Chapter X 1966 Continued.

By the time the weather turned good in 1966,the school up the street was nearing completion,a full year ahead of the time I would be going into grade one.First it had just been a big hole in the ground at the head of Birchmount Avenue,and there were what seemed like hundreds of pallets of bricks piled up by the hole,where the front lawn would be.Slowly they disappeared,and the school began to look like an actual building.There were two kinds of brick,yellow and red.For a time the building had no doors,and a few times we just walked right in and had a look around,after all the workers had gone home.I don't ever remember there being fences around the place at all.

By May or June,the school,Birchmount School was looking almost completed,ready to receive pupils.It had glass in the windows,gravel was being spread out along three of it's perimeters,and a lawn was seeded along the front and a flag pole raised.The we would walk up to the school everyday nearly,and peer into each of the windows on the main floor.Tiles were being laid,and some of the classrooms did not yet have chalkboards.Still,my father was very proud of the school,he was happy that we had one in our neighborhood,happy that it was modern and that it was close by and wouldn't require us to cross any main streets on our way there.Wherever we went,he would brag about our new school even though we were not yet ready to attend.to him,a school was part of the social contract,a big part of the reason he lived and paid taxes where he did.So he was happy to see it ready for my first day there.

The huge hole in the ground just across Mountain Road from the end of our street was taking shape as well.At first it was a mess,a big mud hole.But gravel trucks and flatbeds with loads of bricks just kept coming.One day we were walking to the barber shop,my father and I and a truck arrived with all of the letters for the sign-KMART.We wandered on down the road and got our hair cut,then came back and watched them place the sign along the front of the building.the Kmart was a building site that you could not walk around,not like the school or any of the houses.I don't really recall any fences,but there was so much mud around the site that you could sink up to your knees,and the building itself was a long way from the road.Later on,we watched them put in some big plate glass windows along the front of the store,and they seemed big enough to take up the whole front of our house.

Most of the houses around and about were nearing completion too.Usually the last thing to be done was to plant a lawn.Some people rolled out sod and had a lawn right away,but most of us rolled out dirt in the front lawn,then packed it down and seeded it with a small hand pushed seeder.That is exactly what my father did.It would have been easier to roll out sod,because he had to level the lot out,then go get the dirt and spread it out before the lawn could be seeded.And,as he pushed the seeder,his feet would sink down into the dirt,so that by the time he was done,the whole lawn to be was a mess of unsightly foot prints.And,if it rained hard,some of the soil would wash away.some of our neighbors had to reseed after planting.If you put up a "Do not walk on the grass." sign,it ended up being an invitation for someone to do just that.And we were not really getting to the point where there still were not dogs running all over the place either.So getting a lawn planted,and seeing it through to the point that it was more grass than dirt was not the easiest thing to do.When we planted ours,I was there from the start.I remember well the day we went to get the dirt.

Chapter X 1966 Continued.

Most week day mornings we headed up the street to the babysitters,and there we would spend the day. But not everyday.If our father was not working we got to stay at home.It would have allowed my parents to save a bit of money on childcare,and of course,we always complained about having to go to the sitters.I would never have really been able to voice my concerns back then,but I think we really did not like the sitters that much.It was a loud place with a lot of kids and,a lot of conflict.Stating at home was much better.

Early in the morning,just after nine O'clock,if the weather was nice I would get onto my tricycle and head on down the road to Kenny's house.My parents never seemed to have the least concern about this at all.I was well out of sight of our front yard,but my father would just say"Be home at eleven thirty." So I would ask Kenny's mother or father to let me know when it was time to head on home,and there was never any problem.Sometimes we would get into the car and drive off to pick up my mother for lunch,so my father would drive by Kenny's place,pick me up,and I'd leave the tricycle behind until I returned in the afternoon.We's go off and get my mother,then come home and eat,and I'd be off again.

In the mornings we'd usually hang around at Kenny's place,racing bikes,or playing trucks.I had a yellow dump truck that I would tow along using a piece of string so that I didn't have to carry it.On the way down the street I'd count the cracks in the sidewalk.Well,actually,I'd count ten of them,but more than once because ten was as high as I'd learned to count.So,I knew exactly how many cracks there were along the way.I just would never have been able to communicate that knowledge to most adults in a way that made much sense.Sometimes,at mid morning,we'd stop and have a plate of cookies and some lunch.

One morning we were out at play when an ambulance came up the street.It's lights were flashing,but it wasn't sounding the siren.It stopped right across the street from Kenny's house,maybe one or two house up the block.Two men got out with a stretcher and went into the house.They were in there for a long time,then they came out.There was an old woman living in that house,and she was on the stretcher.Kenny was trying to see if he could see the woman's face because,he said,if the blanket was pulled all the way to the top,it meant that the person was dead.But I wasn't able to tell.The ambulance left slowly,so I thought the person inside really couldn't have been that sick.But Kenny said that they wouldn't be going fast if she were dead either.There would be no point.I never really found out one way or the other,but I think she must have been alright.?We likely would have heard if she'd died,even though we didn't know her.Sometime while we were playing at Kenny's house,the mailman would come around.Actually,there were a number of different mailmen.Some were grumpy old guys who wouldn't say a thing to us,and we didn't bother with them at all.But there was this one mailman,whose name was Reggie,and he liked kids.He would shoot elastic bands at us and joke around all the time,and all of the kids liked him.He delivered mail for a number of years and always got along well with the kids.

While we stayed around Kenny's place in the mornings,in the afternoons we'd usually head off for the woods.Kenny never came to our place to play,so we were either at his place or in the woods.To get to the woods,it would have been easy to just cut across the field and enter from the back side.But that's never what we did.We would ride,or walk all the way back up to Willet Street,almost all the way back home,then go over the one block to Crandall Street,and proceed down to the first fire hydrant,almost directly across from the end of Second Avenue.Right there the woods opened up into a little path,and we could hide our bikes and explore.The woods were not big at all,you couldn't really get lost in them,but you could hide from anyone passing on the street.Anyone passing would maybe have a vague awareness that there were people in the woods.And if we were in there playing,we would not have much more than a vague idea that there was anything going on out on the street.Right in the center of the woods,there was this tree that had fallen most of the way to the ground before getting wedged into the crotch of another tree.So,we could climb along it's trunk,and there was never much danger of falling because it didn't really go up very high.We referred to this tree as a fort,and that is where we would spend most of our time,every nice day until summer had passed.

Kenny sometimes brought along a string of caps.We didn't have cap guns then,so we would find a rock and stretch the red paper roll of caps out on the sidewalk,and hit them with the rock until they blew up.Kenny would sometimes fold the paper over so there was more than one cap,sometimes even four or five together before he'd hit it,and it would make a really loud bang.We would catch insects too,and put them into bottles and take them home.Usually the only insects we could find were these long furry caterpillars that would crawl right along the curb.They were big and dumb and easy to catch,and one day Kenny decided it might be a good idea to blow up one of them using the caps.But,he never had any matches.He talked about having matches,and lighting up whole boxes of caps at one time,just to see what kind of a noise,and how much fire it would make.But he never had matches.So,he was never able to figure out how to blow up a caterpillar because it would involve putting them into a g;lass jar,with some caps,then hitting it with a rock.But we never did that because we didn't want to break glass.

We would find treasures of various kinds in the woods.We found a box of cigars once,hidden under this pile of sticks,and Kenny took them home.I would find mushrooms there too,and once I gathered up a whole bunch and took them home,thinking my father could use them to put in his eggs like he liked to do.But he explained to me that there were no mushrooms in the woods that were good to eat,and that I must never eat them,because I might end up getting sick enough to go to the hospital.All the time,we would find empty shotgun shells in the woods.But I'd never heard anyone shooting in the woods.But still,there were spent shells.Kenny said there were bears living in the woods too,but I never believed him.The woods were just not big enough.A bear was so big that I would have been able to see it from anywhere in the woods,and I'd never seen one.Besides,this woods was right in the city,and everyone knew there were no bears in the city.

Chapter X 1966 Continued.

When I say Moncton was almost a fifty fifty split between Franco-phones and Anglophones,the statistics have born me out for most of my life.It has varied slightly from year to year,but over the years it's been a very close split.And,for the most part,our street pretty much reflected that.

On our block,though,there was only one French family and they lived right beside us.Across the street,the names living in the houses were,in order,Wilson,Sherwood,Carter,Savoie,Duffy and Constable.  I've left out Karen's family,who lived directly across from us because I've forgotten their last name,but I believe it to be slightly ethnic,but not French.That's two French families on the whole block.But farther down,past the first house on the next block,an ,the street turned Francophone rather quickly.In fact,to the best of my recollection,an Irish family was the last of the houses of English speaking families until the other end of that block.Across the street seemed to be mixed.I wasn't allowed to ride down that side of the street,but I could tell from the mix of language being spoken that it was a mixed block.The other thing that I recall was that almost all people,at that time were white,and spoke one of either English or French.Very little else was spoken,and is was rare to see a black or a brown person.

