Chapter V continued.

On the second of March,1965,I celebrated my fourth birthday.For the very first time ,I had a party.In fact,it's the very first time I ever recall being at a party.A few other children from around the neighborhood were there,but mostly I don't recall who they were.My sister was  there of course,but she was still really small.and not much into the party.The only other person I recall was a little girl who lived across the street and one house up from us at 12 Watson Avenue.When we first moved in,there seemed to be people moving into and out of that house a few times in a short time period,so I don't really know who that girl belonged to.My father used to refer to the man living there as Mr.Hale,and ,for some reason I was under the impression that he worked for the military.My father talked to him a lot and seemed to know him quite well.But I don't know if that little girl was his.What I do recall was that her name was Marlene and she was a chubby little girl with light curly hair.We used to play together sometimes,but not often,because neither of us could cross the road on our own.

My party was like most children's birthday parties.We ate cake and ice cream,and we played games.The cake had four candles,and I thought I'd never be able to blow them all out,but I did.

There were several different games that we played,and each one had prizes.But the only game I really remember was one called Pin The Tail On the Donkey.My mother made certain that none of the children at the party went home without a prize.

Pin the tail on the donkey was a lot of fun.The object is just what the game says.Inside the box,there is a picture of a tailless donkey and a whole bunch of numbered tails.To win the game,you had to pin the tail onto the donkey,closest to where it would belong on a real donkey.With a pack of four year old children,that was never really close,so the donkey ended up being deformed.First,my mother blindfolded the player,and turned them around in a circle three times,so we were a bit dizzy,and of course,blind.So the poor beast would end up with tails on his nose,or ears or knees-everywhere but the anatomically correct location.But we would all laugh to see a donkey with so many tails,and somebody won the prize.It turned out to be my first real training in being an iconoclast as well.I never would have guessed that at the time,but later in life,when I'd been writing for some time,and had learned a lot more about life,I recalled that game.By the time I'd heard of people like Alberta premier Ralph Klien or Toronto mayor Rob Ford,I was already aware that having a handful of numbered tails tended to make everyone look like a donkey.

On the night of my birthday,after the party,we all got into the family car and headed up the coast to visit my Uncle Bill,who worked for The Royal Canadian Mounted Police,in a small town in Northern New Brunswick.I was tired from the party and must have fallen asleep on the way.I do recall arriving there though,in the middle of the night.Uncle Bill lived in a bungalow that was attached to the police station.At the time his family was just him and his wife and my cousins Janice and Shawna.Janice was older than I was and she was walking with crutches.Shawna was just a baby,and my cousin Alan might have been on the way at that time.

Uncle Bill's place was an exciting place for a young boy to be because it was the police station.There was a police car parked in the driveway,and another one in the garage,along with a fast looking boat on a trailer,and a snowmobile.All were painted just like the police cars.And of course,I got to sit in the police car and turn on the light and siren.

I thought it was neat visiting my uncle,and getting to sleep in the police station.I would tell people about that for weeks afterward,and they always seemed to think there was something funny about sleeping in a police station.They would smile and chuckle when I told them that.

We visited for a whole day,then started for home again at  night.It's very dark in that part of New Brunswick.The towns were all small and far apart and you were really out in the woods.So,there was not a lot to see-unless you looked up.I sat up front and my mother would point out The Big Dipper and Orion to me.I don't recall there being a moon that night,but there were blue and green lights that seemed to dance in the sky.My mother suggested that I try counting the stars,but I couldn't count nearly that high.

Our car had a radio too.I was amazed that there were people in the radio who could talk and sing,and I couldn't really figure out how it worked.My mother explained that the people I was hearing were at the radio station and they spoke into a machine which took their voices and threw them into the sky.The car had another machine,the radio,which could somehow catch the voice and bring it inside so we could hear it.The story fascinated and confused me as I sat there between my mother and my father. How could a single voice leave the radio station and come into our car.It occurs to me now that I had a good deal of  trouble separating the idea of a person voice from that person,at the time.So I imagined a machine throwing people into the air,and our car catching them.Only I couldn't see them.I had other questions in my mind about this too.Like why didn't those people just get lost out there with all the stars? And how would they ever find our car,and not some other car?

If the story about the voices were true,I thought,there must be wondrous things in the air.All of the things that were ever on the radio were floating around outside the car,in the night.There were singers and people telling the news.There were also stories,about good guys and villains,and even cowboys and Indians.I was beginning to view the world with a sense of wonder,filled with things that were there but that I could not see.I remember two songs on that radio,inside our car.The Statler Brothers were singing about Counting Flowers On The Wall,and  Nancy Sinatra was singing These Boots Are Made For Walking.I wondered, and sometime in the night fell off to sleep.

Chapter V

1964.The year past had seen the birth of Matt Dillon,Michelle Obama,Chris Farley,Prince Edward,Sarah Palin,Barry Bonds and serial killer Paul Bernardo.

Herbert Hoover,Douglas McArthur and actor Alan Ladd left this world.

It was a year of racial unrest in the American south,and three civil rights workers were killed in Philadelphia,Mississippi.John Lennon announced that the Beatles would not play to a segregated audiance in Jacksonville.Sydney Poitier became the first black person to win an Academy Award:Best Actor for Lilies Of The Field.
Jimmy Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering and Cassius Clay became the World Heavy Weight Champion.Plans to build The World Trade Center were announced.A massive earthquake,9.2 on The Richter Scale struck Anchorage, Alaska,buildings came tumbling down and 125 people were killed.Towns in British Columbia were damaged by an accompanying tsunami.The final design for the new Canadian Flag was chosen,The Verrazano Narrows Bridge was opened and the Ford Mustang was unveiled.Comedian Lenny Bruce was convicted of obsenity and sentenced to four months in jail..Canada began a peace keeping mission in Cyprus and The United Kingdom abolished capital punishment.

In America,President Johnson declared war on poverty in January,then signed The Civil Rights Act,abolishing racial segregation into law in July.In November he defeated Barry Goldwater and won his first full term as President.The Warren Commission published it's report,concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.Martin Luther King won The Nobel Peace Prize.

New words appearing in The Oxford English Dictionary in 1964 included ninja,sit-com and Pop Tart.Nomex refered to a kind of fire resistant fabric.Ans Paki appeared for the first time as well,refering to a person of Pakistani or East Indian decent in a derogatory fashion.I guess the world at that time needed another racial slur,with all the progress that was seemingly being made in the American South.

In 1965 the average yearly income was about six thousand dollars.A new car cost about thirty five hundred dollars ans a new house about thirteen thousand.A loaf of bread was twenty one cents and it cost a dollar and a quarter to go to a movie.

1965.A new house cost just over thirteen thousand dollars.A new car was about two thousand,six hundred dollars.Gas was about thirty one cents per gallon.Average monthly rent was one hundred eighteen dollars.The federal minimum wage in Canada was a dollar and a quarter.

Early on in the year Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President Of The United States.A few days later Winston Churchill passed.That must have seemed the end of an era,given his longevity and dominating persona.Poet T.S.Eliot and singer Nat King Cole also passed in 1965.

Charlie Sheen,Shania Twain,Rodney King,Brooke Shields Dr.Dre,and professional wrestler,The Undertaker all came into the world in 1965.

On February 15 Canada got a new flag.That was known as National Flag Day.On March 25, the Province of New Brunswick got it's present flag as well.

South of the border it was the year of the Watts riots and civil rights marches in Alabama.State troopers attacked civil rights marchers in the town of Selma.In July President Johnson signed The Social Security Act into law,followed by The Voting Rights Act in August,which guaranteed the vote to African Americans.In November there was a massive blackout in the American Northeast and parts of Canada.

The world population in 1965 was 3.3 billion.Asia was the most populous continent with 1.89 billion people.Tokyo surpassed New York City as the worlds largest city.

Life expectancy in The United States was 70.2 years.In Canada it was 71.8 years.

The oxford English Dictionary introduced three hundred,sixty eight new words in 1965.They included log-in and megabyte,both from the world of computer technology.The term naked ape was used to refer to human beings.Music  gave us the word Motown.It was also the debut of the word Bio-hazard.Shake and Bake was  also among those words..And ironically both the words Zamboni and jet lag were first used.Ironically because,to this day I'm not aware of anyone getting jet lag from riding a Zamboni.1965 also saw the inception of the word clusterfuck.It came from the world of pornography(use your own imagination) but was adopted by the military as a means of describing a monumental mess.After all,it was the era of the Vietnam War,so the word just seemed to find a natural niche.It was ,in fact more common in that context,and gradually migrated into the language in a more general sense.There was much in the world of 1965,and the years to come that could be aptly described by that word.But of course,I was yet to turn four years old,so I'd never heard of such a word.It only existed in The World Just Beyond.  

Interlude:Some thoughts about people

"When he drank some of it's wine,he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent."(Genesis 9:21)


Obviously when we are children our parents loom very large in our lives.One or both of them are there,unless we are orphaned,providing all of the necessities of life,all the nurturing and role modeling and provision,all the love that we need.They are there when we speak our first words and when we take our first steps.Nearly everywhere we go we go with one or both of our parents,and we come to know something of their parents and there siblings,we emerge into a family,a community,a society and hopefully attain a sense of belonging.Our parents are,in short,everything,they made us and they continue in their presence or absence to form us,as do,through them our forefathers.

