simple type, in that they were more accepting of shortcomings.

There were yet other types of guys. They never ever dated girls, and they never ever talked about girls. and quite frankly, they didn't seem to be interested in girls at all. They did their own thing. A lot of them seemed to be bright, and creative, not too big on athletics, not the usual athletics anyway, and good public speakers. I don't know what the connection was.

Then there were the guys who weren't particularly good in all the subjects, but might shine in one or two, and they weren't particularly good in sports, but they concentrated on one or two outdoor activities. They probably liked drinking and partying. They weren't afraid to try something new, and if they were good looking, had developed enough social skills from attending so many parties that they could pick up just about any girl they cared to chase, and keep her long enough to develop a superficial, yet satisfying relationship.

There were also criminal types, and musical types, and comical types. We all had a little bit of every type in us, but interestingly enough, in high school, whatever predominated in your personality and your skills, seemed to make you generate towards people of the same ilk. You were usually fully aware of the others, and you knew that you would be dealing with all the others when you got out into the real world, but for now, you could separate yourself from the masses.

High School Dances

Every once in a while the school principal would let the students put a dance together. I would guess that in one academic year there was probably a dance per month, on average. It might have been a little less, but who's counting.

School dances, and any other activity were very important to us, because there were no girls to speak of in our school. If we wanted to see girls, we had to invite them to these dances. The easy way to do it was to invite the two neighboring girls' schools officially. Someone from our student council would go to the other schools and make the invitation. Needless to say, our students' council was wise. The wisdom was in asking about twelve hundred girls to a school dance at a boys' school with a population of just over six hundred. Talk about hedging your bets!

There would always be a live rock or blues band. In those days you could get a really good band for four to six hundred bucks a night. The tickets to get in were sold for around a dollar apiece, and the Coca-Cola Company would usually foot the bill for the soft drinks, so that the student council could actually make money on dances.

The big kick was to get as liquored up as you could for these things, and that was done by getting someone older with a car, or someone who looked older and had a car, or someone who looked or was older, and driven by someone else, to go buy the beer. A six-pack was a dollar and a half in those days, including the deposit. That was pretty close to your entire week's allowance, when you think about it. But of course a six-pack would get you out there. Cocktails were in the parking lot, about an hour before the dance. This was a guy thing usually, and the idea was to down your six beers in the least time possible. There was nothing like sucking on a cool one when the snow was falling, and the temperature was at the frosty end of the scale.

The girls often did the same thing, but with more lady-like drinks like a mickey of vodka, or a bottle of rose wine. We often wouldn't see the girls until the dance actually began.

It was quite something to be at one of these things. Of course there were those who went there straight, and if you didn't want to get into trouble with the teaching staff who monitored the dance, you made sure to be on your best behavior. even though you often couldn't stand straight.

There were always rows of chairs lining the outer perimeter of the auditorium, and people who weren't dancing usually lined these areas. There was always a cluster of people at the back of the auditorium. That was the best place to check the traffic of people, because the washrooms were outside the auditorium. Inhibitions seemed to disappear as the evening wore on, and there always seemed to be a panic to find a dance partner for the slow ones. In those days, that was often the closest that you would get to having sex.

The whole evening was a blast, and if you were really lucky, you met a girl that you wouldn't mind having a date with sometime soon, and she would feel the same. Those dances were probably one of the best parts of going to school, except for the house parties. I loved to play the field in those days. I felt like a kid at a smorgasbord. There was a trade-off to playing the field though, and that was that you didn't get to develop your relationships. And that's something that would probably have done me some good.

On the River

I don't really know why they call it living on the river when you're actually living by the river. Technically, I suppose that if you are a Tom Sawyer, or Huckleberry Finn, you really are living on the river. In any case, our house sat on the shore of this particular river, which ran its course through the center of the city in which we lived.

Though small, by river standards, it's a pretty river. It flows through some ninety miles of countryside, and actually flows in two directions from a series of lakes at the center. The waters are sort of muddy, giving the river a rather brownish look. Apart from springtime, it's an ambling river, and when looking at it on a windless day it is difficult to distinguish between reality and reflection.

Soon after moving to the house by the river, my parents decided to buy a small boat. It was more dingy-like than it was boat like, and had a funky name. It was called a Moby Ding. It was all of eight feet long, and about four feet wide. It was made of plastic-like material that bent under pressure. The bottom was so shaky that we had to make a plywood floor which we placed on the existing floor of the boat. The boat's only redeeming quality was that it was unsinkable. My parents also bought a four-horse outboard motor for the boat. It was an air cooled motor which allowed you to run it out of the water if you hit a shallow part of the river. Even my parents wondered why they hadn't bought an aluminum boat. However, the fun factor was there, and I spent a lot of time on the river with other friends who had, ahem, real boats.

If you happened to be two people in the boat, the balance was fairly good. If you were alone in the boat, you had to sit at the front of the boat to get it to plane, which was fairly easy to do because you could spit from the stem to the stern. At one point, I devised a pulley system using the oar locks so that I could sit and steer from the front and get the boat to plane more readily. It also meant that I had to rubberneck my way around to see where I was going.

My friends and I spent entire summers on the river. Some of us had boats, and some of us had canoes. We'd go swimming in the middle of the river during the day, and we'd go fishing in the evening. We'd even have campfires and cookouts on the far side of the river, which was undeveloped. It was like being in the country with all the conveniences of being in the city. If you ran out of something or other, you simply hopped into the boat, and crossed the river to your house. The school that I attended, was on the other side of the river, and in the spring and fall, I'd sometimes take the boat across the river to get to school.

There were a few mishaps due to the design and construction of the boat. I remember traveling along one day only to discover that the boat was filling with water, rapidly. I couldn't see where the water was coming from. I was able to reach the shore safely, and upon closer inspection of the boat, discovered that the motor's shaft had rubbed and eaten through the base of the transom. So I placed a fiberglass patch on the hole, and that seemed to fix things for a while. The same sort of thing happened again sometime later, but this time the whole stern section was splitting from the rest of the boat. So I placed a larger transom board to better distribute the pressure. This was some boat. Claims of unsinkability were probably based on the fact that the boat would rarely see water.

During the years of the Moby Ding, two of my older brothers built a seaflea. Now that was a real boat. It had been built solidly with a series of water tight foam filled compartments. It was extremely buoyant, and could support a ten horsepower motor and three adults. Not that it was wise to have three adults in the Seaflea at the same time. The river was ideal for the Seaflea, because the waves never got bigger than a few inches. The four horse was adequate, but not thrilling, so on occasion we would rent a ten horse, and that would really give you a thrill. It was wise to wear a bathing suit when using this boat, mostly because the bow was just an inch or two above the water.

The river was a great source of entertainment summer and winter. It was a place to swim, to water-ski, to fish, to camp, to skate and to enjoy every day, even if it was just to look at it.

Another First

High school was a super place to source out just about anything. Everybody had a brother who's sister in law's best friend had a cousin who's nephew had something to sell, give, borrow, trade to whomever was interested. Thank goodness sourcing out didn't usually have to go that far for most items.

I was about fourteen at the time, and had a real passion for motorized things. I loved and fantasized about anything that saved you from walking, or riding a bicycle. My head was older than my body, and the law would not permit someone my age to drive anything but a tractor or a riding mower. Neither within my grasp. It used to annoy me to hear that in other parts of the country kids who were fourteen could get a license to ride small motorcycles. I remember trying to convince my parents that we should move to such a place because they had their heads on right in that part of the world.

During a conversation at school one day, I discovered that a guy who lived near my place had a motorcycle for sale. It was an old Suzuki 80 two-stroke, and it ran. I asked the guy how much he wanted for the bike. He said he would let it go for about thirty dollars. At the time my weekly income was a paltry two dollars and fifty cents. There was a financing challenge here if I was going to buy this thing. The first thing to do was to go and see the motorcycle.

It wasn't far to go. The kid who had the bike for sale lived a few streets away. It was a beautiful late spring day, and I had the hots to buy me a motorcycle. When I got to the place where the kid lived, I noticed the motorcycle in the driveway. It was originally red, I guess, but had faded to an orangy color. The exhaust was made up of a muffler that had been severely severed and squashed into a flat piece of metal. Just about everything else was there, including some funky white sidewall tires. We started the thing up and listened to it. The kid explained to me that it ran fine, except that the spark plug had a tendency of fowling up quite frequently. I hopped on and went for a very short spin. The thing was really giving me a thrill.

I decided to buy the bike on the spot. We worked on the price, and the financing arrangement. Twenty-five bucks now, and the rest later. I also made a side deal with the kid, promising him that I would give him free hot dogs which I brought to school daily in a thermos to sell to kids during lunch. He agreed, and I pushed the bike home because I was too young to legally ride it.

I got it home and started it up. It ran well, and from there I could ride along the river. At the bridge I would turn the bike off and walk the bike across the bridge. Then I'd start it up and ride along the other side of the river. This was a street bike that was learning life over as a trail bike. I had tons of fun with it. I also became good at taking the spark plug out to clean it. I finally had a set of wheels that would take me somewhere instead of vice versa. I had no money to put into it, and it didn't ask for anything more than a bit of gas, and a minuscule amount of two-stroke oil, or any other petroleum product thicker than gasoline. Thank goodness for that, because I still owed the kid who sold the bike to me, the balance of payment. I think he reminded me every day until I paid him in full. I guess he was not a trusting person. Maybe he opened up a collection agency in later years.

That bike served me well, and when I was done with it, I sold it to one of my brothers, and when he was done with it, I arranged for another kid in school to buy it off my brother. The last fellow actually fixed the bike up and ran it legally on the street for the longest time. I had paid thirty bucks for the bike, sold it for thirty bucks and arranged to have it sold for thirty bucks. There was very little talk of inflation in those days.

Summers With my Cousin

Even though I had a lot of friends my own age, there were always older people in my life. For some strange reason, I could communicate with adults in a way that made them talk to me like I was an adult too. One of those people was my older cousin from out of town.

The university offered a series of summer programs for teachers wishing to upgrade their qualifications. My cousin was one of those people who liked to study, and liked teaching. The courses he wanted to take were not available in his home town, so for a number of years he would spend a part of his summers at our house, while studying at the university. On the weekends he would either go back to his parents' place, or go visit his girlfriend in a small town that was located a bizzillion miles away. It took him some eight hours one way to get there. I hope she was making his trips worthwhile.

Most of the courses took place in the morning, and my cousin would usually study for part of the afternoon. After that he was free to do as he pleased. He had a neat car to drive around in. It was a '65 or '66 powder blue Beaumont with a small block V8. It was a squarish looking coupe with a white interior that was quite sporty with bucket seats and a floor console. He had the wheels, and I knew the city, so we spent many summer days exploring different places in the city and surrounding areas. I was in my early teens at the time, and I loved to cruise around with my cousin in his car.

One of the fun things about my cousin was that he treated everyone on an equal basis. He was always interested in what you had to say, even if you were a kid, and he would respect your opinion for what it was. In retrospect he may have been using me as a test bed for his teaching ideas. After all, he was learning the art of teaching, and his work was mainly with high school students. With me around, he could bounce off ideas, and mentally record his findings on my reactions to ideas as a young teenager. Whatever the motivation was, we had a really good time checking things out in the city, and talking about all kinds of things.

