Monday, August 30, 2010

The Steps

The Steps. North-facing, one metre outside the wartime house.

We were a front-door family. One of the most important memories from my life in Shaughnessy Heights happened on the front steps. In Shaughnessy Heights nobody said, “the porch.” It was always “the Steps.” Just like nobody ever said “sofa” or “couch”, it was “the chesterfield.” We had our own lingo.

The Steps was the place where we would gather. Anyone’s steps would do. The steps were made of two-by-fours. Nothing was pressure-treated in those days. There was no indoor-outdoor carpet and no rubber runners. Some steps were painted. There was really just one step to a landing which was a bit wider than the door, and then you were in. Some people had railings on the sides, but not everyone. Eventually, people started replacing the Steps with more upscale decorative and practical improvements. Wrought iron railing came much later. First, some people got poured cement steps and some got the Barkman steps with the little concrete pimples all over. Our house was a holdout. Our steps were replaced with wood, at least once, before the concrete steps came.

It is on the wooden steps, facing north, in the hot summer shade of the wartime house that many of my most pensive memories lay. I would stare at the cracked frontis-stone of poured cement that butted up to the step. Its diagonal crack had grass growing through it in the middle of July. I knew every pebble that was locked into the mix. I spent hours pouting and staring at that hunk of cement, lusting after the good fortune of the family across the street. I was trying to look sad and forlorn, aching with every theatrical muscle of my body and pushing forth my need with every paranormal sensory perceptual gift I was granted to get them to invite me with them. From that step, I’d watch them load a Coleman cooler, blankets, kids, toys, anything a good family would need for an afternoon at the beach. Stonewall Beach.

Take me! Invite me!

The waves of my thoughts would waft across the street as I tried to make eye contact and plead for an invitation to the beach party.

Pity me! You know I’m fun! Let me come too!

The girls, my so-called friends, would pass a smug glance my way, smiling, no, laughing happily, very unlike usual sisterly behaviour, as they piled into the car and drove west to the gravel at Keewatin and then off, north of the city, to the man-made pond at Stonewall. It would have been about 90 degrees in the shade that day. The resentment seethed out of me from those wooden steps after they pulled away and my pitiful theatrics dissolved into a bitter, hard-done-by attitude. I became snarly. I usually imagined myself as a conciliatory girl. A helpful girl. But on those steps, more than once, my less gracious sides were staged.

Later, when I was older, and paying my own way in life, I would return to Shaughnessy Heights to see my parents, and there would still be reversions to the former patterns of family angst. Frequently, situations would arise and my personal turmoil would spill back into that house and out again onto the Steps. There, where as a preteen playing fruits, I had chosen gooseberries and listened triumphantly to apples oranges peaches pears plums bananas as my neighborhood friends would try to guess my fruit so I could jump off the Steps and race them around the house, I sat again, with my mother. For some reason, I was in a fury, and for some other reason, she was sitting beside me in an infuriating calm. She wanted to get me through my fury, but it was not to be. I was fighting mad. Beyond snarly. I was so angry, I pulled my glasses off my face and wrang them into mangled snapping plastic trash, then threw them onto the same piece of concrete that had fed my sullenness many years before. The steps were the stage for poignant moments as well as drama. It was not a private stage being only a scant ten paces from the sidewalk, and the bus stop, for that matter. We had no front fence. What happened on the Steps was community theatre for neighbours and passers by. Except for that one time.

I had been commuting to Fort Garry Campus for a year by the time that hot summer was born. I was starting to realize that Shaughnessy Heights was indeed a cove, an urban cove, a mixed-up urban cove that was hard to describe to others. I’d never bother to explain it. I’d just say, “The North End,” when I told people where I lived, and their eyes would roll back and they’d imagine some mythical place they’d never been and abruptly change the subject.

