Chapter XI,1966,The Later Months,Continued

It was not long until I saw the kid who had incinerated the ant again.Of course you couldn't keep me out of the anthill.I was there everyday that it didn't rain,or that we were not staying up the street at the sitters.And I'm guessing that this kid too Crandall Street to school nearly every day.Sometimes he would be in a big rush,because I suppose he was l;ate.Other times he'd stop to chat,at least for a few minutes.I was seeing him a lot,but I really wasn't getting to know him all that well.

At five years old,I thought I knew kids fairly well.At least the ones I played with all the time.We all liked to play cowboys and Indians,and,of course nobody wanted to be Indians.And we played war,and,guess what?Nobody wanted to be Germans either.But for the most part the kids I hung out with were fair,and took turns in our games.Most kids had fathers who came home just before it was time to eat in the evening,and a good many had mothers who were home all of the time.So children seemed to be a fairly like-minded lot as far as I could see.Of course there were the French children,and they spoke a language that was different than what my friends and I spoke, but we could play reasonably well with those kids too.There was a bit of rivalry at times,but usually,things worked out well. The older kids I had a harder time trying to figure out, but I just thought that it was because they were older.But this kid who kept stopping by the anthill was something different.He wasn't really that much older than I was,though I don't believe he was in first grade.The whole thing is, this guy just had way too many moving parts. I knew that almost right away, but that doesn't mean I was anywhere close to knowing what was going on in his head.

One day,while I was playing in the anthill he happened along while I was digging with these two Tonka trucks I had.One was a gravel truck, the other a front end loader.So when this kid came along,.he asked if he could push the dump truck.I told him I guessed it would be alright,so he pushed it along in the anthill for a bit.The thing was though,he wasn't really playing with me the way some of the kids my own age did.He was just playing by himself,and I was just sort of there.He wasn't paying me much attention.The other thing I noticed about him was that he didn't seem to like the dirt.His clothes were always clean when I saw him,and he looked as though he'd just stepped out of a bathtub.And I didn't know any kids like that, or that could stay that way for very long.So he pushed my truck around a bit,then he said he had to be going.And when he started leaving,he just took my truck along with him-just cradled it under one arm and started up the street.It didn't really occur to me what he was doing, because I'd never really met a thief before. I thought he'd bring it back right after school.My father was out in the garden,and must have seen the whole thing,because he was after the kid in a flash.Not much happened. He just handed the truck to my father,and said he'd forgotten that he'd had it. I'm not certain my father believed him, but he wasn't inclined to be disagreeable with the kid.So I got my truck back and watched the kid go up toward the school.Before he got to the corner,I saw him pull something out of a pocket.I couldn't really tell what he was doing at first,because whatever he did with his hands was out of my view.Then he turned and looked back,and I thought I saw something in his mouth.Could it really be a cigarette? It looked like it, but I'd never seen a kid that small smoking before.But,as I say, this kid was a bit of a mystery to me.

Part of the mystery about this kid was about the way he looked.Not that I'd studied a lot of people, but this guy was quite different.Later on I'd come to believe certain things that could have explained what was going on in his head,perhaps.But perhaps not too.This guy was older than I was.He looked to be maybe seven or eight.He was slim and had skin that was a bit darker than mine.His hair was noticeably longer than most of the boys around too,and it had sort of long,loose curls.Back then,boys were not really supposed to have curly hair.Parents wanted curly haired daughters, but not so much curly haired sons.Boys didn't really like having curly hair much either it seemed.It was kind of like having freckles or a big nose.But this kid had curly,dark hair,and so he was different.His eyes were different too.They were darker than most eyes I'd seen, but the thing about them was that they never quite looked at you all the way, without looking away. And,as I said, he seemed to be cleaner than most of the other boys around.All of this.I think added up to being a bit of a charmer. Beguiling I think is the word for it. Because all things considered, this kid was rather handsome.Some might even say"pretty." The eyes and the dark countenance seemed to effect people, especially some of the mothers around.A lot of people seemed to know this kid too.It could be that he was kind of hard to miss, but I sensed that he had a reputation too.Being known could be a good thing, but I'm not certain it was with this kid.I'm not certain everyone liked him.In fact, I was sure some people did not.As for me, Either way,his attitude seemed to say he didn't really care what anyone thought.He would just go about doing whatever was in his head anyway,be that smoking,or burning up living creatures,or pulling the fire alarm.In any event, no matter what it was he was doing,he didn't seem mean at all.Not even when he burned up the ant.I knew that doing things like that was considered mean, but I just didn't think of this kid as actually being mean.In fact, he seemed rather captivating and charismatic.He could do things that other kids could not, and you didn't really want to question it.It was as though a bad thing wasn't really bad when he did it.Clearly I still had a lot to learn about people.