My cousin loved all kinds of music, and he loved books and movies. We went to see a lot of what were to become all-time great movies. He was really taken by The Sound Of Music, and I swear, he must have seen it a hundred times. There was one cinema in town that played the same movies for oven a year, sometimes, and The Sound Of Music was one of them. We also went to see things like James Bond and just about every comedy you can think of. He had a great sense of humor and he looked a little bit like Peter Sellers.

When it came to music he was as fanatical as they get, in an era where stereo was just taking off. He had all kinds of music, and a wonderful reel-to-reel tape deck that recorded very well. My cousin would sometimes dub some music for me onto cassettes so that I could have a copy.

On one occasion I really stunned my cousin. We were sitting in front of the house one early evening, talking about this and that. At one point we got on the subject of cars. His car happened to be parked on the street, not far from where we were sitting. I'm not sure how this came about, but at one point, he told me to go ahead and take the car for a spin if I wanted to. I was thirteen or fourteen at the time, and he didn't think that I had the nerve or knowledge to do so. I casually walked over to the car, hopped in, and started it up. Once it was started, I put it in gear, and drove off. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my cousin's jaw drop. I didn't want to scare him, so I just went around the block. It was great fun, and I really enjoyed driving his car. When I got back, he sort of continued to be amazed at what I'd done. He wasn't mad or anything, but I don't believe he ever let me drive the car again.

At one point my cousin finished up what he had set out to do at the university, and he married the girl that he used to go and visit in the little town that was eight hours away, and they made some kids of their own. I knew from experience that when people in those days got married, they always changed, and when they had their first kid, they changed even more.

House Parties

A good friend of mine and I once theorized during one of our philosophical discussions that teens should be put on Hormonal Farms from the time of puberty to the end of their teens. Both boys and girls would go to these farms that would combine some schooling, a lot of grunt work and all the sex you could muster up. You'd have the option to leave when you were fed up, but then you'd be out of the farm and theoretically satiated and socially adjusted.

For want of Hormone Farms. we settled for house parties. House parties occurred at any time of day, and on any given day of the week. They took place at anyone who's parents were not home, and preferably who's parents had a healthy supply of liquor in the cabinet. When I think of it, we probably contributed to lengthening the lives of many parents by diluting their supply of booze with water. I can just imagine Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so entertaining their friends one evening, and Mr. So-and-so pulling his Bridge partner to one side, pointing out that his favorite Scotch doesn't seem to have the same kick that it used to have.

There were games at house parties. Fun games that everyone loved to play. One of the most popular was Spin The Bottle. If you're alive, and were a teenager, you know what is involved when playing Spin The Bottle. Another rather fascinating game involved turning off all the lights in the place, usually someone's basement rec room. and letting everyone wander around in the dark. If your groping hands fell upon something that you figured belonged to the other sex, then you pulled the person to whomever the parts belonged to, and you gave them a big wet kiss.

These were a couple of ways of taking care of the hormones. The whole thing was lots of fun, and made you a good kisser for when you'd be dating someone seriously. There were rarely any conflicts that came out of all of this. Yes there would be the occasional jealousy, and sometimes you'd find yourself going out with someone one day, and the next day your close friend would now be going out with the same someone, and you had somebody new. That's how it went, and that's how we learned. Practise, practise. practise.

As we grew older, and cars became available to us, the games changed a little bit. There were still house parties, but they became a little more sophisticated, in that you went with one person, and you left with the same person, if you were lucky. Cars, however, allowed you to reduce the number of players, and restricted the amount of space that was available. They did give you a lot more privacy and a lot more intimacy.

I still feel that the Hormonal Farm would have been a good idea. We might have better adjusted citizens today if they had been given the chance to purge those incessant urges that plague teenagers, and made them go wild.

Screwed-up Summers

Academically, I had done all right so far. I wasn't an all-across-the-board A student, but I did shine in a number of subjects. Things started to get a little rougher in grade ten, and the subjects that were giving me strife were math, and math. I was also having problems with math. You could call it algebra, you could call it geometry, or anything else for that matter, it just didn't sink in. I also didn't like the teacher. I was not alone, and having spoken to a number of my peers in latter years discovered that they felt the same way, concluding that half the problem was the teacher. Not only did I have the un-pleasure of having this person teach me math for two of my four high school years, I also had to take some catch up courses on Saturdays in the winter, and two summers of summer school.

Big, big drag. The only good thing about summer school was that there were some girls to look at. At least you could lust after their bodies as you sat in class. I plugged away at it, and got through grade ten Math.

The following year I continued on with the subject, but the motivation was not there. I did make it through to Christmas with a passing mark, but when it came to the mid-term exam in March, I packed it in. I remember sitting in the auditorium with hundreds of others, poring over the math questions, and not getting anywhere. At one point I paused, handed in my uncompleted exam, and promptly ended my math career. Unfortunately, that did nothing to cure my woes in physics.

At the end of grade eleven, I faced the pleasure of returning to summer school to re-do my Physics course. There was a lot of Math in Physics, wouldn't you know. I remember pissing away those beautiful summer mornings that we just don't get enough of in our part of the world, and then going to my summer job in the afternoon. I didn't pass the Physics course, which was given by the same teacher that had given the course during the school year. What karma! We hated each other's guts.

In the fall I returned to school, and was given a break by the administration. The deal was: if I passed chemistry, they would forgive my physics failure. No more mister nice guy. I was bound and determined to get this monkey off my back. I was fortunate enough to sit at the same lab table as one of my good school friends. He happened to be one of the smartest guys in school. We sat at the very front of the class, which made things like cheating difficult. That year, however, I cast off the gloves, and cheated my way through the whole year. The chemistry teacher had a hard time understanding why I was getting exceptional marks in my school work and abysmal marks in my exams. I looked at him straight in the eye, and told him that exams made me nervous.

I passed Chemistry, and was forgiven for Physics. I stopped taking Math after grade eleven and never looked back. I passed grade twelve and never cheated in another subject. I didn't have to. I was good in the other subjects

A Buck an Hour

I was fifteen coming out of grade eleven. and I felt that it was time to get some summer work, to make some spending money.

I had to go to summer school in the morning. I had a little bit of academic catching up to do. So that left the afternoons and weekends free for work. A good friend of mine who still lived in the old neighborhood said that he would not be able to work at the store where he was a stock boy, any more. He asked me if I was interested, and I said yes.

It was a funny sort of store. They sold kids' things, everything that you could think of from cribs to carriages. The store was in the Italian part of the city, but was run by two Jewish women, who sold stuff that only Anglo-Saxons could afford.

I don't really remember the interview. All I remember is that I got the job. It paid a whopping one dollar an hour. For that hourly sum I was given the title and responsibilities of stock boy. The work involved going down into the basement where stock was kept. I hated that basement. It was one of those old, dark, musty basements with a low ceiling and exposed pipes and joists. On occasion the traps that had been strewn about the place would interrupt a rodent's activities. It was not a pretty basement. That's where the stock was though, and I was the stock boy. I tried not to spend too much time down there. Shipments to the store were relatively small and frequent, so I could sort of blitz the boxes down the stairs. I did however, manage to develop the quasi modo look in the time that I was there. I was in the growing stage of my life in a place that was meant for elves. I also learned to vigorously dislike banging my head on the large wooden support beams that spanned the basement ceiling.

I also had to assemble the items that needed to be assembled. Fortunately I was able to do that sort of work upstairs on the main floor in the back of the shop. There was no air conditioning in the place. The only source of cooling came from giant portable box fans that were placed in the store-front windows, and at the back of the store. On those hot, humid July days it would get really uncomfortable in there. The store-front window area attracted lots of flies. I can't for the life of me figure out why, because the flies were dropping like flies. Every morning I would sweep the store-front window area and collect mountains of flies. Does this sound like some medieval place that I worked in?

I remember working one day, and feeling very, very sluggish. I felt like my feet were in molasses. I worked part of the morning. It was very quiet that day. By the time noon arrived, I had to leave. I just couldn't help feeling that I was going to pass out. I left and shortly after, went to see a doctor. As it turned out, I had contracted German measles. Apart from feeling weak and developing a mild rash, I felt okay. Ironically, German measles were the one thing to avoid when you're pregnant, and so I was not able to go to work until I had completely recovered, because you can't be near pregnant women when you have German measles.

I worked there two summers. The place was a bit ratty in the non-retail areas, but the ladies I worked for were okay. I'm sort of happy my forehead didn't grow from banging my head on those damn floor beams.

Growing Wild

How does one capsulize the late sixties? Prosperity, peace, love, groovy, let it all hang out. They were wonderful times to grow up in. Never had there been so much freedom to do and explore. If you were young, it was fantastic. If you were a parent, it was probably the scariest thing that could happen to you. Old values were being put into the dumpster. Styles were outlandish, attitudes were changing drastically, recreational drugs were invented, and the whole world was moving towards something else. The military look was out, formal attire was out, bras were out, sex was in. I could go on ad infinitum.

I was fifteen and watching all of this happen. It was exciting and I wanted to take part in what was happening. I had been a pretty straight kid up until that time. I liked doing well at school, because that was all that was really being asked of me at that time. "Get good marks, and keep your nose clean", as my father and mother would say. Keeping one's nose clean became more and more difficult, for some reason. It was probably a combination of growing as a teen, and growing with the times. There were many temptations, and I was a very curious kid. I wanted to try almost everything. I would smoke cigarettes until I'd get a headache, which usually didn't take long, and when we could find someone old enough to buy beer, or whiskey, we would get liquored up. Then smokable entertainment became popular, so we could add that to the list of things to try. We were doing what a lot of middle class semi-affluent teens were doing in the late sixties, and loving it.

At one point the partying got a little too wild. We would get together somewhere outside, in the evenings of the summer and the fall, to ingest vast amounts of grain alcohol and smokables. In our frenzied fun we would sometimes overdo it and lose motor and digestive control mostly. It happened to everyone of us at one point or another, and all of us had a run-in with our respective parents.

I remember stumbling home one night and being totally out of control. I had consumed the better portion of a bottle of grain alcohol and had also eaten a big chunk of recreational drugs in my drunken stupor. My friends decided in their drunken stupor that I should be led to the doorstep of my parents home and left to deal with the situation. Well, my parents just didn't know what to think. They were faced with a babbling idiot who was their son. My mother decided to call the doctor who lived next door. The good doctor came over and had a chat with me, not that I was making any sense. I was probably on the verge of alcohol poisoning. He sent me to bed.

The next morning I woke up. I felt terrible, just terrible. I was completely dehydrated, and smelled like barf. I wandered over to the bathroom. I looked in the mirror and noticed that half of my locks were gone. One side of my head still had relatively long hair, and the other side was gone. I was too ill to worry about it, but the hurt of having scared the hell out of my parents, and the close to feeling dead sensation from the previous night's alcohol, was compounded by the deep feeling of loss for my hair. I had betrayed, and I had been betrayed equally. The previous night's events must have really hurt my mother, because she reacted by cutting off my long hair. I had no choice but to go to the barber shop that morning, and have the rest removed.