I had a year of university under my belt and after first year had ended I landed the dream summer job; I became a Park Lady for the City of Winnipeg Parks and Recreation Department. I navigated the city on my ten-speed, from Shaughnessy Heights, jumping crumbling pavement along Selkirk to McPhillips, down Logan to my nest of youngsters at Roosevelt Park on Elgin and Isabel in the city’s core. We had a handsome Pool Man, Harry, another North Ender who was also unfazed by the reputation that preceded this little inner city playground. I received my first eye witness experience with solvent sniffing that summer, and I also met hundreds of kids who were game to sing and dance and cut and paste and roar with laughter over and over again. One day we were given a chance to leave the concrete wading pool for an overnight trip and take a school bus to Birds Hill Park, wherever that was, and go camping and swimming and, man alive, we would do it!

All Park Ladies wore these outfits, homemade of indestructible polyester fabric that was handed to every Park Lady, courtesy of the City of Winnipeg, on their first day of training. We had to buy the pattern and had five days to make our Park Lady outfit. Most people hired a seamstress, but I made my own. Green shorts under a sleeveless goldish-orange shift. No hat. I had about twenty kids in my charge for the beach trip and somehow kept track of them. They filled pop cans and plastic bags with hundreds, maybe thousands of frogs, babies, not long since tadpoles, and threw them into the biffies where people, kids and grownups, entering from the blazing sun and blinded in the contrast of the dark building, stepped on them barefoot, not realizing what they were, and exited in screams and even nausea. I experienced my first official “sexual abuse” instance where one kid’s penis got zipped into his fly when a few of the other boys, probably playing doctor, were interrupted. The boss of our field trip probably had to file an official report. The poor kid had to go to Emergency to get unstuck, and I stayed camping with the rest of them. And we swam again the next day. It was 93 in the shade. We bussed back to the city to drop the kids off at Roosevelt Park, and I rode my ten-speed back into Shaughnessy Heights. I was a mess. My skin clashed with my Park Lady outfit. This was in the days before sunscreen was invented. My freckles were popping and the skin between them was redder than a raspberry. The part of my hair on my scalp was red. The tops of my ears and the tops of my feet were already blistered. It wasn’t my first sunburn but it was serious. I must have slept.

I must have dreamed. I woke. I felt really rough. Fever. Logic would have told me to have a cool bath, but once you pass puberty, your parents stop looking after you in Shaughnessy Heights, and you are not quite sure how to look after yourself. I was still wearing my Park Lady outfit and had been sleeping on the chesterfield in the front room. It would have been too hot upstairs. I was delirious. Again. This was not my first encounter with delirium. It was my second.

The first time I was delirious I had the flu and was about thirteen. I had been asleep and I suddenly woke on the same chesterfield and started raving. My brother and sister thought it was hilarious. I was the circus act of the day. My dad had just gotten home from work. He still smelled of fuel oil, and he was the first to realize that I was speaking from another realm. Maybe what he’d witnessed during the war twigged his awareness. He came over to me.

“Throw me in the garbage!” I was yelling. “Just throw me in the garbage!” The garbage was at the end of the hall near the kitchen, and that is where I wanted to be. From the inside, from the perspective of the delirious teenage girl, I could see myself. My head had become a shiny featureless ball atop a spindly neck. No eyes. No nose. No mouth and absolutely no hair. With this identity, I had no worth. I was determined to be shed from this place.

My dad lifted me from the chesterfield and I became a plank. I was stiff as a board, willing him to shove me head first into the garbage can. He carried me past it, though, and into their bedroom. He’d figured it out. He laid me on the bed and picked up my mom’s hand mirror from their dresser. He put it in front of my eyes, and as soon as I saw myself, I snapped out of it.

The second time, though, I was on my own, too old to expect parental support, and it was in the middle of the night. I lay there in the wartime house that hot July night and opened my eyes to see an illuminated, upside down capital T hovering in front of me, and it offered me a choice. I could stay how I was, very miserable, aching from head to toe, very very sick, or I could become the inverted T. That was a comfortable and peaceful option, and very tempting. I stood up and immediately felt better. The summer sun was rising. The heat wave would continue, but the early morning was pleasant and cool. I went outside through the unlocked wooden screen door and the spring pulled it shut behind me with a familiar bang. I entered the fresh morning air and sat on the Steps. The sun was just coming up over the wartime houses across the street. It was a brilliant yellow light and the dew made everything so clear and perfect. I rested a moment then stood again and went back in.