At the far end of the next block down,I found a friend at house number fifty-nine,one of the older houses on that block,one of those that was there before the rest of the sub-division.All the houses in between that and the Irish family seemed to be French speakers.While I remember that time during the spring of 1966,running all the way up to when I started school in the fall of the next year as being a time the two of us,me and that kid were inseparable,all I really recall about him was that his name was Kenny,and that he moved before school started.As hard as I try,though,I can't bring his face to mind.I do recall meeting him again,after he moved,years later,just before I left Moncton.

Parts of our neighborhood were left undeveloped.There was a big field,a meadow running up from the corner of Mountain Road between Watson and Crandall Streets.It was wide at the Mountain Road end and it narrowed out as you walked up towards Willet Street.Along one side of this meadow was a big stand of trees,what we called the woods,though it really was kind of puny to have been called woods.There was a path that cut diagonally through the meadow too,from the corner of Mapleton Road up to the dead end of Gilbert Street.And there was one old house in the meadow between Gilbert and Willet Streets.The people living there were French,and very poor indeed,the house being best described as a shack,though it was rather large.

So,when I was five years old,that was my hood,and I consider myself blessed to have lived there then.The meadow and the woods were my favorite places to explore and play in.The meadow was always full of birds and tall grass,and there were many things in the woods that were new to me.There was a lot of various kinds of junk laying around,and trying to figure out what it was and how it came to be there occupied a lot of my time and energy.If it was hot outside,the woods was usually cool and shady,and it smelled good,at least most of the time.There was a lot going on there too.Interesting,though not always wholesome things,and if my mother had ever taken a walk through there,I would likely have been forbidden to play there.But,to the best of my knowledge,she never stuck her head into those trees,so it remained my playground for a few years.The woods was also useful to another end.If you were outside,and you needed to pee but didn't want to run all the way home,the woods is where you went.It was convenient that way. 

Chapter X 1966.Continued.

Street hockey,of course was a Canadian institution.Any street that you passed in  Moncton was bound to be crowded with youngsters playing hockey.Two opposing nets would be set up on a street.This could be any street,even fairly busy ones.Sometimes kids would have a net,or maybe even two.By that,I mean a store bought net of nylon mesh and light aluminum that could be easily picked up and moved around.Most kids though didn't have store bought nets so they would just mark out a net osing two rocks as goal posts.Nobody ever measured to see if both nets were the same width,so far as I know.And it was generally disagreed on that the net was as high as a persons head.By person,I mean any given goaltender.Since goaltenders came in a lot of different shapes and sizes,there ended up being some arguments about when a goal was scored.It was usually better to have a shorter kid as a goaltender,because in theory it meant the makeshift net was smaller.Also,it allowed the taller kids,those being mostly older,stronger and more athletic to play outside the goal,and that was far better for scoring goals.

Now along with the nets,hockey pucks were usually also makeshift.They might be an actual puck,but more often they were some kind of a ball.A tennis ball worked best,but kids used all sorts of balls,whatever they had.Usually it was some sort of sponge rubber ball,very soft,the kind kids would play catch with.A time or two I'd see kids playing with India rubber balls,what they called "super balls." There was one thing wrong with that sort of a ball,and that was that it had a lot of action,so,when you shot it as hard as you could,unless the goaltender actually blocked it,you would end up running halfway to the Nova Scotia border to get the stupid thing back.Kids loved hockey,but I never saw anyone who was really keen on the amount of exercise they got from chasing a super ball.One time I was involved in a hockey match where the only thing we could find was a blue croquet ball.This was really not the best thought out idea,but if it was the only thing around,giving up on a really bad idea was not the best thing young boys did.As I recall there was a general agreement that we should shoot the ball gently,but the presence of testosterone made that idea only last until someone got pissed off about something,and really started putting some arm power into the shots.So all we really accomplished was teaching each other how to sing soprano in one easy lesson.There was even a ball made especially for street hockey.It was larger than a tennis ball,day glo orange in color and it didn't bounce around much,nor were they made of wood.Much nicer than a croquet ball.They were kind of expensive though,and most times kids preferred a slightly livelier ball.So,in my part of the world the old mud soaked,dog dung streaked,half worn out,slush sodden and then frozen brown but used to be green or yellow tennis ball was the hockey puck of choice.They were about the dirtiest thing any kid could lay their hands on and most likely had more viruses than your average pig pen or American voting machine.When a frozen one hit you where the Lord split you,it was a right of passage.Not the real deal as far as ice hockey goes,but a ubiquitous symbol of Canadian culture nonetheless.Whenever you see one,you know exactly what it was used for.

Watching a street hockey match,or even just passing by one,a person would become educated on one of Moncton's and in fact,Canada's most prominent cultural schisms. Kids liked to wear hockey sweaters when they played street hockey.In fact,kids would even show the world their hockey colors when the weather was well below zero.Sometimes they would layer up,sometimes they woulds not.The most obvious colors were red,and blue.The red sweaters had a letter H enclosed within a larger Letter C.The Montreal Canadians,or Canadiens if you preferred.The blue sweaters had white arm bands and a big white maple leaf on the front.The Toronto Maple Leafs.Two of the original six NHL teams,and bitter rivals.

The rivalry demonstrated something about Canadian culture.I could tell that even at five years old,watching street hockey for the first time,even if I had no real understanding of what the different sweaters meant.Montreal is a predominately French speaking city.Many of it's hockey heroes had French names. Toronto was mostly English,and it's players had English,Irish or Scottish names. Moncton was split pretty much fifty fifty as far as language and culture were concerned.So both sweaters were very popular.It was never a really hard and fast rule,but French kids usually wore red sweaters,English kids the blue  ones.There was even a book written about this aspect of Canadian culture* So,thanks to my new ability to explore,I was receiving my very first lesson in Sociology.











Author's note:

* The Hockey Sweater by Roche Carrier was originally written in French,then adapted to English.It was also made into a short film by The National Film Board,which is available on Youtube. It is a rather short and completely charming,light hearted  look at the culture noted above.Easily worth the few minutes that it takes to view.

Chapter X 1966 Continued

Spring and summer of 1966 seemed like such a glorious time,at least in my mind.Days and days of nice weather,all through the spring,summer and even into fall.I'm sure it must have rained on occasion too,but I just remember it as a carefree time with nothing to do but play in the neighborhood and meet new friends.

The neighborhood was about to expand and open up to me in a way it never had before.It all had to do with that beautiful red tricycle I'd received at Christmas,the one that I'd only been riding in the basement up until this point.It was bigger than most tricycles,bright red with white handle bars and streamers at the end of each handle.At least for a short time.The streamers didn't seem to last very long,but no matter,now I could get around the neighborhood in a way I never had before.

Moncton,in those days was a rather small,quiet,some might even say sleepy town,where nothing much ever happened.For young children,it was a safe town.Nobody worried much about the things parents worry about today.Nobody even locked their doors when they went out to the store or any place like that.It would have been considered an oversight if you'd locked the door and someone you knew came to visit and couldn't get inside the house and make themselves comfortable.A lot of people would leave a key hidden under a mat or some place like that,even right in the mailbox.But a good many people just left the door unlocked.This included my parents.That's just the way they were,just the way they reasoned about such things at the time,and just the sort of trust they had about the kind of town we lived in.So,accordingly,at five years of age I was permitted to venture farther from home.

I'd gone everywhere I went up until this point with my parents.Downtown or just walking around in the hood.That had included a good deal of walking around.Usually the longest walk we took on a regular basis was down to the community college to get our hair cut at the barber school.So I was familiar with the area in which we lived.Sort of.I didn't really know many kids around and about until I got that tricycle.After not too many days I was allowed to stray a bit farther from home,down to the corner of Gilbert Street,two full blocks away.I was allowed to drive down Gilbert,or Willet Streets to their end.Both of those streets were dead ends that ended one block of of our street.And soon after I was allowed to venture down Crandall Street to the first fire hydrant past where Willet  dead ended.About a block and a half from home.

All of this might not sound like a lot,and in fact it wasn't in terms of actual area.But up until this point I was expected to stay inside of our yard,with the exception of being allowed to go a few steps up the street on our side.Once Karen's family moved in across the street,and after I'd gotten out of the calaboose from the rock fight,I was allowed to go over to her [place,so long as an adult watched me cross the street.So the new freedom I was allowed when I got that tricycle expanded my territory by at least a factor of ten.There was a lot of new places to explore,and I was quick to get on with the business of doing just that.