Some of the wildness had certainly been knocked out of me, but I still think that the haircut was an unnecessary measure. If my parents had only known how bad I felt from the alcohol alone, they would have understood that the medicine was in the bottle all along. The period of difficulty passed, and I eventually found some kind of balance. I had gone somewhat astray, started growing wild, so to speak, and a series of events following that infamous night had a domesticating effect on me.

I didn't stop partying and seeking out greater sensations, but I did temper things somewhat, and I made every effort not to subject my parents to disturbing events.

Legal at Last

The big day finally came up. My sixteenth birthday. I had been looking forward to this for months. Everything to make it happen was planned. I was on my way to get my driver's license.

My birthday fell on a school day that year, so I had to set up the first driving lesson for the end of the day. I already knew the road safety handbook by heart, and I was ready to write the test to get my temporary permit.

The school day finally ended, I rushed to the bus stop and anxiously awaited the bus. It was a short ride to the license bureau, and I felt like telling the bus driver to step on it.

I rushed into the license bureau and sat down to write the road test. It took me no time at all, and before I knew it, I had the temporary permit in my hand. Now I had to wait for the driving school instructor to arrive. I had picked this particular school because the only cars they carried were Mercury Cougars. I had a thing for Mustangs and Cougars. They were essentially the same car, with the badges and grill work changed to protect the innocent.

The driving instructor arrived on time. He was driving a turquoise Cougar with a vinyl top. It looked good and I was looking forward to taking the wheel. I hopped into the passenger seat to introduce myself and we drove off. We drove about one block. The instructor asked me when I had written my test. I told him. Then he asked me if I knew how to drive a car. I said yes. Then he asked me if I wanted to drive. I felt like physically pulling him into the passenger seat as I was getting out to run over to the driver's side of the car. This was going to be better than sex. I had lusted after this for years. I had taken cars out of the garage and into the driveway, I had driven my sister's car from the passenger seat. I had done everything that I could in my life to get behind the wheel of a car, and to drive one down the street. Here was my chance.

The car was already running, and now I was at the wheel. The instructor looked at me and said: "Let's go." I put the car in gear, and off we went. The lesson lasted about an hour, and I had a second one booked for the following day, and my driver's test the day after that. Everything went well. I had started all of this mid-week and by the end of the week I had my driver's license. I was so proud.

Carnival Time

By the time I reached the twelfth grade, I found myself involved in a lot of school activities, usually to the detriment of my studies. I loved to help organize dances and other events, mostly because it was fun to do, and it usually involved a certain amount of excitement.

One of the year's major activities was the winter carnival. The day's activities included indoor and outdoor events. These were topped off by a dance with a live band in the auditorium. Logistically speaking, the carnival was an event that lasted a very short time, but required an enormous amount of planning. We had a team of good people though, and everyone knew what they had to do.

We were going through a series of cold snowy winters at that time, and so the chances of getting real winter weather for the outdoor activities were pretty well guaranteed. One of the new events planned was a car rally in the soccer field. This was my idea and I pushed hard to make it happen. The course would be carved out of the snow that lay in the field. There were already four or five feet of it at the planning stages. The course would be a single lane, single direction one with natural barriers made of, you guessed it, snow. Safety was a big consideration, because we didn't want some kid's disgruntled parents suing the school for having allowed a car to run over said kid. We managed to sell the idea to the principal. I'm sure you could never get away with something like that today. The Treasurer of the student council and I walked through the field and marked out a course. We then had a front end loader come in to carve out the course. It looked great, and the Treasurer tried the course with his Austin Mini.

The course was ready to go, but snowstorm after snowstorm kept filling it in. We were wondering what to do. So just before the big day, the Treasurer and I drove around the course in his car to stamp down the snow. We must have gone around a bizillion times. The Treasurer was getting pretty good at doing the course. He wanted to win the competition on Carnival Day.

The big day was upon us. A lot of work had gone into preparation. In scheduling the events some bright person decided rather arbitrarily that some events should be run simultaneously. The net effect was that the car rally was run at the same time as an in-house talent show featuring some of the boys who were pretty good rockers. This diluted the crowds and made two of the most interesting events take place at the same time. Then there were gaps in the day when virtually nothing interesting would happen. Go figure. I was annoyed, to say the least. The council had forked over big bucks for an event that was far from maximized. I had to be philosophical about the whole thing, and remember that I had a lot of fun putting the rally together. The Treasurer won the timed rally as we both thought he would.

The day's events continued. We had taken the precaution of inviting two local girls' schools for the carnival, which made the ratio very interesting. An autistic could meet a girl on that day.

The preparations for the dance were in order. What was not in the formal schedule was the delivery of the cases of beer into the dressing room at the back of the stage. Someone else with a car was dropping off the beer at a pre-determined time. I was in the dressing room waiting for the delivery. All of this was very tricky to do, because the stage door looked out onto the priests' residence which at the time was part of the school. The principal was a priest. He happened to be on his way to the residence via the dressing room door at the back of the stage. He used to do this to avoid going outside in the cold. When I saw him, I just about soiled my pants. Here he was getting ready to walk out the door that the beer was going to be delivered through. He looked at me with a big smile and asked how the preparations for the evening dance were coming along. I looked at him, smiled, and said that everything was under control. Inside, however, my bodily functions were ready to let go. He sort of waved at me as principals do when they walk by, and went out the door. A few moments later, the beer came in the door. That was one of the closest calls in my academic career.

The dance turned out to be a big, big success, and the carnival turned out to be the last for that school, and probably the best it had ever seen.

Yet another First

Spring had arrived. We could see the end of an era as the school year was coming to an end. We would be the last graduating class from this school. History was being made. I was looking forward to the summer, and not at all to the graduation ball. I was getting my certificate all right, but I just wasn't into ceremonies, and formal things at the time. I was more than happy to see that I had successfully completed this portion of academia, and a little disappointed that I would not have marks high enough to go to what they called pre-university. My mind was ready for pre-university. I desperately wanted to get out of the high school controlled environment. The desperation had not translated into acceptable marks, and so the option was to go to grade thirteen in the year to come, and then go to first year of university.

I was all of sixteen at the time. I now had my driver's license, but no car. I'd sometimes get my parents' car, and I really enjoyed that. Everybody our age wanted a car in those days. Some of us were more fortunate than others. A friend of mine who was just a little bit older was very lucky. He had virtually unlimited access to his mother's '67 Chrysler Newport convertible. It was a beautiful car. It had a big 383 hemi engine which produced rubber on demand. We used to go everywhere in that thing. To top it all off, it came with a credit card, that was to be used for gas only. That's what we used it for, lots and lots of gas.

At that particular time, we were friends dating friends. That seemed to happen a lot in those days. He was dating a very pretty girl, and I was dating her friend. We did a lot of things together, and had a lot of fun. One night that summer, we ended up at my friend's place. His parents were gone of course, and we had lots of beer and cigarettes to go round. It was nice when the girls you went out with liked beer. It meant one stop only, and that was good because we were still under age. Well we partied as we tried to do as much as possible and as the evening wore on we were feeling less and less pain. At one point, my friend disappeared with his girlfriend. They were much closer to each other than my date and I were. But, ah, the miracle of alcohol. It was such an effective mental barrier remover. It was also an effective panty remover. Of course, I'm sounding one sided here, but in reality it takes two to tango and I know that drunken lust travels a two way street.

The kissing went on to petting, and the petting went on to the removal of clothing, and once most of the important garments were removed, we did the big one to each other, on that damned cold tile floor, near the bar, in the basement. How romantic. That was my first time. I was actually late getting started. A good number of people were getting it on at fourteen and some at thirteen. Late or not, it felt great to unleash the hormones, and it was even better in those days, because a lot of the girls took the pill. There was no such thing as Herpes yet, and there was no such thing as AIDS. The worst thing that might happen to you is that you might pick up a case of the crabs. Those were the good old days.

First Car

I was sixteen now, and I had my driver's license. My parents weren't big on lending their car out, and I wanted to get some driving time in.

It just so happened that my brother had a car he wanted to get rid of. He had a '69 forest green Corvette with a 427 fed by three two-barrels. That's not the car he wanted to sell. Even if he wanted to sell it, I couldn't have afforded it. No, the car he was willing to part with was a little more mundane, and a little funkier. It was a 1960 Austin Westminster sedan, with a detuned Healey 3000 straight six. This car had been around for some ten years, and was just about as old as I was. It did however have some redeeming qualities such as luxurious leather upholstery, red no less, and an overdrive transmission that didn't work, mated to a column shifter. The fact that the overdrive was there served as a topic of conversation, more than anything else. It also had a stock functional air scoop. Very in. My brother had intentions of painting the car, and had taped all the chrome bits and had washed off any wax that might have adorned the bodywork, with a solvent.

I wanted the car. The price was right. One hundred dollars. We already knew that the car was in need of knee action shocks, a resonator, and a tune-up, among other things. I made a commitment to buy the car and gave my brother a deposit.

On a super bright late afternoon in the summer, I went over to my brother's place with my father. I had made arrangements to have the car fixed, and my father had consented to join me. I'm pretty sure I needed my father there for insurance purposes. My brother was not at home when we got there, but his girlfriend was. I explained to her what we were going to do and where we were going with the car. There weren't too many shops that sold knee action shock absorbers.

Driving to the shop was a bit scary. There was lots of traffic, and the car's column shifter was cantankerous at the best of times. You had to lead it into another gear before it would go into the gear that you wanted to go into. The car also wallowed tremendously because of the bad shocks. To be perfectly blunt, it was a piece of crap.

There were a few complications, but the car eventually became mine. My first car. I even painted the thing, seeing all the taping had been done. I roller painted it dark blue. It didn't come out too badly either.

It was a bird killing car. I remember taking a couple of my friends out for a drive to one of the passenger's cottage. There would be flocks of birds standing on the road, and I guess the car was either an invisible color, or very silent, but it ate two or three birds at different points along our travels. We only had twenty-five miles to go in one direction.

I also got to take a girl I knew out to the Lane where people went to park. The car turned out to be a good car for making out.

The car turned out to be a better car parked, than running. I wasn't making very much money at the time, and the thing was bleeding me dry. By late summer I'd had it. One day the car didn't want to start, and I asked the brother who had sold it to me if he wanted it back. He took it back, and for not much more than what I had paid for it. That was my first experience at car ownership. It was an experience that taught me a lot about old cars. It would turn out to be the first of many experiences with old cars.

Roll Those Dice

There's an old saying that goes something like this: "Youth was misspent on the young." Something like that anyway. There is quite a bit of truth to that saying, but some of the blame must go to society, and how it views growing up. School, more school and some work and discipline and more school. You've got to be kidding. I remember when I was a teenager, we felt as if adults were often wasting our time, and so, we didn't feel too bad if we on occasion wasted our own time. That was usually the night time.