I must confess a level of ignorance that I find disturbing.Memoir is ones own story,a selfie,we would call in today.Still,I find it challenging to proceed without mention of the people who filled my world at each step.Most of them I observed,simply because there was no way not to as I lived out my life.I spent my life watching and listening to them,and have drawn conclusions about them based on all that observation that I never realized I was doing.But who has ever heard the word memoir at the age of four?

To leave out the people who inhabited my world,while I'm trying to make sense of some part of my life would be akin to making a cake and leaving out some important ingredient.Things would no more make sense to me then than they did in the shadowy days of earliest childhood.To not understand my mother or father leaves the story incomplete,and nobody could understand who I am.

In regarding my parents,as I've done for so many years,I find it remarkable that I can draw so few conclusions.In large part,they've both retained a sense of mystery,leaving me with as many unanswered questions as definitive knowings.In just the few chapters I've written,I've come to know,and to present certain knowledge of some of my parents character traits.My father,for instance had a growing family,and in that family he had an intense pride,as did my mother.Both of my parents were good providers,hard workers and family oriented,both to their families of origin and the family they made.You can see the family pride,for instance in the rides we took to the ice cream stand.For my father that was all about being seen,being conspicuous.You can see,for example,my mother's industrious nature in the fact that she was willing to work outside the home in a tuberculosis hospital,ans in that she made butter long after doing so had fallen out of fashion.

But saying all of these things,and many more to come in no way make either of these omni- present persons less of  an enigma,though in some sense I know them both well.Nevertheless,I have a great many questions with regard to each of them,and,both of them together.But we were not intended to be all knowing.It is not a good thing to look upon the nakedness of a parent,in the sense of trying to degrade them as a person.To an extent,though that's what we do in constructing a sensible memoir.It doesn't mean that the questions I have are not legitimate,but it is a good thing to allow some of the mystery to exist.

One of the problems with trying to arrive at a consistent picture of any given person,especially one with whom you've spent years with,is that very little can be said to be unchanging,especially anything that lives.Moreover,we change ourselves,so both the reality of a person,and our ability to see and measure reality change over time.Of course,in childhood,that developmental process is most acute in the earliest years.Our parents change more slowly then,but change they do.We all live and learn and the way we see our world and the people in it evolves.So,my father at thirty is not nearly the same as he was at forty.Nor was he likely the same person in Moncton as he was in Goose Bay,or in Springhill.My mother,in Moncton could only have been said to have been from that world of her parents in Dead Creek.You could not say she was still in that world.

Among the things that I wonder about,in regards to my mother:Was there a mystery to living in Dead Creek?How much of it remained unspoken? Why did she adopt a strategy of ignoring the presence of evil?Was that solely for the protection of her children? How did she deal  with the problem of evil internally in her everyday life? Why did she never pursue higher academic goals? How well was she really getting along with both of her parents? What was the specific nature of her religious belief,and was it consistent? What were her political convictions? Was she unequally yoked inside her own marriage?Inside her family of origin? How did she make her marriage work?

My father calls forth many questions too,some of them the same,or at least interrelated and some of them extremely different.For instance,what was the state of his health,both physically and mentally?Was he ever really in good health? When did he have his first stroke? Beyond health,how did he relate to where he came from? Does his past contain any secrets? Was he ever being evasive with his wife or other family members? What did he believe in a religious sense?How different was it from what my mother believed,and how did they work out those differences? What did he believe politically? What state did he think the world was in? How different was he at his passing than he was when we were children? How well did their marriage weather the storms of life?And many other things.

In looking back on my early world,It looks like a constructed  world.There were things that we were told,and things which we were absolutely sheltered from.But such is as it should be I suppose.In all,I would have to say,that both of my parents were complex,complicated and very real people.Our family under their leadership had a lot of moving parts,and was not always easy to make sense of.Still,of the two,my mother was by far the greater mystery,being,in addition to everything else,so very adaptable.So it was often difficult to know when she was responding naturally and when she was adapting.This was true to the greatest extent in how she taught us of the higher things,relating to God,and how she lived out faith in her own life.Yet it is not true to say my father was of a simpler construction,nor that he had no faith.And these things were becoming more known to me as I was about to enter my fifth year.    

Chapter IV Continued

There came a time after we moved that we took a vacation.I'm a bit uncertain as to when exactly that was, but it must have been near the end of the first summer we lived in Moncton,because I was still a very small child.In fact,I don't recall a lot about that vacation,aside from the story I'm about to tell.I guess I was still prone to sleeping a lot during long car trips.

As I recall,my younger sister was not with us.It was just my parents and myself.I think she must have spent the time with my grandparents,when all of my mother's people still lived out in the country.It's possible she was with us,but I don't recall it that way.In any event,we went to visit some of my mother's family in Portland,Maine.For some reason,it's stuck in my head that we took the ferry from Yarmouth,Nova Scotia to Bar Harbor,Maine.But common sense say's it must have been the other way around.But I can't say for certain.

I have some memory of the visit to Maine.My mother's family owned a restaurant called Smith Farm,in a place called Gray,a bit north of Portland.It was kind of like a big red barn.Other than that the only real thing I remember is that the place we visited had a huge stone wall out in front,and the surroundings looked very different from where we lived.

When we got to the boat that was to take us across The Bay Of Fundy,it was nearly evening and the boat ride was to take us all night.I really didn't get to see much of the boat.I must have gone to sleep shortly after we got on board.I recall,though that the boat was blue and very very large.I was amazed that we drove right inside the boat,where it was very dark.And I have the vague memory of not liking the dark much.

Once we left the car and started to wander around on deck,I remember a lot of  people waving up at us from far below as the ferry started to move.There were other boats around too.Before I went to sleep we visited a gift shop on board and my father saw a small sailors cap,something like the captain would wear.It was a crisp,clean looking white hat,with a yellow braid going around it.My father bought the cap and placed it on my head,no doubt thinking it was cute.For months I wore the cap nearly everywhere,but I've always wondered why my parents never took a picture of me wearing it.

But it's not so much the hat that I remember as it is what eventually happened to it.One chilly,windy,blustery day,likely in the fall,I was sitting at the curb in front of our house.My mother was nearby in the front yard.There was a lot of dirt blowing around and getting in my eyes and it really wasn't a very pleasant day.As I sat there,a big gust of wind grabbed my sailors hat and began to blow it down the street towards Mountain Road.But my mother came along just in time to rescue it.To do so she had to go running down the street after it.She placed it back on my head,but no sooner had she done so than it was gone again.This time she didn't have to chase it quite so far.For a second time she put it back on my head,where it stayed for a few moments.Then a really strong wind roared down the street,not so much a gust as a steady,stormy blast,the kind that you get in November.Once again my hat was gone.It started down the street,sort of rolling on it's edge right beside the curb,but much faster than I could have run had I been allowed to run out into the street.It rolled all the way to Willett,the first side street,and it didn't stop.It flipped over  onto it's top,and seemed to slide down the road going faster and faster and getting farther and farther away.By the time my mother noticed it this time,it had blown almost all the way to Mountain Road.I could still see it rolling and flipping,but there was no hope of catching it no matter how fast  you could run.It began to look really small,but I could still see it.I suppose that it finally reached Mountain Road and was flattened as it blew out into traffic.But my hat was gone,and I knew that it was gone.

And gone too was the summer,and most of the days of 1964.Our neighborhood was still unfinished,and I don't remember Christmas or snow that year at all.

Chapter IV continued

My mother worked at a place called The Hospital Annex.I didn't know what that was at the time,even long after I saw the building.Most of  the buildings down along Collishaw street at that time were old military buildings.Had they remained in military hands,they might have kept better than they did.Only twenty years after the war ended they were looking dingy and a bit less than well kept.The Hospital Annex was in one of these buildings,more or less right on the corner of Collishaw and Killiam Drive.It was very much typical of the buildings in the area.Kind of long and narrow,painted black and white,and a bit run down looking.It didn't look anything like a hospital to me.It wasn't really far from our house,so I suppose my mother walked there,and that's why I can remember waving to her from our back door.But there were not all the through street that there are now,so she may have walked through one of the trails in the woods.The Hospital Annex was,in fact a hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis is an ancient disease,going far back in human history.I recall hearing somewhere that there is evidence of it in remains of Egyptian mummies.It is said to have reached it's peak in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,then declined until the later part of the twentieth century when resistant strains began to emerge.Mostly it is a disease of the lungs,but other parts of the body can be affected as well.It was also known as consumption,for the fact that one of it's symptoms was consuming weight loss.The bodies of those infected could seem to waste away.Until quite recently,a diagnosis of tuberculosis was a death sentence,though death would often take a long time to claim it's victim.

In the late 1800'sTuberculosis had been recognized as being an infectious disease,and better treatment protocols were being developed,though anything approximating a cure was still years away.Doctors would collapse the lungs of patients,to allow infected tissue to heal,a treatment that was helpful to some degree.Another approach to treatment involved dedicating hospital beds to the care of tuberculosis,and thus sanatoriums were developed to provide treatment specific to tuberculosis.It was also thought that clean,clear air was helpful in recovery,so sanatoriums tended to be located away from major population centers.The first sanatorium in The United States was opened in Saranac Lake,New York,in 1885.It was followed by the first in Canada,at Muskoka,Ontario eleven years later.By the 1930's there were more than sixty sanatoriums in Canada,including one in River Glade, New Brunswick,about a half hours drive from where we lived in Moncton.Conditions within sanatoriums were said to range from resort like to prison like,where poor people with the disease often did not recover.I really have no idea what conditions were like inside The Jordan Sanatorium in River Glade,as my memories of the place are memories of being outside the building.