I got to know the kids up and down the street on our side of Watson,or at least most of them.this was great because there were no other boys to hang with on our block.Karen was a completely companionable playmate,but she didn't much care for trucks.But down just past the first corner there was a large family that lived in one of the older houses,and they had a ton of boys.Actually,they had a ton of children,most of whom were boys.My father would always say it was because they were Catholic that they had so many children.But that family made up most of the kids who would hang out and play in Willet Street.Not one of them was exactly my own age,but I still hung out with them,and some others,playing guns or racing our bicycles,or,in my case tricycles.We'd play tag too or hide and seek.And a few of the older boys played hockey.If you didn't go to school though,the older boys didn't let you play.I guess that was kind of a good thing because the older kids could be kind of passionate about hockey,almost like they were Canadian or some such thing.Sticks could get to flying around too and there was even the odd fight.So it wasn't really a great activity for pre- school children.Once or twice some of the kids even took part in another well established Canadian road hockey tradition.That involved stopping the game in the span of about a second,gathering up sticks and any other equipment that was laying around and high tailing it for the hills because a cop car had turned onto the street.It was kind of funny to watch.It was rumored that if the cops caught kids playing hockey on the road,they would confiscate all of your equipment,and drive you home to your parents.So,whenever a cop car turned into the street,ten different kids would clear the playing area and scatter in ten different directions.I'm not certain why,because those ten kids likely lived in a grand total of maybe three or four houses,and I'm fairly certain that the police knew where all of those houses were.But,even from the first time I ever saw a kid pick up a hockey net and take off hell bent into the woods,tripping over roots and snagging himself and the net on every low hanging branch of every tree,and sometimes wiping out into poison ivy,I regarded it as rather amusing.If only because it was about the only place you would ever see that much action in our neighborhood.I always kind of suspected that the cops though about it that way too,because I'd never seen them actually gather up anyone's sticks or other hockey equipment.Playing in the road was technically illegal,for good reason,but the cops likely thought kids would learn their lesson by having to run for it,and the cops,of course wouldn't have to generate a lot of paperwork.Those were the sorts of things I got to see once I could venture farther from home. 

Chapter X 1966 Continued

Winter seemed to take a long time passing in 1966.Actually I'm not certain it was any longer than most others but my perception was likely colored by the fact that I had a nice new shiny set of wheels in the basement.That tricycle I'd got for Christmas.Of course,I didn't have to wait to ride it,I just couldn't ride it outside.that never stopped me from riding in the basement.

Back then our basement was open,there were none of the walls there that are there now.It was just a single,big room with nothing much in it but the furnace and water heater at one end a few support posts in the middle.There were a few tools laying around too,and a n old wringer washer,but no dryer.And,of course,the hiding place for the cat,under the steps.So I could pretty much drive from one end to the other as fast as I could pedal.This did bring about a problem though.The floors were not painted and there was a lot of dust.It didn't take a lot to get the air perturbed to the point that there was a cloud of dust hanging down from the ceiling,and it got hard to breathe.So my father brought home a few cans of gray paint,about the color you would find on a battleship.And we all spent a morning painting the floor.Once it was painted,we couldn't go into the basement for a couple of days,and the cat had to stay upstairs,which rather annoyed her.But,once the paint had dried,we could tear around down in the basement all day and it would never get dusty.The smell of fresh paint replaced the previous dusty,musty scent of the basement too,so it was a much nicer place to be.My father had not really done much in the way of improvements since we'd moved in,and 1966 turned out to be the year that the basement got upgraded.

Meanwhile,up the street at the babysitters,I was finding out that the sitters older daughter could be half decent some of the time.Not often though.I do recall that she was the one that taught us how to make snow angels though,by laying down and doing jumping jacks in the snow while in the horizontal position.There was a lot of wet heavy snow the first time I'd ever done that,and I remember watching some of the neighbors up on the roofs pushing off snow with shovels.It was one of those heavy snowfalls that Moncton is prone to getting at times.We made a snowman too,a big snowman,pretty much the same as most snowmen,until the two older kids decided to make some changes.The girl put a cigarette in it's mouth,and the boy removed the big carrot nose and replaced it about a foot and a half further down.I remember seeing a lot of snowmen like that back then,all anatomically correct,sort of,with cigarettes and pipes,and even one with a cigar.

Finally all the snow was gone,though the weather stayed cold for a while.It seemed we were going of with the sitters oldest daughter to fetch smokes a lot that winter.One particular day I recall it being quite warm and foggy,but there was still a lot of snow on the ground.Every other day all winter long,it seemed we were off to the store for cigarettes.But finally it started to get nice out,and I could bring my new wheels outside.

Chapter X 1966 Continued.

The incident of the cat seemed to raise the issue of theology.I was certainly too young to have ever heard that word,and I'm not really certain my mother ever had much use for it.She thought of herself as a  Christian,in her family of origin,and she was trying to teach those values to the family she had created.But I'm not certain she ever really thought about religion in a really sophisticated way.To her,religion seemed to be about reading,going to church,and obeying.But I'm not certain at all if the obeying part of her belief referred to obeying The Bible,or the minister from church.

There might have been the beginnings of a small split with my father so far as theology was concerned,even though no one was using that word.But what my mother said regarding the cat,and what happened to her,was not exactly the same as what my father was saying.At first,my mother said"dead",then later grew unsatisfied with that word,along with any of it's variations,and settled on "Gone to Heaven." But I'm not certain that that concept was something she actually believed.Did she really think that a cat had a soul? It was kind of difficult to tell.My father,when I asked him about it a while later said that animals,cats,dogs,horses,pigs or whatever didn't really go to Heaven.They went to cat Heaven,or dog Heaven,or dog and cat Heaven,or animal heaven.And he said he didn't thing either cats or dogs would think where they went was Heaven if they both went to the same place.He also said,and this was the nature of my concern,that he didn't think animals went to the same Heaven as people.And this was a bit unsettling,as I was beginning to grow rather fond of dogs.I liked cats too,but I was really beginning to be more of a dog person.So I wondered something along these lines: if dogs and cats were good,we enjoyed them,and God created them,then why would He not allow them into Heaven? Because then Heaven would be less than what it should be,because we had animals while Heaven didn't. What my father actually said was that he didn't believe animals had souls the same way people did,and you needed to have a soul to get into Heaven.So this was really a rather articulate bit of theology on his part,and he explained it in terms that were simple enough for me to understand.He also said that just because animals did not go to Heaven,it didn't mean that they went to Hell.My father was still encouraging us to think of Hell as a place with a huge fire,so he told me that making an animal go to Hell would be very much like throwing our cat into the furnace,and a good God would surely not do that.But that left two things very much unexplained.What actually did happen to dead animals?And,did my father really believe that God was good?

My mother was very much into avoiding unpleasantness of any sort,so where her children were concerned,such things were consigned to The World Just Beyond,that place that we were able to perceive,but that she refused to make manifest to us.Accordingly,she tended to avoid a lot of what theology actually is.My father,on the other hand chose to deal with what I'm sure he thought of  as difficult questions that he believed deserved at least some kind of an answer.But whether or not that answer was something he truly believed,or something he thought out,and tried to explain just for the purpose of addressing difficult questions,I am unsure of to this day.  

Chapter X 1966 Continued

When we first came to Moncton,or shortly thereafter,we had a pet.Not a dog,but a cat.I don't recall the cat's name,or even if she had one,but I recall the cat very clearly.She was a long, slender thing,with a long,high tail and one eyes was yellow,the other blue.

As far as cats go,this one was gentle and calm and I don't ever remember being scratched or bitten by her.Occasionally a dog would come into the yard when she was outside,and she would arch her back and hiss at the dog.Once she went running up a tree because there was a dog chasing her.I ran inside and asked my mother if she was going to call the firemen to rescue her.I'd seen that in one of the books that she had read to us,so I just kind of thought that's what you needed to do.But my mother just said"no,she can get down out of the tree by herself.I was rather disappointed,because I really wanted the firemen to come. But my mother was right.It wasn't long until the cat was safely on the ground.

Sometimes our cat would bring us things that she had dragged in from outside.Like mice.Usually when she did that it was only some part of the mouse.Never the whole thing.Sometimes she brought in birds,usually sparrows.Once,though she caught a robin,and my mother called her a bad cat,and took the dead robin away from her and put it outside with the garbage.I would have guessed that this was because our mother didn't want us seeing dead things,only she never objected to dead mice.Dead mice brought about praise.Dead birds brought about a "Bad cat!" I was out in the yard one time when I saw our cat moving quietly and slowly through the garden.The,all of a sudden,she took off like a streak and jumped,right at a robin that was near the foot of the maple trees that used to be in the yard.There were a lot of nasty sounding noises,and a big cloud of brown and gray feathers,but the robin ended up getting away.When the cat came inside,she still had feathers stuck to her fur.