Odd, I thought, that Bijou, our yappy poodle hadn’t greeted me. Odd, I thought, that I could see myself lying on the chesterfield. I walked to my parents’ room, five paces away, and looked at them sleeping, the dog at their feet. I returned to the chesterfield and lay down and went back to sleep.

The front steps constituted the threshold of my life in Shaughnessy Heights. I crossed them to enter the world and to return to the home. It was the peephole, the magic tunnel of my life. I still can feel that flat urban summer sunrise of delirium. I can feel the comfort of the Steps in silence. I can smell them.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Parent Invisiblity

Parent invisibility, within the walls of the wartime house.

Recently I found myself sitting at a sewing machine. The home computer has robbed me of my private friendship with the sewing machine, and as I sat again in front of that clunky old friend, my mind drifted back to my first one.

The jet black Singer treadle sewing machine with the lovely gold-painted crest came into our house during the early years, before boys and junior high. It had been my granny’s. I’d spent days in her dining room sorting her buttons by the hour. Piling her crazy quilt squares. Granny sewed mostly by hand, as far as I can remember, and at some point this Singer treadle with an oak cabinet – two drawers on the left and two on the right – ended up at the wartime house. We would ride the treadle, sitting on the cast iron footplate underneath the cabinet. We usually had to spin the big wheel underneath, catching our fingers and small fists as we worked to get it spinning. The top wheel never worked because the belt between the top wheel and bottom wheel was always broken. When it came time to sew, the belt would be jerried with safety pins or coat-hanger wire punctured through the leather belt. Eventually it would eat through and the belt would get shorter and shorter, and have more and more pieces holding it together to complete the pull.

As I worked to mend my lingerie on my electric machine and listened to the hum and lock and watched inexplicably inconsistent tension and missed stitches, I realized why I have become an expert on the PC. It was the sewing machine that taught me patience.

I used to listen to my dad vibrate and whine and shake and snap at us when he was under the hood of a car that was refusing to do what he wanted it to do. He didn’t swear much, but this was worse. His wrath would percolate slowly, growing in intensity until we would hear this high pitch vibrato from deep in his throat, and we’d look at one another and duck.

With a sewing machine, that kind of childish behaviour gets you absolutely nowhere. Thread breaks. Needles break. Mistaken seams get sewn and must be ripped. Tension can suddenly become impossible to adjust. Change the thread. Change the needle. The bobbin thread can break, and break, and break again. Dust the bobbin case. Add a few drops of oil. Lift the presser foot. Lower the presser foot. Loosen the feed dog. Dust the feed dog. Stitches get missed. Loosen the pressure foot. Such adjustments were possible with the treadle. Once the electric machine replaced the treadle, you had backstitches, zigzags, buttonholers, and far more sensitive adjustments that could increase the permutations and combinations for solving a nagging problem of thread breakage. It took more than patience; it took persistence and a view to the eventual goal.

And sew I did. My first Home Ec teacher happened to have been my mom’s Home Ec teacher too. Miss Krett was the reason my Mom quit school, but she taught me how to clip the seam allowance of a shoulder seam and how to never put pins in your mouth. I had already learned how to tie off a seam because my Granny had taught me that. Pull the thread through. Tie one knot, right over left, then tie the other, left over right. Then snip the end. There was no reverse on the school electric machines, and there was no reverse on my treadle at home. I already knew how to stitch by hand.

In the focused intensity of the sewing machine, I discovered a new self, the bookish me. I was not really a patient girl, but if there was a destination to reach I became determined to find my way there, not letting any little piece of equipment block my path. For hours, perhaps days, I would stitch stitch stitch.

One day, during a renovation project in the back shed – I think we’d finally gotten a new hot water tank – Dad decided that the sewing machine was too big. It took up too much room. He handily sawed off the two oak four-inch lips that extended over each side of the cabinet. He made it fit. Then he painted it white. There was no value in it. There was no such thing as antiques. It was still a sewing machine and one of my few refuges. It moved with me, away from the wartime house, away from Shaughnessy Heights, above the escarpment, and eventually, after I got my electric sewing machine I sent it to my sister. It is dead to me now. I do not wonder if it still joins fabric for a girl.