No body ever mention  the purpose of either The Hospital Annex or The Jordan Sanatorium to me.I learned about the Hospital Annex from my grade six teacher who described it as  a terrible,very sad place,and then it gradually dawned on me why it didn't look much like a hospital.

As I've said,some of my mothers family were staying with us in Moncton shortly after we moved there.Both my Grandmother and my Aunt Ruby were there.And I think it must have been about that time that my grandmother's sister,my great aunt,Anna English was in Moncton too.More specifically she was in River Glade,at the sanatorium.

We had no thoughts of things like tuberculosis when we were small.We lived in a world where our mother did not acknowledge any kind of unkindness or impurity,and I suppose that it was not a bad place for children to live,at least while they were still children.But it also leaves me with a cloudy sense of family history.While we played happily by day and went to our warm beds with Bible Stories For Children,there was a whole world just beyond that was never spoken of,even when we were older and had begun to ask questions.

Anna English,like her sister lived at Dead Creek,just across the road from Aunt Ruby and next door to my grandparents.They were,as far as I know farmers and lumbermen,just like my grandfather,and it had to have been a hard place to live.

My memory of Anna English is of a kindly old lady,tiny in fact,when I last saw her in the late 1980'sShe seemed to get smaller with age,as people do,though,at a subconscious level it evokes thoughts of consumption.Still,she was not exactly frail,despite a slight stoop and a crooked finger on one of her hands.Anna loved children of all kinds,though I believe she was childless.I loved being around her and her home.She was married to Fred English for more than sixty years.Fred was a very old man,even when we were small.Sometime in the 1960's they moved into the nearby Village of Canterbury,where they lived just over the crest of a hill going out of town toward Skiff Lake.That was at or near a time when most of my mother's family were moving from Dead Creek.Some moved a few miles into town,while others moved farther away.

Of course the reason for Anna English being in the sanatorium was that she had contracted Tuberculosis.This is something that I can only conceive of in my mind,as to what it must have been like.Dead Creek is almost two hundred miles from River Glade,so her separation from her husband would have been protracted with very few visits.It could not have been easy to manage a farm without the help of a wife either,so I wonder if this is the reason they moved.Tuberculosis must have had very disruptive effects on people,and it was still a feared thing in 1964.People still worried about contracting it.And it must have been very hard on the body too,though neither she,nor anyone else I knew ever mentioned it.I also got the sense of sanatoriums being rather like leper colonies,though that may not have been the intent.There seems to me to have been at least some sense of stigma about them,as they tended to be located in remote places,far from the rest of society,not unlike prisons,insane asylums or institutions for disabled persons.Their disappearance also seemed to correspond to the move to deinstitutionalize insane and disabled persons,though it may have had more to do with the decline of tuberculosis than with more progressive attitudes about institutions in general.For Anna English and her family,including my mother,it must have been a very difficult time.

Once or twice I recall being outside the sanatorium with my mother and grandmother.We were very small.The building was very imposing,but rather more like a house than a hospital.A very large house though.There were a lot of pipes sticking out of the building,pipes that didn't belong on a normal house,and there was a kind of smoke stack,or incinerator,perhaps too.In an upper floor window,near the corner of the building a woman would appear,and we would wave to her,having no idea of why we were leaving her at this building.At the time ,my focus was on the building,and I don't recall much about it's surroundings.Later,though we stopped near the building,by then closed,for a picnic.At that time I was impressed by it's seeming smallness.Nearby a small stream flowed by,through a grove of old trees,and I though what a bucolic,pastoral setting this was,as we sat there eating sandwiches and sipping Cokes.

Meanwhile,at home,we must have been exposed to the possibility of tuberculosis as well.My mother must have had some degree of risk at work,as well as from the times she visited her aunt at the sanatorium.Later,I remember we all had skin tests and chest x-rays,though nothing ever came of it.And still nobody ever talked of these things.

Chapter IV Continued (Tar)

Just before dinner time,all of the machines would come to a rest.All of the men,the "monkeys" would gather up their lunch boxes and monkey hats and walk,or drive away,leaving our neighborhood very quiet.All of the monkeys had little black lunch pails and I always wondered what could possibly be in them,as we sat down to our own lunch inside.I thought it strange to eat out of a black box,I thought that when we were called to eat,that all the monkeys should come and gather around our table too.But they never did.Still,I really did want to eat out of a lunchbox just like the monkeys.

There were not so many people living in our neighborhood then,as there are now,So when the construction stopped for the day,it seemed an almost silent place.Lots of the houses were still unfinished,without families living in them so there did not seem to be many children around.And because so many of the streets were still under construction,hardly anyone used the neighborhood as a short cut,as they would come to do later.

It was summertime and sometimes  my father would take us out walking in the evening.On those occasions we would up and down the new streets,past the unfinished houses and open excavations,and we could walk right up to some of the equipment that was left parked on the road.There were lots of bulldozers and graders,and even the shovel that was used to trench out the sewers and curbs.Except for maybe one other machine,that shovel was the one that most interested me.They were completely different sorts of things when they were still.My father always said they were sleeping.They were not safe to play around,but we could get right up close and look at them.One or two times my father even boosted me up onto the seat of one of the bulldozers.He told us never to climb on the equipment when he wasn't there,and,we were not allowed on the roadway anyway.For the most part I complied.

But then there was the tar truck.It got parked at night too.My parents always wondered why someone couldn't take it home with them,but nobody seemed to want to.They likely didn't want it parked near their house any more than we did.Nobody wanted to steal the foul thing either,because it could only creep along and wasn't made for joy riding.Not what you would call a cool set of wheels,at any time ,ever. It really was dirty and foul,smeared with oil,big gobs of tar and coated in dust and mud from driving around all day.And of course,it absolutely reeked.I think the only one who liked it at all was me.

After the tar truck had passed,usually much later,we could walk up the street and see what it had done.When it went by it oozed wet,hot and very sticky black tar from a pipe that ran across the back of the truck. You could see it seeping out,and you could certainly smell it.I could tell that it was very hot because steam would rise from the road for a while after each time it went by.So I knew it was dangerous and that I shouldn't go near it.

Eventually I got my chance to get closer to the tar truck.I remember it as a wonderful kind of storybook adventure,a delightful taste of forbidden fruit.My mother and father both worked at the time,so some of my mother's family had come down from Canterbury.My grandmother was there for a time and so was Aunt Ruby,my mothers sister.On this particular day both my parents were at work.I recall standing at the back door with my grandmother,and her telling me to wave to my mother as she left for work.We would stand at the door and wait for her return too.In my mind,there were a lot of days like that,but in reality there could not have been that many.

Sometimes,if it rained all the equipment outside would shut down early,and that's what happened on the day I found the tar.It had been a very warm day and both my sister and I were out playing in the backyard.Sometime about midway through the afternoon,the truck crept up Crandall Street,leaving tar behind it.Right after it passed,it began to rain.Not hard,just a gentle summer shower.I don't even think we came back inside.But by the time the shower had passed,none of the machinery was still running and the monkeys were not around.But the tar truck was very nearby.So I slipped through our neighbors yard to the edge of the street.It was all tar and water,and,because of the heat from the tar,it was a bit foggy right over the road.That fog interested me too.There was water standing in the potholes.My sister was right at my side,and I just couldn't resist the tar.At first I just stuck one foot past the edge of the road.Really the road had no edge.The grass just ended and the dirt began.If I put just one foot down.I reasoned,it wouldn't really be like playing on the road.And so I did.The tar was wet and warm,but,at the same time,the rainwater was cool and there was no danger of burning myself.It was like putting my foot in bathwater that was both hot and cold at the same time,and it felt delicious to my feet.I didn't mind the stickiness,though it was a new and unfamiliar sensation and texture.I couldn't really understand the fog either,or why it disappeared when I walked in it.There was just something magical about the road that day.And so I stepped fully out into the road,starting for the place where the old tar truck was parked.And just a moment later I saw Aunt Ruby coming through the back yard on the run,and we were quickly herded back toward the house.I'm surprised we didn't get spanked for our misadventure.We may have,I just don't recall it that way.Aunt Ruby used the garden hose to wash that delicious tar from our feet,and thus ended what seemed like one of the best adventures of all my childhood.

My mother,and sometimes my father or other adults even would tell us,or read us stories,especially at bedtime.One of the stories I recall was about a fox that kept trying to catch a rabbit without success.So he made something called a tarbaby,a kind of doll covered in tar,and he put the tarbaby out in the road,where the rabbit came along,touched the tarbaby and ended up caught.I don't recall the whole of the story but from what I do recall,It turned out well in the end.So,for a while I though of myself as a tarbaby,whatever a tarbaby actually was.


Authors note: I've been writing for quite a number of years now and this particular story has been recorded in several incarnations prior to this.Sometimes I'm asked what is my favorite piece of writing that I've done.This would have to be near the top of my list.Actually,of course I hope that my best writing is ahead of me,as writers always do.Still this story is both endearing and enchanting,and this memory has never lost it's sense of magic to me,no matter how often,or how many different ways it gets told.

Chapter IV continued.