I remember spending entire evenings and sometimes whole nights sitting with friends and listening to Jimi Hendrix and The Cream over and over till the morning sun would sort of peak through the basement window. My gosh, a lot of time was spent in basements. Maybe that's why I hate them so much now. I wouldn't think twice about building a house without a basement. The music was good, and we'd get into a funk. Just put the album on the turntable, and let the repeat mode do the rest. If the album skipped a bit, we'd throw some change on the tone arm. I'm surprised we never got to hear side two while playing side one. We didn't have much money, and you could only do so much school work, and when it got cold outside, you could only stay out there so long. So we listened to a lot of music, very loud, over and over again. It was great if there were some girls around. You could listen to music and try to make out with the girls.

On a more sedate note, I remember going over to one of my friends' place. He had a small stereo in his room and his parents didn't mind how long we would stay up. They were happy to know that their kids were at home, whatever they were doing. We in effect were not doing a whole lot. We would smoke stinky brown tobacco French cigarettes, or roll up some Dutch blend tobacco, and maybe throw in some wacky to make things more interesting, and we would play sixty or seventy games of Yahtzee, interspersed with games of One Thousand. All the while we would wax philosophical, and listen to a lot of the same records over and over again, until the sun made its way into the sky.

There was something whimsical about nights like that. We were young, had lots of energy to stay up all night, and the exercise was very much like a form of meditation. The repetitiveness was not boring but soothing. And every once in a while, a revelation, as we called them. would surface out of the conversation. I don't think any of these revelations would usurp Plato or Socrates from their philosophical thrones. Nonetheless, whatever we figured out was something we had figured out by ourselves, and that was a refreshing change from the beat-it-into-your-brains methods that were being used at school.

And in the morning frostiness you would make your way home. You smelled like a giant cigarette, and you were looking forward to brushing your teeth with lots of toothpaste and a really super scum removing extra hard bristle toothbrush that you found out in later years scraped all the enamel off your teeth. And you looked forward to hitting the pillow with your head. And you asked yourself why you stayed up all night, and what was the name of that tune.

Fun Jobs

The work world can be a strange place. A lot of people can't wait to get into it from school and others long for school when they get into the workplace. When you're still in school a summer job is a somewhat refreshing change.

I was sixteen and going into grade thirteen in the fall. Summer was on and I had two months to get some work in. I had been lucky to work at school during lunch hours, throughout the year, and I was hoping to get something for the summer. It wasn't easy that summer, and at one point I thought I might not find anything. I even went to a TV interview that dealt with job searching. The night of the interview my eldest brother clued me in on a job that was available at the university.

It was a neat sort of job. It involved running a photocopying machine, and I had my own office, and my own hours, as long as I put in twenty-four hours in a week and spread the time over at least three days. It even paid well. Great job when you're sixteen. I read a lot of books that summer, and I had lots of time for fun activities.

The following year, the year I finally got out of high school, I was all of seventeen. I went to the student employment office to see what was available. I looked around and found a job for a delivery driver. This was for me. I loved driving, and would take anything that involve driving. I was a little worried that they would find me too young, but I decided to give it a shot anyway.

I got to the paint and glass shop that was located downtown. I went in and asked to see the person whose name appeared on the employment slip. The name belonged to one of the owners of the store. He looked just like Chevy Chase. He asked me a few questions about where I had worked in previous summers, and I mentioned the shop where I had worked as a stock boy when I was fifteen. It turned out that this guy knew the two Jewish women that I had worked for, and he gave them a call. I got a great reference, and he hired me. I had worked for two Jewish women, and now I was going to work for two Jewish guys. I was starting to wonder if I should have been born Jewish.

The job was pretty straightforward. I took care of stock, cleaned the store, and delivered paint. The stockroom was in the basement. I was used to that. The basement had a low ceiling. I was used to that. I'd be hitting my head on the floor joists. I never got used to that. Nor did I ever get used to rodent traps. More karma?

The very best part of this job was that I got to deliver paint in the bosses' cars. One of them was a real sled. It was a green Mercury Monterey convertible with white interior and a 289 V8. The other car was a gold Pontiac four door with blah interior and a hefty 350 V8. I was in heaven. Whenever I could, I took the convertible, even on cloudy days, and I'd put the top down as soon as I got in the car. If it was really rainy, I took the Pontiac. It laid a really good patch of rubber, and looked like what the police were driving in our city that year, so people always got out of the way when they saw the bland beast coming. The Merc was a boat. It wouldn't lay rubber, but it was smooth and comfortable.

Thank goodness there were lots of deliveries, because I hated working in the store. It was usually hot as hell in there and certainly not as exciting as being outside, cruising. The only good thing about being inside the store was watching the glass cutters do custom work. It's really something to watch. The glassmen will tell you that glass has a grain to it, and you have to learn to feel glass as you're cutting it.

Good things sometimes come to an end sooner than you want them to. I was cruising down one of the main streets downtown with a full load of paint. I was using the convertible that day. I was driving down the left lane of a three lane one way street. The other two lanes weren't moving. As I approached an intersection, some asshole darted out into the intersection without looking to see if anything was coming. I slammed the brakes on, but there was nothing to be done. The Merc broadsided this car and just sucked its side window out. The whole thing looked like one of those pin-ball machine situations, where the little man with the gun pops out of the side. The Merc wasn't too badly damaged, except that everything on the car was pushed back about one inch. It didn't show too much on a car that was almost nineteen feet long.

Well that sort of screwed up the delivery end of the job. The bosses wanted to keep me on, but only for in-store duties. I couldn't take it. I had been spoiled. It was late summer, and I decided I would get something else to finish off the season.

I'll always remember that Mercury convertible, and so will the boos who owned it. For years after that, whenever I would go in to buy something at that store the guy would look at me, smile, and say to whomever I was with: "That's the kid who wrecked my car." He even delivered a joke like Chevy Chase.

The Black Room

Everyone needs their own space at one time or another. Some have the capacity to create that space in their minds. Others need to define the space physically. In either case, the space is needed.

It was the strangest thing. We were living in a big house, but the place just didn't afford any privacy to speak of. Sure, you could shut a door, but you couldn't shut out the sounds from the rest of the house, and the rest of the house couldn't shut itself out from you. The fact that we were a family of seven living there probably had something to do with it. I envied a lot of my friends because a lot of them inherited entire basements that were finished and were reasonably soundproof.

At one point I got fed up, and I asked my parents if I could have a part of the basement to do something with. They agreed, but I couldn't finish the room in permanent fashion. My parents were a little neurotic about municipal taxes, and they figured if we added rooms in the basement, we might get taxed more.

I was working in a paint shop that summer, and I came up with the concept of the Black Room. This room would not be a permanent room, but it would certainly be visually set apart from the rest of the basement. I began by painting the walls and floor flat black, hence the moniker, Black Room. I then loosely spilled fluorescent orange paint on the floor and painted designs on the walls using the same color. I then made a paper wall, a la Japanese, using checkered black and white wallpaper. Are you getting a feel for the room yet? I then threw in the old RCA stereo console, some couches, a bunch of lamps, fish nets and candles. The room left no one without an opinion.

One of the most interesting things about the room was the walls. Having painted the concrete left sketches of faces where the paint had not covered completely. They were so visible that a friend and I took black and white pictures of the caricatures to see if they would come up well on photographic paper. They did.

The Black Room was used for some nine years, and saw a great number of people during the course of that time. I guess it wasn't too scary because a number of girls that I dated over the course of those years did not mind taking their clothes off in that room. But enough of carnal thoughts. The Black Room also served as a place of conversation and discussion. It hosted many, many music sessions and saw a lot of good talent play within its walls. It even served as an amateur music studio. If those walls could replay the music that was created there.

The Black Room stood silent for another nine years after being used regularly for the first nine. It eventually became a storage area for household goods. When it was time to sell the house, the Black Room was painted a non-committal beige, along with the rest of the basement, in order to make the place more sellable. Fortunately, I still have the photos of the faces that were on the walls, of, the Black Room.

The Wrap-up

Motivation was waning in grade twelve, and virtually non-existent in grade thirteen. I had not gotten the marks to get into pre-university, and the problem was being compounded by the fact that I was thoroughly fed up with the high school environment, where the administration had to deal with twelve-year- olds and twenty-one year olds.

There were some pluses though. It was the first year since grade four that I was in a mixed school. It was so nice to see something other than guys day after day, year after year. It also allowed for a normalization process to take place. After all, some people would be going into the work world at the end of the school year, and it would be good for guys to know what girls think like before they worked with them. So far all they had done was work on them. The other good thing about school that year was that we had to share the place with a bunch of other kids while a school was being built to accommodate the growing student population in our area. That meant that our group started school at about one in the afternoon and finished at around six in the evening, which meant you could stay up late at night, do your homework in the morning, and not be any worse for the wear.

You would think that I would have been ready to get the lead out, but it wasn't happening, however there were lots of girls to chase, and lots of parties to go to. I knew that if I got through the year, my motivation would be right back up there when I would

get into university, and until that time it was a matter of enjoying what was going on, and try to keep the grades up.

Some things I had trouble keeping up, and some things I had difficulty keeping down, especially the thing in my pants. There were some incredibly good looking girls when we were in high school, and I maintain to this day that the girls were prettier then than the ones they're churning out now. Girls like Locker 231. I dubbed her that because I didn't know her name and I never could look at her in the face long enough to ask her. She had this angelic face surrounded by soft blonde hair. She had pearls for teeth, full lips and an immaculate complexion. Her body was the picture of perfection, and she carried herself elegantly.

There were many others of course. I did manage to talk to a number of them, and I managed to get a good number of dates that year. A lot of the guys were very steady. They found a girl that they liked, and stuck with her throughout the year. I was not so steady. I felt like a kid in a candy store. I didn't see the point of just sticking to one type of candy, so to speak. Although it would have been sort of nice to have a steady girlfriend, there was the distinct advantage of meeting more people and finding out more about human nature.

The year came to an end. I was seventeen and fed up with the place. The guidance teacher, who had been my Latin teacher for something like three years at the previous high school, looked at my marks, then looked at me. I looked at him and told him it was imperative that I go to university. He looked at my marks again, and he looked at me inquisitively. I explained to him that it wasn't a brain thing, it was a motivational thing, and I would do well once I got into the environment that I sought.

We did some averaging and came up with a sufficient mark to get me admitted to university. I was very happy.

I proved myself right. At the end of the first year of university I achieved a solid B+ average.

Alma Mater

Wow, what a mess-up! Here I was at last, but the bureaucracy and the confusion were overwhelming. This was what I had been dreaming about for years?

I'm pretty sure this is where I began to shine as an organized person. It was early September, and enrollment time at the university. The beautiful late summer days were now being dedicated to the choosing and planning of subjects for the coming academic year, and organizing a schedule that would, as just about twenty-thousand other students were trying to do, leave Mondays and Fridays open. I was familiar with the campus from having worked in the Administration building a year before. That helped out some. I couldn't believe the stock exchange floor system that was being used for course selection. You made up a list from a university calendar, then you placed your choices on a form, then you waited in line with the rest of the world, then you handed in your form, and someone on the other side of the glass would tell you if your shares were bought or sold. All of this would go on for a week, unless you didn't mind going to school Monday morning, then Monday night, with an early class Tuesday morning, with nothing again till Tuesday night, and then a cluster of classes on Friday afternoon. Well I caught on to this right quickly.

