14 years old: summer nights, swimming pools, rock and roll, dance, pranks, the VW bug, street fire, before Dhakor, the marble table.musi

What stands out for me most from this year is the summer heat.  This is before air conditionings. It’s Winnipeg. Winter is forever and extremely cold. Spring is clouds of mosquitoes that are 10 feet tall and periodically steal children.  The horse flies wage aerial combat with the eagles and hawks. The summers are as hot as the Winnipeg girls.

My memory is of hundreds of children wandering around the streets of Fort Gary at 3 am looking for swimming pools.

It began with Jamie.

“Do you want to meet me at 3 in the morning and we’ll sneak into my neighbour’s pool.”  Jamie, the banker’s son, said. He lived 3 blocks up the street past the Gyles place where Bill, his sisters, their mom and his famous artist cartoonist father lived.  My brother Ron once went up with a 22 and scared the crows away from their house for the sister.  Bill and I would become close friends in Vancouver 20 years  later.  

But this summer Jamie and I were sneaking  out and skinny dipping in the rich neighbours pool. It was a rush.  Stifling hot nights and then this cool illicit swim.  Jame and me and the raccoons. My brother pretended to be a sleep when I sneaked out. We shared a room and I am sure he knew I was coming and going. Mom and Dad probably didn’t but who knows.  It was like there was this magical parallel world with the adults all sleeping and us kids out in the night with the fairies, goblins and leprechauns.  Full moons were the best, even the trees were enchanted.

Kirk was away at Minaki some of the times. Keith Carter soon joined us.  Garth was involved. Kirk must have been in on this. There got to be so many kids involved it got hard to keep track of everyone.   The idea came about that we should meet and swim in the Fort Gary Pool.  What a lark! Even if it was behind the Fort Garry Police Station. This was the age of telepathy and gossip. This was before Woodstock, Cellular Phones and Flash Mobs.  This night kids from all over descended on the Fort Gary Swimming Pool.  We kept meeting different groups of our classmates.  Carl Hedlin was the funniest. He was the first kid to hit his growth spurt, and 8 foot tall at 14. His bedroom was on the second floor.

When we met him on the street with a few other guys the question was immediately, 

“Karl, how did you get out?”

“I used a ladder.”  

Of course. 

So here was Carl putting a ladder up to his window before going to bed and his parents didn’t know. At least Keith came out of the basement window. He just had to leave it unlocked. I walked right out the front door myself. Half the houses in Fort Garry were unlocked that summer. It was witchy eerie how many kids were just sneaking out of their houses and meeting up on the streets that summer, like aliens had stunned our parents. 

One kid had his brother’s little bicycle and was riding on it with a couple of other friends walking beside.  Over the football field and onto the swimming pool we descended as a mob. The swimming pool had a wire fence around it but we just scaled it like criminals or zombies.  All us kids in the pool trying to be quiet at first.  The police station was right there.

The next thing was some kid got on the diving board and then another. That’s when  the cannonballing began with its noise and huge splashes. Next  the little kids bicycle was handed over the fence and some guy took it up to the high diving board. He rode it right off the board into the water. That was a first.  We couldn’t not applaud. That’s what brought the police. The noise had escalated  exponentially.  The police en mass came out of the police station. It  took a while for them to figure out what was happening. We kids were scaling the fence by then. The bike was left in the pool and the kid whose bike it was was grilled by the police while his brother acted shocked. Hundreds of kids went running off across the fields like so many cockroaches. The Police  were chasing. They were on foot and in cars. Fort Garry didn’t have helicopters or SWAT so the kids still had the advantage. The police drove their cars with lights flashing across the football field,  They didn’t use sirens. All we heard was our heart’s breathing and ourselves sucking air as we ran like the wind from federal time.   Kids and police were everywhere. It was a full moon.  Miraculously no one got caught.

‘We’d better lay low for a couple of nights’ was the word the next day. The rest of that summer we were out 2 or 3 at a time meeting other kids but never the numbers of that night.  We didn’t go back to the Fort Garry Swimming Pool either. 

I tried swimming in the Red River one night. We’d been told they’d closed off the raw sewage outlets into the river. But I realized the logs I’d dove into weren’t t wood and had to use the garden hose at night back home to wash off.  

When the Queen visited, the Prince who presumably had been drinking dove off the Queen’s boat to the boat of this very fetching young thing. I wasn’t surprised none of the women wanted even a Prince after he’d been in the Red River.

We continued to go skinny dipping in the pools. We also stole carrots. Stealing carrots from gardens was a really big thing we did on those night time follies.  Strutting  down the street in the wee hours  as a teen chewing a dirt covered big carrot was better than having a Cuban cigar. 

Baptist church camp was that summer. I only remember one which is probably not surprising. I doubt I was invited back. My brother went too. He was the good guy. I, not so much. There were older kids and younger kids some 20 or 30 of us.  Church services in the morning. Lots of baseball and volleyball and swimming in the lake. Great communal meals. Christians ate the best pot luck and smorgasbord. This camp, the food was the best. Lots of barbecue burgers and mashed potatoes and gravy.  The girls my age were cute. There were 3 or 4 of us guys 14 and three or 4 of the girls who were 14 or 15.  

Naturally I suggested we sneak out and skinny dip at night. It what I’d been doing in the city. I kind of overlooked there weren’t any girls with us those nights. The smallest youngest guy was all for it. The two of us slipped over to girls cabin. Whereas they’d all been for it in the afternoon now only one wanted to go alone with me and no one wanted to go with the other guy. His drooling and buck teeth might have contributed. The little guy went back to the guys cabin.  

This daring beautiful girl then sneaked out later to join me.  We went down the trail to the beach. We stopped and stood there. I still remember how beautiful she was in the moonlight.  She wanted to kiss. I hadn’t kissed anyone so there we were holding each other  and kissing closed mouth in the moonlight. Adolescence a time of steep learning curves. It was the most wonderful thing I’ve ever known.  Obviously there was lust on both our parts. But lust was sinful so this was passion. We were definitely overcome by a force greater than ourselves.  I don’t know if Jesus was there but God was definitely present.  I would have stayed all night just holding and kissing her  but things had hardly started and she was slipping away back to her cabin. So I went back to my cabin too.  I couldn’t get over the smell of her hair.  Her face in the moonlight. I was head over heals in love.  I’m surprised I slept at all that night.

All hell broke lose in the morning. I wake to all three ministers staring at me. The ugliest jealous little girl had told the minister. The minister had called a tribunal. The tribunal was these three men.  I was brought to the common hall before these three men and who asked me for every lurid detail of what I’d done. I admitted everything except fault.  I said it was wrong. I knew we weren’t supposed to leave our cabins at night but I couldn’t believe anything so blessed as kissing a girl so beautiful if the moonlight could be wrong. Nothing else had happened. 

“Lust. Hell. Fire and Brimstone. Satan. Adam and Eve. The snake.”  This one man held the Holy Bible over me. I think he was trying to exorcize the demon of adolescence out of me. It didn’t work. I just sat there dumb founded remembering the softness of her skin. 

“It wasn’t like that. I love her.”  I said.  

I remember the youngest of the men trying  to reason.  Talked to me about girl’s reputation. This was a really big thing back then before Hollywood, Madonna, Miley Cyrus, the Kardashian and Fify Shades of Grey. All of the risk and what could have happened.

“Nothing happened. We just kissed.”

The truth be told the camp was going for 3 more nights, a long weekend affair and I admittedly thought that things were just beginning.  I didn’t feel any need to rush not that I knew what to rush to. My sole sex education at this time was pictures of naked girls, an STD film from WWII, love songs on the radio, and the Song of Songs in the Bible. That had been her favourite passages and she’d shown me those the day before.  When we were guys and girls doing Bible study together. The girls honed in on Song of Songs. Us guys knew the Old Testament battles and loved Joshua fought the battle of Jericho.  The girls knew Song of Songs.  

“She could have become pregnant.”  

(From kissing? I don’t think so)

I didn’t say that but I frankly wasn’t thinking the whole thing through.  