Chapter XI,1966,The Later Months,Continued

Finding books about ants turned out to be not nearly as hard as I thought it would be.My mother had been reading us stories at bedtime for as long as I could remember,but she had been reading from the same books over and over.Really,there were very few books in our room.I'd never been to a bookstore either,so when I asked for books about ants,I really had no idea where books even came from.But I was about to find out'

One afternoon,before we went to pick up my mother from work,m,y father,sister and I all piled into the car early,right after the afternoon movie.I guess maybe my father had a couple of routine errands to run,but where we eventually ended up was at a supermarket called Mountain Way,just a few blocks from our house.But we didn't come to pick up groceries.Instead,we stopped by this old bus,or at least that's what it looked like.It was a kind of blue and gray color,and it was taking up a lot of space in the parking lot.But it wasn't a bus exactly.There might have been a time when it had been a bus, but what it was was a bookmobile, or a portable library.The public library was downtown,but as of that time,I'd never been there.But the library operated at least one of these bookmobiles that would run all over the place with books.The Library in Moncton at the time actually serviced three of New Brunswick's counties:Albert,Kent and Westmoreland. So it would have been a very long way for some people to be able to get to the downtown library.Therefor,they had at least one bookmobile that used to visit far off places on a regular schedule.

We went into the bookmobile.Right in the front,in fact probably right from the actual driver's seat,there was a desk where the librarian worked.She made out these little, blue paper cards with our names on them so we could borrow books.Then we were off to look for books about ants.Apart from the seat/desk,and a very narrow walkway,the rest of the bookmobile was stuffed to the ceiling with all sorts of books.It had a children's section,and we did find a book about ants.We found a book about snakes as well.I'd never seen a snake that I could remember, except on some television show,but what I knew about them was that some could bite with a poisonous bite that could kill a person, and some were very large and could wrap up around a person until they were dead.I also knew the story of Adam and Eve,and that the snake in that story was a seriously bad dude,though I wasn't exactly sure what he did.It turned out there were harmless snakes as well,but I guess they just didn't make for very good television,so I never heard of them.I was somewhat afraid of snakes on the one hand,but,on the other hand I didn't think there were any around where we lived,so I never worried about them much.In any event,one of the first books I ever remember taking out of the library was a book with a lot of pictures of snakes, to go along with a picture book on ants.

So we learned a lot about snakes and ants from those first library books.I found out that poisonous snakes had eyes like cats,with horizontal slits, while harmless snakes had more doglike eyes,with round pupils.And of course,if a snake carried poison,he had a set of very sharp teeth inside his mouth from which the poison came.I thought if I ever actually saw a snake,I might look into his eyes to see what kind of snake he was.But I was really darn sure that looking into a snakes mouth for teeth was a bad idea, and I swore never to do it.It was a while longer before I actually saw snakes though. I learned about ants too,more than I could ever hope to learn just sitting in the anthill.I learned that they burrowed beneath the ground,through miles and miles of tunnels that were kind of like the hallways in our house.I learned that they would eat sugar,so I put some out for them and watched them carry it away.The book also told me that some ants lived in trees,and that there was a kind that could even cross streams by building a bridge out of, well,ants.They would stretch out over a body of water and form a line,and more ants would crawl over top of them until they all reached the other side. According to the book,there was also a kind of ant called fire ants,because a lot of them could start crawling on a person and biting,and it was said to feel just like being burned.Fire was something I was very aware of,and I didn't thing the idea of using the word "fire" and "ant"  in the same  sentence was a very good one.It had the potential to ruin a lot of my fun at the time.The burning question in my mind was,could those red ants out back be fire ants? I didn't think so,because I'd been playing there for some time,and I'd never been so much as bitten.Not even once. According to the book there were ant-like things called termites too.These thing kind of worried me,because they could eat your house.Well,I think the book meant kind of gradually,but try telling that to a five year old.I wondered if these ants could possibly be termites, but again, I didn't think so.I'd surely carried enough inside with me at lunch time and at the end of the day,and our house still seemed to be just fine.But you could just never be certain.My mother really didn't seem to like the ants, and she really didn't want them in the house,so I thought maybe she was wondering about termites too.