In grade seven Home Ec, I first found out how big the North End was. It turned out that St. John’s High School (or Isaac Newton Jr. High) either had no Home Ec classroom or too few chairs in the one they had. Thus, the girls from St. John’s came to our school. They were girls from a part of the North End that I’d never really considered: past Arlington! Existence beyond McPhillips had entered my consciousness by this time, because my older brother had some friends from over there, but these girls were so different! So stylish! So brave! Make-up! Short, very short skirts. They were loud talkers and had such confidence.

I saw them as the years progressed, the same girls, on the basketball court. They always had their noses in the air. Our part of the North End was definitely in a class of its own.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Racism

Racism. In our own backyards and within the walls of the wartime house.

While racism existed through the North End and into Shaughnessy Heights, I didn’t recognize it for what it was. In those days, the grown-ups would spew out snot in laughing fits over jokes about Bohunks and Indians. Our attitudes were tainted early in life. We had absolutely no understanding of the horrors that had been created by the colonial racial attitudes. We were innocent victims, being fed unhealthy attitudes and grievous scripts, false stories about people of other races, people who weren’t WASPS like us. We would eventually be called to duty, to raise our own kids without these horrible racist assumptions. Families are still struggling to break the cycle of ignorance that has divided our communities.

In grade five, Shaughnessy Park School tripled in size. Kids from the Rural Municipality of Rosser and other kids from the Burrows Keewatin Housing Development had moved into our corner of the world. They had infiltrated through the edges of our little grid of concrete streets and wartime houses. The Rosser kids were farmers and property owners living off the grid. They came to school by bus. The kids from the Development were from families who had qualified for subsidized housing, poor folk. There were single-parent families, immigrant families, and both rural and urban Native families from far and wide. Instantly, the dynamic of the school changed. Some of the Rosser kids didn’t have running water and had farm chores so they would get teased. They smelled different. They were heartlessly teased. The kids from the Development were a mixed bag. Their houses were new and these kids seemed older and braver and smarter than any of us who had been born into the neighbourhood. Rivalries started and our parents became afraid. There were some tough kids around now, kids tougher than us. But it did not take long for the integration, and soon the new gangs of friends blossomed and the trouble we made tripled. It wasn’t the fault of the kids from the Development, but many parents scorned and complained about the new kids, about how the neighbourhood had gone down hill, about how the new families were nothing but trouble. Imagine that, North Enders full of disdain for other North Enders!

But then we lived in a privileged corner of the North End. We knew that the dirtiest poor people lived on Jarvis. That was the street where nobody went and nobody wanted to live. It was past the tracks and past McPhillips, so it was well beyond our borders and we were safe from the likes of that sort of folk, until now. This was exactly the kind of family that had moved into our neighbourhood. Our parents scorned them because of where they’d been. It was a collection of myths, but everyone concurred, so it became truth.

None of our parents found friends among the grown-ups in the Development. Though the neighbourhood expansion was all doom and gloom from the grown-up’s perspective, it was great for me. I was no longer the only hyperactive kid in class.

In grade two my report card read, “Nancy would do much better if she would quit playing with pencils and singing aloud to herself in class.” This did not bode well for my future career as an elementary school student. I got my first whomping from Miss Calder in grade three. Her tactic was humiliation. She made me wear a baby bottle around my neck and drink out of it when I was bad. I was crushed. I was not a smart alec. I was just a chatty little girl with a quick wit and an interest in pretty much everything. My mom intervened, so I didn’t have to wear the bottle again. Then came grade four. I spent lots of time in the hall. I asked all of the wrong questions and interrupted at all of the worst times. I couldn’t sit still. One day, Miss Vickers grabbed my bangs and bounced my head against the pink painted cinder brick of the hallway, outside Room 10, at the end of the long hall. I can’t remember what she was saying to me, but I can still see her orange lipstick and the white crap in the corners of her mouth and the stretchy saliva going up and down inside her mouth as she yelled something into my face.

Then came grade five, and the lovely Miss Vickers with the Betty Boop hair cut and the bright blue Austin Cooper was promoted to grade five with us. The Rosser kids and the Development kids started moving in and our class doubled in size. By the end of the year, there were more than forty of us in that grade five class at Shaughnessy Park. And Miss Vickers had taken to strapping me instead of slamming my head against the wall.