There were no computers being used in those days. Once a class list was filled, you were out of luck for that time slot unless your name was on the list, or even on the reserve list. So during the first three days I attended every possible class in every possible time slot, in every possible subject that I was tempted to take during the course of the year. I would stay just long enough to write my name on the list of students, and I'd look at the prof to see if I liked his or her face, and I'd have a quick look around to see if there were any nice looking chicks, and then I'd leave. When it came time to select the courses and times, I was already on every class list that you could imagine. So what if I was taking sixty or so classes a week. When I handed my final selection form, the person behind the glass just rubber stamped it and I had the schedule that I wanted. As the weeks went on, my name would automatically be removed from the other fifty-four classes as a no-show. Brilliant.

I knew from that point on that I was going to like university a lot. I wasn't there to just fool around. I had done enough of that in high school, and I was out to prove some of my former high school teachers wrong. which I did. This is not to say that I didn't do my share of partying in university. I did, and with gusto. I had a policy though, and that was to party only after the work that had to be completed, was completed. Another policy to which I adhered was to go to class. The third policy was, to listen and take notes. The discipline worked, and I succeeded.

Hard Body

The teen years are difficult on your ego. It's like an ongoing joke, and you're the butt of it. First you start getting into puberty, and the hair starts to come out everywhere. That's the good part. But then your nose pores start to fill up with blackheads, and inevitably, the zits start to mushroom, feeding on the oil cartel that set up shop on your face. Then your arms and legs start to grow, and your torso decides to stay the same size. However your feet and hands decide to go along with your arms and legs, and you're looking a little disproportional, and oily. The girls you want to date are your age, but they have taken the express elevator, and are now towering threateningly over your slick little head. You asked for a little bit of facial and body hair, and look what you got.

We all went through that painful period, but there was one thing you could do when you got out of it. You could breathe a sigh of relief. I was now eighteen, and finishing up my first year of university. I had grown to a respectable height, but as I looked in the mirror, I didn't really like what I saw. There was an inordinate amount of flab on me. I wasn't in bad shape cardio-vascularly speaking, but I had no shape to speak of. I was sort of tall and shapeless.

When the opportunity to work for a construction company came up, I jumped at it. Actually, I had to bug my eldest brother to get me an opportunity. He was managing crews at the time and knew how difficult the work could be. The pay was good though. Four dollars and twenty-seven cents an hour, with plenty of available overtime. That worked out to at least one hundred and sixty dollars a week, and the opportunity to develop that body.

My brother was very good to me. He got me a job as a supply driver for the different crews. That paid a little less, three-fifty an hour, but it was a hell of a lot better than being at the end of a shovel, or carrying five gallon pails of hot tar all over the place. I actually started my career working in cement, with an evil-eyed, but golden-hearted cement finisher. He was an artist, and he taught me to mix the finishing cement just right. It was like finding the grain in wood.

From cement apprentice to site supplier I became. I had an old green Chev three-quarter ton small box pick-up with six-bolt wheels and a bull gear that would pull a house away from its foundation. With it I delivered tall propane tanks, cartons and barrels of tar, barrels of toluene and xylene, and an array of other stuff that was needed by the crews. I also towed tar-melting kettles to construction sites.

Well, I got my wish. The grunt work started at seven in the morning, and sometimes finished at eleven at night. I remember being so tired some nights that I'd just go to bed with my work clothes on and not bother washing. I was only five or six hours from getting all dirty again. There were times when I thought I was going to get crushed by one of the seven hundred and fifty pound barrels of tar. I had to roll these suckers up into the back of the pick up truck using four by fours as a ramp. Did I mention the forty-five gallon barrels of water? One of the thrilling parts of the job was walking up twenty flights of stairs to the rooftop of a building to let the crew know that I had their supplies.

On hot days, I could easily go through two large chocolate milk shakes, about a gallon of water, and four or five Cokes. The stuff just went in and back out through your pores like your bladder had been disconnected.

By the end of the summer I was no longer flabby. My legs turned to rock and my shoulders went wide. No getting sucked in by those Charles Atlas ads. No sir.

I don't think I ever worked so hard in my life, physically of course, and I enjoyed it to a point. I even considered skipping a year of school to make some big bucks. I'm glad my brother changed my mind.

Better the Second Time Around

I was making big bucks now, and working my butt off for them. I was quickly finding out that working on construction was a process of hardening oneself. The transformation from flab to firm was less romantic now. In the first days of work I would come home and just be exhausted. In the morning I would ache all over until I got myself going for an hour or so.

I'm surprised that I didn't grow shorter that summer. The recipe went like this. Tote two five gallon pails of water from inside the building to a barrel. Fill the forty-five gallon drum with water; you can figure out the math. Take a four by eight sheet of plywood, throw some sand on it, throw some Portland cement on the sand, trowel in, make a little volcano, add water, but not too much, add a little bit of latex to it, and trowel till mixture is ready. Shovel mixture into wheelbarrow, and cart to John, the cement finisher who is located somewhere along the foundation of the building. Lesson time. Cement is the product with which you make concrete. Don't make the mixture too liquidy, and don't make it too dry. It was always a challenge getting the stuff to stay in the wheelbarrow as you maneuvered through construction site terrain.

If I wasn't mixing cement for John, I was helping Kurt find leaks on rooftops. Kurt had a second sense for figuring out exactly where a leak was located. He was a well-wisher of sorts, and a fine political scientist. He had it right. The Minister of Health should be a doctor, the Minister of Justice should be a judge, and so on.

All these dollars were burning a hole in my pocket. I was making adult dollars that summer, and I wanted some adult toys. One of my brothers had a '68 Austin Mini 1000. It was royal blue with gray interior. It ran pretty well, but the body had been modified drastically by another car. The entire right rear section from the B pillar back had been pushed in. Two of my brothers had fabricated a sheet metal cycle fender to cover the right rear wheel, otherwise the poor thing would have stuck out naked, seeing the body was now compacted some eight inches towards the inside of the car. The fix worked, and the ownership papers were able to change hands between my brother and me for the sum of two hundred and fifty dollars. That was about a week and a half's pay, after taxes.

This was my second British car, and I was hoping that this time I would get a little more use out of it than my first car. I put in some Austin America seats that were extremely comfortable, and I put in a grille made of mesh that you pour concrete over. The larger seats made it impossible for the rear passengers to put their feet on the floor of the car, and I remember splitting a gut looking at three people sitting in the back seat, like little chipmunks waiting for a treat. Yes the pneumatic suspension could handle five adult passengers. I wouldn't want to hit anything with that many people in the car.

The little sucker was quite a car. It rode on ten inch wheels. I remember buying some brand new snow tires at the store, for the thing, at a cost of ten dollars apiece, plus tax. The car had a high compression engine and it was recommendable to use high-test gasoline. The five gallon tank would cost less than two dollars and fifty cents to fill, and would move the car around for two hundred and fifty miles, on the highway. These, by the way, are all pre-oil crisis statistics.

The Mini was great in the snow. If you did happen to get hung up on something, you just had to pull on the throttle button, put the car in gear, and get out and push. The only time I remember getting stuck with it was in the spring, not in the winter. I remember going parking with a young lady in a tree nursery, late at night. We must have been there for quite a while because the car had a chance to sink down to the axles in mud.

The car was not without its problems, but all in all it served me well. I and others had tons of fun going places in it, and its unique bodywork is probably still part of many a motorist's memories.

You're a Scorpio, aren't you?

The play-offs were on, my first year of university was coming to an end, exams were coming up, spring was in the air, and I didn't feel like watching the play-offs.

It was a beautiful spring evening and I decided to go for a ride in the Mini. I figured I'd just cruise the main streets of the city, and just take in whatever was happening. In our city, you were pretty well guaranteed that nothing much was happening on a weeknight.

At one point, I found myself driving along one of the streets near the university. It was a street that had a few good bars on it. As I approached an intersection, I spotted a young couple hitchhiking. So I decided;" What the hell, let's give them a lift". They weren't going far, and as a matter of fact they were hitching a ride to their pick-up truck which was parked some eight blocks away. In the conversation, they asked me what I was doing. I told them that I wasn't up to very much. So they asked me if I wanted to hop in with them, so that I could show them where a certain place was. They were not familiar with the city, and they had to meet some friends at this particular place. Then they were off to a bar not far from where I had picked them up. So I said okay to the offer.

I parked my car in the spot where the truck had been, and we drove off to the meeting place, which was not too far away. Once we got there, a bunch of people got in the truck and a few of us got relegated to the open back. It was a little cool back there, but these people had some smokables, and the drive to the bar was not a long one. A little frozen and medicated, we parked the truck and proceeded to an upstairs bar that I'd heard a lot about from one of my out of town cousins who was studying at the same university.

I walked up the stairs with the others, and into the warmth of the bar. There was a folk singer playing, and the smoke in the place made me want to have a cigarette. I also wanted a beer. At one point between the going up the stairs and the going into the bar, I lost track of the people that I had come to the bar with. I remember just standing there, minding my own business, taking in the place, and thinking once again about having that beer. All of a sudden, this little finger poked me in the ribs. The little finger was attached to a rather attractive young lady with big bazoobees. As her finger poked me she said: "You're a Scorpio, aren't you?" I said yes.

The conversation continued from there. It turned out that she was working at that bar part-time. She was also an artist. She liked reading Tarot cards. I had no idea what Tarot cards were. I sort of knew what art was, academically speaking. One of my courses that year was a History of Art course. What I couldn't figure out though, was how she knew I was a Scorpio, and why this would have any bearing on anything.

She had a really pretty face and nice teeth. I've always had a thing for nice teeth. She was also a lot of fun to talk to, although she never explained why she approached me with that rather knowing line. We took a table, and drank, and talked, and smoked cigarettes. As the place emptied out, people would leave half-finished bottles of wine on their tables. so we'd grab them up, and drink them down. I guess she had a pretty casual working arrangement because she was able to spend most of the evening with me.

I drove her home that night, and asked her if she wanted to get together again. She did, but she had to work the next night. So we decided to make it a date while she worked at the bar, and I saw her the following night, and many nights after that. She had a small apartment on top of a store in the middle of the city. I remember staying there one night and staying in bed late the next morning only to realize that I was missing my History of Art exam. The prof really didn't like me because I hadn't taken his course seriously during the year. His revenge was to make me write a capsule paper on the course that I had just taken, in lieu of the missed exam. He failed me anyway. Thank goodness it was just a fluff course.

I continued to see the mysterious young lady, but it never developed into anything serious. I remember being in bed one night with her. We were on our way back east for totally different reasons. She was going to an art school and I was going to visit some friends. As we lay in bed she looked at me and told me something rather disturbing. She told me she was in love. Unfortunately, she was in love with a girl.

I was not disappointed that she wasn't in love with me. I'd only known her for a short time. I was probably more disappointed that she didn't feel like swinging both ways any more, because she was a really good lover.