I was grilled for hours, or so it seemed, tag team, one minister after another.  The girl was kept apart, Shamed. Her parents came to take her away.  My brother shook his head. He was not impressed.  He was into sports and loved the church camp for badminton. I don’t know what it was with my brother but he had this thing for badminton. The Badminton Club was down the street from us and Ron somehow got the badminton bug.  So at the camp he couldn’t understand why I’d be chasing girls at night when there was badminton to be played during the day. He liked girls well enough because they liked to play badminton. Personally I wanted to go skinny dipping with girls and it was clear that this was not going to happen at church camp.

Mom and Dad gave me heck further when I got home.  More grounding. I was still a popular kid and would be elected President of the Baptist Youth in Fort Rouge and then the whole of Winnipeg.  I’d rather have never stopped kissing that first girl in the moonlight on the wooded trail by the beach.

It was 1966.  I was only thinking about girls.  I was also thinking about music. It was all about the music. That was the year of the beach boys Good Vibrations, the Troggs Wild Thing, Beatles Yellow Submarine, Rolling Stones Paint it Black. 

That was the year the Beatles released Help too. Kirk and I made a point of going to the movie.  “The girls will be there,” I told him. He was more into volleyball than girls.  He had sisters. Girls were not exotic.  But he went with me to Help. It was crazy. The girls screamed through the whole movie. I remember Kirk and I feeling very out of place watching this inane movie all while girls screamed and cried and rolled around in the aisles. It was weird. Girls were weird. I did like the Beatles. 

The first episode of Star Trek with William Shatner as Captain Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Spock aired the fall of 1966. Now that was something Kirk and I could get into.  There’d been westerns on tv like ‘the Rifleman’ and WWII war movies like ‘Desert Fox’.  But nothing like Star Trek. I remember being in school looking forward to running home and watching the next episode. We never missed any.  I loved the Uhura played by Nichelle Nichols and the doctor, De Forest Kelly.  Scotty the engineer played by James Dothan was priceless as was Hikanru Sulu played by George Takei.  I’d read all the science fiction in the Fort Garry Library, had branched out to the school and city libraries and now was watching Star Trek every week.  The space race was on and I really hoped to go to Mars one day.  It was all a matter of time. I was going to have my own spaceship one day. 

We were also reading James Bond.  We didn’t get to the movies at first but we read all the books. We’d discuss them at school.

That’s the year I dropped a text book on the bald head of the math teacher. He actually stumbled and almost fell. He crumpled more out of surprise, not dazed but pretty soon hopping mad as he rushed up the stairs to catch who had done it.  The kid beside me just said their book slipped and didn’t say I’d actually knocked it outdo their hands.   I’d gauged trajectories and timing and shoved the book out of their hands at just the right moment.  I was at the top of the class in science but that stunt put me at the top of the class among my friends. We dropped books on three teachers altogether until they placed one at the top and the bottom of the stairs. 

We were full on into pranks grade 8 and 9.  I don’t know why. It was an obsession then. I wasn’t alone either. Kirk was usually right in there with me.  A couple of other guys too and then lots of copy cats.  I liked originality. That’s when I made stink bombs and cleared the whole two floors of Junior high.  I was  the ideas man but I also lead from the front. More often than not the other guys refined the plans and added a nice twist to end.

My favourite school prank was when we were in chemistry and this kid foolishly asked me how the gas fires worked. I’d used gas as a kid with gas camping stoves and barbecues. I was my brothers and Dad’s mechanical helper in the garage forever. I’d even used acetylene torcheswith Dad teaching and supervising.   I knew stuff other kids didn’t like they knew stuff I didn’t.This was a kid who didn’t have much practical knowledge. . I told him to open up the gas line full and stand aside. “It needs to get the air out of the line before you light it.”  He believe me.

The result was holy. When he lit it, it looked just like a military flame thrower? The flame went 4 feet across the room and set the teacher’s desk on fire. The teacher had been writing on the chalk board at the time with his back to us.  He was utterly astonished when he heard the whoosh turned around and saw his desk on fire. He was amazingly quick thinking and quick. He shut the bass off at the wall and immediately  he got out the fire extinguisher.  

I was proud to see that  scorch mark on the chemistry teacher desk was still there years later when I came back for high school reunion.  As men now , several of us boys stood around in awe looking at the evidence of that awesome day.  

The stink bomb evacuation of the school was nearly as good.  Several of us each hid the pens with sulfur in desks It took the teachers wearing masks a while to find them while we stood outside. I loved science.

Meanwhile I was also enjoying English. I just loved poetry.  I loved reading. I loved history. I loved language.  I was writing journals and poetry starting in junior high.  

Volleyball continued to be incredible. We were getting up at 6 am to be at practice an hour before school.  We were winning all our games. Something about the team of us gelled. Kirk and I spiked. Kirk was an awesome spiker. Anderson was the best setter. I happened to learn this great overhand power serve and would rack up points for the team..  It was great to win. I liked the cheer leaders too. Winning and having those girls in these little white dresses hug you. I was feeling breasts then too.  Hugs had become a whole lot better as the months went on.

Gym Club got better too.  Keith was awesome. I can’t say that enough. Knowing him was awesome. We’d be walking in a field and he’d take off doing handsprings, summersaults and back flips and ending with some impossible triple round twisty things.  Kirk and I would do some dozen hand spring in a row and Colin and Ron would do back springs and summersaults. Kirk got good at back hand springs and I got really good at forward walking hand springs but choked at summersaults. We learned them with a spotter holding a big belt around our waist with rope to hold us up and help us over. I could do them but I never got over my fear so they werent the sheer fun that forward walking handsprings were.  I even liked the occasional back hand springs. Cartwheels had been neat but now these handsprings were something else. We’d break into them going down streets or crossing fields. They were something. And if Keith was around he stole the show hands down everyone clapping just to see him. But together we were a force.  Gym Club was awesome.

I was began riding that summer more too.  A horse riding studio was at the outskirts of our end of town. I’d ridden over on my bicycle and shown an interest. I think I paid for my first ride then the couple who had the place told me I could come by any time and exercise their horses. I simply don’t remember paying much again but I was there going for rides all summer most weeks, sometimes two or three times.  This went on for a few years too.  Riding horses with Dad was one of the best times in my life.

He was working in Saskatchewan and Mom sent me off to spend a week with him. He knew all these cowgirls and cowboys and we went riding in the evening just like in westerns. Then he’d take me fishing.  I’d wander around on my own during the day while he was at work, reading, exploring but then those rides and the fishing pickerel on the weekend was so memorable.  It  so special having time alone with Dad. Ron was his favourite mostly because he could assist him working on things. I was the second assistant. Dad was always working on his car or truck or building things around the house. He built the garage and poured cement for the walk and veranda, did the roof and built another room in the basement. That extra room was where Mom kept her canning. It was planned to double  as a bomb shelter. The Cold War Continued in the background.

I continued martial arts practice with Kirk and some advanced stuff with a black belt at the Y. I got really good with jump kicks which would prove especially fearsome.

Ron and I fought as we got too big for the one bed room. I took to sleeping downstairs in a sleeping bag on the cement floor rather than sleeping in the same room as my brother. Dad just up and built the most beautiful little hardwood floored room with lovely walls all in the space of a weekend. I loved my room.  Dad was the best even though the tension between us was increasing at times. Teen angers are testy. I remember taking my parents for granted as a teen. I don’t know why but I was resenting them more and yet they were simply the best.

We’d go to auctions. Dad liked auctions and smorgasboards. At this one auction I saw a Rcoh dual lens SLR. It had a screw out. I was all set to fix it but Dad stopped me. When the auction began Dad pointed out the missing screw. I got my first SLR for $5. Dad loved photography and making films. He’d shoot these super 8 clips then splint a whole bunch together.we’d watch his home movies. Mom liked bringing out the photo albums and going through them, “There’s Edna. There’s your cousin Robert....” at the time we found this boring but after they both had died and my aunts and uncles had died my brother and I felt so bad we hadn’t taken notes. We have all these black and white photos and we don’t know who they are.