The kids from the Development and from Rosser doubled the population of Shaughnessy Park School. I had been an impossible student for the teachers in the 12-room school, and now it had 30 classrooms. I had been bounced around and humiliated, but by grade five, with all of the other kids pouring in from different parts of the city or province, from somewhere, we never knew where, they would have to deal with me, once and for all.

Give her the strap. Just give her the strap. Never mind that I weighed sixty-five pounds and was three and a half feet tall. I was a never-ending hassle for the grade five teacher and was creating a bad atmosphere in this class of 42 kids. Just give her the strap. And that they did. Time and time again. It started in grade five and followed me over to junior high at Sisler and continued until grade nine. I’m not sure why it stopped. Maybe it was the straight A’s that had been following me all the way through. In hindsight, there was something dreadfully incongruous about it. I remember my face and neck and ears being red with heat as tears poured down my face. I was embarrassed that the teacher might know it hurt. Shrugs.

Our small enclave called Shaughnessy Heights had spawned street-smart kids with the gift of gab, but we were not very worldly beyond our four streets. The kids in the Development had lessons to share from their lives, so far. They had brand new houses complete with basements and an upstairs without slanted ceilings. They had brand new cupboards with fresh white paint. We should have been coveting their good fortune, but underneath the excitement of having hundreds of new houses in our neighbourhood was a quiet hum of dissent.

We were used to nothing being said. Our dads didn’t talk about the war. They went to the Army Navy or the Legion, but we didn’t know about the war. All of the kids on the street knew that our dads played pool or went drinking and we also knew that they didn’t do it together. My dad went to the Army Navy. Shelley’s dad went to the Weston Legion. Legion 141 was the sports Legion. We didn’t know why our dads weren’t friends with each other.

Neighbours weren’t friends. There was a difference for grown-ups.

“You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your neighbours,” my mom would say. I knew this was another nugget of wisdom from my Irish Nana.

The social division between the Development and our part of the neighbourhood started somewhere. Maybe in the school. Maybe in the homes. I think it began with the grown-ups. We would hear them talking to each other and their innocent racism would just spill off their lips into our open ears. They were the poor kids. They were the bad kids. Stay away from there. Even the teachers seemed to have that idea. But we were all just kids. And I was already a bad kid in the school, so where did I belong? I was smart-assed and smart on the tests. By grade six, Mr. Biblow had his hands full.

As the only male teacher in the school, he got the problem kids. He knew I was a problem, just as my brother had been before me. A big-mouthed jokester, but I was still the smallest kid in my grade and the loudest too. And along came Donald Roy. He was just as loud and funny as me, but he was two years older and eighteen inches taller. He became my new best friend ─ in school, at least. Together we tore Mr. Biblow’s class apart. It made me cool. Every day he was strapping either Donald or me. I didn’t give a shit. Yes, I got A’s and B’s and Donald got D’s and E’s, but together we were a perfect team. I was proud to be chirping and laughing with Donald from across the room, disrupting. I had to sit right in front of Mr. Biblow’s desk and Donald had to sit at the back. He was the tallest and I was the smallest. I never knew where Donald lived. On Chudley, I think. In the Development. Outside of school I never saw him.

The next year I went to grade seven at Sisler in a class with kids from way beyond the boundaries of Shaughnessy Heights, kids from King Edward, and Faraday, and Robertson schools. Smart kids. Kids who’d already taken typing, for Christ’s sake. Kids who for years had been told they were smart and special by the teachers. Kids who didn’t live beside the Development and had never heard of Shaughnessy Heights. They had put me into a special class. They called it Major Work. There, I had no notoriety. I became isolated, bra-less in a school of grade twelve kids. I had been stripped of my cool banter and plunked into a sea of show-offs and smarty-pants, smarter than me, anyway. And there was no sign of Donald Roy. Lightly fondly disappear. Just go.