Anyway, I'll always remember the girl who asked me if I was a Scorpio.

Cream Between

I was firm now, thank you. I had worked my butt off during the previous summer in order to build up my body. I got to where I wanted to go with that, and although the money was good, it was time to move on.

So I went to the student employment office, and found something that appealed to me. Driver, flexible hours. I got the referral and went to see what the job entailed.

I was greeted by a guy who looked like a young Viking. He had blonde, blonde hair, and fair, very fair skin. He was tall, quite tall. An impressive person. He spoke with an accent, and I later found out that he was not a Viking, but a Dutch person. He owned and ran an ice cream business. You've seen something like it. Kids with three wheelers selling ice cream on the street. He needed someone to drive the bicycles to the kids that would sell the ice cream, and then pick up the bicycles in the evening. The best part of all of this was that the van to do all this work was a souped-up sand colored Ford van with side exhausts and American mags shod with fat, fat B.F. Goodrich tires. There was also a very good sound system in the truck. I was sold if he was, and he was.

The day didn't start too awfully early, but ran till about ten in the evening. There was a break in the best part of the day, the afternoon. There were kids hired to fill the bikes up in the morning, and to unload them at night. They had to wear parkas to go into the freezers. If you needed to cool off on a hot July day, you just had to walk into the freezer for a few minutes. If you happened to bring a warm Coke in with you, and decided to leave it there, you could go back in five minutes later to find it frozen.

The van was a blast to drive, especially when you had a few bikes to bring back to the warehouse. If the bikes were fastened to the very back section of the hauling trailer, it would make the back end of the van very light. You could go down the road at just about any speed, and lay rubber at your heart's desire. I was just at the right age for stuff like that. One of the hazards of pulling one of those huge trailers was that it would sometimes start to swing like a giant pendulum if you tried to stop to fast. There was nothing more unnerving than to watch a trailer's sides show up alternately in your side mirrors. I never lost a trailer, but some of the other drivers did.

One thing happened that did bug the hell out of me. One day the young boss asked me to drop off his gorgeous girlfriend at home on the way back from a run. It was a pleasure to do so. She was a well endowed girl with a very pretty face, and nice teeth. I couldn't drop her off right at the house because the trailer was too big. So I dropped her off on one of the main streets near her house. I was full of good thoughts as I was pulling away. It was a nice morning, everything was fine, then, bang! The whole truck stopped suddenly. The freezer that was bolted to the floor of the van was now pushing up the back of the driver's seat. The tape deck which used to live under the driver's seat was now at my feet.

What the hell had happened? I looked into the rear-view mirrors. There was a telephone pole where the trailer was supposed to be. The trailer was about three feet wider than the van, and in that part of the city, the streets had been widened, leaving the telephone poles out in the street. I had not noticed that as I was pulling up to drop off the young boss' girlfriend. I did, however notice it on the way out.

I still had not seen the damage to the outside parts, so I went to look. You could have sworn that I'd been going a lot faster, when in fact I had been just pulling out. The trailer was bent. the trailer hitch was pulled out, the bumper was pulled out. What, a, mess!

I was able to get back to the warehouse. I wasn't looking forward to it. When I got there I went into the office and explained what happened. What could he say? People get very philosophical in moments like that. I know I felt really bad.

Everything got fixed, but it was never the same. The van didn't feel right and the trailer never felt right. Eventually they bought something that was a lot better suited to the job.

It turned out to be a funny sort of summer, because I decided after the mishap, to go on to something else, and I did, then I came back to the same job to finish off the summer, because they ended up needing someone.

Ride the Wild Pony

Spring was in the air, late spring actually, and I had already found a job for the summer. I was off on an errand, not too far from home. As I rounded a corner, I saw something that I just had to have. The for sale sign had my name on it, so to speak. The for sale sign was looking out from the wind shield of a cream colored '66 Mustang with a black vinyl top, and black interior. I stopped the Mini I was driving, jumped out and had a closer look.

The car was almost eight years old and had lost some of its virginal appeal. The rear fenders had been reworked, but not masterfully, and the wind shield had a rather long hair-line crack running through it. The interior looked new and the rubber looked new as well.

I had been coveting these cars since their introduction in 1964, and I always dreamed of having one. Might this be my chance?

The owner of the car came out to greet me. He was a short fellow with a Jimmy Dean sort of look to him. He was soft spoken and had evergrease in the skin of his hands. It turned out that he was a mechanic at one of the local dealers. We exchanged the usual formalities and he proceeded to show me the car. It had a 289 V8 sitting under the hood. It was mated to a three speed automatic on the floor. The shifter was surrounded by a full floor console, which was unusual. We started up the engine and blipped it for smoke. We couldn't take the car out for a spin because it was not licensed. I took his word that the car ran fine, and worked out a deal whereby he would take my '68 Mini as part payment, and that I would pay the balance in cash. That meant five hundred in cash, and my car for a total of seven hundred and fifty dollars. I had paid two hundred and fifty for the Mini over a year before. so I figured it was a pretty good deal.

I managed to get the car safetied without getting the wind shield replaced, which at the time saved me a bit of cash. The car did indeed run fine, but had a tendency of overheating. I had noticed that disgusting odor, that smell of antifreeze, when I had run the car before buying it. I figured the previous owner had recently changed the coolant in the rad, and had not given it any more thought. But here it was again, that haunting odor, accompanied by bouts of overheating. I called the previous owner and asked him about it. He pleaded ignorance, stating that he'd never had any problems with the cooling system. So I changed the thermostat, and that didn't work, then I took the thermostat right out, and that didn't help, then I changed the rad, and that didn't help. I was getting pissed off. And that insipid lingering odor made it all worse.

So I stopped worrying about it for a while. The car really move, and was smooth and quiet to drive. One evening I was going to a club to meet some friends. I was just about a block away. As I turned a corner, I laid into the gas pedal a little too hard and left a patch of rubber on the city street. A policeman was right behind me when I did the deed. I hadn't noticed him there. He pulled me over, and proceeded to give me a ticket for littering rubber. Not too much was going right. I didn't have my papers with me and I had some contraband in the car. Fortunately the officer, and most people who didn't know these cars were not aware of a cubby in the console that's extremely visible, but the door to the cubby doesn't open conventionally. I was perspiring heavily as the officer was rummaging through the car. He even put his hand on the cubby door, and tried to open it. He asked me if there were any cubbies that opened in the central console. I pointed to the one that lay towards the back of the console, and told the officer that that was the only cubby I knew of. He let it go at that and told me to drop by the station within twenty four hours to show my papers, as he handed me the fine for making excessive noise. I was very lucky in my misfortune.

I quickly grew disenchanted with the car. One evening, I dropped by a car dealership. The salesperson had a bigger passion for these cars than I, and he asked me if I was willing to unload it. I said yes. We took the car for a spin, and he brought it up to eighty-five miles an hour on one of the hottest evenings of the year. It must have been ninety degrees out. The car overheated a bit, and the salesperson asked me if it was a habitual thing. I gave him the answer that I had received from the person that I had bought it from. He took the car for six hundred and seventy-five dollars. The experience cost me two or three hundred dollars.

One day, a few weeks later, I found myself rummaging through a junkyard. What did I see? The little blue Mini that I had traded in on the Mustang. I guess there is poetic justice after all.

Go West, Young Man

Summer was half over, and a mishap with the truck I had been driving for the ice cream company had sort of turned me off of driving. I decided to have a look at the student employment center to see if there were any opportunities.

It being so late in the season, the pickings were pretty slim. There was, however, a new concept being tried out. It was a national job bank for students. If a position couldn't be filled in locally, the employment centers across the country would post it. If, as a candidate you qualified, the center where you applied would send you to where the job was. So I looked at the board, and there it was: Bartender, Smokey's Pizza, Pine Gorge. They also needed a pizza chef. I couldn't stand the smell of pizza at the time. let alone cook one, but I did have bar tending experience which I had acquired working at university bars. I looked at the guy in the student employment center, and I said to him that I would be happy to take the job. He looked at me and said that normally they would send you out by the least expensive mode of transportation, but seeing the vacancy had to be filled quickly, they would send me there by plane. If I stayed there a minimum of eight weeks, they would pay for my way back. That was the deal. I said okay.

One or two days later I found myself on a plane that would take me two-and-a-half thousand miles away to be a bartender in a Smokey's Pizza. The guy sitting next to me turned out to be the pizza chef.

After a transfer on the way, we finally made it to Pine Gorge, a lumber town where men are men. The pizza chef and I made it to the Smokey's Pizza to introduce ourselves to the manager. He greeted us and went on to explain our duties. He looked at me and said that both of us would be bartenders, and pizza chefs. I didn't like that idea, as that was not the original deal, but I didn't say anything.

My cohort and I had to find lodging. Someone in the restaurant offered to put us up until we found something. By this time. we were both getting tired. I started mulling over what the manager had said about being a bartender sometimes and being a pizza chef at other times. The idea was becoming less and less appealing as I worked it over in my tired head. It got to the point where I didn't like the idea at all. The only obligation I had was to stay for eight weeks if I wanted to get a free ride back home.

I walked over to the train station. It wasn't too far away. I went in and inquired about departures, and prices. It turned out that I could get a coach fare back to the east for about sixty dollars. I bought a ticket, and I sat down. The scene that took place in the station could have been in a one act play. There were three main characters. There was an older hippie with long silver hair and a beard, a tall guy in a leather motorcycle jacket and a pair of jeans, and me. The tall guy was soaked to the bones from riding his Harley Sportster. He had been riding in the rain for hours, and was on his way to the valley, which I knew nothing about at the time. The older hippie was going somewhere else, by train.

We all got to talking, because there was a lot of time to kill. With one thing leading to another I found myself having been talked in to going to the valley with the tall guy on the Harley. We had walked over to the snowmobile dealer and had bought me a cheap snowmobile helmet just to say that I was legal, riding on the bike. We were back at the station and the older hippie kept telling me I should quit smoking now, and that my lungs would be pink again in no time at all. There was no way in my mind that I was going to try to stop smoking that day.

I sat there and gave the motorcycle ride more thought. I had a pretty heavy pack sack that I would have to carry on my back wherever we were going, which was hundreds of miles away. I gave that some serious thought, because I had injured my back working on construction the year before. I'd be in a fine pickle if I couldn't even walk after a few hundred miles on the back of a Harley Sportster. Upon serious reflection in that train station, I decided that the bike adventure would have been thrilling, but it would not happen then and there. I gave the tall guy the cheap helmet that I had bought for the trip and wished him well. I thanked the older hippie for his advice and said that I would follow my own that day.

The train finally arrived, and I hopped on it. There were a million thoughts going through my head. For now though, the plan was to stay on that train, and live with the consequences of my decision. I know I did feel like I was cheating myself out of an adventure, but as it turned out that fateful day, no matter what I decided, I would be in for an adventure. It was one of those existential moments and as with existential moments, you can't do a hell of a lot about them.

The train ride was a hoot. Five days of travel with a heterogeneous bunch like you find only on a train made the adventure more complete.