As we weren’t ice fishing and I’d begun a darkroom in the basement using a hose from the laundry sink Dad suggested I use the ice fishing shack because we could take it all over black and get it so dark I could develop film there. That way others could use the basement when I was in my darkroom. I’d taken an interest and got the chemicals and developers. Next I began printing. Then Dad went with me to an auction where I bought an enlarger cheap. Suddenly I was the school photographer and loving black and white spending hours in the basement. This got Mr, Laidlaw the chemist going and he put a skookum darkroom in his basement. Three guys came to learn how to set up a darkroom. I helped them develop and print their first films. One became a commercial photographer with his own studios and a lifelong career. Another became and artist with black and white photography featuring big time in his avante garde work. The third became a wilderness travel photographer with works featured in magazines. I loved photography and was glad I could pass on the joy of the dark room watching the images appear out of nothing.

I met Kathy when I was 14 too. She was black haired and utterly beautiful. Naturally she became the reason that poetry existed. The sun rose and the moon set.  I wrote horrid songs too, couldn’t tune my guitar and couldn’t sing with my guitar but never were better love songs sung alone by a boy sitting on a porch. At that age we are in love with love.

Kathy had a pool table in her basement.  Herman and the Hermits and Jerry and the Pacemakers were the groups the girls liked. There was always a half dozen or more of us, a mixed gang in their basement, playing records and dancing. We danced all the time. The Pony. The Jerk. The Swim.  We would dance and we’d play billiards. And we’d try to get alone with the girls to kiss or hug and they’d tease us and slip away. Meanwhile the parents were always appearing like Jack in the Boxes. Coming down the stairs every minute and foiling every attempt at the boys to get closer to the girls.  No unsupervised time back then.

I just remembered that was the year us guys began to move cars around. We’d noticed that some people left their keys in their car so we’d climb in and take the brake off then six of us would push the car down the street.

The Milowski’s Car on South Drive was a favourite. Kirk and I pushed that down the street onto South Drive by ourselves because the driveway sloped. It was a big black Mercedes I believe and the long driveway ran down to the road. Twice we were able to get the brake off and push the car down to the street where we left it.  Then we hid in the bushes and watched as a half dozen cars lined up honking their horn till the father of the twins came out in his slippers and house coat. The girls told us that he came back shaking his head and insisting he’d put the brake on. Twice we did that. It was a hoot.

The best one was time we moved the VW Bug of the college football coach. We’d found his Volkswagen parked askew on the street with the keys in the ignition. Six of us pushed it a block away, one kid in the car steering, 4 of us pushing and on skid sitting of the roof. We pushed it over the curb and right up the lawn blocking the front door of the house next to a friend of ours. Our greatest problem was keeping quiet because we were always laughing so much.These capers were late in the evening coming home from being out with the girls.  

I just realized too that none of this truly hilarious fun occurred with drinking or drugs.  We were all under age and were having the best of times being little miscreants for sure but we really didn’t do any damage. Kirk and I had talked about that when we’d soaped the school windows.  That was a coup, putting all those dirty words on the windows and not getting caught. We both knew that if we got caught we’d be killed by our fathers so we planned . We also didn’t believe in destruction and knew the value of things. There was this other group of rich kids who were doing pranks too but they were always getting caught and always causing damage. One kids dad was a lawyer so he was getting them off and they seemed to think that getting caught was half the fun.  Not Kirk and I.

So that night the six of us parked this Volkswagen Beetle on the front lawn of another guy. After the weekend  our friend who hadn’t been in on the caper told us the outcome of the story. His neighbour was furious when he saw the Volkswagen on his lawn. He knew it was the football coach’s. He called him to get his car. The football coach was truly remorseful. He’d been so drunk on the Friday night when he drove home he couldn’t be sure he hadn’t parked it there. This whole shouting match ensued and the poor younger hung over coach backed his VW off the lawn and over the curb to head on home up the street.  Our friend reported the story in detail to endless laughter.

The best caper which probably was on the edge of bad was the bonfire in the middle of the street.  Kirk and I and a few other guys had found gallons of gasoline in a garage when the people were away on holidays. We’d been snooping for it because everyone had gas in their garages for lawnmowers. We’d had thought the idea to make a huge pile of dead leaves in the centre of the road bonfire using the gas to set it on fire.  We were all outdoors guys and knew about gas and fire. We had a good perimeter so the fire wouldn’t spread. Weused just enough gas. We knew it would be a great burst of flame and then burn out.  It was awesome.

Naturally I poured the gas and set the fire.

A dozen of us kids stood watching with sheer wonder. Kids love fire.  Fire is fantastic.  The fire station was 2 blocks away. It turned out that a car had come round the corner and seen the fire and smoke and raced to the fire station reporting the whole street and neighbourhood was on fire. Two fire trucks and three police cars responded. This was by all means a record. Even better Kirk and I stood by watching and talking to the police and telling them we didn’t know which kids had done it. “Older kids.”  

The funniest thing was one of the always guilty younger kids had climbed into a tree figuring he was sure to be blamed even though he’d just watched. Thinking he’d done it because of his guilty behavior it took the police a lot of time and coaxing to get him out of the tree.  Meanwhile Kirk and I and the others continued to talk to the firemen. That’s when I saw a policeman sniffing a kids hands. As I was the only one who had handled the gas I slipped away after motioning to Kirk they were sniffing hands. He stayed and began distracting the police by discussing the combustion quotient of leaves and asking the firemen about what type of gas would cause this flame. The flame was out. There was  just a pile of ash when the fire trucks arrived. I was gone around the corner then headed through back yards vaulting 6 foot fences at a bound.  Dakhour wasn’t around then. We just loved outrunning young police.  Being gymnasts and athletes we got away every time except for the one time I tried a hoppy on the back of the cop car and got my butt kicked.

This was the ‘very best’ ‘prank’. While the adults were very serious and there was all kinds of lectures on fires and the danger of fires and pictures of Rome burning and London burning, we never got caught. Kirk and I became legends in the teen underworld though. .  “Two fire trucks and three police cars” was the record. No one beat that.The owner of the garage got in to trouble for poor storage of gas or some such thing but everyone had gas  in their garages for their lawn mowers. The story made the Fort Garry press. I’d later be a part time photographer for the paper my mother wrote a column for. I took pictures of a real fire seeing how fast it spread. No surprise adults take fire so seriously. Years later I’d be a volunteer firefighter in the countryside fires. Scared stuff but at 14 years old we were teen underworld hero’s “2 fire trucks and 3 police cars” and no one hurt. 

That was the year I began to climb up on roofs and run across them. The jumps from garage to roof to roof were awesome but we were throwing eggs at police cars just to get chases and climbing over a roof was a genius way to evade them. We’d get over the roof and run across south drive , then lose them in the bushes along the river.  Obviously the police had a different perspective on our childhood entertainment. It was fun for us. They were getting paid and these were young guys. 

Now a whole case can be made for the police chasing kids and people with real emergencies dying but it was’t like that at all back then. It was Barney Miller.  A police emergency really was a cat caught in a tree. Police have told me since we were ‘entertainment’.  They even waited to chase us kids the night of the swimming pools and loved catching the slower ones. They knew about us kids in the Gym Club too. They even  bets on who could catchthe “Vaulter “but no one did. That’s because I switched tactics and began climbing houses and running over roofs. 

My Dad had taken to selling roofing material on the side and giving Ron and me jobs putting it on. I knew roves.Heights didn’t bother me. Jumping off roofs and rolling on grass was easy.

One of the kids went onto win the nationals sprinting. I think it had a lot to do with his being a lousy vaulter and climber so he had to depend on strait out speed to evade cops on foot and in police cars. It got so we didn’t even have to throw eggs but just walked by them calling them ‘fat,old and slow’.

The Fort Garry Police were community police. We grew up talking to them. One of the sons was a friend. Naturally he’d didn’t get involved but he didn’t squeal either. The police would joke with us too.  Like a police car pulling up beside Kirk and I and the young cop smiling saying ,”not out starting fires today eh.”  