Those first few books we brought home from the bookmobile told me a lot of things I wanted to  know.But they told me some things that I could maybe have done without knowing too.Things that caused me some anxiety.Like the whole thing about fire ants. But such was the nature of reading,I was to find.No matter what I've read though,reading and books have been a wonderful part of life that all started with that first trip to the bookmobile, and a couple opf picture books about ants and snakes.

Chapter XI,1966,The Later Months,Continued.

I'm not entirely certain when it was I discovered my new friends.To the best of my knowledge it was sometime in the summer of 1966,though it's possible that it could have been one summer earlier.I only know that it was after all the streets were built and paved,and I remember playing with them the year Birchmount School was opened,and I was still to young to go.I remember sitting and playing with them right on the edge of Crandall Street,behind the Clark's house,maybe fifteen feet or so from the fire hydrant,not far from the corner of Sumner.While we played together,I recall that the fire trucks sometimes came roaring up Crandall Street because there was a fire alarm box on a telephone pole up near Snow Avenue.And it must have been just too much temptation to resist for some of the school kids,because the trucks always came when the students were coming from or going to the school.It seemed that they would come up sometimes two or three times a week.It was about the most exciting thing that ever seemed to happen around home.

My new friends were a bit unusual.First,there were a lot of them.And they were very hard workers,very conscientious and industrious.You see,my new friends were ants.They lived in a little mound out past our back yard, and my sister and I discovered them one summer evening.I'd never seen ants before,at least not that I could recall.They were a completely new thing to me.My sister called them bees,and ran to my mother yelling "Bees,Bees." I knew for certain that these were not bees,but I really had no idea of what they actually were.My mother came too investigate,no doubt worried about the presence of a bees nest anywhere where we were allowed to play.But when we showed her,she just laughed and  told us what they were.I asked if they would sting,because I knew about bees,so this was my big concern with these new critters.My mother said that they would not sting,but it's possible they could bite. These particular ants were big red ones.

Once I knew that these creatures would not sting,I became intensely interested in them and their comings and goings.I determined to my satisfaction that they did not bite either,so now I was content to sit right down among them and watch what they were doing.Sometimes they just ran around all over the place.Other times they would march in a straight line one after the other,going someplace.And there seemed that there was no place they couldn't go.They would march through the grass,all the way to the curb,and even out into the street.They could climb trees as well.Sometimes they would come back to the nest carrying things that were nearly as big as they were,and that looked very heavy for them.Things like dead bugs,or even other kinds of ants.Usually I'd see them carrying smaller,black ants,so I assumed that they either didn't like black ants,or they were eating them.They also carried these little things that looked like Rice Crispies, so I thought that perhaps they were coming into the house and getting into the cupboards where my mother kept the cereal.But when I looked,there were no ants.I did grab a hand full of Rice Crispies and took them out to the anthill with me one day.I thought it would be kind of nice if the ants didn't have to go so far to find them,because they obviously seemed to like them.Later I found out that these were ant eggs, so the Rice Crispies more likely seemed like a cruel trick to them.