The cat stayed outside a lot if it wasn't cold.My mother would usually put it out at night,and it would stay there until morning.So it wasn't long until it was having kittens.When the cat was inside,she used to like to hide out under he basement steps.She could get way in there,under the last step where nobody could reach her and she could get some peaceful rest from a house full of kids.I think she likely found mice in there as well.So one day my mother called us to come down to the basement,and showed us this cardboard box she'd put under the stairwell.Inside was or cat,and a whole bunch of tiny,furry kittens,mostly white,but some yellow and gray ones too.They were not much bigger than my five year old fist,they were all curled up under our cat,and their eyes were closed.And they were making these really tiny meowing sounds,without stop.We never kept any of those kittens.I don't recall what happened to them.They were there,then they were gone.A few years later my father was saying the way to get rid of kittens was to tie them up in a sack and toss the sack in the river.You couldn't keep kittens because soon there would be dozens of them all over the place.But I'm not certain he was saying that he had done that to these particular kittens.

One early morning our cat was struck by a car.I didn't see her,but my mother told me she was dead,that a car had run over her.But I think she must have come inside at some point,and crawled in under the stairs.I tried to look under there to see what might have been there to see,but my mother kept herding me away and saying something about her back legs being all crushed,and she couldn't walk,could only drag them behind her.She must have been really upset,trying to figure out what to do with the cat,and how to keep us from seeing it.To the best of my knowledge,that was the first time I recall seeing my normally calm mother in distress.I never did see the cat.Somehow my mother must have gotten it out of the house and cleaned up whatever mess was down in the basement.She never did say much else about the cat,like what she did with it or where it went.When I asked,she seemed to be avoiding the use of words like "Dead" or "Died",not to mention crushed or mangled or bloody,or any like word.Eventually she settled on telling us that our cat had "Gone to Heaven."

Chapter X 1966 Continued.

Likely the most noticeable thing about our new sitter was all of the cigarettes she smoked.there were ashtrays all over the house,usually more than one on the kitchen table,at least when we were not eating.And when we were eating she was always hovering around in the kitchen with a smoke dangling from her mouth.The same was true on the mornings she washed and waxed the hardwood floors.We would end up confined to her toddlers room when that happened because the floor outside the door was covered in wet wax for an hour or more,and she would be on her hands and knees,smoke between her lips and dropping ashes all over the clean floor.Sometime,a lot of the time,she'd be at the table and she would be smoking a cigarette while another was burning away in the ashtray.With all the smoking she was doing,she couldn't have been very healthy.In fact,we once had her friend drive us to the hospital in an old,beat up jalopy ans waited in the car while she went inside to have a blood test of some sort.All the while she sat smoking she would say things about her lungs not being good,and she would complain of her nerves too.

If our sitter had reason to complain of nerves,it was most likely her oldest children making her neurotic.Assuming that it wasn't her husband,or just her natural orientation.But her older kids were forever fighting with her,to the point of it getting physical more than once.And,I got he distinct impression that neither of them liked us,or small children in general,including the girl who was just a year or two older than I was,and who was in grade one.The oldest girl was about twelve when we first went there and she seemed to have an attitude about everything.Her older brother was likely about fourteen and seemed very angry,brooding all the time.Usually he would just leave us alone though.

When the sitter ran out of cigarettes she would start getting edgy.Once or twice she would pack us all up and march us off to the store with her to get cigarettes.Usually,though,she would wait for the older children to come home,then send the girl off to the store for smokes.Sometimes we went with her too,just to give the sitter a break I suppose.The store was about three blocks on First Avenue.Most of the time,they would sell cigarettes to the sitters daughter.Sometime they would not.They would insist that they did not sell to minors.Other times they would say they could only do that with a note from a parent.So off we would go to another store,all the way up Hastings Street to Mountain Road.Once the girl just went outside,pulled a notebook from school out from under her coat and furiously scribbled out a note,then went back into the store.A minute later she would come back with cigarettes,even though it had only been a short time since she'd been turned down,and it must have been clear to anyone that she had not had time to get home and back.

Sometimes on this trip to the store,the sitters daughter would buy more that one pack of cigarettes,if she had enough money.Cigarettes were less than a dollar then,so if she was given a five dollar bill,she would buy a second pack,then sat she'd accidentally dropped some of the change on the way back.Her mother never seemed to question this.

Once,likely the second or third time that we went to the store with this girl,she played a mean trick on me.It was still winter time,a very damp day that had started out warmer that it was,then iced over.When we were coming back from the store,a car went driving past and she just grabbed on to the rear bumper and allowed it to drag her up the street.Soon she was a full block ahead of me,and let go of the cars bumper.A lot of kids back them would do this.It was a quick way to cover a couple of blocks,and it looked like a lot of fun too.But I guess she'd forgotten that she had a couple of us kids along for the trip,so she started back towards us.When she got there she said"Brats,can't you walk faster?" Sometimes it was brats,other times it was "Bastards." I think bastards was her favorite word.

When we turned the corner onto Sumner,her neighbor was out at the side door,and we went up onto the step while the two had a short visit.After the neighbor went back inside,the sitters daughter said"Hey Brat,lick that door handle." indicating the metal handle on the screen door.I didn't see much harm in that,so I did.And I ended up tearing a big strip of meat off of my tongue.There was no blood or anything like that,but it hurt like the blazes.When we got to the sitters house,the daughter was laughing and told her mother"The silly little bastard was licking the metal door handle." Her mother said for her to stop calling us bastards because we would tell our mother,then she wouldn't get enough money,because she wouldn't be sitting us anymore.I never ratted her out about that.And I never licked anything made of metal again either.

Chapter X 1966 Continued.

Life was not really all bad at the new sitters house,despite all the things that seemed to be going on in the family.Mornings were always spent playing with her youngest son,mostly in his room.Most of the time it was like he wasn't even there,he was just so much younger than I was had we really had nothing in common.But he could be quite entertaining,as he was a toddler after all,and prone to being into just about everything.Occasionally he would take off his socks and throw them down the toilet.He would take off other items of clothing too,but usually it was only the socks that went into the crapper.Once he managed to crawl up onto the stove and turn on all of the burners and was sitting there when his mother came upstairs from the basement.No real harm was done,but it could have turned out much differently.Neither me nor my sister caught on to what he was doing,because we were in the other room at the time.But things could have had a very different outcome.

The sitter always provided a good,hot lunch,and I enjoyed most of the food she served.Usually it was some kind of soup and a sandwich,then some sort of dessert.Sometimes she would make pancakes,which was alright with me except that she insisted on soaking every pancake with syrup,and I would have really preferred to have had mine with just butter.At times she would serve corn on the cob too,and this really drove me kind of nuts,because of the way everyone put butter on it.At our house,you would use your knife to get a bit of butter,then spread it on your corn.Not at the sitters house!There everyone just grabbed their corn and rolled it in the butter dish until it was covered in way too much butter.It the end of the meal there would be the melted remains of a pound of butter in a big puddle in the dish.I tried doing it that way at home once,and it really flipped my mother out.She said it was "Barbarian." Then there were the occasions when our sitter served what she called "Spanish rice." Basically it was rice with what I suppose was chili peppers.But it tasted to me like something that someone had emptied a whole pepper shaker into.Later on ,I would come to like Mexican rice,but this "Spanish rice" was truly crap.It may have just been that as a kid,like many kids I just wasn't fond of really spicy food.But this stuff didn't taste much like Mexican rice at all.Her older kids liked it though,and seemed to get a kick out of the fact that none of us younger children did.So it continued to get served about twice a month or so,and when it did,she would sit there and watch us until every single grain of rice was gone.

In the afternoon,my sister,and the sitters toddler went for a nap.But I didn't have to,being five years old.Sometimes I would just chill out in the kitchen with the sitter,who really wasn't such a bad soul.She just didn't seem to want to be bothered with kids a lot,and spent her time on the phone,or sometimes neighbors would come to visit.I didn't mind her at all.We seemed to get along fine,and when she was in a bad mood,I could usually manage to stay away from her.Mostly in the afternoon,I got to watch whatever movie was on.That was okay if it were a cowboy movie,which were my favorite,or a war movie,but some of the other movies would bore me,and I might even nod off.But I'd do my best to never let anyone know if I did.

