ShakeyJay

…September 1957. It was now time for school. Grade one. I was a smart young lad back then for I skipped Kindergarten. What kind of name is that anyway, Kindergarten? Jimmy-mum and I would go together, walk to school, and keep each other company all the way and on the way. It was about a mile and a half to walk, normally taking a shortcut through a huge hydro-field. I can still remember that walk. Stay on the left side of the road, face traffic, look both ways, cut across the street, quickly, then walk through the long grass of the hydro field. That field’s long and soft early autumn grass seemed to undulate magically in the light breeze, like an ocean’s swell of late summer’s willowing grass. Each long and tenuous swell appearing to a young fellow like me as some sort of an enormous barrier or sea swell that had to be climbed or sailed across. Down hill and dale we would go, through valley and trough; then up to the next crest, and to the next, and to the next, finally portaging across some wild and raging river until alas, back to the reality of the school yard where I would be confined to for the next seven years.

Catholic grade school: grades 1 through 8. No junior high or whatever they feel inclined to call these things these days. To us kids it made no difference.  And to an imaginative lad school was school. And it sucked. And the Catholic Schools really, really sucked because in addition to all of the scholarly stuff we also had to contend with the wrath of God disguised in long flowing black robes and habits. Sister this and sister that.  Father this and father that.  Adapt quickly and quietly and quickly and quietly we did for it soon became apparent that it was us against them. For that reason alone our time in the Catholic School system was the very best of times as well as the very worst of times.  At its worse? A residential school for white Anglo – Saxon boys and girls. At its best? It was a great deal of fun and a whole lot of laughs for it was us against them for the next seven years. Seven years, as I skipped a grade for being the smart ass that I was back in those days.  Then again the Catholic Separate School System had a mandate and a mission to spit out as many good catholic boys and girls on society as fast as was heavenly possible.

They had lay teachers there as well. Some were great, others not so much.  Ms McFayden, grade seven, a closet chain smoker.   Mr Bowner: a superb, artistically inclined grade six teacher. There was Ms Tupper, grade three; Ms Kellerer, grades four and five; Ms Raddigan, grade eight, Radiator in our vernacular. Sister Theresa, grade one. Grade two – I can’t remember…

…Jimmy-mum, as he was later known to us, was my very first really best friend forever. I met Jim when I was 5 years old. We are still friends to this day. It was late February 1956. And he was 6. Wow, 6. I couldn’t wait to be 6. He was a shy guy for he hid outside the front of our house on a terraced part of the front yard’s landscape. My mom told me she thought she saw him but he ducked around the side of the house when she looked out the front door. I hurriedly dressed myself as best I could and out I went into the dull grey February afternoon to seek what I could find. Sure enough, there he was, at the side of the house dressed warmly in the frigidness of a late winter’s day.

Want to be friends? I touted.

“Okay” he said

“Okay”, I repeated

My name is John

I am Jim. Want to see my dad’s 56 Ford?

Huh? 

We became fast friends, out and about exploring our small world as best as we could. The Catholic Church, which was located across the road from our house, had an enormous parking lot. It was, in essence, our future ball hockey forum in the fall and winter months while growing enthusiastically in our ripe imaginations as Yankee Stadium in the summer. Our small street with its post war houses, empty muddy lots, small ornamental elm or maple trees on every front lawn and in exactly the same spot became our playground. Unbeknownst to us at the time these post war years were really the genesis of suburban social engineering with a tree on every lot.  Oh and those tarred, graveled, blacktop roads. Hated them for in the heat of the summer the tar and the small stones would melt in a gooey charcoal grey fusion mass and stick to the bottom of our “Keds.”  “Keds:” my first real pair of running shoes. Black and white “Keds!” I took that moniker to heart and felt that while I wore those treads I had to be running all of the time. They were running shoes after all.

And on those hot humid days of July and August our Moms and Dads would sit on their front door stoops surveying their domains yakking away at the neighbors while monitoring our whereabouts. Not blatantly obviously you see but ever so discreetly. If it was really, really hot and humid they could be found sitting in the cool dark and damp cellars sucking back on an India Pale Ale and drawing on a Buckingham or a Camel, non filter. A real man’s cigarette. Moms too. This generation got through the war not just on their stomachs but by leaning on their nicotine sticks.  In those days, everyone smoked.

I loved it best when my mom and dad sat on their front door stoops. Us kids would run around playfully then sit with them listening to their neighborhood gossip, or in my dad’s case, some good ole war stories. Not bad tales of combat but the fun reminiscences of bygone days, the war effort and the antics of his war buddies. If I was really good my Dad would let me have a draught of his cold, amber IPA.  I was too young to smoke but I so loved the sweet smell of nicotine in the air that I usually sat downwind and took in the fumes.  How I loved those days…

Note this post follows a thread that begins 02 Jan 17.

…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.