One day,after the start of school,but before the weather got cold,a boy came up the street on his way to school.He stopped while I was sitting there in the anthill and asked what I was doing.I showed him the ants,and he seemed to think that they were pretty neat.But what he did was pull this thing out of his pocket.It was a round looking thing that was made of glass, and I'd never seen whatever it was before. Once he had that out,he reached down and picked up an ant,and gave it a little smack with his other hand.He didn't kill it-it was still wiggling around.But it couldn't go far, because it was injured. Then this kid took the tool that he'd removed from his pocket and held it over top of the ant.The sun shone through the glass until a small point of light was right on top of the ant.The ant did not like this,and tried to get away.But,after just a few seconds, the ant's body began to smoke, and it just kind of burned up until there was no more ant. The boy then put the glass back in his pocket and said that he had to get on to school and he would see me later. I was kind of stunned at his little trick.It had never occurred to me to kill one of the ants.They were simply too interesting to watch.I did sometimes kick the hill,and at times I would accidentally step on an ant,and either kill or injure it.But I'd never seen anything like what this kid had done, and I felt fairly convinced that my mother would not approve. So I watched for a minute or two while the kid headed off in the direction of the school.By then,there were not a lot of kids passing by.Just a few stragglers.So I got back to the ants. Then,about ten minutes later, the fire engines came roaring up the street, past where I was sitting,right up to the corner where the firebox was.A police car followed.After a while,they all left, having found no fire.

For a few months perhaps,the ants became more or less an obsession with me.I would play for hours in the anthill, picking them up in my hands,even shoving then into my pockets. I noticed that they seemed to be like us.They stayed inside when it rained,and when it started to get cold,they disappeared altogether. So.when winter came, there were no more ants to play with. That hardly ended the obsession though.I wondered where they went, and I even asked my mother to find a book about ants that she could read at bedtime. All the ants were now gone, but,for a few glorious weeks-at least that's how it seemed to me,although my mother likely had a different opinion- I literally had ants in my pants nearly everyday. 

ChapterXI,1966,The Later Months, Continued

In the fall of 1966,my Grandfather Davis came to our place for an extended visit. I can't say for certain if he'd come just to help my father with all of the work he'd wanted to get done, or if he'd fallen on some misfortune and needed a place to stay, or perhaps both. My grandfather was not a stranger to me, I knew he lived around,or in Springhill, but I never really could recall being to his home,a place where I knew for certain that he lived,until some years later. We always seemed to meet him in town, or in some other persons house, or he would come along on some road trip or another, then get dropped off someplace. But I never really knew for sure where he lived. It could well have been that he was a bit nomadic even then,and moved from place to place,like he came to do in his last years. But during that fall, he came to live with us.

My grandfather was a carpenter.That was a big part of the reason for his presence in our house at this time.My father was competent at working wood, and doing general construction, but my grandfather  was an expert.Over the period of a few weeks, together they built the forms for paving the driveway, and added a full sized bedroom to one corner of our basement.The driveway was not to be paved over in blacktop like most people did, but was to consist of two parallel concrete tracks running up the driveway,from the street to our garden, spaced at roughly the width of a car,or,more accurately,our car's tires. Along with this,they built a walkway running from the driveway,along the front of the house, up to the front door. It was not really a huge project, but my father still worked revolving shifts,and with all the commuting, it would not get done quickly.So my grandfather and father worked on it together. I thought that all that need for cement might mean a visit from a cement mixer,and that was a rather exciting thought,but it turned out they didn't need nearly as much as a cement truck carried, so they just went out to the hardware store and bought the cement in bags,which they mixed in a big tub, batch by batch,as they were ready to use it. It was very labor intensive to do it that way, but foot by foot, the job got done over a few days. What I remember most about my grandfather was how he would work for what seemed like hours seeing that the forms were set level and square.He seemed to spent most of his time with the level, or a t-square, much more than the time he spent actually sawing and nailing boards together. As far as I could tell, he had a good, meticulous eye.

When the driveway was complete, my father and grandfather started hauling lumber into the basement.Most of it went in through one of the small basement windows, as  there was very little in the basement to worry about hitting, and it was a lot easier than taking boards through the house. At some point, my father went downtown and got a building permit, which he nailed up tp one of the support beams that was to form one of the corners of the room. Then the two of them got busy framing in the far back corner of the basement, preparing it for walls to be erected. Again,my grandfather was exacting in his work, and seemed to take a long time setting each board into place.