Just beyond our back yard an endless parade of construction equipment worked day after day,for what seemed like forever.Each morning that it didn't rain would find me out on the back step,as early as I could manage to get there.I was always distracted at breakfast,as I ate cereal,grapefruit,bacon and eggs.I could often hear the first dump trucks arriving and I didn't want to miss a thing.

For a long time there was a big,bright orange shovel  parked at the end of Sumner street,right across from our step.They must have been using it to trench out the curbs,and it didn't stay there all day long,but that's where they parked it at night.Every morning I simply had to be on our back step before the worker started up this machine.I was entranced by the way smoke puffed from it's stack when it was first started.Big balls of smoke,jumping out one after the other,until they became a steady stream.It told me it would not be long before the arrival of the other trucks.All day long they came and went,mostly bright orange and yellow,but the dump trucks could be any color of the rainbow.Each made it's own sound,together not quite a cacophony,not quite a symphony;growls and grinding and roaring,cement scraping the inside of mixer drums.The gentle swish as the driver washed out the cement mixers trough with a hose.Gravel sliding from upraised dump bodies of the trucks.The harsh and loud bang of dump trucks gates swinging closed when they were done unloading.Earth falling into the back of dump boxes.Pebbles,clay,loam,each a different sound.Men shouting,and I suppose swearing,though there seemed far less of that back then.Shovels in earth,hammers on nails or wooden stakes,drills and saws.Beautiful,raw music.The machines seemed to grow out of the ground,there were so many.A forest of earth movers and a whole gang of monkeys who lived in that forest from early morning until supper time.Gradually our community came together.

Crandall Street,like most of the other streets was gravel,just like a country road.It seemed pocked with holes,each of which would hold a small puddle some of the time.Few cars came up Crandall Street then.Most of the traffic was construction traffic.Sometimes the street would get dry and dusty.Clouds of dust could foul the air and get all over everything.But the city had a solution for that.An ancient looking truck,that had once been yellow but that was covered from end to end in an oily film,streaked and spotted with tar,and topped with the latest settling of dust.Even it's windows were dirty,so I wondered how the driver could see to drive.The whole back of this old truck was a tank filled with sticky tar.This truck was frail looking,not moving very fast,as it passed up and down the roads spreading out tar which smelled awful,but cut down the dust.I thought of that truck as being sort of like an old man,spending the last of it's time in existence,wondering when it would break down for good,giving it's life so that our our new community could be born.

Chapter IV continued(Monkeytown).

The part of Moncton we moved  to,the Northwest was very much a work in progress in 1964.It was not even close to being a finished neighborhood.On our street,all of the houses that are there now were there then.And there were a couple of really big houses right near Mountain Road that are no longer there.but the rest of the area was really like one giant construction site,and construction sites back then were rarely fenced in.

Most of the streets branching off Crandall Street had dozens of unfinished houses,their streets were muddy quagmires and there was all sorts of construction junk laying all over the place.today the sites get cleaned up and locked down when nobody is around,but not back then.At that point,Birchmount Street and Ayre Avenue did not really exist,at least not as they do now.Most of the streets ended just past Lorne Street,though there were some paths which you could walk through.Mostly though it was woods through  to Killiam Drive.At the corner of Lorne and Whitney there was a sort of a pond ,or a swamp and a really run down old house right beside it.It looked worse than most of the houses out in the country.

To the best of my memory our street was the only one that was paved and had curbs along it's whole length.All of the others were still dirt,filled with potholes and usually wet enough to be at least somewhat muddy.They were poorly lit as well.At night they would put out these kind of lamps that looked like a cartoon version of a bomb,and were filled up with kerosene.They were set out along the edge of the streets because there was usually a big hole just beyond them where the curbs were being built.They filled the streets with an eerie sort of a glow,because they had open flames at the top.In 1964,we were very much on the edge of town.All you really had to do to be out in the country was cross Mountain Road,or go out past the bottom end of Birchmount.

Because of all the building going on,living where we did was an endless source of fascination to a young boy.I literally got to see our neighborhood going up all around me,day after day.My earliest clear memories of Moncton are of the men and machines that came and went all day long:Dump trucks,cranes,paving machines,rollers,graders,trucks carrying big panes of glass,telephone trucks,and all other sorts of working vehicles.There was even an old beat up looking tank truck.A tar truck,as it turned out.

Sometimes the fire trucks would come roaring down our street too.Usually three or four at a time,and there was usually a police car with them.Back then there was a call box at the corner of Crandall and Snow and,if you pulled the handle,the trucks would come.but usually there was no fire.In fact,I don't ever recall there being a fire,but there sure were a lot of fire trucks.Later,after the new school was opened,the false alarms became much more frequent.So many days,over the noon hour some kid would pull the handle at the call box.

Nearly as interesting as the trucks and machines were the men that operated them,and the others who worked all day with rakes,shovels and picks.My sister and I always called these men "Monkeys." That is likely because some of these men climbed the poles,and my parents may have said something to the effect that they climbed just like a monkey.But no matter if the workers climbed poles or not,monkeys they were,at least to me and my sister.Men without hats were not monkeys.Construction workers were,unless they took of their hats,then I guess they'd "evolved." Mostly I recall the idea of calling them monkeys to be something my sister came up with.I don't know how she did that,because at three years old,I'd never seen a real monkey to know what one looked like.Nevertheless,monkeys they were.

The whole idea of monkeys kind of evolved into a different sort of a game after a while when we started calling our hometown "Monkeytown." It seems a natural enough evolution when you're small and live in a place called "Moncton.",which just happens to be infested with what we knew as monkeys.So,when we were away and someone asked us where we were from we'd always say"Monkeytown." Everyone but my parents would fall over laughing at that,no doubt thinking that these are cute little kids who could not pronounce "Moncton." Actually that was easier to say,but it never got a laugh like when we said"Monkeytown."

Chapter IV continued

Like the inside of our house in Moncton,the outside was very different as well.We had both a front and a back yard,and the back yard was leafy and grassy.The front yard was still made of dirt,no grass had yet been planted.We had a gravel driveway,but we no longer played in the driveway.We parked the car there and there was a profusion of tall yellow flowers that looked like sunflowers,but weren't.They would reach down and grab you if you were trying to walk through the driveway,and they were far taller than I was.There were bushes on the other side of the driveway as well,and here in the city the houses were close together,so there was no real room to play.

On the end of our house opposite the driveway,between our house and the Cormier's it was cool and shady all of the time,so it was a good place to be when the weather was hot.Sometimes my mother would bring out a  blanket and we could all nap there.I could also see down into Mr.Cormier's basement.Down there there were hundreds of things that looked kind of like glasses,the sort you drink out of.That's not what they were though,it's just the only thing I knew enough about to compare these things too.At that point,I had no idea what I was looking at.

Mr.Cormier had a garden.It took up almost all of his back yard,and when the weather was fine,both he and his wife were out there working,hoeing,digging up weeds and picking vegetables.There seemed to be a million different things growing and I had no idea what most of them were.But since there was almost always someone in this garden,I no longer worried about pigs.

Mr Cormier was a short,heavy man.To use my fathers words he was "Built like a brick shit house." He was older looking,with tight bulky musculature and a head of mostly gray curly hair.Most of the time he worked shirtless,and so he would get very red.Both he and his wife were on friendly terms with my parents right from the start.Later on,he would come over to our place and turn over a place for a garden in our yard,using a gas powered tiller.It was a big machine that made a lot of noise and seemed to be very hard to handle.It looked as though it was fighting with Mr. Cormier.His wife would talk to us from the edge of the yard,but never came to visit. Mr. Cormier only was ever in our  house once that I know of,about a year after we moved in.

One of the things I do recall that we worried about at our new house was dogs.Back in those days,the sub division wasn't really finished.It wasn't much like the way you think of a modern city today,and there were always dogs running loose.My mother worried dogs a lot,whenever we were outside,but especially if we were in he front yard.She was always watchful.I wasn't sure whether or not I liked dogs at all.I'd never had much to do with them,but I keyed into my mothers concern about them.Sometimes a dog would come down the street and knock over the garbage can,which you would always put  out for Monday pick up.Some of the neighbors used plastic bags for garbage,and the dogs could tear right into those.But hey had little trouble getting into cans either,and if they got a start,the garbage would soon be all over the road.I'd seen this happen from our living room window once,and it was beginning to  make me think I really didn't care for dogs at all.Still,I was quite curious about them,and could never recall having touched one.So I wanted to,but my mothers worry was influencing me away from it.

The rest of our neighborhood wasn't finished.Our street had always been paved,and most of the houses were built when we arrived.Some of them were even much older than ours.They'd been there for years,and back then,they didn't tear houses down to build sub divisions.They just built around anyone who didn't want to move.But all of the other streets were not finished.Not only were they dirt,dusty and full of potholes,but none of the houses were built either.Our new neighborhood was still very much a work in progress.

Chapter IV continued.

Our new house was very different from the old house in Redmondville,aside from just the setting of course.By comparison to that house,our new place was squat and low to the ground,more of a rectangle than a square.Not counting basement or attic,it had only one floor.A typical 1960's bungalow,just like most of the other houses around it.Because it's ceilings were low,it did not have an open,windy feel like our old place.Being new it was likely better insulated as well,so it always felt warm.It's windows were higher off the floor too.In the old house I could easily look outside.In our new house,in the living room,I could crawl up on the back of the couch and look out the big picture window.But all of the other windows were far too high for me to see out. The view out that window was very different too.Here the street-a street,not a road-was much closer to the house.There were no trees on the other side of the street,and,because our street was paved and finished,there was no ditch.The other side of the street had houses,just like on our side,and I could watch people coming and going from those houses.The traffic in the street passed by much slower as well.