By late afternoon,the older children would return from school.One of them was in grade one,and would get home earlier than the other two.Sometimes she would watch the movie with me,but she was a really quiet sort,and would just disappear someplace.As much as I can picture her in my mind,I don't ever recall her having much to say.But the older kids were rowdy all of the time.They would fight among themselves,and they argued endlessly with their mother.By the time four o'clock rolled around,they would take over the television set.That was okay,because there were some really neat shows on.On Tuesdays there was a show called "Mad Movies" which were old silent comedy films,where all the motion was way too fast,and the characters were getting into really funny situations,something like the circus clowns do with that little car they have.Other days,the "Three Stooges" or "Abbott And Costello" would be on.Once a week there was a show called "Zorro." which was all about this guy with a mask that could ride horses really well and got into a lot of sword fights.At five o'clock,cartoons would come on.My mother would usually be by to pick us up before cartoons finished,and that only bothered me when the cartoon was "Woody Woodpecker."  So I managed to spend most of my days at the sitters watching television,and that suited me fine.Because even though the sitter was alright,her kids were a pain,and there was a lot of drama in their house.I felt lucky if I was able to avoid that drama.

Chapter X 1966 Continued.

In my first five years we had never heard anything like bad language at home.My mother never swore at all back then,and with my father,it might have been a very rare hell,or damn.In fact,while both of my parents described Hell(not that they necessarily described it correctly),we were not even allowed to use the word.So we didn't,and not doing so left a good many of my questions unanswered.In fact,so resistant were both my parents to using bad language,that it was not really possible for them to explain what taking The Lord"s Name in vain meant.So,life at our new babysitters turned out to be quite a shock.

"Little bastard",the girl said.A word I'd never heard before.And I wasn't certain it was directed at us,or at her little brother.Her mother let it pass though.And even though it was a word to which I was unaccustomed,I knew it was not good.By her tone I knew it was a word I would not want to be caught saying at home.I knew she was expressing anger.

It turned out that "Little bastard" was not nearly the only word I would hear from this girl and her older brother.I was in for quite an expansion of my vocabulary in a very short time,even if they were words I'd never say,or would seldom ,if ever be said at home.It wasn't long before I'd heard the other "B word" and the "F Bomb" as well.And the taking of The Lord's Name in vain was a common practice and took quite a few inventive forms.In all,the language being used conveyed the idea of a home that was much different than our own.Here,there was anger and rebellion.

Not only did this girl swear,and swear a lot,but so did her older brother,the oldest of the four siblings.In all though,he was not as foul mouthed as his sister.But he would at times be really closed up and silent,and you knew that you didn't want to say anything at all to him then.The two youngest children were not given to swearing,in fact,the youngest girl seemed shy and quiet most of the time.With the toddler,I think it was just a matter of not knowing any swear words.

The older kids seemed to come by their mouth honestly,if listening to their parents was any indication.Our new babysitter was not the least reluctant to engage either of her older children in argument,and when she did,the air could turn blue rather quickly.She would spend a lot of the time we were there on the phone too,and an endless stream of hell and damn issued from her.Her husband came home only rarely as he was usually off somewhere delivering aviation gas to some other city in Atlantic Canada.But when he did come home,he would park an oil slicked,dark green truck out front of the house and track greasy shoes right into the house,at which point our babysitter would start in on him about the dirt,and about the filthy truck parked outside,which she said caused all of us kids to be soiled,even though we never touched his truck.He would come in at odd hours too,and when he did he would demand to be fed.His wife would always protest,saying she didn't run a restaurant.He would always return with something like"If my wife won't feed me when I get home,I'll just run down to the tavern and get my dinner". Those conversations were never very comfortable and were liberally salted with words that we were never to say,and that I'm certain my parents wished we would never hear.But hear them we did.

I had no idea what a tavern was.But the very idea of it,once mentioned set our babysitter off to being in a foul mood,that usually lasted the rest of the day.Tavern was a new word to me,and when I asked my mother what it was,she explained that it was a place some people went to take their meals.But why would a person eat at a tavern when there seemed to be enough food at home?And why did the mere mention of a tavern bring about this woman's anger.I came to know,when I heard these conversations that it was a time to tread lightly,to find a place alone and not bother anyone,least of all any of the adults or older children.

Chapter X 1966 Continued.

You might get the impression that I lived in a very religious household,from the fact that my mother read us bible stories at bedtime,and from the fact that we went to church a lot.But that was not really true.Or should I say,it may not have been as true as things might have appeared.

For one thing,we really didn't go to church all that much.Not even every Sunday.We wouldn't go in the summer time,because there was no Sunday school classes,and my mother would have had to bring both my sister and I up into the main part of the church with her.It was often hot up there,sermons had an adult orientation,and both my sister and I were a bit young to be expected to sit through an hour's sermon.So we went to church over the course of the school year,September to June,when there was Sunday school.And not even every Sunday.My father worked shifts,and we only had one car,so we only went on days when he was at home,or on autumn or spring days when it was nice enough to walk.

You wouldn't have found a lot of Bibles or anything else of an overtly religious nature laying around,or hung from the walls either Those children's bible stories were about the most obvious indication of a Christian home,and we still heard those stories every night.I didn't realize it at the time,but my mother was being somewhat selective as to what stories she was reading to us,because,even though I didn't realize it then,the Bible was a very grown up book.My mother,as it turned out was doing a bit of textual editing of those stories too.

We were told about Adam and Eve,and the apple,and I couldn't figure out how an apple caused so much trouble.She read to us about Cain and Abel too,but she wouldn't say just what the word"slew" meant.But it seemed like an important idea,because not only did Cain do whatever it was to Abel,but Davis also slew Goliath.For such an important concept,it seemed to put my mother somewhat ill at ease,and she wouldn't explain what it meant.

My mother read to us the story of Moses too,and that was a story that especially appealed to me.After all,I was four years old,and tended to be impressed by things like burning bushes,and waters that parted,and food falling out of the sky,not to mention locusts,frogs and a host of other plagues.Then we got to the part about The Ten Commandments.The problem then,though was that I'd actually learned to count to ten,and so,when my mother was reading the story,I could only count nine.Don't steal,don't lie,only one God,no idols,respect your parents,don't covet,don't witness falsely,don't swear,and don't kill.Yes,only nine! It turned out that my mother was holding one back.She actually explained all of the others in language that small children could understand,but I was sure there was one missing.

Sometimes,not often,but sometimes my father would read us Bible stories too.When he got to The Ten Commandments,his count was true.It seemed maybe he'd remembered one that my mother had forgotten about,or maybe never knew in the first place,and he let it out.No committing adultery.When I added that to all the others,there were ten,just like there was supposed to be.So,what was adultery? Turned out my father didn't see the necessity of explaining it either.

Now this turned out to be a bit of a problem,because I really did want to obey commandments.I knew it was important,and I remembered Hell.Avoiding Hell meant you had to obey commandments,and I didn't really have a problem with that.There was nobody I wanted to kill,or steal from,and one God seemed like more than enough.But then there was that adultery thing.If I was going to not do that,I needed to know what it was I wasn't supposed to do,only no adult I knew wanted to talk about it.So I had to imagine what it was I wasn't supposed to do,and that could have been almost anything.Could it be running out into the street,or being mean to your sister,or maybe not eating all of your carrots? Could it mean not doing what my mother or father said to do?Well,no,that seemed to already be covered by one of the other commandments.Maybe it was getting into rock fights.Could it be that I had committed adultery with Karen,and we were both bound for Hell,not to mention that Santa Clause certainly wouldn't be visiting next Christmas? No way to know for certain.So,after a while I got the idea to ask one of the Sunday school teachers what adultery was.He told me"well,you really don't need to worry too much about that one." So I guessed we were back to nine commandments.If I'd only understood enough Pig Latin to realize what the root of the word "Adultery."was,I could likely have realized that it was something that children need not worry about,at least when they were four and three years old respectively.

We read more than just Bible stories too.There were a few books in our house.There was this old book that my mother had,and it had something to do with a lavender colored crocodile,though I don't recall much of what it was about.Just that it was in an old,falling apart book,and my mother couldn't always find all of the pages.

There were a couple of books that do stand out in my mind though,because,when I grew up they had grown out of favor,and I wouldn't read them.It's hard though to impose today's morality or political correctness on that earlier time though.One of these books was about a fox who was trying to catch a rabbit,using a lot of different tricks.One of the tricks he employed was to put this thing,called a tarbaby out in the road.The rabbit came along and got stuck to the tarbaby,but in the end he got away.The picture of the tarbaby looked like exactly what the word implied-a baby covered in tar,or,to be more exact,a black baby.The other book that my mother read,and we had it around our house was a book called Little Black Sambo. It was a story about a little African boy who liked to eat pancakes,and his mother,an enormous black woman.I got the idea that I would like to have pancakes sometime,after my mother read that book to me.So,as it turned out,we had pancake mix in the cupboard.Not only that,but the bag had a picture of Sambo's mother on the outside.She looked exactly like the woman in the book.Now I wasn't really certain what all was going on here,but I knew that the story about the tarbaby,and the one about Sambo and his mother,the woman who was both in the book and on the bag of pancake mix,was a lot bigger that met my four or five year old eyes.To my mother,though,it was just a story,and there was no real inconsistency with telling those stories as opposed to Bible stories.I guess it's just the way things were back then. 