Meanwhile,my mother's cherry wine had finally aged to the time called for in her recipe and was ready to be bottled. So she strained it out one final time into these large pickle jar like bottles.We sometimes played in the basement,and this was no real concern while the wine was in the heavy crock. But once it was in glass bottles, it wouldn't do for it to be sitting on the floor. There was really no room for it upstairs either, and I think my mother had ion mind allowing it to age some more.So she needed a place to store a few large bottles, where they would be safe. That place turned out to be between two of the floor joists- in the back corner of the basement. She just set it up on the foundation and didn't give it a further thought. She never even though to tell anyone about it. Until a few weeks later, when a whole new bedroom had been built around the bottles. They might well be there to this day, for all I know, and most likely that is the reason I can't recall anyone drinking that wine.

ChapterXI,1966,The Later Months, Continued

The late summer,and fall of 1966 was a time when some things were coming to a conclusion in our home and neighborhood.Down the road,the new Kmart shopping center was close to opening.What had been a big hole in the ground took the shape of a modern shopping center,and soon we would be able to walk to the end of the street to get many of the things we needed.

Most of the streets around our place had finally had curbs and sidewalks completed and all of the roads were paved,though there was still some construction going on a bit farther off.

In our basement,there was a big crock full of wine brewing away in the basement,right beside the furnace.It was cool in the basement,but the furnace could give off a bit of heat,which is why my mother set the crock down there,and not someplace else.Inside the crock,the wine turned into a deep maroon color,and the top had a paler,pinkish foam on top.And the whole of the basement began to smell of the wine.A few times my mother used a sheet to strain the contents out into another container.But by early September,it was ready to be bottled.

While some things seemed to be wrapping up,other things were just getting started. My father decided that it was finally time to pave the driveway,and was anxious to get it completed before winter. He also had the idea that he wanted to finish part of the basement,so that the house would have an extra bedroom.Until this point,my sister and I had shared a bedroom.And we still had the same boarder in our house, as she completed nurses training at The New Brunswick Institute Of Technology, and at Moncton Hospital. So the house had grown a bit small, and an extra room would come in handy. So a pile of lumber materialized in our basement,and all of these projects soon got underway. And,we came to have another visitor during this time, a man who stayed until at least Halloween. And all of this took place just as that big crock of wine was coming into it's own.

Chapter XI,1966,The Later Months,Continued.

In Western New Brunswick,in my mothers hometown,there was a lot of change going on.The road from Moncton to Canterbury was still all torn up,as there was a huge dam building project taking place just above Fredricton on the Saint John River.When the new dam came on line,all of the roads above it would have to be located higher up,because a huge flood basin was going to be created.So,while there was no problem getting from Moncton to Fredricton,getting the last sixty or so miles could seem to take forever,and involved long dust waits for moving equipment.

In and around the town of Canterbury was changing too.My grandparents had completed their move into town.At first they lived in the back of a store right downtown.But by 1966,they'd moved up to the top of the first hill,onto Orchard Street.Canterbury,in those days had a lot of old Victorian style houses,the grandest of which were right along Main Street.Orchard Street was the second of three streets  branching off the main drag.At it's lower end the houses were big and well tended.As you drove further from Main Street,the houses became less well tended,until at the far end of Orchard Street,they were little more than shacks.My grandparent's new house was about two thirds of the way to the dead end,on the left.It was hardly new,but it was in decent shape.I always thought of it as being large,but,in fact it was small.The kitchen was at first dominated by a huge wood stove,which then got replaced with an oil stove.Either of these stoves took up enough room so that you would have to walk through the room carefully in order to avoid bumping into it and being burned.If there were four or five people in the kitchen,the room seemed uncomfortably crowded.The living room was small as well,and there was another oil stove in there,though it was much smaller.There was a stand with a television,which hardly ever got turned on,and, along one wall,right next to the window,there was a huge old organ,which was in a rather sorry state of disrepair.From the living room, a narrow set of stairs led to a second floor,which contained four tiny rooms,three of which were bedrooms,and one a washroom,which contained only a toilet.No bath or shower. All of the rooms,save the bathroom had sloping ceilings,so that the rooms were only about four feet high where they met the outside walls. At the very front of the house,there was a long, narrow glassed in porch,that was always very nearly the same temperature as what it was outside. Beneath the porch,there was a bit of a crawl space, with mud walls and floors.You could crawl into that space by opening a trap door,but there was hardly enough room to stand about,even for a small child such as I was at the time. Occasionally my grandmother would go down there to get potatoes or some other food item that was stored there. And, as far back as I can remember, there were always mousetraps set about on the mud floor.