I'll always remember the look of disappointment on my father's face. He had been very proud to see me take on this challenge, and now I was back prematurely. I guess he had psyched himself up to not see me for a while. I felt a little sorry too, but that's the way it was, and I had thought about all these things before hopping on the train back. My mother, on the other hand was happy to see me. She had not liked the idea of my going out west in the first place.

The next day I went back to where I had been working to see if I could get some work. They were very happy to have me back. One of the other guys had wrecked one of the vans while I was away. So I got back into it and finished the summer back where I had started.

Silly Swede

Reputation will take you so far. That's what I found out about Volvos.

When I got rid of my '66 Mustang, I went from the frying pan to the fire. I had just gotten back from a quick trip out west and I needed a set of wheels for the coming season. I did have the motorcycle but it would not keep me warm in the months to come. I started looking at the ads in the paper to see what I could line up. I found a listing for an older Volvo 544, with a B-18 engine. These were rather culty cars, and there were still quite a few around at the time. A good friend of mine was a Volvo nut. He had owned a bunch of them, and knew the cars well. I asked him to come and see this particular example to see what he thought.

As it turned out, the car we went to see was one of the first that my friend had owned. It had come out of the factory as a white car, but now sported a color called Rolls-Royce Gold. It had suffered an accident. but did not look worse for the wear. It had been bondoed up and painted, and looked fine. The front bumper was removed and a pair of funky chrome kitchen chair rung-like things had been put there instead. It made the car legal.

I liked it and I bought it for something like seven hundred dollars. The thing had a bizzillion miles on it, but these cars had a reputation for durability. And they were durable. You could easily get a couple of hundred thousand miles out of the car, and those free spinning 1.8 litter engines were usually good for at least one hundred and fifty thousand miles.

The car was running on two ply razor blades, so I went to the wrecker's and picked up four fat radials that had adorned a Citroen at one time. Then I bought the requisite moon chromed hubcaps. You just had to have the moons to make the car complete.

The car was really fun to drive. It felt solid like a tank, and it had that retro look to it. The styling dated back to the mid-forties. On my twentieth birthday, I drove over to a friend's place to pick his girlfriend and him up. We were off to the movies. When we got into the car, I started it up. It started to sputter. I thought nothing of it. Those damn S.U. carbs were probably out of sync again. It turned out to be more than that.

It turned out that the rings had let go in one of the cylinders. We found out by mashing the throttle on the highway. I never had heard the sound of an engine blowing up before. Amazingly enough, we were able to get the car to my friend's Volvo barn outside the city. They do make tough engines when you think about it. The car made awful sounds all the way, and people were really wondering what was going on when we'd get to a stoplight.

We spent an entire weekend replacing the engine. To make things simple, we yanked an entire drive train from a spares car that was at the barn and put it in my car. I have to admire my friend's tolerance for pain. He spent most of the weekend on a cold concrete floor in an unheated barn while I spent a good chunk of the weekend helping from the top, and puking every once in a while from having partied too much the night before and smelling antifreeze. We managed to get the car rolling by late Sunday afternoon. The last pieces to go on were a makeshift series of about twenty washers that we placed on the clutch connector shaft to give the clutch pedal the play it needed. The operation was a success, and the car got me through the winter.

Parts were prohibitively expensive, and the car, although it always ran, nickel-and-dimed me to death. The final blow was when the king pins that had been replaced at a cost of nearly two hundred dollars seized. The mechanic had neglected to grease them because he had heard that you never had to grease a Volvo. The steering got progressively stiffer until it got to the point where the steering wheel would turn no more, even using two hands.

We had a ton of fun burying the Volvo. My friend and I went back to the barn where he kept his old cars. The dirt road that led to the barn crossed a little stream. The bridge that spanned the stream was elevated. So we'd take turns running the car up to about sixty miles an hour and we'd get the car airborne for some twenty or thirty feet, then the car would plow out the road upon landing. They do make tough cars at Volvo.

Going my Way?

When you're young, you've got all the time in the world, and you've got the world by the balls, and you've got the balls to take on the world.

I was eighteen, and had two years of university under my belt. If I were to continue, I would be nineteen coming out of university, or twenty if I were to take an honors program. I took a good look at my life clock and concluded that it was time for a hiatus in my formal studies. I had been at school all of my life, and now I wanted to taste something different.

One day, in early fall, I bumped into an old friend. We had been neighbors as kids. We reminisced a little, and I asked him what he'd been doing during the summer. He mentioned that he'd been driving a cab, and that the money was good. I had no immediate prospects, so I followed up on the cab idea. I loved driving, and I thought the experience would be good, in that I would meet lots of different people, and learn about life in the adult world. It turned out to be quite an education.

I still remember my first night. I had decided to work evenings because the money was better, and the traffic was lesser. I was still living at home at the time. Working in the evenings gave me a form of privacy that was not possible otherwise. My schedule was so unorthodox that I actually simulated living away from home, even though I had not moved out. Because I was working, my parents charged me a nominal sum to live at home. I thought that was fair. Back to the first night of work. It was early fall and I got to the stand. Vactor, a tall gentleman with a very heavy accent passed me the keys to a car, and wished me good luck. He was basically telling me that I was about to learn the business by fire. I took the car out for a quick spin and concluded that he was passing me a piece of crap. If I was going to make any money at this business, I needed a good set of wheels. So I drove back and told the guy that the car was a piece of crap, and that I wanted a good car. From that point on there was no more bs, and I was very proud to have nipped that situation in the bud.

I left with a good car, and didn't know what to do. The dispatcher was calling out all kinds of things and you could hear the other drivers returning cryptic messages to the dispatcher. It made me nervous as hell. I decided to just drive around for a while, and get a feel for the car. At one point, I just drove to a side street, and placed the car in park with the engine idling. I listened to the dispatcher on the radio to see if I could make sense of what was going on. I knew that if I was going to make any money, I would have to learn what was going on. As I was sitting there, minding my own business, one of the car doors opened, and a voice from outside asked if I was free. I was stunned. My first fare, and here I was, actually trying to avoid this kind of stuff. The person attached to the voice hopped in and gave me an address. We drove off, and that was my first fare. I was thrilled. Money was coming in instead of going out and I liked the feeling.

I finally got the nerve to talk to the dispatcher and explained briefly that I was new. He turned out to be a very patient person, and he helped me out during those first nights. I quickly learned that the dispatcher was God's right hand man. If you treated the dispatcher right, or even helped him out with a stale call, he had the power to make your life much easier. And so the lessons of life at the school of reality were being taught. It was wise and lucrative to be attentive. You learned to keep the microphone in your lap, and your finger on the trigger. If you wanted to get a freebie, you had to be fast, and you needed a good radio. You could actually make more money with a lousy car that had a good strong radio, than you could with a good car that had a lousy radio.

I was in business for myself. I rented the car on a nightly basis, six nights a week was the minimum, and Sundays were free. The shifts were long. You had the car from four in the afternoon, to four in the morning. You needed to work a minimum of ten hours a night, six nights a week to make a good buck. Otherwise you were wasting your time.

My first night turned out to be great. Beginner's luck was on my side. After that first fare, I didn't stop all evening. The adrenaline was rushing through my veins, and the money was rolling in. Little did I know that I would do this type of work, on and off for the next eight years.

Meet You at the Eiffel Tower

Not many businesses offered the flexibility that this one did. You could leave on one day's notice, and you could come back on one day's notice. I made it a point to take full advantage of that feature.

It was summertime, and one of my brothers, who was a teacher at the time decided that he would go to Europe for a month or so. I thought that to be a pretty exciting adventure.

My oldest brother and I drove the brother who was taking the trip out to the airport. There was a little bit of time to kill, so we went to the bar. While sipping on a beer, an idea came into my mind. Why not try to join my brother in Europe? So this was the deal. He was flying that day, which was a Friday. I would try to make arrangements to meet him in Paris on the following Friday, at the base of the northern leg of the Eiffel Tower.

All of this was rather whimsical. I had no passport, no ticket reservation, no Eurail pass, no nothing, except the cash and the willingness to go.

My brother would call me from Europe mid-week to see if I had managed to make all of the arrangements to join him in Paris. What a week it turned out to be. I managed to get a temporary passport, and a Eurail pass. I needed to book a flight. I called all the airlines to see what I could get at a decent price. Fortunately, I was considered a student, and was able to get a reduced fare with Air France, flying in to Paris. Once I had the ticket and the passport, I went to the taxi broker that I was working with at the time, and told him that I was going to be gone for a while. Taxi brokers were used to this sort of thing. A lot of the fellows my age would work their butts off all summer and go to exotic places like Sri Lanka in the winter. It was the thing to do in those days.

During the mid-week trans-Atlantic call with my brother, I confirmed that I would be at the Eiffel Tower on Friday morning. It was Thursday afternoon, and my parents were driving me to what was then the country's largest city so that I could catch my flight. We met up with my eldest brother. We had dinner, and my parents headed back home. With pack sack on my back, my brother gave me a ride to the airport on his motorcycle. It was a beautiful early evening, and the temperature was great for the ride to the airport.

So there we were again, my eldest brother and I, having a beer at the same bar where we'd had a drink the week before. This time, I was leaving for Europe. The flight was on time, and I took advantage of the overnight flight to rest from the week that had just passed.

I arrived the next morning at the all new Charles de Gaulle airport. I had never been to Europe and was looking forward to the trip with my brother. After a slightly confusing information gathering session at the airport, I managed to get on a bus that would take me to a point not too far from the Eiffel Tower. It was interesting to see the differences in architecture on the way in from the airport. The cars were funky, the women were beautiful, the drivers were crazy, and the city trees had all their branches lopped off.

Well I got to the Eiffel Tower. As a matter of fact I got there an hour early. So did my brother. We met at the base of the north leg of the Tower, as we had planned, one week before.

California Here We Come

It was late August, and the Rabbit was brand new. My friend had just sold his Porsche 914 and had remained true to German cars by picking up one of these new-fangled replacements for the defunct, in our markets anyway, Beetle. The Rabbit was, as the name implies, quick.

My friend was at university that year, and I was still continuing my education at the real world school, concentrating on short spurts of work, and longer periods of travel. University wasn't starting for a month or so, and as a result of a rather spontaneous decision, we decided to pack the car with camping gear, some beer, and a few cans of sardines. The destination, California.

Our jaunt would take us across North America, and so it was imperative that we make good time, so that we might take advantage of the late summer sun and sand on the west coast. We decided to do the trip non-stop, at least to get out there. The plan was that we would drive one tank each, and alternate at every fill-up.

Our trip took us first through Detroit, then to Chicago. From there we had decided that we would travel south-westward to arrive sometime later, in San Francisco. The first leg of the trip took us to a Holiday Inn. Once there, we visited the bar. Not such a good idea, seeing we had some three thousand miles left to go.

Our energy level was still pretty high, and we were sticking to our one tank shifts. Driving through Detroit had been quite the experience, and driving through Chicago proved to be an experience also. Whenever we would be driving through one of these major centers, we would wonder why they packed so many people into one place, and why so many people would want to be packed in one place. Thank goodness they had good highways to get through the cities.