Chapter X 1966 Continued.

Karen and her family were the first new people that had moved to our street after we got there,ans she was really about the only other person around who was close to my age.So we ended up p[laying together a lot.I would have preferred to have had another boy to play with,because Karen sure wasn't too interested in trucks,or playing in the mud,and she eventually became better friends with my sister than with me,despite a years difference in their ages.As it turned out,given the way we met,Karen and I got along well.She wasn't mean,despite the rock fight.In fact,I think the rock throwing was really about boredom,and each of us trying to get the attention of the other in what seemed like the only possible way.We couldn't very well go across the street and shake hands and say hello,and the rocks did work.

If Karen was not mean,then the same could be said of her dog.I don't recall the dogs's name,but she was a big baby.She was a doberman,and she looked like she was all business,but really she was as gentle as a lamb.She was quite big though,her head rising above my own.Once or twice I even jumped on her back and rode her around like a pony.Not only did she not mind,but sh was more than strong enough to provide pony rides without complaint.Most of the time she would stay off leash in the yard without running off.So,as much as she looked as though she might eat small children for dinner,she really made me realize that dogs were good companions,not something to be feared.I began to become much more at ease around dogs after that,even the ones running loose.

Karen turned out to be a good playmate,and her family,and ours became friends,pretty much as soon as the rocks stopped flying.Soon I was allowed to cross the street to her place,and she was over at our house a lot too.Both sets of parents were always hanging out together as well,at either one of our houses,or out in the backyards.Karen had an older brother too,old enough that he didn't bother much with either my sister or I.In fact,he likely only paid attention to his sister because she was a sibling.By the time I was in grade one,he was in grade four or maybe even five.As much as I don't even recall his name,it occurred to me,a year or two after they'd moved away that he must have been quite the hellion.Of course he hung out with kids his own age but,by the time I was in junior high school,a couple of those kids had fallen far enough behind that they had become classmates of mine.They were kids who liked to fight too,and who were always getting into trouble.Karen's brother seemed alright to me,he was never really nasty and didn't swear a lot.He was always calling other kids"Fruit",though.It seemed like "Fruit"was his favorite word.I knew he wasn't talking about apples or oranges when he said it,so one day I asked him what a fruit was.And at first he replied "you know...things like apples...or oranges."Then he said "Fruits" were girls.This seemed a little odd since the only one I'd ever heard him refer to as a fruit were other boys.He seemed to think it was funny though,so there must have been some secret that he wasn't letting me in on.I tried the word out at home,and it didn't go over so well.I didn't get into a pile of trouble over it,but I was told never to call anyone that again.

So we'd met our first real friends in the neighborhood,which was really still quite new to us.My father knew a lot of people all over town,mostly military people,but he really didn't associate with many of the neighbors until Karen and her family moved in.My mother was either at work,or home looking after us,so she really didn't socialize much either.She was more than friendly with anyone she happened to meet,but I don't recall us having a lot of company from anywhere around town.Eventually she made some friends in church and some of them started coming around.But really,Karen and her family were our first close friends in Moncton.They lived across from us for about a year,then moved up to a new house on Ayre Avenue,then eventually moved away. 

Chapter X 1966 Continued.

As it turned out,I was developing a bit of a knack for getting in trouble at places other that the babysitters.One of the places I liked to play was right on the edge of our allowed range.Right at the curb in front of our house.I wasn't allowed to cross the street,but I guess I was already pushing boundaries and wondering what was  beyond,maybe even thinking of extending myself beyond what was allowed.

Sitting at the curb was a great place to view all the comings and goings of the neighborhood,and there was still a lot going on.I would never sit with my feet out on the street.I just sat cross legged on the boulevard and watched.Dogs would run up and down the street,getting into the garbage,knocking over the cans or ripping into the bags.Once a week the garbage truck would come down the road and pick up our trash,then throw the can back into the driveway,not even giving the least thought to putting it neatly in place.By this time there was a street sweeper coming down the street on a regular basis too,along with a big tank truck that would spray clean the road surface.There was even an ice cream truck that came by once in a while,and,of course a food truck that came by for the construction workers.I really wanted to get lunch from one of those trucks,as the thought of eating from the back of a truck was quite novel.Telephone trucks were busy in the neighborhood too,and I loved to watch the men climbing the poles.Occasionally the fire trucks would come screaming up the street.

There was the routine coming and going of the neighbors too.Nothing very interesting there,but I was getting to know the neighbors and was able to spot most of their cars.One day a moving van came up our street,and stopped at the house directly across from ours.This was a house that was turned end wise to the street,with the door in the wide side of the building.Some men got out.opened up the rear of the van and started unloading furniture onto the front lawn,then into the house.They were there for the better part of the day,but I didn't see any other people around.Eventually they locked up the house and left.

It was a few days before I noticed anyone around the house.There had been people living in the house,which was already fully built when we moved in,but I had no idea who they were.Over lunch I heard my father saying to my mother that it looked like we were getting new neighbors.

It seemed of no great significance that we were getting new neighbors.Really,they were not neighbors,because as far as I was concerned,they might just as well have lived in China.Across the road was not very far away.I could see there and even beyond,but I couldn't even think of ever going there.So that made them not neighbors,but people who lived very far away.

The first I ever saw of our new neighbors was their dog,chained up in the driveway.It was a tall,big,mean looking dog with a cropped tail.Dogs were something I was still trying to figure out,but I'd generally adopted my mothers attitude toward them.That could best be called wariness.Dogs ran about all over the place,and I was glad that this particular dog was chained,because,in truth,I was afraid of it.It was what we usually called a police dog,so I began to wonder if our new neighbor was a cop.

Then one day,not to long after that I was by the curb,watching the neighborhood,pitching small pebbles from the drive way out into the road,which was something I did from time to time.At some point,a little girl approached the opposite curb.I guess she was doing about the same thing I was -checking out the lay of the land,trying to figure out what was new.Checking me out,tossing my stones out into the street.It must have looked like a fun sort of a game to her,because before long she was pitching stones too.If she was saying anything by way of introduction I couldn't hear it,as we were both in our own front yard,and there was quite a distance between us.And that was a good thing,because we were soon involved in a full blown rock fight.Really though,we had no hope of inflicting any damage on one another.Our rocks just landed in the road,which was only a problem for cars,and,at that not much of a problem.Half way across the road was about as far as I could throw a rock,and she couldn't even manage that,so we were like a couple of armies shooting at each other from about fifty miles away.At some level,I certainly knew I should not have been heaving rocks.And,when both of our mothers arrived at about the same time,we ended up busted.I spent the rest of the day inside.And that is how I met Karen.

Chapter X 1966 Continued.

On the morning we first went to the new babysitters,we spent the whole morning playing with her youngest son,who was just a toddler.My sister and I considered him a baby,and would likely have elected not to play with him at all,had we not been a captive audience.

My mother walked us up to the babysitters house on the first day.It was mid winter and quite a cold day,snowing a bit and there were icicles growing on the fronts of all the houses,from where it had recently thawed,then refrozen.The house we were going to was not far up Sumner street,not even all the way to Hastings street,but we were not allowed to walk there ourselves at this point.

We were greeted at the door by a woman of about thirty.She was not a very big woman.I suppose,though all adults seemed big to me at the time.She was long and slim,tall but light boned,and she had short,dark,curly hair.a cigarette dangled from her lips and she held an ashtray in her hand,an ongoing habit of hers as I was soon to discover.this was the first sign of her being different,as our mother did not normally smoke.At times she would accept a cigarette when offered one,but,as a rule she didn't smoke.In fact,her parents considered women who smoked to be indecent.But our new babysitter smoked,more or less continuously.

Once we had entered,the woman told us what to call her.That is,she told us her first name.but our mother insisted we address her by her surname,proceeded by Mrs.In all,she seemed like a nice enough woman,and she told us a bunch of things we already knew about her.Her husband was away most of the time,because he drove truck.In fact,he hauled aviation fuel. Occasionally he would be home,and,she told us when he was we were not to go near the truck.we would also have to be quiet,as when he was home,he would be sleeping.She told us about her four children,only one of which was in the house when we arrived.The other three would be home at lunch time.She told us their names,and that the oldest two would most likely not want to be bothered with us because we were so young.We could go play with her son for the morning,in his room.If we had any questions or problems,we could find her in the kitchen.