I recall our new kitchen really clearly.It had white walls above the table where we ate and the cabinets were of highly varnished wood.The floor was of brown and white tile,in a regularly alternating pattern.One of those tiles was discolored and loose.It was right in front of the refrigerator,four tiles over from the door,and in the third row of tiles as you entered the kitchen from the hallway.Eventually a man came to fix the tile,but that seemed like a very long time after we arrived,and my parents wondered if he would ever come.When he did,he had a little blue hand held torch,which I was afraid of because it made both noise and fire.The man played the lit torch across the tile,and I thought he would burn down our new home.It made a bad smell too.In a short time he had pulled up the old tile and replaced it with a new one.I was very happy to see that man leave,and I worried for a while that he might come back.

Once my mother had arranged her things in the cupboards,the arrangement never changed.Under the sink she kept things like Ajax and dish soap and a bunch of other cleaning supplies.We were encouraged to stay out of there,but it was never locked.Beside those doors,to the right she kept the cereal and bags of flour and sugar.The two staples in that cupboard were cornflakes,in a box with a brightly colored rooster on it,and some sort of puffed rice,or wheat that came in a big bag.There were usually other boxes of cereal in there as well..There was always at least one bag of Robin Hood  Flour in it's bright yellow bag in there as well,along with a device which my mother would use to sift that flour.Above the counter,on that side of the sink,she kept all of the glasses,plates,saucers and cups.Utensils were kept in a drawer just to the right of the sink.Over on the other side of the sink,my mother kept all of her pots and pans.I discovered that I could crawl into that cupboard and hide,though I would always make so much noise I'm certain everyone knew where I was.Above the counter on that side my mother kept various baking supplies-cake mix,salt,pepper,a small bowl of sugar,peanut butter,ketchup,vanilla,butter,dried mustard,as well as mustard in a bottle,along with hundreds of other things.There were cabinets above the stove and refrigerator as well.Among the things kept there were boxes of photographs in slide form,which my parents would sometimes take down and ,with a projector show on a white sheet pinned up on the wall.There were other things in those cabinets as well,but, for the most part they remained a mystery.

Down the hallway to the right as you left the kitchen were the rest of the rooms of the house.Three bedrooms and a bathroom.The bathroom was small and clean and ordinary,with a tub,sink and toilet.The rooms,as I recall them were pink,blue and green,all pastel.Two of the bedrooms faced the street,while the other,and the bathroom faced the back yard.

There was a set of stairs just beside the back door that led to the basement.At first the basement was plain and empty with unpainted concrete floors.But,the longer we lived there,the more cluttered it became.For as long as I can remember,water would accumulate on the basement floor.It could get really dusty down there too.There was another thing in the basement too,which I did not like.It was big and green,and if you opened a small door in the front of it,you could see fire.It was almost as big as my father and I always thought of it as a monster and tried to stay as far away from it as room would allow.The furnace!

My mother and father kept things under the basement steps too.There always seemed to be a tire or two under there.Tires were heavy,and they had a odor that I was not sure I liked,but I could usually drag one out and roll it from one end of the basement to the other.We had a cat too,a white one with a blue eye and a green one,ans she liked to hide under the stairs,inside the tires,because we would not chase her under there.

Above the main hallway,just outside the bedrooms and the bathroom there was a hatch in the ceiling that led up to the attic.The attic was a mystery.Not only could I not reach the hatch,but I'd never been in the attic,not even once.Every so often my parents would dig out a ladder and go up there looking for something,but I was never allowed to go up there with them.So,of course,I wanted to.But for many years it remained the one room in the house which I'd never been in.

Chapter IV continued.

All through childhood,both before we came to Moncton,and long after,it always seemed to me that we could travel just a very short distance,yet things were so completely different than they were at home.It's not that they really were so very different,and if they were they were,they were in a subtle kind of way.

We went everywhere by car once we'd moved to New Brunswick,and it really was a very small sort of a place.It didn't seem that way to a small child though.You could drive for just a few minutes and see the ocean,for instance,and instead of the things we would see around our home,there would be a lot of water,and fishing boats and there might be lobster pots stacked in driveways,and sea shells instead of gravel. In other places you would see little cabins in the woods,with men in red and black checked woolen jackets.In other places the houses were covered in tar paper and looked so different from our big white house.People talked different too.They talked a language I could not understand at all,especially in Redmondville,once you got very far from our house at all.I Didn't know that this was French.Not until I got to Moncton,where a great many people spoke French,and,eventually we would all be taught to speak it.

So,if traveling out into the country was like visiting a foreign country,coming to Moncton couldn't have been more different than if we'd landed on the moon.It was busier,with far more cars and truck,though not right in our yard.It was safer,because we were not permitted outside of the back yard,and so,no traffic came really close to us.That's not to say our neighborhood wasn't bustling though.

Moncton,in 1964 was a medium sized industrial city.As far as Atlantic Canada was concerned,Moncton was located pretty much right in the middle of the region,and so it was a convenient place to put a city,to locate all the services that the region would need.At the time,it was growing rather fast.

All the trains passing from the west into Nova Scotia,Prince Edward Island and points east passed right through Moncton,and so,we lived in a train town.There was a switching yard,and further on,towards the center of town a huge locomotive shop.Anytime we went downtown,we would pass that shop.It was a long,low,dirty looking building,with rails snaking all around,and trains coming and going all the time.Usually it was smoky and smelly as well.When the shifts changed at the shops,you could hear the whistle from anywhere in town,or,at least anywhere I ever was.Up by our house,you could always here trains too,chugging along and you could hear the crashing when they were hooking cars together.Trains,in those days were the one true reality of Moncton. Everyone knew someone who worked at the shops.Our next door neighbor worked there.It was the biggest thing happening in town.

Moncton had a downtown too.Downtown was a new concept to me.It wasn't very big really,but it seemed big to me at the time.It was a single big street that was lined with stores of all sorts.Usually we went downtown to go to Eatons,which was the biggest department store in town.In fact,when we first moved there it might have been the only department store. Woolworths came a bit later,just down from Eatons.When it opened,everyone was talking about it because it had escalators,which was completely new.At Eatons,which had several floors,there was only an ancient elevator,or a set of stairs.The building was old at that time,kind of a dingy brown color,with big windows,like an old factory might have.The elevators always worried me,and they must have worried my parents too,as anytime we went shopping,we took the stairs.

Farther down Main Street,there was just about any other kind of store you could imagine.Lots of clothing stores.More than one shoe store.We went to the shoe stores all the time,because our feet were growing fast.I'll bet it was every few months we were in the shoe store.There a man would use some kind of device to measure our feet,then go in to the back of the store and bring out a new pair of shoes in a big box.Sometimes he was gone for what seemed like a long time,but that never worried me,because the shoe store had one of those mirrors that wrap around you where your standing,and when you stood next to it,you would see maybe eight of yourself reflected in it.That's the reason I always liked going to buy shoes.

I'd go downtown with my father sometimes,to go to the bank,and to city hall,and to a place called HFC.I had no idea what HFC was,or why he went there.And the bank wasn't very interesting at all.But it was an impressive building,being made of old stone,and standing in a scale that would make you feel very small. City Hall would make you feel even smaller.It was an old building too,made of stone blocks.It might have been the biggest building in town,apart from Eatons and the locomotive shops.It towered above your head,and the steps leading up to it were big and wide.Pigeons flew all around City Hall too.Inside,it was big and open,with clean,shiny floors,stairs and railings.My father would always say,in those days that we had a good City Hall,we could be proud of it,because we lived in a good town.He was also proud of the bank.You see,it wasn't just any bank.It was The Bank Of Nova Scotia.And my father was Nova Scotian to the core.It's the only bank he used then,and he liked it because it belonged to the place he came from.

At one end of downtown,near,just beyond Eatons,there was a little shack with a lot of windows.The Co-Op Ice Cream Bar.It was located right by the Co-Op store,which we never went into.That store,so my father said was for farmers,and we were not farmers.But he loved to go to the ice cream store,and,as far as I know,that was the only place you could buy ice cream.It was in a busy part of town,and my father liked to be seen there in the summer time.I didn't understand it at the time,but that was a sort of status symbol for him.He was new in town,had a decent car  a growing family,and was not wealthy,but modestly prosperous.And taking his family out for ice cream embodied all of that.He would always have orange pineapple,my mother always got butter pecan,my sister strawberry,and I always had chocolate.It never varied much,at least not when we were small.

                                                                                                       continued

Chapter IV-First Hometown.

I suppose being born and growing through to adulthood is something like a Big Bang experience.At first you don't remember anything,but as you get farther and farther from your point of origin,you see a few things flashing by you.But you have no idea that,at some point,it may be useful to think back to those things so that you might tell others about it.They are isolated events when they happen.There is no sense of what history is,or why it matters.As you grow,and more and more things flash by,they become easier to see,understand and eventually to describe.You are not in any one place for more than a moment,though when you are a child things seem to move very slowly.It seemed like we were in Redmondville forever,but,as time goes,it was just a moment.But for me,a year was a whole third of my life,so it seemed like a very long time in which nothing changed very much.And then,very suddenly everything changed in a moment.