They couldn’t have failed him in grade six; he was already fourteen. He must have been somewhere in thise shiny tiled halls of Sisler High School. Maybe they made short work of him. I noticed his younger brother, Van. He fit in better. He had friends. But I never saw Donald during all of those years. He saw me a few times, but I must have looked through him. Our tight connection built on wit and an intellectual war with Mr. Biblow had vanished and so had our chemistry.

I grew through that school, across the tracks, on the other side of the Northwood wading pool. There were only seven Shaughnessy Park kids in my Major Work class: Rod and Ken, Gary and Michael, Evelyn and Pat and me. So I had no locker partner and was embarrassed about that too. Our grade seven class was in the furthest corner of the school, surrounded by grade twelves. I was in a sea of phase one baby boomers and never spoke to any of them because they couldn’t see me. It took time for me to find my way among these strangers. I ducked the big kids. I cried at home and started to accept my new role in the class as the unknown kid with average grades. Eventually my wit percolated forth within the class and I started to take my strappings from our math and science teacher, Mr. McCullough. He would strap me in his secret back room where he prepared his science labs and supposedly drank his mickey. I chatted in class and took my expulsions to the gym while gradually, my grades started to improve.

I grasped for the fringe of the pretty girls and the popular boys, wanting to be seen near them, aching to fit in. Like most insecure adolescents, all I could see was how different I was. I couldn’t find a way to fit and I had been hitting this wall of insecurity since grade two when I felt the first sting of the big girl from Magnus Avenue, the bully, Donna Wozney. It was recess and the new addition had not yet been built on Shaughnessy Park School, so we could play on the swings and teeter totter which were still close to the school. I was standing by the red painted baby swings, that had chains to keep you from falling out, but I wouldn’t go on them, not during school hours. I think Donna was in grade five. She came over and offered me a rubber chocolate candy while I was playing, and I was thrilled. She watched with glee as I bit into it then laughed really loudly and pointed her finger at me. I think it was a fake laugh or a sinister laugh. She laughed because I had fallen for her cruel joke and I was crushed, not because I was embarrassed about the rubber candy, but because I thought she really was being nice to me when she made the offer.

In our house, the worst offence that we could commit was to hurt someone’s feelings. When I would come running in the front door, letting the spring door slam behind me, howling and talking at the same time, my mom would seem to listen. In hind-sight, I wonder if she did. She would eventually turn to me and say, “Aw, did somebody hurt your feelings? Come ‘ere.” And maybe she’d give me a hug, or maybe not, and she’d just let me explain and cry and shake and weep. And then she’d tell me I was just too sensitive. I got that a lot.

Sometimes I got lucky in my efforts to be one of the crowd and would get to ride in cars and drink. I eventually finished Sisler. I graduated with honours. I took some drugs and painted my weekends with lights and fast-moving opportunities. There was no plan, I just found out what excitement beckoned on a day-to-day basis. Parties and concerts and socials and bars were the main attractions. I usually ran with a pack of the pretty girls so that meant we wouldn’t get turned away at the door. They let me come along because I was the fast talker. I had a job to do and I was pretty good at it.

On one of the trips from Shaughnessy Heights, I found myself in a car traveling south along Main Street, probably to a social in Fort Rouge or a bar in St. Boniface. I didn’t like bennies and didn’t do acid very often, but I liked to smoke pot and hash, and it was pretty strong stuff, usually boasting red hairs or white stripes. We usually had our trendy liquor, maybe Southern Comfort or Molson Old Stock. Despite our imbibing, however, our focus remained on the next party, the place where the best boy was. Or the place where the next bag of pot was. Or the place where we knew we could sneak in.

It had been raining. It still was raining. The neon lights and the streetlights and the head lights and the police car lights were reflected in the wet sidewalk. We had to stop. We had drugs with us. We had to “get the fuck in the car!” Why were we out of the car? Why had we stopped?

“Stop! Someone is hurt!”

The car was stopped and I jumped out. There was a bus in front of me and people were standing around looking at a man lying on the ground hollering.

“He ran over my foot! He pushed me off the bus!”

I went over. Yes. It was Donald Roy. He saw me and I saw him. We read each other’s minds. He saw himself and I saw myself. There we were, the two loudest people in the crowd, again. This time I saw my separation from him. The separation I could not see when I was in grade six. Back then he knew it, but I didn’t. I was just a little girl, but he had already lived much much more than I had. Since then he had, too.