Her kid turned out to be about half my size and maybe three years younger than I was.He had fine,blonde hair and wore coveralls.In his room,we discovered a large toy box,filled with things that  had little or no interest to me,because he was really still an infant.My mother had anticipated this,and allowed me to bring one item from home to play with.that turned out to be an action figure of a caveman,holding a boulder in both hands,high above his head.That one item I guarded jealously,and it turned out to be a good thing.

This kid turned out to be a bit of an entertainer.The only idea I had of babies came from my little sister,and she really was not that much of a baby in comparison to myself.But this little kid knew that he had an audience of two,and he seemed determined to make an impression,to draw us into his circle,to make us laugh.for a while,all was well.We took everything out of the toy box,and there were a lot of things there that we never had at home.most of it was his,so,as I said,none of it was all that interesting.I did discover a square,red thing with a couple of knobs on the front.To me it looked something like a television.It turned out to be something called an Etch-a-Sketch,and I spent a bit of time trying to figure out what it did.

But as the morning wore on,things took a turn for what turned out to be for the worst.The lady left us pretty much to our own devices,only sticking her head in the door once or twice.We could here her in the kitchen,talking on the phone,but as things seemed to be going well,we had no need to find her,and,as we were being quiet,nobody was squabbling she must have decided all was well.but all was not well.Her kid found his way to the head of the bed,which happened to be right by the window.In no time at all,he had slid the window open.It was warm in the house,so it seemed sensible to me that he would let in some air.On the other hand,I supposed that he really wasn't supposed to open the window.It was something we were not allowed to do at our house.

Letting in fresh air was about the farthest thing from this kids mind though.Once the window was opened he got down onto the floor,found a toy,a stuffed animal of some kind,climbed back up onto the bed,and pitched it out the open window.now I knew he wasn't supposed to do that,I could think of no reason why that sort of behavior would be good.So I would tell his mother.well,I would wait a bit,and then tell his mother.Because what he was doing struck me as being kind of funny too.My sense of humor was also developing,and he would turn around and smile,looking for our approval.So I would allow myself to be entertained,then I would tell his mother.Giggle! As fast as that first toy was gone out the window,and we had rewarded him with a quiet chuckle,he was on the floor again,finding another toy,and it too was gone out into the snow.Giggle,giggle! Down onto the floor.up onto the bed.Out the window.Giggle! In about a half hour everything that had been in the toy box was outside,under the dripping icicles in waist deep snow.All the dolls,Legos,a jack in the box,a bunch of lettered blocks,picture books,even the Etch-A-Sketch.my sister had brought a stuffed monkey with her,and when the time came,she just passed it over to him,and out it went.Giggle! The only thing left in the whole room was my caveman,an empty toy box and the bed.Giggle,giggle,giggle.The show was over,but I'd really enjoyed it while it had lasted.

Finally the kids mother called out from the kitchen."Almost lunch time.Clean up the room,put everything away neatly." now that was going to be a bit of a problem,wasn't it.Well,not for us surely.We hadn't really done anything.But now was the time to do the right thing,so I went out to the kitchen,found our babysitter and ratted out her son.I also thought that this might get the biggest laugh of all.Giggle!It really was funny after all,so she would be really impressed-just before she got mad.I really couldn't have been more wrong.She blew off a bit of steam in the direction of her son.Giggle,giggle! Then she turned her ire upon us.He might have tossed the entire contents of his room out into the front yard,and we might have done the right thing,but why did we wait.Our omission turned out to be not going to her right after the first stuffed animal got evicted."He's just a baby," she said,"you've got to expect he will do things like that,but you two should know better." I guess likely I did know better,giggle,giggle,giggle,but really it was pretty darn funny.Still,I'd only been at the sitters for one morning,and I'd not even managed to get to lunch time before finding myself in trouble.

We had tomato soup for lunch.The other three children arrived home at noon,and were promptly dispatched out into the snow to retrieve everything that had been tossed.To say they were less than thrilled about that was a bit of an understatement.The snow was quite deep,and cold water was dripping off the roof,and they protested about things not being fair as they each made a couple of trips to gather up the toys.All this while the sitter huffily provided a running commentary on how we had let her son toss everything out.the oldest girl,maybe twelve,turned out to have quite a mouth."Little bastard." she hissed under her breath,followed by something to the effect that she would toss us out the window if she had to clean up our mess again.    

Chapter X 1966 continued.

I turned five years old in March of 1966.Ironically,I have no memory at all of that birthday,unlike the one before.It seems unlikely that I had a party,and it must have been just an uneventful stretch of days in early  March.

Had I had the fortune to have been born in December,instead of March,1966 is the year I would have been starting school. Instead,I had to wait a year,and was closer to seven years old than six when that time came.But 1966 was that year that led up to school.I recall it as being a time of expanding my horizons,being able to wander a bit farther from home,and learning and preparing for that day when I finally could enter school.It really was,so far as I can remember the most carefree time of my entire life.

Nearly ever day we would wander by the school,which was not yet built.It began as just a big hole in the ground,and endless piles of bricks,some red and others yellow.But slowly it took shape,opening in the fall of 1966,without me.

There were a lot of rituals involved in getting ready for school,and they seemed to take up the whole year.I had to be vaccinated against smallpox,as all children did back then,and I seemed to have spent a long time anticipating that.My father took me for a complete medical check up too,and it was the first time I ever went to the doctors that I recall.The optometrist and the dentist followed as well.Again,a lot of time was spent looking forward to each of these milestones.My parents must have been unsure as to how I would react to all this ritual,so they spent time preparing me for it long in advance,walking me through what exactly would be happening.

We spent some time actually preparing for school too.My parents had brought home a small chalk board and began to teach us to spell simple words on it.Words like cat,or cow,or box,dog,fox or hat.When my father was home we did not leave for a babysitters,so he spent long,patient hours helping us learn the alphabet,and construct our first simple words.

When my father was not at home,but working a day shift,we went to the home of a neighbor who lived up on Sumner Avenue.For the most part we'd been at home for much of the time up until this point,but that changed in 1966.The home that we went to was a very different place from our place in a number of ways,though,of course,it was laid out according to the same floor plan.The most noticeable difference was that there were a lot of children around.The woman and her husband had four children of their own,the two oldest being teenagers.There was a girl a year or two older than I was ,and a toddler as well.

Up until we went to this woman's house,my sister and I had really only had each other for company.There were not a lot of children our own age within a house or two of where we lived,and most of the time was all spent playing in our own yard,though that was all about to change as well.So having at least four other children around,and sometimes more because this woman brought in other children as well,took a lot of getting used to.I'd spent a lot of time on my own,and I'd rather liked it.In fact,that wasn't going to change much.I had no idea at all as to how to react to teenagers,not that anyone ever does or did,but it was a completely new experience to me.The toddler was the only other one at home during the day,and at almost five years old,I didn't relate all that well to him either.So my sister,being the closest in age to myself stayed my closest companion.At age four,there was not as much difference between her and myself as there had been when we were younger.It was just more crowded,more of a shared existence,with some people,some children I might not have chosen to share my  being with.In particular,there was one of those kids,the oldest boy that I never felt comfortable around.But that was most likely just because he was much older than  myself,and a boy,being the way boys are.

Home life was a lot different at our new babysitters house than it was at our own.We were exposed to a whole new system of values,so very different from our own.I'm not certain how this particular family was selected to provide childcare for us,but it seemed to me that they were already known to my parents.We were told that the woman was someone my father knew from Springhill,and once,while we were driving around outside of Springhill,we met her there,in front of this old house out in the country.Her and my father were very nearly the same age,and the house was close to the part of town where my father grew up,so I'm guessing they grew up together,though this was never spelled out in any detail.

Where this family got there values from is another thing.Things were just very different than in our own home.Different words were spoken,different things done,which would not have been said or done at home.In particular,they were things that my mother would possibly have been less than comfortable with.And I wondered,or at least began wondering about the differences between my parents,and how they thought about things.They never openly presented themselves as not being united in belief though,and I was not yet old enough to discern any conflict between them.   

Chapter X 1966 Continued

The inside of our house had 1960s written all over it,in a way that could updated but never fully disguised.The floors were tile in the kitchen and bathrooms,hardwood everywhere else.The walls were of drywall,sheet rock,not plaster and lathe like in pre- war houses.The windows were double glazed and were opened by sliding the panes from side to side.There were dual doors both front and back,one a screen door,one,the inner one of heavy wood.Each entrance had a doorbell.The basement came unfinished,unadorned except for a furnace and water heater at the foot of the steps.The cellar floor was concrete and unpainted,and it was cooler there tan in any part of the house.There were a number,four,perhaps five narrow windows cut into the foundation.