Early in 1964 Bob Dylan released an album called The Times They Are A Changing(still my favorite Dylan song).I guess if I'd had such thoughts in mind at the time,I would have found the song very appropriate for the occasion.The world was seemingly in upheaval,but then again,when is the world ever not?

Things were changing in our family too.My father decided to move us to Moncton,about eighty miles down the road.He still worked just five miles from where we were living,but he would commute the eighty miles back and forth.In all the years since,he never strayed from that decision.

So one day we were in Redmondville,and the next day we were gone.I have no sense of planning for the move,at least not in any way that involved me.I don't even have a sense of making the trip by car on the day that we moved.That trip down Highway 11 became familiar to me over the years,but I'm certain I didn't see it that day at all.I must have fallen asleep.

The next day we were in Moncton,and it was a very different place.It was the first time in memory that I'd ever been in a city.That first day I remember arriving at a red and white house.There was a moving van too,and my father talking to it's driver.And a supermarket,with food laid out over an area vaster than anything I'd ever seen.And there was a big park.I'd never been to a park before.This one had swings and seesaws and a big thing that everyone called the witch's hat because of the way it was shaped.It went around and around a big post in the center of it,and it also went inward and outward.Sitting on it,and riding around and around was very exciting.But then,I smashed my foot in the cement anchoring the center post,and the fun ended.There was a lot of blood,but in the end I was not badly hurt.

Back at home we ate hot dogs that we'd got at the big store,and then we spent some time out in the back yard.There were no cars rushing past at all,and there was green,soft grass all over the place,in place of the mud and wood and trees that I'd been used to.But when I heard my mother say something about a garden,I wondered if there would be pigs digging there.And then we slept in our new house.



Author's Note: a few days ago I received a message on Facebook from Braunlyn Beaulieu,who was a neighbor when I lived in Moncton,saying "Moncton must have seemed like the big city. Braunlyn,to this point is among my most faithful readers,and I wish to thank her for taking the time.Indeed Moncton did seem very big,but that's kind of getting ahead of the story.And hey,Braunlyn,I would invite you to take the time to leave  comments here on this blog,should you so choose.I'm always open to the commentary,I've always wanted this to be interactive.

                                                                                                             continued

Chapter III Continued.

Our time in Redmondville was nearly over by the end of 1963.My father wanted to move on to the city,and I suppose he had his reasons.He had two growing children and it was time to think about school.My mother taught school,and knew what the schools were like in the area,and they likely didn't want that for us,especially when we were young.Later,many years later he said he never wanted us going to school with Indians,but it was a little hard to know how serious he was about this.He was never really a bigoted person,at least when left to his own devices.Still.it very well might have been true.

In Redmondville I have no memory of there ever being snow on the ground.My snow memories are rather odd.Mostly I think of those days as being rather cool and blustery,and it very well could have been that that is how they were.But,as I grew I became aware of Atlantic Canada being a place given to snowstorms,sometimes huge blasts of snow and ice.So I'm tending to think that there must be something faulty about my memory.I don't recall myself dressed in a heavy winter coat that winter.

Still,there must have been snow.I have a picture of snow in my mind,but it's not of snow laying on the ground.

Once,my father and I started out for someplace in his old blue truck.There was a young woman with us.I believe it was the same woman who was looking after my sister and I the day we saw the pigs rooting in the garden.We didn't really go all that far,maybe ten miles or so,but things looked very different.We were on this old dirt road where we stopped and this woman got out of our truck and began walking.Down off the road there was a big body of water,or at least it seemed very large.The woman started off across the ice surface of it and she was happy and laughing.We watched her until she disappeared,then turned the truck about and went back home.Later,I came to believe that we had gone somewhere near Escuminac,out on the coast,and that the woman was someone who lived there and was distantly related to my mother by way of marriage to her niece in Canterbury.

My only other encounter with snow that year was rather odd.Not the way you usually encounter snow at all.It was later in the winter,going into spring at least,maybe even going into summer.The lady who lived in the trailer to the south of us was standing  out on her porch.I don't recall that her little girls were around,but then,I hardly remember them at all.My sister was there too,and someone else,a woman,possibly my mother.It was very warm out.There was some conversation between the two women,then our neighbor poked her head back inside the trailer and returned with a box.It was a big box of snowballs,and I guess she'd been keeping them in a freezer just inside the door.She started tossing them,slow pitching them,not trying to hit anyone with them.She just stood there tossing snowballs,an obvious act of joy for her,until they were all gone.But it was a dreamlike memory for me,I can't be assured that it really happened in the way I imagine.It could have been created from a few other things I suppose.

Then I cease to remember Redmondville at all.We moved,it faded and all became memory of Moncton.

Chapter III continued.

It's ironic,I guess that my first memory had to have taken place somewhere close in time to that other earth shaking event.Others were  remembering things like getting out of bed late,turning left down a road,or maybe right.Watching a plane pass overhead,or a man in a green coat crossing the street.They were remembering hands on a clock and the sound of that clock ticking.Or maybe solving a trigonometry problem,or answering a multiple choice question on a history test.A,not D,then wondering if it was correct,until the news came down and then it hardly mattered.

I,as usual was in the yard,walking up and down the driveway,not really doing much of anything.Chasing a hen perhaps.Maybe I'd been told to watch out for pigs,but I don't know if I was doing that.There were crows on the wires out across the road.And then it came.That first event that I can clearly recall.But it was such an odd thing,that memory.Later I realized it was because my mind was dealing with it as a child would.

It was cold.That's what makes me think it was autumn.I was wearing a jacket and little puffs of wind were chasing me around the yard.There was sawdust on the ground and the grass was brown.Firewood too,out near the barn.Cloudy and blue sky both.My sister was not in the pen.Cars flashing by,from time to time,but not really busy.

And then it came from the east.A bright blue truck,or van,late 1950's model.Ugly blue.I knew,even then that it was a telephone company truck.The same blue they were painted for years,bright and hard on the eyes.Moving towards our house.I watched it approach.Then,before it got to our driveway but after it passed the little road going into the woods,it kind of slowed a bit,then seemed to almost stop.It was,of course still moving,but it looked unnatural.It seemed to pause,and I knew it would not make it to our driveway.And it jumped.Kind of like the way a frog jumps.I recall it as a ghastly looking blue frog.It hopped,Across the road.Into the ditch.It made a kind of noise that I'd never heard before.It rolled up on it's side,and I could see the side of it sticking up over the edge of the ditch.And there was sawdust in the driveway,and little bits of birch bark from the fire wood,and crows lifting off from the wires across the road.The wind blew in the stubble along side the driveway.

That's the memory,and it seems very unusual.It fascinates me every time I think about it,because now,when I think of it as an adult and try to get it written down just right,I realize the difference,in part between how a child thinks,and how I think about it now.At the time,it had no significance aside from the fact that it happened.And it's so clear in my mind.But it never occurred to me at all that I should do anything because of it's having taken place.It's just that my mind went on to other things as they happened.My eye caught something else,like the crows returning to the wire maybe,or perhaps a mouse scurrying across the ground.And so I never told anyone at all.

I have no idea how it came to be known what had happened.Maybe the neighbor was looking out the trailer window,though that's hard to say because the trailer didn't really have a window that faced the road.More likely another car came along because there were a lot of cars on that road.It was afternoon,so maybe it was even my father coming home from work that discovered it,overturned in the ditch.I have no idea.

There is no real sense of how the next few minutes passed.Not in my memory.I don't know how long it was.After awhile we were up the road,my father and I.A tow truck was dragging the truck back up onto the road.I looked inside and there were drops of blood,though not a lot.There were yellow and pink receipts,some pinned up on the trucks headliner,some blowing around  inside.There were even some on the road.There were little squares of broken glass too,and I even knew to be careful not to cut myself on it.And there was a man,I remember him as being kind of thin and tiny with a swarthy complexion.There was a bandage tied around his head,and blood all about his right ear,but he looked alright and even smiled.He spoke in a language that I didn't understand.Years later my father once said how that man had got his ear cut off.Maybe it was an exaggeration,I don't know.He didn't talk of it much,and my mother talked of it not at all,banishing,I suppose it's unpleasantness as she often did.

And that's it,my first memory.I could recall other things,but this was something different,something more solid and memorable.Because I'd learned to speak some,and because it was such a vivid thing to see,very unusual in my mind,up to that point.Graphic,we would call it today,but nobody would have thought of that word back then.To me though,it's always given me an insight into how my thoughts worked.A deep psychology lesson,also my first.

The rest of the world kept on turning.Wobbling maybe.People wondered and didn't believe,some came to wonder if belief was still possible.Some sought the deep truth and others didn't care.Some lied,and others told the story as best they new how.Questions were asked and answers given,and whole books written.But those memories deeply scarred many,cut our countries right to the bone,while time passed unto the day when the next such event came and formed the collective histories of yet more of us.History lays it out in a certain way,alternate history in another.But my first memory was never nearly so troublesome.

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Chapter III continued

Our time in Redmondville spanned some part of the years from 1963-1964.That was our world,and it was beginning to emerge more and more in my mind,in a way that I can remember.

There was a lot going on outside of Rural New Brunswick in  1963 too.That year saw the birth of Larry The Cable Guy,Michael Jordan,actor Quentin Tarantino and televangelist Joel Osteen.