“We didn’t start any fires.”  We shrugged. But we were scared they’d catch us.  It was that kind of cat and mouse stuff.  No one got hurt. Everyone was community. It changed years later. It  was all before drugs and alcohol we all went to church. In Fort Gary there was the big Catholic Church, big Anglican Church and big Unite Church all within blocks of each other nearby Viscount Alexander. Everyone knew my Mom and everyone knew Kirk’s Dad.  

The only damage I remember was too Kathy’s table. Her parents weren’t home and her best friend, her boyfriend  and Me had come over  probably against her parents wishes. We were playing music loud with the parents upstairs stereo.  We were dancing and somehow we got dancing together ,all of us , on this huge marble table the parents had in the living room. The ‘crack’ was volumous.  OMG!  Well we were all terrified the parents would find out but Kathy said she’d just not mention it.

At school the next day we learned that the parents found the crack but that the Dad figured it was a geological atmospheric phenomena. . The men got together and discussed climate and expansion and contraction of rock and it was the discussion of the evening. Kathy said she’d not told them the reason was their teen daughter dancing on the table because they liked their own explanations better. The crack apparently was glued and a topic of conversation for the father who would wax poetic about marble and atmospheric effects, thereafter.

13 years old: hormones, masturbation, ice floes and church camp

13 years old went on forever. We still lived in Fort Gary.  I still went to Viscount Alexander School.  We were no longer in Viscount Alexander Elementary School but now in the Viscount Alexander Junior High School. The former was a bungalow building whereas the latter was two stories.

As a family we continued to go to Trinity Baptist Church in Fort Rouge. I was a member of the church youth group.  I rode my bicycle, the big one, no gears that I remember.  Gears came much later.  Things were basic when I was growing up. Legs were gears. 

Sonny the dog still lived.  Dad and Mom still slipped him treats under the table but still said ‘don’t feed the dog at the table’.

In the summer I swam at the Fort Garry Pool where I took Red Cross life guarding courses. I remember mixed feelings about doing mouth to mouth even if my partner was a pretty girl in a red one piece. I continued in the YMCA Gymnastics Team and Leader’s Corp in the winter.  I wrote poetry.  I played a little guitar.  I didn’t keep it tuned.  I was off key so why should the guitar be different.  We played volleyball on the school team.  

Kirk masturbated first. He told Garth and I about it. He’d asked us about nocturnal emissions and we’d said no and stared st him weird. Then a few weeks later he said he’d figured out how to do it. Really. Amazing. After that  I tried. Nothing happened.  Months would go by ,probably just weeks, which didn’t make sense because Kirk was younger. But his black hair that started in his legs travelled up his body.  Garth and I were jealous. Garth reported next that he’d had one it. Kirk had his brother’s Playboy  stash while Garth and I only had the Sears Catalogue. Eventually all three of us had masturbated. 

So one day the three of us in different rooms in Garth’s house when his parents were out,  had a ‘beat off’ competition.  Each took a Playboy Kirk had stolen (‘borrowed’) from his brother’s under the bed hiding place.I don’t know who won. It was all an honor system. It just seemed before  we started one shouted  ‘Finished!”’ . We’re kids.. This is micro and nano second era. Premature ejaculation might not be in our vocabulary but it was de rigour.

Whoever finished first left the remaining two of us in fits of laughter. That’s how that competition ended. One of us won hands down. Kirk returned the magazines to his brothers hiding place.  We never had a beat off again. Probably because we figured no one could beat the winner. The irony is that from that occasion forward the objective became to slow down.  We certainly didn’t discuss this with adults or anyone else. We only talked about it at first.  That stopped when we actually began to think about girls as girls. Then  extreme privacy became the code. As a Christian I think I had more concerns than others.  But I was also the first one with a girlfriend which didn’t help that matter at all. This was before the age of sexual promiscuity and kissing was all junior highs did unless you actually ‘copped a feel’.  I had every intention of marrying my first girlfriend too. The girls were very proper (until high school).  But kissing and petting and dancing were all happening in junior high school.  

At my age today I say that my ‘automatic’ is broken and I’m reduced to a ‘pull start’.  When we were 13 spontaneous erections were  an issue.  Farts and erections. Both very embarrassing.  The complicating factor was tight jeans.  We’d have to stand up but could be literally  trapped in our seats because of the jeans and the erections wouldn’t let us stand up.  The horror of horrors would have been to get an erection at the Y. The pool was probably kept cold for a reason.  The joke was, we could get an erection doing math. I never knew when it would come on or what would trigger it. Suddenly I had this  this independent appendage literally with a mind of it’s own.  I wasn’t the only boy squirming around in chemistry class trying to get ‘adjusted’ and hoping things would go away.  There’s a lot of truth to the notion that men have two heads and only one blood supply. But when you’re 13 and in class it’s just embarrassing. Probably blushing helped to alter the blood flow.   

Meanwhile the girls then were periodically running out of class leaving blood on the seats with teachers trying to clean up discretely with Kleenex. Adolescence is a steep learning clothes. And it’s all done with sits and voice changes.

I remember when there were a few of us guys out one night and we ran into Arlene and her girlfriends. A guy asked Arlene jokingly , ‘would you have sex with me.”  Quick as a whip and famous for her comebacks she answered, “I’ll only have sex with a guy who brings me a cup of sperm.  I want to have babies so I need to know he can produce.”

Well, we were shot down.  Really.   A whole cup. It was like she said she would do it but how as anyone going to come up with a cup of sperm. For guys it became a logistics problem. Everyone wanted to it with Arlene. She was gorgeous. We were all afraid of her Dad though. He seemed like a really scarey guy with a beautiful daughter. He scowled at us boys whenever we came by.

So There’s a group of us guys asking each other if anybody thought they could produce a ‘cup’.  No one could. Then we’re discussing if we could store it in the refidgerator without of mothers finding it. We must have struggled with that problem for weeks to something else took over our brains. We all felt we just weren’t up to Arlene’s standards.  It was years later I thought about this again when I read the words of the song Scarborough Fair. Girls have been teasing guys in similiar ways for hundreds of years. Arlene’s challenge was just a modern version.  

“Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme

Remember me to one who lives there

He once was a true love of mine.

Tell him to make me a Cambric shirt 

Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme

Without no seam nor fine needle work

Then he’ll be a true love of mine.

Tell him to bring me a cup of sperm

The girls were wearing bras in gr 7 whether they needed to or not. Gr 7 was simply all about hormones.  Voice changes, acne, growing up, new clothing, gossip.  Everything was different.  

I was elected class president and began school politics.  I was on the student council in Viscount Alexander and later in high school..  Wes Hazlitt and I became friends as a result of this overlap in interests. He’d go on to be school president, a truly great guy.  I’d end up President of the Amalgamated Baptist Youth Groups of Winnipeg but that would come later. It just began in Viscount Alexander with going for meetings at lunch with one of teachers and  sometimes the principal. We discussed the most mundane matters.  It was an exercise and only in later years would it hold more meaning and pay off. Learning Robert’s Rules of Order and how to conduct meetings became a plus. Being on the executive in high school was something else. Later I’d even be the Winnipeg Representative to Youth Parliament in Ottawa. It all began in Viscount Alexander with Wes Hazlitt. I wanted to have a sock hop where my friend Dan Donahue who had a band could play for the school. We eventually got the sock hop and Dan and his band played but that was a couple of years later. 

I miss the little girl with pig tails who cleaned the hamster cage. She was really pretty but we all were surprised at how she’d muck about in hamster shit and seem not to be bothered by all that. The pretty and popular girls shunned her. As guys we like to muck about with shit but she was a girl ahead of her time with a passion for biology. Sitting behind her in class one day I made like I was putting one of her pig tails in my ink well. I didn’t have ink in the ink well. She just thought I did. She just jumped up, turned around and punched me. Not slapped but punched.  Amazing girl. Naturally she got detention.  I acted innoscent but I never forgot her. She wanted me to dance with her one time and I didn’t get the hint so she stomped on my toe once and walked off.  I’ve often thought of her as the one that got away and wondered what became of her. She was brilliant and totally different.