Despite the drugs and despite the liquor, I entered a zone of absolute clarity in that Main Street fiasco.

“Wait!” I screamed. But maybe I only screamed in my head. “Somebody call an ambulance!”

“Get the fuck in the car! Let’s get outta here!”

The world turned to slow motion. I must have had a bag of weed in my purse and probably open liquor in the car.

“Here come the cops! We gotta go! Get in the fuckin’ car!”Maybe someone told me that Donald Roy left this world prematurely. He saw the world with a clarity that is only now seeping into my mind. His memory rests between my shoulders and whispers in my ear. He tells me about my neighborhood and the people that we were. He tells me that we were pitiful in many ways and narrow in scope. But he liked me and I liked him back.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Transportation

Transportation. Out of Shaughnessy Heights and back to the wartime house.

Hitch-hiking was the most logical mode of transportation for teenaged North End girls. That was the summer that I started to head to Grand Beach every weekend. Every weekend. In those days, it seemed like quite a trek, but now when I realize it is barely more than an hour north of the Perimeter, I smile at my lack of worldliness.

By that time I had reached first-year university. Riding in a car pool to the Fort Garry campus from the North End in time for 8:30 classes was no small feat. Missing my ride home would mean an hour-long bus ride or a thirty-minute hitch.

In first-year university, my car pool started right in front of our wartime house. It was with a neighbourhood chum in my own grade, Bruce, who lived only two doors down. I went to U of M with the Commerce guys: Bernie, Gaylord, and Bruce. Bruce drove like a maniac south up snow-laden Route 90, passing two-ton delivery trucks in the far right lane, speeding over the tracks at Taylor, and passing on the curve toward McGillivray. There was no faster way to get there than in Bruce’s red Belair. But I wasn’t in Commerce, so my schedule never matched for the ride back to the North End. I learned to ply my trade as a hitch-hiker. I had the gift of the gab from many years of chatting it up and down the back lanes of Shaughnessy Heights. Everything in life was interesting. There was always lots to talk about and interesting questions to ask. The risks of hitching were simply urban myths. None of us knew anyone who’d been mugged or raped or stabbed. The most I was ever offered was a cool $100 on the corner of Notre Dame and McPhillips. I just hopped out and put out a fresh thumb. I was almost home.

Monday, August 2, 2010

The Bannister

The bannister. The core of the wartime house

The banister in a wartime house is not made of fancy oak spindles. It is just wallboard. We used to slide down it, but it was about only about two feet long, so once you were on it, you were pretty much at the bottom. Usually we’d just sit there and hang out, like we were on a hobby horse. But having a solid banister had its advantages. It was a great place to sit and eavesdrop on the grown-ups.

I think my mom was so embarrassed about explaining the “facts of life” to me that she did it while on the phone, knowing that I was sitting on the stairs listening.

“Hello? Yes, this is Betty McLennan calling regarding my prescription for birth control pills? Yes. I need to get my prescription if that’s okay. Yes. I can get it up at Shaughnessy Drugs. The pharmacist there knows me. Yes. I really appreciate this. Thanks a lot. Bye.”

Oh my god. I was in shock. My mother is pregnant and is taking a pill to kill the baby. How could she? I was shaking as I sat there. I turned and crawled up the stairs into my room and fell onto my bed. I wept into my pillow.

I pondered the idea of begging her not to go ahead with it. I did not know how I could broach the subject with her, and nothing was ever said.

Another time, I woke in the night and found myself sitting on the stairs listening to my parents fighting. My dad was wearing his blue ESSO shirt and my mom had just gotten home. It was very late. He had packed the suitcase and was leaving, for good. That time I had to intervene. The tears were pouring down my cheeks. My sister and my brother were still sleeping, but I was there in the middle, begging from the bottom of my broken heart for my dad to stay with the family.

I had not considered why he would possibly leave. I knew Mom was home late and had been out with some curlers or old friends or something, but that wasn’t important. Nothing could be so bad that my dad would leave us.

He didn’t leave.