When the Confederation Train rolled into Winnipeg we all went down to the depot and walked through this great rolling museum of Canadian history. We went in Fort Garry folk and came out Canadian. It really did a wonderful job of making us feel a part of a greater whole, a larger enterprise.
Expo 67, the great world fair was the other major event of the year. My lovely Aunt Sally offered to take me to Montreal. She was my favourite and I was her little boy. She was the Executive Assistant to the head of research for ESSO Canada and her friend Babe was the Executive Assistant to the Head of ESS0 Canada. The two of them were best friends and wild to be with. Babe really did look like Marilyn Monroe but she’d driven ambulance during the war and would shout out the window as she drove through Toronto streets in her car, no longer driving an ambulance. Dad said, she swore worse than any trooper he’d ever known. Rides with Babe and Aunt Sally were a hoot.
I got on the CNR train in Winnipeg and met this girl in the cars. The whole of the trip I was in lust. Really like a dog on scent. She was hugging and kissing me and we were necking and petting in the seats but didn’t quite make it to the end. She said she was going to Expo and wanted to meet me there to have sex. She thought having sex at Expo would be ‘monumental’.
When I got off the train my lovely best friend favourite aunt was there and I was not the ‘little boy’ she remembered from a year or two before. I’d gone from child to teen. Worse a teen on a mission. My poor aunt would talk about that year of transformation because I was distracted and gloomy and intellectual instead of carefree. So her holiday which had been planned as fun and together was instead with this nightmare that was me. I hardly remember her, and she really was my favourite saint. We’d travel to Montreal together. She was always a lot of fun. But now she was abiding old person, probably in her 30’s.
I could talk to her about my family and any problems I had before. She’d always reassure me and give me an angle on the concerns that would make everything alright. After talking with her I knew I no longer had to kill my parents in their sleep or sell myself into slavery. There were lots of other options. However, I couldn’t tell her about the girl who’d promised me ‘sex’ in Montreal. The great unknown world beyond virginity. I was going to Expo to see Sputnik but hoping to be out of this world in lust at any moment.
Expo really was amazing. So amazing that it distracted me from adolescent lust for some time. I was amazed by Habitat. So often people don’t realize that these monumental achievements introduced whole new ideas of being. Habitat was the first condominium or townhouse complex. It was wonderful.
Sputnik was by far the best. I was watching STAR TREK, (now called, the original series), after school. It had aired first in 1966. Now I was actually in Sputnik. The most amazing thing I remember too at the Expo 69 was the American Exhibit of the Geodesic Dome by American genius Buckminster Fuller. I’d go on to read his work and be uplifted by his glorious mind. So much of the ‘climate change’ money scam and the actual environmental and population changes of recent years were anticipated by him in the 60’s. Rather than scare mongering and pseudoscience this brilliant man proposed actual solutions to every problem we face today all the while the corrupt UN government like some kind of carnie huckster makes money off the plight while withholding the solutions Buckminster Fuller advanced when he built the first geodesic dome. Amazing man. I was in awe walking about Expo seeing advances in technology that would become everyday solutions in the years to come.
I ditched my poor aunt one day. I can’t imagine how she must have felt losing her sister’s angelic little boy in the midst of a world festival where everyone was a foreigner. I found the girl and necked and petted behind Sputnik but never went ‘all the way’. I was disappointed and found my aunt who was quite beside herself convinced that she’d lost me and I’d been kidnapped by Russian slave traders. If anyone has misplaced someone else’s child in a large group of strangers they might imagine partially how my aunt, who admits “I”m a worrier, Billy, I’ve all my life been a worrier. I pray all I can but I still worry.” So there I was ‘ditching’ the poor lady for a couple of hours of touchy feel, athen returning pissed at the girl and the world that I’d not culminated years of evolution there and then. All the while my aunt was worrying what she was going to tell my mother when she found my mutilated body being eaten in the African pavillion.
I really liked the beret I got in Montreal. I had my big navy sweater and blue jeans and now that black beret from Montreal mad my signature statement. Also the beat up untuned guitar which all together made me in my eyes ‘cool’. I’d later add RCMP riding boots to the picture and become ‘ultra cool’.
I never got laid. My poor aunt took me back to Toronto .I couldn’t help but enjoy her company. She’d take me to these amazing restaurants. Her friends were all charming. The church she attended, the large Baptist Church on Bloor had an intellectual speaker whose sermons were riveting to me. I was becoming much engaged in all things ‘intellectual’ . I loved walking downYonge and Bloor with Aunt Sally. I loved ‘Sally’s pad’ where the nephews from Canada and Scotland and the US would crash when we came to Toronto. She had a roll out couch for guests.
“I used to give up my bed when guests arrived but then I realized they were already out of their beds so why should I be out of my bed making two of us uncomfortable.” She was fond of saying.
Having tea and toast with her in her little kitchenettes was a bit of heaven. I’d also shoot paper planes off her balcony and watch them sail through the air out onto the streets. She’d make me pick them all up when she got home.
She had a garbage Shute at the end of the hall and I thought this amazing.
She also had two older men who were friends and neighbours. They were delightful and funny. Aunt Sally said, “They’re that way, Billy” in an observational tone and I’d eventually learn ‘that way’ meant ‘gay’. I think they were the first gay men I officially met. When I’d visit they’d be friendly again just like the other neighbours who would remember me on the elevator ‘you’re Sally’s nephew from out west’. Anything outside of Toronto in that direction was ‘out west’. I’d say yes.
I’d come visit my Aunt time and again but this trip was a disappointment to her and looking back I’m ashamed at what a James Dean sulky little intellectual I was. The gay guys didn’t attack me or even proposition me which I just say here because I actually have Christian friends who don’t know gay people who think they’re on the prowl all the time. This is simply not true any more than Italians are always ready to steal your tomatoes to make lasagna.
If you’re a teen boy hitchhiker late at night gay men will think you’re cruising when they’re cruising. They would become our UBER before Uber.
These guys would help my aunt later when she became blind with cataracts and the government refused services to her for a year causing her to be home bound and dependent on others to do her shopping. It was almost as if this whole experience was to punish her for all her years of independence. To make it more of a nightmare for her the government sent a man around to take her shopping in her wheel chair. My aunt was very feminine and all this modern malarkey about gender and sex in government was disdainful for her.
“I needed to buy new panties and I couldn’t with this man. A nice boy but he didh’t know anything. I had to wait for one of the women from church to come by. They are about as disabled as I but the two of us got down the street somehow to get me new panties and other feminine products. Can you believe that the government sent a man to help an 75 year old woman to do her shopping instead of just giving her the surgery that would let me see. Once I could see again I didn’t need any of those people.”
Once she was able to see again she was right back to loving her city of Toronto taking taxies to the theatre and opera and loving attending her church.
“A lot more black ladies there now. Wonderful people but I miss my friends. So many of the white people I knew have died or moved away. It’s not the same. We can’t talk about the war the same and they don’t know the old poetry and songs. We do have fun. I love their babies. We all have Jesus. You’re reading your Bible still Billy. I know you’re studying all that other stuff at the university but don’t forget your Bible.”
That was Expo. Even now I feel thrilled at the wonder of it. I miss my Aunt Sally still. What I’d give to spend more time with her at Aunt Sally’s pad.
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