Meanwhile Laurel a taller girl was the first to actually develop breasts. The girls were wearing bras I later learned were called trainers and thought they helped “boobs” grow. But you could see that Laurel had shape because she wore these white blouses when she stood in front of the windows with light shining through she was mesmerizing. I just stared and thought of heaven. Other guys handle hormones differently. I remover a couple of guys couldn’t deal with the tension so showed their affection by snapping her bra strap. She slapped a couple of guys silly and that stopped. This was before MRI’s so the guys weren’t taken to emergency but went straight to the principals office where he strapped them even sillier before sending them home to their parents. This was still the age of chivalry and girls were expected to be treated like ladies. 

Meanwhile I fell in love with Kathy but I don’t think she became my girl friend till gr. 8.  

The Baptist Church camp came before Kathy.  Lots happening at age 13.  Music suddenly became very important along with dancing. Everything continued but somehow it was all no longer in black and white but in technicolor passion. I was having intense moods. I remember I was totally torn up about some Mrs Browns daughter fromEngland and went about singing all the words of the song. Before I had a girlfriend I’d broken up wit everyone on the radio.  I was reading books from the school library, every poetry book we had, studying the Bible and philosophy and still reading science fiction.

Keith Carter had memorized all the Bill Cosby ‘s Baby Coach Wheels and Monsters under the bed.  He’d tell the story and we’d laugh till we cried.  “Hey , come see my kid, he set the house on fire because he thought there were snakes under his bed.”  

Dead baby jokes were all the rage too.  Fart jokes. “ Beans ,beans , the musical fruit , the more you eat the more you toot!”  At campfire we’d tell gruesome horror stories.  

Snuggies were in then too. . Guys running around trying to lift each other up by the ‘gotch’ (underwear). That stopped when one of the slower guys did it to a girl and came up with a hand half her nylon panties. Somebody should have explained to him that you had to stick to Stanfields. Canadian made Stanfields were tested for standing up to snuggies. They had some lab where they did tensile tests. Stanfields had to withstand snuggies and fats. Panties were never in the league of Stanfields. 

I was shooting at the gun range getting marksman awards then too. Hunting and fishing with Dad and Ron and Mom continued.  I began shooting grouse with my 22 rifle when I was 13.  I still wasn’t big enough to handle the 12 gauge. My father and brother let me take a shot with big Remington pump action. The recoil put me 10 feet back on my ass in the wet marsh. We all laughed. Nothing like a practical experiment to show I wasn’t ready for a shot gun. My brother had his own by then.   The dog sure loved duck hunting though. My dad and brother shot  atthe ducks. Seeing one fall out of the sky was rare but extraordinary.  Sonny the springer spaniel hunting dog just flew through the air into the freezing water right to where they fell catching them in his mouth and retrieving  them .After the early morning hunt we go looking for prairie chickens in the grain fields.  That’s when I’d get to use the 22. Mostly we shot prairie chicken, in the woods we might shoot a grouse. Sometimes we’d shoot a rabbit.  Dad had his old truck and we’d drive across the fields to park. Then we’d hike for hours along the edge of the field sometimes even getting some ducks that were eating the grain. Then we’d sit down and eat the sandwiches Mom had packed for us and drink the sweetened tea she’d made for the thermos. These were greatest fall days.

The fall suppers were incredible too. Great harvest feasts we’d go to. They were held in the town’s around the cities, the farmers and their wives would make these unbelievable smorgasboard dinners, the turkey and the mashed potatoes with gray were the best. Then there’d be Apple and pumpkin pie and vanilla ice cream. We’d seconds too. Great harvest moons would be shining outside abode in the star studded sky. The city lights obscured the stars but once you were on the outskirts the whole Milky Way was ablaze in the sky. The moon was so bright and big you felt you could touch it. The sound of Canada geese flying south could sometimes be heard with hawks hooting as they hunted field mice in the night. A soft which was the sound of a bat flying by close.

Spring break up was the exact opposite. We’d be worrying about flooding and even get school days off to join in the sand bagging the red river.  Kirk and I would raft about on ice flows in the golf course. We almost got carried out into the Red River by the current. That was the same day we saved a couple of other guys from passing out of the park eddies to the fast flowing river.

That night there was a picture of a couple of guys our age on the cover of the Free Press. I remember Mom and Dad asking me if Kirk and I ever got out on the ice floes. They asked about the river ice floes so I said in all honesty, “No, never”. We just rode the ice floes in the golf course. It flooded each year to the 8 foot dike, 

In the  winter the snow would be so deep we couldn’t get the door open. I’d have to climb out the window with a shovel to dig us out. I’d go over to the neighbours too. The 1966 Winnipeg blizzard was famous showing all the houses with snow up to the roof but each year we’d get so much snow you couldn’t open the doors without shovelling. That year was the worst because the snow was over the doors and the windows. Dad fished me the smallest through the kitchen window some 12 or more feet above the ground. I just spent the day shovelling neighbours doors free. I must have freed dozens of people. The old people were the most thankful. I’d come back the next few days and shovel out paths. As kids we had tunnels you could stand up in all through the backyard. People couldn’t get their cars out for days and some weeks. We pulled a toboggan up to Pembina with Mom so she could shop for groceries, Pembina a mainstreet was plowed and businesses along Pembina opened one after another. It was a while before the side streets could be plowed and cars dug out. Days or maybe a week later everything was back to normal. Winnipegers were the most resilient people one could imagine. Everyone pitched in too.

Being 13 was a busy time. I had a very full life when I think back to it.  We were just so active. Now I hear that kids are looking at their screens. I remember mom only allowed 1-2 hours tv time a day.  It was the first thing to go too if we got into trouble.  I didn’t mind so much because I was so into reading.

Younger I’d entertain myself with cards, four boxes with different colours would become my armies and I’d have these kings and queens and princes and have the cards having major wars I imagined in three d all over the room. Sofas were hills. The carpet was the valley . When people talked of past lives I thought I was probably some kind of general because as a kid I was so involved in strategy. I laid out these great wars with hundreds of cards. Later in life when I looked at some of the wars of history I had the feeling of déjà vu. It was like I was going through all these wars as a kid, reviewing them. Napoleon and Wellington.  

Life as a child and especially as a teen was sacred. Astro projection and synchronicity were givens. Kirk and I were always talking God and physics.  We just believed. Kirk wasn’t limited by Christianity. He was just spiritual and had these experiences like I did but didn’t have to consider them in the light of Christian teachings. My brother would join the Billy Graham movement and it would be years before I found myself around Christians who lived in the spirit.  At church there was just a lot of preaching. Hell and brimstone ruled back then. Dad would fall asleep and mom would elbow him awake. 

I thought about Jesus and crucifixion a lot.  

I didn’t think I was going to hell.  There’s a lot of misunderstanding about Christianity and a lot of wholly unwarranted criticism. I just kept asking myself if I was doing what I was supposed to do. Was I fulfilling God’s desire for me. Years later I’d come across the Christian reader, “My Utmost for his Highest.” Christianity was just all about doing your best.

I’d have these dreams of shining people like angels. I’d see a mother and father godlike creatures who’d reassure me it was going to be alright.

I’d had this recurring dream all my life of myself in a pod and somehow getting knocked off course and ending up in the wrong planet and the wrong life.  Stop the planet I want to get off meant something more to me when I heard it.

Gr. 7 we weren’t into pranks as much as we’d be in gr. 8 and 9. But we were becoming mischievous. I think it was when I was 13 that I set a bag of dog poop on fire in front of my neighbours house on Halloween. I watched him go ballistic after stamping the fire out with his slippers getting wet with poop. He saw us hiding in the ditch.. we immediately let out down the road while he fell stumbling behind us in his housecoat in the snow. We only did that once but it worked perfectly.  It definitely encouraged us.  Success does that.  

12 years old - the nail, syphilis and BDI

I was with my brother and his friend Tommy, Kirk’s older brother.  I was pestering the older boys in some way, beside the house in the garden.