American poet Robert Frost died,as did singer Patsy Cline and Pope John XXIII.American civil Rights activist Medgar Evers was killed,as were four little girls who were inside a Birmingham Alabama church that was bombed.An early civil rights activist,W.E.B. Dubois also died in 1963.

On January 11,the first discotheque,Whiskey-A-Go-Go,opened in Los Angeles.Alcatraz was closed in March and Simon Fraser University was founded in that month as well. In April the Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup and Lester B.Pearson became the fourteenth Prime Minister Of Canada.In June,Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space,and in August Martin Luther King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech in Washington.Meanwhile,Governor George Wallace of Alabama was saying"Segregation today,segregation tomorrow,segregation forever." and putting his money where his mouth was by trying to stop black students from attending The University Of Alabama.Kenya received it's independence from Britain.,and the last Studebaker rolled of the lines.

A loaf of bread cost about twenty two cents,and a gallon of gas was about twenty nine cents.An average new car cost around thirty two hundred dollars,and an average house about twelve thousand,six hundred dollars.

Mr,Ed,The Andy Griffith Show,The Flintstones and The Avengers were popular television shows of the day and popular movies were To Kill A Mockingbird,Cleopatra,Lawrence of Arabia and mutiny On T.he Bounty.

In 1963,tornadoes,four hundred and sixty three of them in total killed thirty one people and caused one billion dollars damage.

The Oxford English Dictionary had four hundred and twenty new entries.They included expo,first used during the planning stages for Montreal's World Fair,deregulation,,neuroscience,spacewalk,intermodal,machine-washable,mindgame,old money, rent-a-cop and dipshit.Some of them seem to be words that aptly describe 1963,with all of George Wallace's mindgames showing him to be a complete dipshit.

Of course there was another event that took place during the later part of 1963.It was one of those events which everyone who was alive and of a certain age can remember,right down to where they were,who they were with and what they were doing when they heard the news.It was the sort of event that divided time into the time before that event,and the time after.It was an event that has never really been fully resolved in the light of history,and affects us even today.But of course,I don't remember it.My memories consisted of cool days,and chicken,pigs and crows.Wood and a narrow driveway and a barn.My mother,father and a little sister.And a big white farmhouse along the side of Highway  Eleven in eastern New Brunswick.



Refrence:www.onthisday.com

                www.thepeopleshistory.com

                 www.wikipedia.co

             

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Chapter III continued

One day,while my father was away,we made an unusual trip.My father was gone,I believe to a funeral,likely in Springhill. I don't know who had passed,but it was always said afterward that he'd been gone to a funeral.

So,I don't know how we came to make our trip.It was only a short drive into town,but my father would have had the car,I suppose and it's unlikely my mother would have driven in that old dodge truck.It was big inside,and keeping two children contained would have been darn near impossible.But,my mother may have been able to borrow a car,or convinced a neighbor to drive us.Under the circumstances,the convincing would likely not have been all that difficult.Or,we may have had some other car perhaps.My father was rarely to be found with fewer that two cars at any time I can remember well.But this was not such a time.

However we managed it,we went to the hospital.It would have been located in Newcastle perhaps,or maybe on the base at Chatham.My little sister had swallowed a screw.At least that's what my mother called the thing,though when I saw the thing years later,I would have called it a bolt.I don't know how important that distinction was to my sister.The end of the thing was blunt,not pointed,so I guess it could have been a good thing.

My little sister was growing,even I noticed it.She was still inside the pen whenever we were outside,because she would have been less than two years old.I'm not sure where she found the screw,but she did,and she swallowed it,and we were off to the hospital.

We were at the hospital for what seemed like a very long time.I have the great sense of myself being very impatient.There was a lot of sitting around in uncomfortable chairs,inside a waiting room.I remember looking at the holes in the ceiling tiles,wondering in bugs or worms would come out of them.I recall running to the end of a long hallway,and trying to go up a stairway,and of my mother chasing me down more than once.I couldn't get outside,and that really bothered me.It must have been a stressful time for my mother,with my sister being in with the doctors and me running up and down the halls,and her wondering if my sister would be alright,and how she would get home.But all ended well.My sister rid herself of the screw with little if any harm done.My mother kept the screw and put it in my sisters baby book.

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Chapter III continued

Both of my parents worked close to where we lived.My father worked on a military base just a few miles up the road.My mother taught school,in a very small one room schoolhouse.The school was on the other side of the road from where we lived,but you could see it if you looked northward from the end of our driveway.

The school my mother taught in was the first school I'd ever been in.I was way too young to be going to school,but my mother took me to the school once.Like everything else in Redmondville it was made out of wood,and it looked a bit like a church from the outside.It was a rough,old looking building and the trees grew right up to it,so that in the back it was dense bush.There really wasn't any sort of a schoolyard either as the building was right up on the road.There was a big woodpile outside and a wood burning stove inside.My father always used to say that we eventually moved from Redmondville because there were better schools in the city,That was no doubt true,because going to school here would have likely been rather dangerous with the sort of shape the building was in,the woods right behind and a busy highway coming almost up to the door,not to mention a hot stove inside.

Years later,my mother used to say that some of the older boys used to bring beer to school and hide it out in the trees behind the building.Most of her pupils,she said came from our neighbors,the Mormon family who lived almost right across the road from the school.

The army base where my father worked was the greenest place for miles around.There was a patch of neatly trimmed grass right by a guard house by the road.You were supposed to stop there and show identification,but that almost never happened.Usually if was the same guard on duty and he must have known everyone who worked there and he would just wave us through.

Inside,the base was neat and orderly with expansive well tended lawns.Part of the base was set aside as living quarters,and those properties were all well maintained too.Often we would visit someone at one of those houses.We would also go to the base store for groceries,and we visited the barber shop,and the snack bar,which were all in the same building.In the snack bar,I was fascinated by the machine that made milkshakes.I wasn't sure I actually liked milkshakes,and I don't recall ever having one,but I loved to watch the machine,and listen to the powerful whirring noise it made.Usually when we went to the snack bar we would eat french fries.

The place where my father worked had a lot of machines too.It was in a big building,more or less in the center of the base.The building was long and had a lot of big overhead doors.Unlike the other buildings around,this one seemed to be made mostly of metal.There was no wood around here,except for a few trees that were planted about the base.

You could see the building where my father worked for quite a ways around.For one thing it was the biggest building in the area.And it was topped off by what we always referred to as giant golf balls-two or three huge white domes.The base housed a radar installation and a power generating station.My father worked in the generation station.

Once or twice my father took me to work with him,not when he was working,but maybe when he went in to pick up his pay or something like that.When you walked into that building it was always humming,noisy and vibrating.You could sense the power from the generators,it just seemed to move right through you,and you had a sense of being very small.The building was very large in scale as well.There was every kind of tool you could imagine in that building too.Wrenches of all sizes,from tiny,to things almost as long as my fathers leg or arm.Thousands and thousands of tools.There were lights and switches and a control panel of some sort with hundreds of buttons.My father would always warn me not to touch anything in the building.He needn't have worried,because the building made me vaguely uncomfortable with it's noise and vibration.I wasn't about to touch anything.Once when we went inside there was someone there using a torch,and I was really rather frightened of all the sparks,but I didn't say anything.I never did,but I always felt relieved when we left that building.

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Chapter III continued

We went on longer trips too when we lived in Redmondville. But I only have the sketchiest recall of most of those trips.Being able to go places must have seemed like one of the biggest advantages to having moved back to New Brunswick for my parents.In Goose Bay,there'd been no real place to go.You could drive around on the few roads they had,but getting anywhere outside the immediate area was difficult.The roads were said to be bad,and to go to anyplace like Montreal,or the rest of Canada.You would have had to have taken a boat...at least one boat.

In Redmondville we were not all that close to where either of my parents called home,and the roads back then were not all that well kept,but it was still just a few hours to either Canterbury or Springhill. In my mind,the idea of being in Springhill doesn't belong to that time.My first memory of being there was after we moved to Moncton,a year or so later.But Canterbury was a different story.

I can vaguely recall being on the old farm,out in Dead Creek when I was very small,no more than a toddler.The farm was a really rough sort of a place,a long way of any major highway.It was located on the side of a hill that some people called a mountain.The farm house was rough inside,I'm not certain how many rooms it had,but I had no real sense of there being any doors between the rooms.Just curtains maybe.My grandfather grew some crops on the land,but it would be hard to imagine anything more than subsistence crops growing there.Corn and potatoes and root vegetables,but nothing you could sell for a lot of cash.The land wasn't really good,and it would grow over very quickly if left untended for only a few years.My grandmother would take us to the barn where she had cows and pigs,and I can recall her feeding chickens from her apron,and gathering eggs too,which was easier to do when they were eating.

The land all around Dead Creek was rough.A lot of farms even then were abandoned,the people having moved to one or another city,or maybe just a few miles into town.There was nothing like a blacktop road anywhere near,and one of the thing that sticks in my mind from the very earliest time in my memory is of dust.Sitting on the outer porch you could always tell a car was coming,or going by the plumes of dust.Dust got everywhere.On the windows and cars,and on clothes.And by evening I was always covered in it.There was no bathtub at my grandparents farm,but I remember being bathed in a tub out of galvanized metal. My grandmother kept that old tub even when she moved into town a few years later.Sometimes she kept potatoes or apples in it,and I was able to determine how small I was then by looking at the size of that tub.About the size of a bushel basket,maybe a bit smaller.Dust penetrated my grandfathers old blue car too.In fact,he kept that car into the mid 1970's,and it was never free of the dirt that embedded itself in those seats when they lived out on the farm.

