…Growing up in that small neighbourhood with the small park was memorable. I received my very first scar there on that very tiny street; on a fence between two garages that was situated at the back of a garbage strewn lot. Now boys being boys this fence had to be climbed. Why? Because it was a fence, of course. A fence crowned with rusty barbed wire. Adventure yes, and you know what’s coming next. I don’t have to describe what happened. Needless to say, I shit my pants – again! Blood everywhere. My left index finger sliced open from just above the knuckle to its base at the palm of my left palm. I can still see the scar clearly today some 60 years later – a mark of boyhood adventure back then. Yet I can’t quite remember the look on my mother’s face. She must have fainted – or maybe it was me.
I can’t recall having too many friends in those early days. But one I remember dearly. David Cairns was his name. Small lad: blond hair, blue eyes, Scandinavian breeding perhaps. I can still see his face and features as clearly today as if I had just met him yesterday. He lived a few houses up from me in an old wooden framed house. It was huge, like some medieval castle or a western fort. It was painted white, stucco maybe, with brown trim, a somewhat poor example of the English Tudor style. David and I were inseparable as only toddlers could expect to be at that age. Yet we must have grown out of toddlerhood by then as David and I would sleigh to our hearts content coming down the terraced hills and front yards of the 100 year old homes in the area. Descending, fast as the wind, head first, down the front and across the snow frozen lawns of those houses that were lucky enough in our eyes to have had a terraced front yard. And having a paved and ploughed snow and ice covered road at the bottom of that mountain of pure white snow was somewhat discerning but we survived and not a tad bit cognizant of the potential dangers lurking about everywhere, everywhere indeed, behind every where’s tree and every where’s parked car. No not just everywhere mind you, just where there was snow, our sleighs, our friendship, our happiness…