Ron had pulled out a short two by four piece of wood out of the dirt and Tommy had taken it.

“This would make a good club,” he said to Ron. 

“Yea, it would, “ Ron said.

“Can I try it out on your brother?” Tommy asked.

“Sure, “ Ron said. 

Tommy whacked me with the piece of wood right in the head. It had a nail sticking out of it.  It hurt like hell. I bled.  The blood was the limit. Tommy laughed.  I believe my brother was simply surprised at the force  Tommy had used. I think he saw the blood first. I screamed. I screamed bloody loud.  I hurt. Blood was blood.

My dad came to the screen door and shouted. “Shut up Billy.  Stop all that racket.” He went back in the house.  I don’t know what Mom was doing at this time.

I ran into my dad and screamed, “Tommy hit me with a nail!” 

My Dad who was now back on his recliner  reading the Winnipeg Free Press, turned and said, “I don’t care what Tommy did. You can’t be screaming like murder in the neighbourhood.”  With that he went back to his newspaper, ignoring me, a trickle of blood dripping down my face.

I walked away, furious and mortified. I went down into my father’s workshop with a piece of paper and a pencil and I wrote furiously.

“Tommy hit me.  Ronny let him.  You blamed me. You are wrong.”

My mom found me there.  I remember her wiping the blood off my face and head with a wet face cloth she got from somewhere. Mom’s always were producing things like that by magic. 

“Let me have that, “ she said. I think she was amused by my writing that out. 

I heard my parents upstairs. 

My mother had given  my legal brief to my father. It hadn’t gone over well. I don’t know what she was thinking. I’m suspicious today that there was a back story that I was somehow a pawn in what is often seen as the passive aggressive drama.  We were all watching Perry Mason in those years. I’d study Freud and Jung many years later.  To Dad it was  more like the Magna Carta. Or there was another conversation going going. Either parent can use a child to hide behind or to make a point. Mom really was the go  between us kids and the Old Man. She was maintained the peace. She was loved each of us. Even the dog. At this time the dog had made himself very scarce.

I next heard Dad shout.

“I don’t care what happened, I’m not going to have my authority questioned in my own house. I’m leaving.”

Dad just packed a suitcase then and left.  

Now Ron and Mom were angry, very angry at me. Tommy had gone home.  

Mom was crying..

“You shouldn’t have screamed so loud, Billy. See how you’ve upset your father. He’s left us.”

“Tommy didn’t hit you that hard.”

“I was bleeding.” I said.

“We didn’t know there was a nail in the board. It was just a scratch anyway. You’re such a cry baby.” My brother added.

“Stop it you two. Billy go to your room. I don’t want to see your face again this day. You’ve upset your father and now he’s left us. We’re not going to have anything to eat. We’re going to lose the house and end up on the street and it’s all your fault.’  She was sitting there on the sofa , her face in her hands.  Ron sat down beside her.

“Yea, Billy, you upset Dad. You shouldn’t have upset Dad. Now Mom and Dad are upset and it’s all your fault.” He said

Mom just waved me away.

My brother was as I remember always quick to ascribe blame.  Meanwhile I was a jailhouse lawyer myself. What I couldn’t understand was how  I was the guy with the headache, I’d been stabbed with a nail, and somehow I was the bad guy.  

I’d went to my room.

This became the a cornerstone of my twisted inner life.  I’ve played this day over a thousand times, a thousand ways, over the years.  In my mind and my heart it sits there beside  the ships of the USSR and the ships of America meeting on the high seas in the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Cuba let Russia install nuclear missiles secretly on it’s island, breaking the Monroe Doctrine, causing the  having the greatest show down of my life.

Looking back I know that Dad leaving was to do with something going on between him and mom.  This was the era of feminism, Hanoi Jane, and women burning their bras, Overnight everyone was having sex with everyone.  The birth control pill was discovered in 1952. It freed women to be as promiscuous as men.  They were no longer as likely to get caught with telltale pregnancies. The profitable abortion industry  was just ramping up.

In my home, Mom had used my legal dossier (Perry Mason) to challenge my Dad.  Dad was on his day off after a week of work ruling men and unions and trying to get a job done for his bosses way off in Eastern Canada. They sent out blue prints he said were conceived in LALA land and had no bearing on the reality of what he was faced with trying to put modern conveyor systems into a fixed building space with existing materials and tools.  Dad didn’t think highly of architects.  

Now the house was empty.  Mom was crying. My brother was scowling at me. I was stupefied.  

Dad returned that night.  

He stomped back into his house with his suitcase.  “I decided I’m not going to pay for a motel room when I’m already paying for my own bed here.”

That was Dad, the Scots Analyst.  The judge had spoken.

No one else did for weeks.  My mother was quiet as a mouse. My brother and I whispered.  Dad came and went to work.  The meals were served. Not a bird sang in the valley. No blossoms blossomed. The insects died.  My brother did stop being friends with Tommy.  

Dad worked out of town a lot.  Despite huge main projects in the city he’d be gone for a week or two in the north doing a smaller project in a store up there.  

Tommy had this mean streak He’d always insist he didn’t know there was a nail. It might have been true.  Whatever it was about Tommy it helped make him his later success.  He’d go on to be this great leader. I never turned my back on him after that.  This ‘unpredictableness’ became  linked in my mind from that time forward with power. Arbitrariness was linked to respect. There was a critical glance between predictability and unpredictability that a person needed. 

 My brother and Tommy were both respected but for different reasons.  The fact is, Tommy was a great guy, smart, kind, loving, caring but there was that one time. He hit me in the head with a piece of board iwith a nail in it.  He seemed not to my mind it.  Kirk didn’t defend Tommy too much. Indeed Kirk in his typical diplomatic way wouldn’t talk about this at all. I complained. I whined. I complan and whine really well. Kirk didn’t say anything. Kirk doesn’t saying anything really well.

One day weeks later Mom and Dad were hugging in the hallway.  My brother visibly relaxed.  Laughter returned to the valley.  Dad was normally lots of fun.  Mom was the one who’d be serious and slap us kids if we ‘talked back’.  She had the Irish temper.  Dad was the jolly one.  He was also the last resort.  I was never afraid of my Mom but I was afraid of my father.  

“It was all your fault. You made Dad leave home.” My brother would remind me.  

My mother would say it too. “Billy, you can’t upset your father. You have to stop that.”

That’s the way things were after that. I remember being the ‘baby’ in the family then I was the ‘black sheep’ .I’d also learn the term ‘scape goat’. Years later in family dynamics I’d recognize the term ‘identified patient’ in systems theory. To this day I don’t know what was going on in the back stories, in the back scenes, behind the curtain, in the bedroom, in the community, in the cosmos. What mattered was Dad and Mom got back together. Ron and the dog were inside an inner circle.  I was the outside. They were the family. I was the one who’d almost torn the temple down. 

I don’t think others saw it my way.

That was the beginning of adolescence.  Testosterone and it’s distinctive stink. Hormones  could probably explain everything. Ron and Tommy were already adolescent while Kirk and I were just seeing hair appear in funny places.

Kirk would seem to overnight have the hairiest legs. He was black haired so in summer it was really noticeable. I had armpit hair.  Both of us complained about not having chest hair. Chest hair was cool. Leg hair, not so and, armpit hair not cool at all.

Girls began to look different by the end of Gr. 6.  That summer they started wearing bikinis.  We noticed.  Classmates acting weird.  The girls began whispering and giggling a lot.  

Two girls fighting each other in front of the school Ripping dresses off. Scratching. Everyone else in a circle until a teacher came and stopped it before one or the other caused serious damage. Hair pulling and eye gouging.  Not nice.  

My voice was a problem.  I remember it began to be untrustworthy. I knew shame. I didn’t have to wear a fig leaf but I would suddenly squeak instead of talking normally. It was wholly disconcerting. Everything was sstrange. Kirk and my other friends weren’t doing any better.  The girls seemed happy about this. 

