9 years old: library, microscope, bicycle, fieldmouse.,

1960 had been a big year.  A decade had passed on the calendar clock.  I’d learned my letters and numbers in school. I was learning a lot. 1961 was going to be an even more important year. Now I could read and print.

Mom would take my brother Ron and I to the Fort Garry Library on Pembina Hwy every week.  It was a lending library. As kids we’d pore over the books and choose those we would read that weekend.  We’d leave with 3 or 4 a piece.  It began with books with pictures and writing like the proverbial Dick and Jane books but later it would branch out to everything without pictures. I began in the children’s section, moved onto the teens and then read the adult books. It was a suburban library.  By the time I was a teen I’d read every science fiction book in that library. All the adult ones too.  Asimoth. Poulson, Heinlein.  I also liked nature books, westerns and even history at a young age.

I received a small mail order microscope that year.  With my brother and dad’s help I prepared my first slide of puddle water from the back yard. It was teeming with life. I was amazed.  I loved watching this Lilliputian world for hours.  Fabrics fascinated me, the interlocking threads . It was miraculous to me this deeper layer of reality that could be accessed with a microscope.

I don’t know that binoculars held the same fascination. My brother father and I would lie on the front lawn looking the Milky Way, identifying the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, the North Star, Cassiopeia, Orion. In later years we’d study UFO’s. We’d use the binoculars to look at craters on the moon.Dad had big 10 x 50 Power ones.

They came with us hunting and fishing. It helped us identify birds.  I began to carry pocket field guides to birds ,stars and trees. Roger Tory Peterson’s with his coloured detailed bird  drawings were the best . Much  later in life I’d enjoy the Audubon field guides with coloured pictures.  I was an amateur ornithologist at a young age. My brother and father identified and named birds in our neighbourhood and later on our travels. I ticked off each bird I’d seen and identified in the list at the back of my first young person’s field guide.

I had a bicycle. My brother had one already. I remember mine as if it were yesterday. Other kids had bicycles with training wheels at the back but Dad took this 2 wheeler he’d brought home and me out front on the sidewalk across North Drive. I got on the seat and began to pedal wobbling along with him walking beside me holding my seat and the  handle bars. I was gripping the handles for deer life terrified and exultant. .  He ran beside me a couple of times up the street and back down the street. When I got balanced he let me go. Like a little bird leaving the nest. I rode free. I might as well have been a glider being released from a mother ship. It was such an incredible feeling of motion. I was so proud. I had only needed help a couple of times on that pint sized blue second hand child’s bike. Now  I could ride by myself. My father was beaming. 

After I found my balance I could ride. Now  I rode everywhere. I explored the world of Fort Garry then Winnipeg on a series of bicycles.  I don’t recall a tricycle just that first little bike and then as a teen the big bike that my world revolved around all summer. Years later I’d bicycle across Europe in my early 20’s with an actual state of the art new Raleigh Touring Bike. But it all began on a little second hand bike with my Dad holding me up.

With that little bike I’d ride mostly with my brother who’d accompany me though I slowed him down.  I remember being devastated one day when he took off with his older friends and I simply couldn’t keep up. My little bike wasn’t big enough to stay with the big boys for more than a block. I
sure wanted to be bigger then. My brother and I had been constant companions as children but now he was becoming a teen and spending more time with his friends. Kirk was my friend and sometimes Ron hung out with Kirk’s older brother Tommy. Carter sisters.  He was a total cyclist as a teen and even when I’d eventually get a bigger bike we’d rarely ride together. He’d move onto a Yamaha 150 motorcycle years before I got into Harley’s I ride today. 

Kirk and I rode bikes together but he’d go to the family cottage at Minaki in the summer and Garth went to golf camp.  Though we didn’t spend much school year time together, Jamie, the banker’s son, a few blocks away would become my summer friend.  A bicycle expanded the friendship circle. Bicycling was a true joy.

The field mouse died that fall.. I killed it. My dad had been against my bringing it home but I cried and insisted. I’d found it in the woods and captured it while my brother and my father were hunting. Mom wasn’t too pleased but I promised I’d care for it. I made a wood chip nest for it in a plastic box. 

  I’d developed a game in the back yard sidewalk where I’d let it escape and run around free would but stop it with a handled metal whisk.  It would then stay on the sidewalk and not run away into the grass where I might not be able to catch it. Only I misjudged the distance on one reach with the which the whisk edge came down and decapitated the little field mouse. It happened so quickly. It was there alive and then dead and gone.  I think I wanted to put it back together. Humpty didn’t prepare me for this. I was devastated and inconsolable. I was also filled  with guilt and shame. To the mouse it didn’t matter that I didn’t mean to kill it. Mouse slaughter was the same as murder to the dead mouse. I really had killed the little animal, my pal, without meaning to but having done it. 

My parents came to my cries and dad said, « It’s a wild thing. I told you we should leave it.  It was never meant to be brought home. It wasn’t to kept in a cage. It wanted to be free. ». 

I never got over the guilt of killing that little mouse. It really did trigger a lot of thought and feeling about death and intent and fate.  Later I’d meet men and women who would enjoy killing small animals.  I knew I was different.  It didn’t even give me much relief from the feeling I’d wastefully unconscionably killed that innocent field mouse. I felt very alone. 

I reall I did bring home birds with injured wings. With Mom’s help I d  nurse them back to life.  They knock the selves out flying into glass. I remember keeping one black bird around for a week or so and then having to let it go because because my Dad told me it was well enough.  I honestly can say I did that in this period of my life. I was fascinated with healing and even how worms could continue after being cut in two.  My disappointment in the death of the field mouse was all reaching.  It couldn’t come back to life and we’d buried it in the back yard.