Category: A Very Short Story

…One day, and I’m not too sure what day actually, I found myself riding in the back of a large truck.  It was huge and dark and noisy and full of furniture. I was with an older cousin I think. This was so cool. Jerking and bouncing round the chairs, cushions and tables in the back of that truck as we plundered along the pock marked, pot holed roads of the west end of the city.  I do believe it was February, a Saturday, 1956, a mild winter – part of the other hottest year on record.  Where were we going?  Not really sure at the time but I do believe that my parents hit their Shangri-La: a house in the burbs. We were moving out and away from the downtown core with all of its excitement, excrement and hot, humid, heavy smelly summer air to the fresh, healthy and quiet wide open spaces of suburbia.  Houses galore! All looking about the same. Design features of a post Second World War housing boom: two story houses with a large dormer in the back only accentuated on the street by those narrow and long, single story, brick built bungalows.  Street upon street, row upon boring row, with the requisite single maple or elm tree in the front yard. Wow! We had arrived.

What a house that was.  A two story big red brick monster, as all houses are big to a 5 year old.  It sat on a fairly large suburban lot. The front yard had the requisite decorative tree in place with a back yard that was really huge.  I had to curtail my excitement though because under all of the dirty, brown-grey melting snow of February was grass. And grass grew and I could not pretend to believe that while my dad watched his ball games Saturday afternoons in the late spring and summer months that my mom would be content to be out cutting the grass.  That little bit of suburbia, an urban Rockwellian scene of nostalgia, of Dad watching sports on TV with mom out in the yard working with the suburban plow, would not continue forever for I was getting bigger.  I was getting stronger and sooner or later it would be me out pushing that World War I era push mower.  And like those ugly, scary, out-worldly war machines our push mower cut grass about as well as those first tanks careened and mowed across no-mans land.

The backyard was fantastic.  Great for a kid.  It had two distinct areas. The upper yard, close to the backdoor, came equipped with a state of the art sandbox complete with fine coarse sand, four wooden sides with triangular corner seats for heavens sake. Seats!  It was bordered on one side by the paved single wide driveway and a very large and separate two car garage.  In 1956 this was unheard of for a working class home.  Why was this important? A paved driveway? Snow of course! And snow had to be shoveled.  I couldn’t depend on my mom forever here. Sooner or later I would be obliged to take up the shovel and well, shovel.

The other side of the yard was fenced to separate our abode from that of the neighbour.  The double car garage was so wide that the upper part of the backyard was about 20 yards narrower than the lower portion with less grass to cut.  The lower part of the yard, the back forty, dipped down about 3 feet and was separated from the upper yard by a tiered terrace. The back forty had large garden beds laid out in a square pattern with raspberry bush accents around the perimeter.  But all I could think about then was the potential for a backyard rink for when snow melts during a winter thaw water runs down the path of least resistance and pools, in this case, from the upper reaches of our yard to the lower back forty.  And when the water freezes as it invariably would we had a ready made skating rink.  Dad would never have to leave his TV and construct a backyard rink for us kids.  I was so excited and so was he!

My sister had other issues. Not my oldest teeter-totter sister, but my second oldest sister, the penultimate one.   In the winter time she saw the snow covered upper portion of the backyard as her blank and open canvass…a blank canvass in urban snow-house design.  She really wanted the whole of the back forty to lay out a “planned city” of urban snow but I had to put my galoshes down and stop her in her tracks.  As a compromise I agreed to help her in her lay out of her snow walls, her snow rooms and the snow halls of her snow designs, but only in the upper portion of the yard.  The lower back forty of the yard was my territory..

We always did this at night. I don’t know why but at night, when it was really, really cold and frosty out; so cold that each breath took your breath away, the snow glistens like it was imbedded with a thousand specks of diamonds, especially under a clear, moonlit, star embedded sky. And if we were really lucky, the green hues of the dark winter’s northern sky shimmered and danced and wove a pattern that was frighteningly beautiful and soothingly fresh; paradoxically frigid yet illuminated by such a warm glow. And oh so quiet. For two little kids we felt sure that we were all alone in the whole wide world. This was pure magic. To a 5 year old kid life was indeed magical and good…

That first house of ours, the house where I was born, was in the city – on the west end fringe of the city proper.  It was small: a side by side semi-detached two story house that was built during a building boom in the post World War One years.  It had a small kitchen, a tiny bathroom, an unfinished cellar – they called them cellars in those days.  A coal shute with an attached bin plus shovel and grate for the coal burning furnace.  On the main floor there was a relatively large dining room adjacent to the country style kitchen, which was attached to a very small living room.  The dining room and the kitchen were the real living rooms in those days because that was where all of the familial drama occurred.  Upstairs were three bedrooms, the largest for my parents, the masters of course. Two smaller bedrooms were in the back of the house separated by the small bathroom.  I don’t remember having a bathtub, as we were washed in an old tin tub with water heated in the kitchen.  Our ice box was just that, an ice box. I can still remember how the iceman cameth to our place from time to time clawing straw caked blocks of pure blue tinged ice from the horse drawn carriage; and the iceman himself with his large brown iron ice tongs.