The school had a class where they showed us boys WWII STD films of endstage gonorrhea and syphilis cases.  All us boys came out of that session shell shock. If transsexualism had been prominent in those days we’d have enlisted for immediate sex changes. It would be decades before I found those pictures in old infectious disease books. One picture showed a black emancipated guy wheeling his huge ball sack around with a wheelbarrow.The black and white film had been developed in the 30’s or 40’s  to scare the troops going into Europe and Asia.

We were 12 year old boys. All of us were virgins.  Kirk had hair on his legs. I had hair on my armpits. None of us had hair on our face or genitals.  We knew because we still swam naked at the Y and changed together in the locker room. The first boy to have hair on his balls was teased relentlessly.  That was Ron Brawn. He’d have hair on his chest too. We’d tease him. He didn’t care. Nobody messed with Ron.  He was like a combination of Schwartzenager and Chuck Norris.

Meanwhile we were scared senseless about the danger of having a penis. It was somehow associated with girls.  There were no copulating scenes to make it more explicable. Just these clinical diagrams that were like a kind of comic strip. We knew about sex as intercourse but not really.  It was a foreign concept.  We’d even found  black and white ‘True Detective’ magazines and hid them in our fort by the river as boys. We looked at them only because they were adult and taboo. They showed pictures of old guys and old girls in their 20’s ,with the girls having shocked expressions on their faces. All in black and white.  Kirk’s brother Tommy had Playboys and Kirk would steal these coloured magazines. and He’d show Garth and I pictures of these older women with hair and big breasts. 

None of these pictures looked anything like our Mom’s or Kirk’s sisters or any of the girls in our school.

The lesson on STD’s was similiarly about old people. 

Meanwhile the girls would come out of their “special” class smiling and floating down the hall. They had pictures of flowers and pink birds. When we asked what their class was about. They said it was  about menstrual cycles and babies. We didn’t tell them we’d seen pictures of guys with their noses eaten away by syphillis or guy’s pushes their ballsacks about with wheelbarrows. 

All the girls were looking forward to maturing while the guys were looking for rusty knives to cut off our balls before syphillis invaded their faces and ate away our noses. No guy touched a toilet seat for decades after seeing that film.

As boys we didn’t look forward to getting any older.  Boyhood with friends was an idyllic time. We had the best times on hikes, Garth, Kirk and I , down by the River River. Very Mark Twain and Hucklebury Fin. We’d catch frogs to give to girls. We had lucky rabbit foots. We’d skip stones. We’d throw sticks for the dog. He’d fetch them then shake all the dirty water on us.  We’d swing on branches and climb trees. It’s was a really good life. All that other stuff with adults and girls wasn’t so good.  We had our bicycles and we’d ride everywhere. Wildwood park was a great place to ride around. We loved riding along South Drive too. Sometimes we’d ride all the way out to the University. Great wide paved roads with long stretches without traffic.  We’d ride and ride.

The best was when we went in the other direction to BDI. Bridge Drive In. There was a Bridge there which I think is probably gone now. Only foot traffic was allowed on it then because it was already  so old. But the ice cream and milkshake stand was the best in the world. Never knew one ever that was as good. And we’d have money as boys from our mom and we’d get triple layer ice cream cones, chocolate, vanilla and licorice and we’d just pig out on the river bank sitting with our bicycles eating ice cream. One time we ate so much ice cream we puked. And laughed. We laughed and laughed and laughed as kids.  

If I’d known what adulthood would bring I’d have laughed more. Adulthood according to too many adults was deadly serious business. There’d be long stretches without laughter in adulthood.  Like laughter was taboo.  Giants would walk through the world shouting ‘fee fie fo fun, I smell the blood of a child.”

As kids we were beginning to move out of the world of our parents into the world where we had to make it on our own. We’d never forget BDi. It’s was a taste of heaven on earth.  

9-11 years old My Teddy Bear in Satin Pyjamas

I don’t remember the year these events occurred.  I just have thought about them alot over the years.  They probably followed my work. All day long I ask patients questions and naturally ask myself the same questions. Having worked with transexuals for many years one of the issues that arises is whether they had any childhood experiences with cross dressing or playing with toys that were deemed cross gender, eg boys playing with dolls.

The interesting thing is that normal development is associated with varying degrees of confusion so it’s not really an ‘indication’ for a sex change.  The homo phobias and trans phobias of parents aren’t at issue. 90% of children revert to their biological determined gender before adulthood. There’s just some tourist activity in young children.  The politics have however entered here with a tremendous ‘recruitment’ push to have children ‘join’ the ranks of the various minorities.  As adults I truly support this but as for children I consider this trend 1984. It’s fraught with all manner of future pain and cost.  The scientific data simply says it’s high risk and not to be entered lightly yet there are idealogues among doctor, psychologists, and psychiatrists who believe in that perfidious notion of ‘constructionism’.  Intellectually the ideas of memes is good but to jump to the idea that a meme is a gene is arty at best.  

The memory that came to mind for me was my teddy bear. I don’t know where or when I got it. A cute little guy.  What my mom did though was to make the teddy bear pyjamas.  I always thought my mom would have liked a girl.  She physically couldn’t have children after my brother and I were born so that wasn’t an option. Things would have been very different in my life if I’d had a sister.  I feel I put girls on a pedestal and associated them with my really very wonderful mother, whereas my friends who had sisters knew them for less than perfect beings. Despite divorces today I tend to put women on a pedestal at times seeing them as having the capacity for the ‘virgin mother’.  God approached Mary first not Joseph.  It’s also a latin thing. Mi madre.  The perfect woman.  This for men translates into the ‘Madonna-Whore” and the incapacity of man to consider his mother romping in the bed and hence the Oedipal Condition not uncommon in men whereas the equivalent is rare in women. Women have no problem thinking of their mother and father rutting in general.  Women especially after they become mothers’ themselves are much more ‘down to earth’ compared to men.  They are into their bodies more even than men in this way.

Now when I was somewhere 7 to 9 there was a little girl a few blocks away. We’d play together in her basement with her dolls. We liked each other in school and the mothers thought some play time together would be good. So for a few visits I was quite happy to be at her house playing with her Ken and Barbie dolls. I brought my teddy bear and I think Mom even made another outfit.  Well, this caused some concern with the fathers. I remember Dad telling Mom that I wasn’t a girl and that he didn’t think it was good that she was having me play with dolls.  “But it’s just a teddy bear.” I remember my mom answering.  

Anyway that was the end of my playing with my teddy bear and my friends Ken and Barbie dolls.  As boys we’d play in girls games but frankly they weren’t nearly as much fun as what we as boys did. I even ended up eating mud pies when the girls on my street made them in their make believe ovens and gave these to me.  As boys and girls we lived in parallel worlds.  Even Kirk who had older sisters had no desire to hang out with them except when they were putting on plays in the summer and coopted us.

Somewhere in the storage locker I have my teddy bear, I believe. He may well have been chewed up by one of the dogs. I dress the dogs up in sweaters and coats so perhaps that came as a result of my exposure to girls and ‘dress up’ games.  I always liked new boys clothes as a kid.  I put that down to wearing mostly second hand, hand me down clothing from my brother. But I did like ‘natty’ clothes and I liked having my picture taken, not being shy, and liking positive attention. Mom dressed us up for church or at least encouraged us to look our best and I definitely liked being told by the older ladies. “Aren’t you looking nice today Billy’.  So it was no surprise later when disco struck I was into that Staying Alive attire.  But again I put that down to the years of acting and the enjoyment of character and costume.  

The teddy bear, however, in his satin pyjamas, looking a little like a furry Hugh Hefner, still holds a special place in the memory.

12 years old: Bumper shines, IquanaBoy Scouts, YMCA

It seems my life began to be busier with Gr. 6.  The sleepy quality of Gr. 5 with it’s routine and study begin to change as we boys become more rambunctious.  When I think of 12 years old I think of hoppies and soaping the school windows.