The only other thing I recall about visiting Canterbury,or Dead Creek was once standing out in the yard of a small farm just down the road from where my grandparents lived,with an old,tiny,stooped and very old woman,who was trying to focus my attention on watching some bluebirds sitting on a wooden fence.They may have been jays,or actual bluebirds.I really have no idea.But we also saw a woodpecker that day,and there was a small owl way up in the barn too.I loved to go in the barn,and  this particular barn,along with all the other animals also had white woolly sheep,which I'd never seen before.

We made one trip to Charlottetown too.I was very small at that time,and it was winter.You still had to cross on a boat then,and I recall standing in a window,looking down at the water and watching the boat split the ice and push it aside.The purpose of that trip,as I recall was to visit my uncle,William Davis,who was with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,and must have been stationed in Charlottetown at that time.I really don't remember anything about my uncle or his family at that time.I think they could have only had the one child at that time.I only recall the time on the boat coming and going,and the ice in the water.

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Chapter III Continued.

Pigs and cows and chickens could not have been the only animals about. Redmondville was a fair distance from any sizable town and the bush encroached close up on the farms,including the one we lived on.The bush was quite thick in most places and you could easily gotten lost just a few steps in.

We were never allowed to go down the road behind our neighbors trailer.It wasn't much of a road to begin with,but it ended just a short way from the blacktop.There was a pile of dirt there,and often a big muddy puddle,likely enough to drown a small child.The road went on into the woods,but was really only a path at that point.Anytime I asked what was down that road,I was quickly redirected.But I really wanted to find out.I wanted to go down that road.

It would be reasonable to think that there could have been bears down that road.Certainly it's the kind of road where you could easily find bears.There may well have been wolves around then too.I don't remember seeing or hearing any though.And I've always heard it said that there were woodsmen or bad men living in the woods. More likely the adults were concerned about hunters.Hunting has always been big in rural  New Brunswick,and every year of my life I've seemed to hear of at least one hunting accident.My mother would not only have feared a stray bullet,but she would not have wanted us to see a dead animal either,or,for that matter,a gun.

One night ,after dinner we all got into the car and went for a short drive up the road.In which direction,I could not tell you,but it wasn't far from home.We were going to see if we could see a beaver.We never did.We walked out into the bush,a fair way off the road,and it was rough going.Before long we came to this big pond,or perhaps it was a small lake.The water was still and dark and there were all sorts of grey trees that seemed to be broken off and dead.They were in the water,and all around the water's edge too.There was a lot of deadwood lying all over the ground too and it was hard to walk around without tripping.This was the place where beavers lived.I could recognize it easily today,but I'd never been to such a place before then.We waited around for some time,but we never did see a beaver.

Whenever I was outside in the driveway I would always hear chainsaws running.It's the one sound I've come to associate most closely with rural New Brunswick.Log trucks passed up and down the road in front of our house too,and there were a lot of little cross roads where wood was piled up for the trucks to pick up. Redmondville was a place seemingly made out of wood.Wood and old broken down automobiles.

At some point my father bought an old dodge truck.It was a sort of a midnight blue,with blotchy paint and very rusty in places.It would have been a late 1940's model and it seemed very old even then.That was most likely because it had received a lot of hard use.It burned oil,a lot of oil,and it seemed to rattle and shake when you were anywhere near it.There was a sort of stick coming up out of the floor,which my father used to drive the truck.But when it wasn't being driven,when it was still running though,that stick shook all over the place.That truck fit right in with our surroundings.It was a very blue collar vehicle,and my mother never drove it.My father had a car too,a Valiant,which was a much nicer car,and better to ride in too.But we did go into the woods a few times with the truck.We hauled some wood and we went to some places the car could never have gone.We drove it all the way down to the beach a time or two as well.It really wasn't all that far away,but it looked very different from the land around our home.

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Chapter III.Continued

We lived in Redmondville for about a year between 1963 and some time in 1964.That would have meant that we were there from just past my second birthday,until just past my third.It was a time of emerging memory.But it would not be right to say that I remembered well,When I think of children of that age,I think of children developing language skills.There is a big difference between a child of two and a child of three.By the time I was three,I could speak in nearly full.if not exactly grammatically correct sentences,and that made all the difference when it came to remembering things.But today I am aware of the deficiencies in my recall.For instance,I have no real memory of winter ever coming,or at least of there ever being snow on the ground that year.It could have been snowless,but I think that is not true,because most years were not.And further,I have no recall of planes passing overhead,though common sense tells me there must have been a lot of them,as we were right near the edge of an airbase.

Once I was allowed outside the little pen at the side of the house,I had the run of the yard,but was not allowed near the road.I didn't favor the road much anyway,and I don't recall going near it's edge.Cars scared me,going by so fast.So my whole world,for that year became the narrow confines of our driveway,a strip maybe twenty five feet wide,and perhaps a couple of hundred feet front to back.Less frequently I would wander up by our neighbors trailer.They had two little girls,one of which was named Roxanne.We would play together some,and I believe their mother looked after us a time or two when my parents were working.At some point my mother began teaching school,at the little shack up the road,so she would be away during the day.She wasn't really a teacher,but in those days there was a shortage of teachers,and she had been to college and was allowed to teach.

Occasionally I would go into the barn too.There really wasn't a lot happening in that barn as we were not really keeping any larger animals,so there were no cows or pigs to see,at least not in there.Most of the time there were no lights on in the barn,so it was dark and I would not venture inside.

There were chickens about.I remember them,strutting in the yard,pecking at the ground.There must have been a rooster about too,though I don't ever recall hearing it.But at some point,some
kind of a little pen was erected at the end of the driveway.It was a circle of some kind of light wire,held together with pieces of wood.It seemed very high to me,but was not likely that tall.Inside there were a dozen or more tiny yellow thing.Thing I'd never seen before.They were baby chicks.I'm not certain if they came from our hens,or if perhaps they came from a hatchery and were our hens.But on the first day I saw them I remember a number of adults standing around in the driveway encouraging me to drop some bread crumbs into the pen.There was a big pan of water in the pen too,and they told me to drop the crumbs onto the ground,not into the water.I tried,but a lot of them went into the water anyway.Later I discovered that the chickens ate bugs and worms too,when I saw this big white pick up a big black beetle and begin picking it to pieces.I spent a lot of time with those chicken.They were ever present in the yard and driveway,but at night they went back into the barn by themselves.Sometimes in the mornings I'd go into the barn to help my mother or father collect eggs.Often the chickens did not want you to get near the eggs,so they would fly at us, pecking and squawking.

Chickens were not the only animals my father kept.At some point he brought home a couple of cows.He decided not to keep them in our barn ,for some reason.So he sent them over to the farmer who lived up the road.There must have been more room in their barn than in ours.They kept pigs and cows too,and maybe some goats.The farmer was a Mormon,which was very rare in New Brunswick,at least at that time.I recall that he had a wife and a lot of children,who looked remarkably similar one to the other,except for being all different sizes and ages.My mother always used to say that most of the children she taught came from that single family.Later,years later,my father told me that that farmer had more than one wife,that one would stay with him at the farm for a while,then she would leave and another one would come.I only ever recall seeing the one woman.

After my father left the cows with the Mormon family,they would sometimes get loose and come back to our yard.In fact,they were not the only animals that would come into our yard.Pigs would come to visit too,and I gathered they were a bit of a problem.Once I was out in the driveway with a young girl that was looking after my sister and I,and some pigs came up out of the bush,from the direction of our neighbors farm.They came into our garden and started digging thing up.Mostly the garden was bare earth at that time,but I think it must have been seeded.In any event,I was never allowed outside if the pigs were on the loose,and they were more that once.Pigs were something that my parents were concerned about,and I sensed that concern.I was never really afraid of them,but I'd been told not to go near them,so I didn't.

One day the big brown cow came up to our yard.I knew she lived at the farm down the road because sometimes we would go down there to milk her.One of the boys that lived there once showed me how cows were milked,and he seemed to think that telling a small child about it was somehow funny.I think he expected me to have some sort of an adverse reaction to the sight of a big teat,but I don't recall having any reaction to it at all.But I remember that brown cow coming home.She came right up to our house's front door.There was a little step there and I was sitting on it when she arrived.She started licking my hands with her long tongue,and I though it might be a good thing to bring her into the house.My father was home,and he didn't think so though.He came out,and I would have to say,the cow seemed glad to see him.They seemed to have a good deal of affection for one another.While the cow was very big nobody seemed to be as worried about her trampling us as they were about the pigs.In fact,she was very gentle.After greeting my father,she lay down right there by our front step.For a while I tried to get her to eat some flowers.Some dandelions,then some planted flowers that my mother kept by the doorway.Flowers didn't seem to interest her much.It must have been late summer or early fall.It was cool but not cold outside and I had on a light jacket.After trying to get the cow to eat flowers,I guess I must have grown tired,so I went over and lie down right on the cow who was lounging on her side in the grass.Later I woke up in the house. Nap time was over and someone had led the cow back down to the neighbors barn.

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