My two sisters shared one bedroom and the other I shared with my brother.  It was a modest but cozy house, across the road from a small park or parkette.  We were not rich by any stretch or even well off yet we were the first house on the block to have a TV. Why? Because my dad was an avid baseball fan and he desperately wanted one, as all of the major league baseball games of the day were beginning to be televised.  He could watch a game every Saturday afternoon while my mom was outside cutting the grass with our state of the art, hand powered push mower. He got a TV and serendipitously I got a nickname that would haunt me for the rest of my life.  Gilly, as in Junior Gilliam, a baseball star of the day whom my dad had great respect for.  Given that my dad’s name was John and I was named John, I was John Junior of course; and since my dad loved Junior Gilliam and I was also a junior I got the Gilliam moniker. I could have handled Gilliam but Gilly?  And parents being parents or grownup adults think that other kids are really stupid but they’re not.  They picked up on the Junior Gilliam moniker immediately and faster than you could say “take me out to the ball game” I was called Gilly – for ever and ever, for eternity, or for as long as I lived.  A parent’s logic never fails to amaze me and the unintended consequences associated with their dumb-ass decisions in name calling. You have no idea how many black eyes can be attributed to that one lapse of judgment on my parent’s part. Sooo cute eh Gilly? Gilly, Gilly, Gilly! Yeah right. Wham, Wallop!…

…The other thing that excited me most at Grandpa’s was when Uncle Dunc visited.  On those occasions if I was good, very good, which was code for keeping my mouth shut as they reminisced, Uncle Dunc would let me stick my small hand into his war wound. It was in the small of his back and to the left of his spine. Fantastic! A huge, perfectly round indentation in the fleshy part of his back. An old World War 1 shrapnel wound he told me. It was a blighty. Fantastic, I thought for I could trace that wound with my fingers and small hand to my heart’s content.  I was sooo impressed and proud that he was my uncle.

Uncle Dunc was a proud man of Scot descent. He was a single man with no family to speak of except being close friends with my maternal Grandparents, on my mom’s side.  He was as close to them as one could get without being related.  Perhaps he was a lonely man but what do kids know about loneliness at that age, at least they shouldn’t know.  He wasn’t my real uncle but what do kids care about familial relationships.   He was my uncle, for sure.  I could feel his war wound as often as I liked when he visited and listen to him spout off about his adventures with the Hun – whoever he, they may be. And his mates, but mostly about his mates. He always bragged about his physical prowess as a young man as he was loyal to his values, his mates, his generation, the creator, his King, his country and the Empire.  He was proud of his deeds, almost to a fault, yet full of integrity.  He always said that he would die with his boots on.  He was proud of the fact. That’s how men were in those days.  Then one day, a bit later in my life, my dad was called to the phone.  It was his father-in-law. I could hear him comment in a very low voice to my mother that Duncan Macpherson had died.  Alone in his rooming house… alone yes but with his boots on.

…Speaking of parked cars, only a kid could come up with a game called “Running Out From behind a Parked Car” The aim of this game, beside suicide, was to run out from behind a parked car when another car was approaching us on the road. We wanted to see how close we could come to being hit without being hit. That wouldn’t be smart. Not too smart but what can one expect from pre-schoolers. Smarts? Not likely and I am amazed that I am still alive today. A memorable snippet of childhood that was.

Yet another fate for toddlers, preschoolers, kids, that is worse than self inflicted injuries from stupidity is the mandated visit to Grandma and Grandpa.  My maternal Grandpa, on my mother’s side, drooled. And his lips were huge. Red and chaffed they were and somewhat blistered but not from the sun but from the wad of chewing tobacco he constantly chomped on.  His spittoon was always nearby. A dirty brass coloured round finely decorated in minute detail.  It was adorned with ornamental cherubs hovering over agricultural scenes with small claw legs that were there to remind the user of the fate that awaits if one carries on with a habit like this. Perhaps, but they sure paid attention to craftsmanship in those days. It was a beautiful piece of work that spittoon. And while second hand smoke may be bad enough, second hand spittle to a kid is a fate far worse than death and a gross fate to boot.  For what was a toddler’s job anyway? A cuddle, the compulsory hug and of course that peck on the cheek.  Both cheeks! Yuck!

I had a love hate relationship with those visits. I can still see Grandpa clearly, as if he was still alive today sitting here beside me.  There he was standing on the stoop looking above and beyond. All was right with his world. Hands in his pockets, his white shirt, dark black pants held up and tethered to his massive frame, magically, with bright red suspenders.  Red huge moist lips, and not in a good way, were bordered above and beyond by rosy red cheeks.  Cheeks that were divided by a huge bulbous red, pickled and veined snauze topped off by a crown of snowy white but fluffy thinning hair.  And on those very hot and humid days of summer a sweat permeated from every pore of his being staining his shirt with a sickening yellow sheen.

Kids are supposed to be excited when visiting their grandparents.  And I must admit that for all of the grossness I had to put up with I was excited but for more mercenary reasons. For with every visit and with every wet hug and with every wet gummy smooch that came with every visit was the mandatory handshake. And while he was breaking my fingers in that vice grip of a hand of his I could feel a bill fold then crumple into my small innocent pinkish hands. A dollar bill! Fantastic for in those days a dollar bill equated to over 300 black balls…

…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…