My grandparents were hardly the only people to have moved in from the country in those years. In fact, they were very much a part of a larger migration. Nearly all of my mothers family had moved somewhere by the mid 1960s. For younger family members, there was already a recognition that there was very little future out in that rough, rocky country. A good many of them just moved the few miles into town, hardly a move at all, except that they took up different houses. My mothers brother, Clifford had moved,first into Canterbury, where they lived in the back of the same store where my grandparents first moved, A bit later on,they moved on to Fredricton. My mothers sister and her husband moved into Canterbury as well, where they opened a garage and a store on the crest of the second hill, just before the edge of town. My grandmothers sister and her husband, who by this time were quite aged moved into the house just beyond my uncles garage, just where the road starts to go down hill and back out into the country. Most of my grandmothers other siblings, and their children had moved as well, a good many of them to Ontario, and some to the area around Portland, Maine, where they had established themselves by the middle of the twentieth century. All, or most of those people once lived in a big, old farmhouse that had been set well back from the road, but I cannot recall a time when there was ever people living there. Most of the houses around eventually became just like that old house.

When we visited Canterbury, there never seemed to be a lot of children around for us to play with. There was one boy who lived out back of my grandmothers house, where the two lots shared one large garden.So he ended up being about my only playmate, and he was an agreeable one for the most part.Mostly we would play with our trucks, either in the garden, or even right out on the streets, as there was hardly any traffic at all. I'd often sit down right in the middle of the road, and it caused nobody any concern at all. But, I do recall my mother telling someone once,that the boy I was playing with had bitten me on the hand once. My memory of that is very vague.I do recall coming home once, looking at a bite mark on the back of my hand. However, I have no recall at all of how that mark actually got there.

Visits to my grandparents place, in those days consisted of long days playing in the dirt, usually in very hot weather, and getting very dirty.I would try to climb the apple tree out back too, but I was far too small. The roof of the shed looked inviting too, it looked as though I would almost be able to reach it, by standing on some of the old farm equipment that my grandfather had dragged in from the farm and parked there.But again, I was not quite tall enough to crawl up onto the roof. In the still hot evenings, sometimes with thunderstorms threatening, my mother would fill up a huge, galvanized metal washtub, and bathe her children right there on the front lawn, beside my grandfathers old car, a 1953 Chevrolet Belair. Then it was off to bed, where someone would read us a story, and we would listen to the sound of my grandmother setting the table for breakfast, which she always did at night.And we could sometimes see lightening through the window, and always there was the sound of my grandfather snoring, as he was in the habit of going to bed early, even earlier than my sister and I.

Chapter XI 1966 The Later Months,Continued

When we got back to Moncton ,after our two week stay at the summer cottage, it was back to business as usual. Both of my parents were still working, so we would spend some days at the babysitters. On days when my father was at home, we got to stay home as well. I rather preferred this to being outside of our house because the babysitters was still a place where there seemed to be a great deal of conflict, especially when the older children were home from school. At times there was a lot of shouting and swearing,and when it was just my sister and I, and her little one, the babysitter spent a lot of time sitting around in the kitchen,smoking and complaining about her nerves. Sometimes her husband would come home during the day and they would get into a bit of an argument. In fact, mostly our babysitter seemed kind of wrung out and neurotic with a lot of things on her mind. She did love children though, and she had some days that were better than others.

