“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
parents’ part. Sooo cute, eh Gilly? Gilly, Gilly, Gilly! Yeah, right.
Wham, Wallop!
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 pockmarked, 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?
I wasn’t 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 expanses of suburbia. Houses
galore! All looking about the same. Design features of a post–
World War II 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 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 big, two story, red brick monster, as
all houses are big to a five-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 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. Delusional
thinking for sure that was. That bit of suburbia, an urban Rockwellian
scene of nostalgia, of Dad watching sports on TV every
Saturday afternoon 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-man’s-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 coarse
sand and four wooden sides with triangular corner seats, for
heaven’s 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!
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 twenty yards
narrower than the lower portion, with less grass to cut. The lower
part of the yard, the back forty, dipped down about three 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. Yet 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. When 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 wintertime
she saw the snow covered upper portion of the backyard as
her blank and open canvas… a blank canvas in urban snow-
house design. She wanted the whole of the back forty as well 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 the layout of her snow walls, her snow
rooms, and the snow halls of her snow designs.
We always did this at night. I don’t know why, but always at
night, when it was really, really cold and frosty out—so cold that
each breath took your breath away, and the snow glistened like it
was embedded with a thousand specks of diamonds, especially
under a clear, moonlit star-embedded sky. And if we were really
lucky, the green fluid 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 five-year-old kid, life was indeed magical
and good.
Life was good!”
Taken from “I Thought I’d Died And Gone To Heaven.” See the link at the top of the page for more information.
Did ya know: We have now entered the era of Global Boiling – so says the head of the UN. Don’t know about you but this summer has been fantastic. Blue skies and warm temps every single day.
Did ya know that scientists say the Gulf Stream will collapse in 2025. These same experts are out to lunch. All of their predictions – every single dire one of them since the 1960s – have never materialized.
Did ya know that only God controls the weather.
Climate anxiety is going through the roof and the cats are not happy about it.
Enjoy yourselves. Get outside and enjoy the day.
“Old Admirals” by Al Stewart. Tells the story of the Royal Navy’s Lord of the Admiralty Jackie Fisher and his rise up the ranks in the later half of the 1800s and years up to World War 1. In my opinion Al Stewart is a highly under appreciated musician and story teller. I particularly love the brass aspects of this song. Next? Al’s perfect song.
Have a great day. The Camino beckons.
This is where I start the 900km walk!