After Chicago things started to get pretty flat and the roads were pretty straight. At one point we were tempted to tie the steering wheel to the side-rear-view mirror, and to place a rock on the gas pedal. It was the era of the double nickel, and we noticed cars being pulled over for doing sixty-five miles an hour, so we literally and figuratively had to keep it on the straight and narrow. Nice countryside though. I wasn't really sure that rocks actually balanced on pointy peaks, just like in the cowboy movies. Now I know. One annoying thing about driving in the mid-west is that on those long straight four lane highways, the back of your head can get burned off by the headlights of a car that might be miles away.

We ever-onwarded into Utah, and Salt Lake City. That place must be something like ten thousand feet below sea level. My friend and I both noticed that we seemed to be driving downhill for something like an hour. It felt like we were going into an abyss, and in the pre-dawn night, wondered if we were ever going to get back up to a normal altitude. The Bonneville Flats were everything they said they would be, and Reno was offering inexpensive breakfasts, but we didn't stop.

Our energy was waning. It was harder and harder to do full-tank shifts, which, at the speeds we were going, would keep us at the wheel for four, sometimes five hours. At one point, my friend looked at me, and said that he would need toothpicks to keep his eyes open, and I believed him. His eyes looked like little puffy wrinkled bags that just stayed open enough to let a pair of bloodshot glassy white marbles peer aimlessly outward. I was not in much better shape. So we decided to do two hour shifts, and that got us through.

We made it to Pacifica Beach, just south of San Francisco in fifty-six hours. We were very tired, and the ocean waters felt really, really good on our aching bodies. We took it easy after that. We had made it, and promised each other that we would never, never do that in one shot, again.

Motorcycle Mania

Everybody we knew had them. It was the era of the motorcycle. The Japanese bikes were dominating the market that they had entered in the sixties, and now in the early seventies, had become household names.

I'd had four small motorcycles, and one slightly larger Honda 350 twin that was more of a workhorse than anything else. I wanted something bigger now, and the choices for road bikes were numerous. In smaller road bikes two-strokes were still popular. They didn't sound as good as the four-strokes, but they were tough as nails, and they loved to run in the cold.

I was torn between the Yamaha 400 twin and the Suzuki 380 triple. A good friend of mine introduced me to his 380, with straight bars, and not much else. I was sold, but so was my eldest brother, who beat me to the punch, and bought his, one year before I did.

The bike shop I went to was just opening up. The owners were really nice. We swung a deal one winter day, whereby I would give them a certain amount of cash each month until the bike was paid off. They had no problem with that, and in the spring of '76, I picked up my new set of wheels. I was able to join two of my friends who already had picked up their bikes in the fall. One of them had a Suzuki 550 triple, and the other had a Suzuki 500 twin. The first trip for the new bike was on an Easter weekend. Straight out of the shop, and off the bike was on a six hundred mile trip to the oldest city in the country. It was about eighty degrees when we left on Good Friday, and just above freezing when we got to our destination the next morning. We went through the wall of cold where the temperature changed by about thirty degrees inside of a mile. The same thing happened on the way back, except that we drove through a wall of heat.

It was the year of the Olympics, and I did a lot of traveling to the east coast that summer. I'll always remember a trip back home that was riddled with misadventures. It was a two-part trip. Along the way I was stopped for speeding. I explained to the officer that I had been riding slowly for some time and that he happened to catch me at a point when I was cleaning out the carbon, so to speak. The officer didn't buy the story, and gave me a ticket which I could, and did, pay on the spot. Not much later, my gummy rubber boots fell off the bike. I never noticed their absence till I met with some rain. Not too much later I lost a container of injector oil which I was relying on for future use. I was losing a lot of things on the first part of that trip.

On the second day, I must have put on my rain suit a dozen times, until the thing fell apart. I fought sixty-mile-an-hour winds. Just nearing a major centre, I ran out of fuel. The station was one exit back. Time for a walk. Once fueled up, I crossed my fingers and forged ahead. As I prepared for yet another stop, oops, my shift lever had disappeared. The engine vibrations had gradually worked the lever loose. At the gas station, I tried to negotiate with the kid running the place for his vice-grips. The price kept going up instead of down, so I let the kid keep his vice-grips. I pulled a pair of small pliers from my bike's tool kit, and stored them in my pocket for easy access as I rode along. It was a rather hair-raising experience having to crouch down and shift the bike with a pair of pliers while crossing a city of three million inhabitants, but I made it all the way home that day, some 650 miles.

I stood in the shower until the tank was empty. I had been on my motorcycle for sixteen hours. My butt was about to fall off, and so were my shoulders. After showering, I walked down to the garage to remove the shift lever from my Yamaha scooter. It was gone. It turned out that my brother had used it on his bike, because he had lost his shifter on the same weekend.

I rode that motorcycle a lot that summer, something like seven thousand miles. In the fall, I traded it on a liquid-cooled 750 Suzuki two-stroke. I was so anxious to get that one on the road that I took delivery of it in the middle of winter, and because we had a fairly dry one that year, started riding in February. I must have been crazy. I would have needed a snowmobile suit just to keep warm. I remember my knee caps going white on me.

This was my seventh motorcycle. Up to that point, I hadn't taken any bad spills on bikes. I felt that I'd been pretty lucky, because everyone we knew had taken at least one spill on their bikes, and some had been less fortunate than others. So I decided to sell the bike. The end of the season was approaching and I thought I could still get a sale in at a fair price. This was not to be. One night, coming back from a club, I lost the bike going into a turn. It was one of the most unpleasant feelings I have ever felt. The bike and I were separated, and I felt my body skid along the road like a jet plane touching down more than the requisite once. My hands and feet were in constant contact with the pavement, and my knees and chest kept bobbing up and down like a long plank being carried at both ends. As I was sliding, I kept hoping that the unpleasant experience would end soon. It may have lasted a few seconds, but felt like forever.

I was very fortunate not to be hurt. I picked myself up, picked the bike up, and tried not to cry. I got to a phone, called my oldest brother up, and asked if he'd call a tow truck and come and pick me up. That was my last bike. I've ridden them since, but I've never had a solid urge to pick one up again.

The Pad

At one point in time, most people feel a need for their own space. As you grow up, a natural desire emerges. To sever the invisible umbilical cord is a critical step, more in its timing than in its execution.

I was twenty-two at the time that I decided to make a move. A number of my friends were on their own, and still a good number were still living at home. A furnished basement apartment became available in the neighborhood. It was located in a house that belonged to my good friend's parents. I had clued in another friend to this place sometime before when he and his girlfriend were in search of an apartment. They lived there for quite a stretch, but had now moved on to other things, and other places. I knew the place well, as did our entire circle of friends. The place had seen a lot of parties, art sessions, and a variety of other activities.

For two hundred bucks a month I could have the one bedroom apartment, heat and light included. I took it, and fixed it up to my liking on a very slim budget. It was only a couple of blocks from my parents' place, but it gave me the privacy, and the autonomy that I desired at the time.

One of the best things about living there was that you could play the stereo as loud as you could bear it from morning to about eleven at night. Not that the place was soundproof, but that was the arrangement. One of the worst things was that the apartment was located in yet another basement. The place was well kept, but there was an ongoing fight with earwigs, those disgusting little creatures that get into everything. They liked the apartment because it was cool in the summer. The other thing that used to get to me was that the fridge would freeze everything but alcoholic beverages. In the morning you'd have cereal with milky white ice crystals on top. That was your milk. Apart from those niggles, the place was comfortable.

The apartment served as a drop-in center for many of my friends. I was in to making beer at the time, and so were many others. It was very easy to make, and everyone loved to drink the different varieties that we would make. The very best thing about home made beer, apart from its affordability, was that you could drink a whack of it and usually not get a headache. The biggest problem with home made beer was keeping it. I remember people dropping by on bottling day and drinking the entire batch before it even got bottled. Bottling was just a formality. It allowed the beer to become effervescent. Flat beer never stopped any of my friends from drinking. Actually, flat beer tastes a little like a red semi-sweet wine. In fact, beer is technically a wine.

Apart from being used as a brewery, the place was often used as a center for the arts. My friend next door, in the other part of the basement, whose parents owned the house, was studying art at school. He introduced a number of us to painting with oils and acrylics. It was not unusual to stay up to all hours of the night endeavoring to create the ultimate masterpiece. It was an activity that relied on artificial stimuli, and we all enjoyed the stimuli as much as the painting.

I ended up staying in that apartment for about ten months. A renewed desire to return to academia overcame me, and I couldn't afford to keep the place. Living in that apartment taught me a few things. It taught me that freedom has a price. It also taught me that I hate living in basements, and if at all humanly possible, I will avoid living in a basement ever again.

Turning Points

There are natural turning points in our lives. We can't avoid them, and in fact we should embrace them, at least the ones that we have control over. Sometimes, we make a decision that will seem very serious to us. Sometimes it is. Often, circumstances change the course and results of a decision that we make. The important thing to remember is that we should make decisions, we should continually venture, and take calculated risks. If the outcome of our decisions is negative, then we should do everything in our power to correct it. If the outcome of our decision is positive, we should enjoy it and expand on it.

It was one of the most powerful moments in my life. Anger, frustration, and fear were foremost in my mind. I was angry with myself, I was frustrated with what I was doing, and I was deathly afraid that if I didn't do something, I would be stuck in a situation that I had created, and did not see a way out of.

I was twenty-three years old. I had been going to the school of reality for some five years. I had seen every kind of person imaginable, from the richest to the poorest, from the brightest to the dullest, from the luckiest to the most deprived. I had been driving a taxi cab, on and off, for five years. I had traveled, and lived with other people my age. I had satisfied the youthful curiosity that had emerged some five years earlier. I came to the realization that if I didn't break out of the life that I was leading, the lesson would be lost, and I would become the lesson for someone else. I had only wanted to taste the school of reality, to give me time to grow up.

I sat there in the car, one deadly-quiet night, and said to myself: "What are you doing?" That night, I promised myself that I would return to school in the fall, and that I would finish what I had started, and I'd give myself the opportunity for something better.

That fall I returned to my studies, and I completed my first undergraduate degree. It felt good. I had accomplished something that I had set out to do. I had originally wanted to wander from studies because I felt I would be coming out of school too young, and too green. It took an enormous amount of will power to complete the original plan, but I did.

I found no great opportunities upon graduation, so I drove a cab for yet another year. Then I decided to return once again to school to pursue a second degree. Best marks yet. That was a tough year. There were forty hours a week of actual class time. I was working Saturday and Sunday nights. That left Friday nights to go out and have a good time.

I earned my second undergraduate degree in 1980, some eight years after starting off university. Amazingly enough, I learned self-discipline and determination in the working world, and then I applied those things to the world of academia. Two different schools, same lessons.

That year marked the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one.

Halcyon Daze

Growing up Canadian

by

N. A. Dalbec

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Making copies of any part of this book for any purpose is not permitted.

For information, contact N. A. Dalbec, Author, Suite 707, 555 Jervis Street., Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6E 4N1

ISBN: 978-0-9730714-4-3, issued by Library and Archives Canada