When we stayed home, my father would sometimes sleep, after having worked the night shift. If the weather was bad, we got to stay inside and watch television. We had to be quite though. So we would watch The Friendly Giant, followed by this show that was in French, and had this mouse puppet. Later we watched a show called Mr. Dressup. For the most part this worked out well enough. If my mother didn't come home at noon, and usually she did, my father got up and made soup and sandwiches, then we would return to quietly playing or watching the afternoon movie. Sometimes that was alright, because the movie would be an old John Wayne film, or some war movie, or cowboys and Indians, and as long as there was a lot of action, I could watch quietly for hours. The only problem I ever had was one time I got a nose bleed while we were watching television one morning,and didn't know if I should wake my father up. I'd had nose bleeds a lot as a kid, so I knew what to do, and eventually got the bleeding stopped, but when my father awoke, he said if it happened again, I had to let him know right away. It was also about this time that I went to visit the doctor. I have no idea if that was because of the nose bleeds though.

If it was nice outside, and my father was at home, I could go out to spend the evenings with my friend Kenny who lived down the street. I'd been hanging out with him for a while, and he was one of the first kids I ever remember playing with outside my own family. When I visited his place(he never visited our place),my sister never tagged along, so I don't know what it was she did, or how she spent the day. Kenny and I would play Cowboys and Indians usually, or cops and robbers, or war. Some sort of game that involved guns, invariably. For a while, this worked out okay, until we started playing with some of the older kids.

Behind Kenny's house there was a bit of a field. It's before the time that there was a Canadian Tire there, and people used to cut diagonally across the field to short cut from our street, to the lights at Mountain Road and Mapleton Road. As the field receded away from Mountain  Road, it narrowed out, as it was kind of pie shaped. By the time it reached Willet Street, it just ended. But, in that field there was a single house. The people who lived there were poor people, and you could tell by one look at the house. Of course one of it's yards was the field. Then, on one side it had a driveway, and between the driveway and the back of Kenny's house, there was another yard. You really couldn't call it a lawn though. It was all hacked up and full of weeds, but there was no real grass. There was a lot of thistles though. The house was pretty much just like the yard. All run down. It wasn't nearly as well kept as most of the houses around it. Mostly it was painted a kind of tan color, but not all of it was painted, and that part that was, was not evenly covered. Not every window in the house had glass either. Some were covered over with clear sheets of plastic,or sometimes even a black garbage bag. There were a lot children around, from very young, right up to teenagers and maybe beyond.And there always seemed to be a dog around as well.

Moncton, as a city has always been divided closely between English and French speaking people. In fact, the same can be said of New Brunswick in general. If you can imagine the province as a square, then divide it diagonally from Northwest, to Southeast,most of the French people would live in the Northeastern part, while the Southwestern part is largely English. Moncton would get divided in two, being located right along that line. So. you could drive just out of the city one way and find communities where hardly anyone spoke English. If you were to drive the other way, you would find places that were nearly one hundred percent Anglophone. But within the city, it was divided right down the middle, and our community tended to reflect that.

The people living in the house behind Kenny's were French. Their family name was Bastarache, and they had a young boy who I met one day when Kenny and I were playing together. As near as I can remember, this kid's name was Johnny. He was likely a year,or maybe even two older that I was, but he wasn't that much bigger. He did go to school though. Usually he wore clothes that were a bit more worn out than ours, but he was clean, and for the most part ,an agreeable playmate. I don't recall us ever getting into any fights, or even any serious arguments. As far as I was concerned, he was an alright guy. The only problem was, I spoke English, and, when you are raised Anglophone, and are only five years old, you can't really say his name, "Bastarache" all that well, without stumbling over it. For some reason, we would often refer to other kids by both their first and last names. So one day, Johnny decided to help me out when it came to pronouncing his name. "It's easy...just call me Johnny Bastard." Well, it might have been easier, but it also presented the five year old version of a moral dilemma, because I knew it was a word we were not allowed to say. Still, if it was actually a persons name, well I ought to be able to say it. For a while, this was never a problem, because I could just call him by his first name only. But then one night, right after dinner, I got on my tri-cycle and started  off down the street, looking for some kids to play with before dark. My mother was in the front yard, and asked where I was going, though she must have known, because I only ever went one place. But before I could think, and before I could stop myself I just blurted out, "I'm on my way to Johnny Bastard's house." And that's as far as I got that night. Later, when I told Johnny about this, he seemed to think it was kind of funny. But I still prefer to think that he didn't do that just to play a joke on me, because, really he was a great kid.