When I think back to those days,the most striking part of the view is in just how little there actually was in the house at that time.The walls were all neatly painted in light shades and there were very few pictures of any kind.Neither were there any bookshelves.There was a mantle over the fireplace,and on that my mother kept an ornate clock in a glass dome,The clock never worked,and we were never permitted to touch it.Our house,in 1966 had very much not been grown into at all.It was all there,all functional but it really had very little in terms of personal touches.

The floors were laminated hardwood,cut into strips and nailed onto the sub-floor.All of the house save kitchen and bathroom were that way.In those days,hardwood flooring required a lot of care,and my mother would wash and wax the floors nearly every week end.The living room floor was covered in a large rectangle of green carpet,not the wall to wall kind,but something that was placed there as an afterthought and covered up most,but not all of the living space.Underneath there was a sheet of underlay that was not quite the same size as the carpet and was made from something like horse hair.It was rough to the touch,and if the carpet wasn't set on it evenly,it stuck out and my father would say it looked like hell.

Inside the living room,we did not  have a lot of furniture.What was there was functional,but rather minimalist,and certainly not beautiful.A green couch more or less matched the carpet.It was a boxy looking thing that stood on four short legs,and the thing I most recall about it was the roughness of it's surface.You could scratch an itch on it.It could peel up a patch of your hide.It had a matching chair that just looked like a big ,ugly green cube.There was a coffee table,complete with two matching end tables,a big stand up lamp,and that was about it.The tables were made of some sort of plastic laminate,the only wood being in the legs.The coffee tables's surface had a hole at one corner,where it had most likely been overturned on something.A pot lid perhaps,while we were moving.Actually,something a bit smaller that a pot lid.But the hole was always there,ever since I can remember,and I don't recall the event that put it there.Even by 1966 standards the living room furniture would have been considered "budget",if not cheap.The rest of the house contained similar furniture,beds in the bedrooms,chests of drawers,all made of some form of laminate.The kitchen had a table and four brown and white chairs.The dining room was a huge empty space,no heavy wooden table,no chandelier.Those were a few years in the future.There was an old box stereo system in the dining room,and a big stack of vinyl records.No carpet.   

Chapter X 1966 Continued.

By the time 1966 rolled around,our neighborhood had taken pretty much the same form as it has today.All of the house that are still there were completed,and most of the neighbors around us were in their homes.In fact,the next door neighbors on either side were to remain the same until long after I left.The Clark family is still there.

Northwest Moncton was one of the newest areas in the mid 1960s,essentially a product of the demographic changes brought about by World War II.It was nearing the end of the post war Baby Boom,and there was a large demand for more,and more modern housing,and services to supply those living in those houses.So our community grew up as a kind of more or less uniform suburb.

For the most part the houses around us all looked similar,if not alike.Cookie cutter houses,with only a few different floor plans,put up as quickly as they could be.In fact,there the majority of the houses would have been a variation of a single floor plan,the variation consisting of how they were oriented on their lots,which for the most part were all the same size.The houses were all bungalows,one story,with front and back doors,more or less in the center of the house,and approximately opposite one another.The living rooms,dining rooms and kitchens were set to one side of the front door,the bedrooms and bathroom to the other.Some of the houses would have bedrooms to the left of the door,some to the right,but in either case the floor plan was essentially the same.A few of the houses had set so that their ends faced the street,but again,the basic layout was the same.There was the odd L shaped house as well.

When Northwest Moncton was built,it was not undertaken in the same way as things are done today.The big difference is that today a sub division would be proposed and all of the land acquired to build it.Anything older that was still standing would be bought up,not giving any choice to those who did not wish to sell,and houses would be erected and sold.But,in our neighborhood,there were a number of houses that were there before the building of that sub division,and they were left in place,so that along with the 1960s style bungalows,there are a number of older houses,and those houses were allowed to remain and are still standing today,for the most part.The Duffys just down and across the street lived in  one such house,as did the Flanigans,at the beginning of the next block down.There were a couple of much larger houses at the end of Watson Avenue too,on our side of the street just before Mountain Road.The other streets around had quite a few older houses compared to our street.

There were a couple of houses in the neighborhood that are no longer there.One was located in the field between Watson Avenue and Crandall Street,the other at the corner of Whitney and Lorne. Both houses were home to people who gave every appearance of being much poorer than the house around them,and I'd always heard people complain how the houses wee eyesores and should be torn down.The one up on Whitney,a low slung and leaning shack with asphalt shingles and a sinkhole for a yard was torn down a few years later.The house in the field burned down one night.

Chapter X 1966

In March of 1966,John Lennon proclaimed that The Beatles were"More popular than Jesus Christ." About a month later,Time Magazine asked rhetorically on it's cover"Is God Dead?" Mississippi became the last American state to repeal prohibition,and American Catholics were no longer required to abstain from eating meat on  Friday.

Chevrolet introduced the Camaro,Milton Bradley introduced Twister,and Quaker Oats first marketed instant oatmeal.An average new car cost about twenty six  hundred dollars,a gallon of gas thirty two cents and a new dishwasher about one hundred and twenty dollars.

In September,Star Trek debuted,and in December,The Grinch stole Christmas for the very first time.The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation became the first Canadian network to broadcast in color.

When the year turned from 1965 to 1966,much remained unchanged in the world.There was still a preoccupation with the military.Russia and America were still staring each other down,still testing nuclear weaponry,still trying to outdo one another in space.France and China were also getting involved in testing atomic weapons.On December 8,1966,The United States and Russia signed a treaty agreeing to prohibit weapons in outer space. The war in Vietnam was still in full swing,with the American president saying that troops should remain there until the defeat of Communist forces was complete.

Race riots continued as well,in Atlanta,Omaha,Lansing and Watts,among other places.Martin Luther King marched in Chicago,and was struck by a thrown rock.

Lyndon Johnson was President Of The United States,Lester Pearson The Prime Minister of Canada and Harold Wilson Prime Minister Of Britain.Indira Gandhi became leader of India.And,in America,Edward W. Brooks was elected the first African American senator.Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California.Huey P.Newton and Bobby Seale formed The Black Panther Party in October.

In June The United States Supreme Court rendered the Miranda decision,which required that suspects be informed of their rights upon arrest.In Texas,sniper Charles Whitman killed fourteen people at the University Of Texas in Austin,and,in Chicago,Richard Speck murdered  eight nurses.

Actress Cindy Crawford was born in 1966,as were Kiefer Sutherland,Halle Berry,and Adam Sandler.Singers Janet Jackson and Sinead O'Connor were also born in 1966,as were boxer Mike Tyson,golfer John Daley and future British Prime Minister David Cameron. Meanwhile,Walt Disney,Admiral Chester Nimitz,comedian Lenny Bruce and feminist and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger left this world.

In Canada,Toronto Transit Commission opened the Bloor Danforth Subway Line,while Montreal introduced it's Metro System.The Centennial flame was first lit on Parliament Hill,ironically a full year before our centennial.Both The Canada and The Quebec Pension Plans began operation.

The Oxford English Dictionary had three hundred and eighty two new words in 1966.They included AWACS,a military acronym for Airborne Warning And Control System,a concept that was in it's developmental and planning stage at the time. Multi-tasking was used for the first time,as were Kung Fu and autowind,which referred to a camera feature.Jacuzzi was first used as a generic term for whirlpool bath,and Mastercard became a proper noun referring to a credit card of that name.The Vietnam war produced the term medevac,referring to medical evacuation,and the word bot was first used in reference to various forms of robots.

There were a wide variety of slang terms in use in the mid 1960s as well.They came,in some cases from the Hippy and drug culture,from the war in South East Asia,as well as from many other sources.The expression"Hell no we won't go." was the most commonly expressed anti war slogan.A "hit" was a drag from a marijuana cigarette."Heavy" meant serious or profound,and "pig out" meant to eat too much."Pig" was often used to refer to police officers,as was "narc",which could also identify a drug informant.A police helicopter was sometimes called a "pork chop".The term "square"refered to an uncool person,and "sick puppy' to deranged,crazy or perverted person.Some peoples jobs were described using slang terms:"Roadie"-a laborer who travels with a rock band."Talking Head"-a news anchor."Rent-A-Cop"-a security guard. A "Mean Machine" referred to a fast,cool car,and a man who was thought to care too much about his appearance might be called a "Ken Doll".

In truth,I have no idea how popular The Beatles really were.They may well have been just as John Lennon said,as I expect Jesus Christ was relatively less popular in the mid sixties than He had been in the past,given all the worldly attacks against Him.I expect Lennon's statement was not nearly that popular in our home,especially with our mother. Moncton was still a very church shadowed place,and you would have been much more likely to encounter Bible Stories For Children in it's bedrooms or office waiting rooms than you would Time Magazine.