Hoppies or “bumper shines”were ‘hopping on the backs of cars’. This was pre Uber.  As kids in Fort Garry we’d duck walk in the snow ,low down so the driver couldn’t see us, to a car stopped for a stop sign or light then grab onto the fender.  Sometimes when we were really daring we grabbed onto the rear door handle as we were walking past the stopped car. The driver would accelerate and we’d have a free ride skiing on the soles of our snow boots behind the moving vehicle.  This was a primary winter activity from Gr 6 to Gr. 10.  Frankly I don’t know why I stopped it. It really was fun especially with friends cheering or hopping on beside you.

In the burbs the car speed would be 30 or 40 km but when we hopped on the backs of buses on Pembina the bus would go at 60 km / hour. That was a thrill. The down side was when our boots hit gravel or a stretch of  the road was salted to cut down on the ice.  At that point my feet would simply stop moving while I’d begin to be dragged on my belly.  A lot of knees of jeans were torn that way especially on Pembina Highway.  I lied to my mom and said I fell down the stairs.  Several times.

One time I caught on the back of an unmarked police car. The young policeman  jumped out. The chase ensued. Only this young policeman was fast.  I was going over a fence when his boot connected with my butt.  I flew and landed head down into a snow drift. My friends had to help pull me out because I was trapped like a cork in a bottle.  

Mr. Jerry Fischer was the Gr. 6 teacher. He was for many of us the ‘To Sir With Love’ teacher character. He was a character. I remember waking him one fall on the way into school one morning.  He slept in or was passed out in his English sports car parked in front of the school unshaved and shirt tails out.  He also had a babe of a girlfriend. It was the beginning of mini skirt era.  As boys we were just beginning to notice such things.  He certainly was Kirk and my hero.  He brought plants and cages of various animals and fish into the classrooms.  It soon looked more like a jungle.  He was so enthusiastic about teaching. We, as kids, just got caught up in his passion for science mostly.  Biology became fascinating.  

I took the iguana home. On weekends someone took the iquana home.  It was sunny I was letting the iquana out of the cage on the grass. I had little cut bits of apple I was feeding this miniature green monster. Iquana were vegetarian.  Suddenly it keeled over and died. I truly believed that I’d killed it by not chopping his food up small enough.  I was mortified.  Inconsolable. My parents actually were angry with Mr. Fischer for letting the kids take an exotic beast home where it could die and a kid would cry all night.  No one thought I killed the iquana.  Certainly Mr. Fischer didn’t think that when I brought the dead iquana back to class in a shoe box.  The other kids did but none of the adults.  Really, he just died.  Keeled over with a bit of apple in his mouth.  I didn’t try to revive him. I didn’t know CPR or mouth to mouth when I was 12. I was simply horrified. But a couple of my classmates who loved the iquana like I did thought I killed it.  I insisted I didn’t. I felt so sad. I killed the iquana.  Didn’t chop it’s dinner up fine enough.  Today I don’t even think a valsalva maneuver would have helped.  Fate.

His revolutionary teaching ideas resulted in him being interviewed for the Winnipeg Free Press.  A picture was taken of him and the aquariums, I can’t remember if the iquana or some other creatures were in them but there was Kirk and me in the picture.  My mom cut the little clipping out and kept it.  She sent it to me years later. I put  it in a frame and kept it on my desk.  Biology and Mr. Fischer.

Thanks to his inspiration I got my first tropical fish tank that year. Soon I was even breeding Siamese fighting fish.  

I believe it was Gr. 6 that I joined the YMCA.  Kirk and I joined along with a number of other boys. Keith and Colin were members of the gym club. I might have been in the YMCA swimming but it was when I was 12 the the YMCA gymnastics club began to play an important part in my life. It just seemed that I went from playing hockey as a kid outside to spending all my time at the YMCA.

We took the Pembina Bus downtown and loved the walk through the Hudson Bay basement to come out on the street by the Y.  In the winter in cold Winnipeg as kids we travelled through stores, then scooted out onto the street then entered the next store, that way getting warm between exposures to the 40 below wind chill.  The wind on Portage was famous. The wind chill at Portage and Main record making.

This was when we came under the influence of Mr. Don McQuaig (sp).  The YMCA wasn’t just a gym. Young Men’s Christian Association.  I did all the levels of swimming there. In the summer I’d collected Red Cross swimming awards each year at the Fort Garry pool. So when I joined the Y I just repeated the tests and collected all my swimming awards there.  In free style swim we’d not wear clothing as boys but for the classes and tests we wore bathing suits.  There were codes of conduct and people trained there for the Olympics.

The YMCA Gymnastics Club was the thing.  We’d start with a mile run around the track that circled the gym just below the high ceiling.   After the run we’d do tumbling exercises and then take training in the different stations.  We had rings, low bar, vault, parallel bars, high bar. We learned all the somersaults and hand springs on the mats. On the wall there were pegs we’d try to develop our upper body strength with.  Pulling our bodies up and putting the pegs in the hole above. Colin Lount, Ron Brawn and Keith Carter walked the pegs up and down the board effortlessly. Meanwhile I was thankful if I could drag myself once to the top.

I’d left Boy Scouts because there was an older bully who picked on me. My 4 year older brother Ron stayed in Scouts.  He was the same age as the bully. The bully just smashed us younger kids with his fists.  

Dad had taken Kirk, Garth and I as kids and set up a rope ring in the basement. He bought us a couple of sets of boxing gloves. That was when we were 6 and bullies had bothered us in our first year of school. So there he was teaching us to box, us little uncoordinated kids, down in the basement with this rope around a part of the room and us learning to thrust and punch and dance with our feat. Little Rockie’s ahead of time. I don’t remember learning much boxing. Dad had boxed some in the Air Force. It didnt’ go on long but it stopped the bullying then.  When the older kids jumped us we punched back and that took the fun out of it for them.  

Most people don’t realize, especially girls, how often boys are bullied and how we learn to stand our ground and hit back.  I wrestled with this other kid in my class. Despite the silliness of girls we didn’t think it was bullying if kids were evenly matched. We knew about light weight and heavy weight. Girls didnt know anything and nobody fought with the girls because they were girls. Besides if a guy lost to a girl anytime he was a loser and if he beat a girl he was still a loser because he beat a girl. The girls had all the advantage in a fight. But we considered it bullying if two or more guys took on one guy or if an older bigger guy took on a little guy.  Older bigger gang guys were a problem. It was also bullying if the other guys came at you with weapons. So there I was in one of the best districts in the city and by Gr. 6 I’d been attacked three on one and 5 on one always by boys 2 or 3 years older.  Thanks to Dad my friends and I survived.  The main issue was the confidence.  If a kid showed weakness the bullies pounced. I avoided most fights by standing up to challenges and talking.  

Predators can’t afford to be hurt since they really don’t have a support network.  They’re looking for easy kills.  My dad taught me about wolves in the woods and people were the same. There’s really no ‘honor’ in war today because most soldiers only engage when they have a clear advantage. War is all about winning.  Weakness attracts war.  I still find it sad that so many people who know nothing and spent their lives protected or hiding still blab on about things they don't know anything about.

Gr. 6 Kirk found a Ju Jitsu book. That’s when our formal martial arts training began. We practiced on each other all one summer.  Tosses, throws, kicks.  Kirk was fascinated by the Eastern philosophy and we talked about that. At the YMCA there was an older fellow with a black belt and he coached us that fall and for years to come.. We took some wrestling there too. I was abysmal at wrestling. Flipped and pinned by the wrestling guys in seconds.  Lots of laughter at how easily I could be beaten by them on the mats by comparison to how it was next to impossible to get me off my feet. Billy Goat Gruff.

Billy Goat Gruff was the children’s name I got when I teased Liza Laidlaw, Kirk’s little sister. She was sharp as a whip. I called her Liza Lollypop and she came back with Billy Goat Gruff. The nick name stuck with little kids in the neighbourhood.  Liza now  a mother and maybe even a grandmother will always be Liza Lollypop.

My brother beat up the bully at the Boy Scouts . It was my first year as a scout. I ‘d graduated from cub scouts and had the big round hat I was so proud of when the bullying began. Ron told the guy to lay off. When he didn’t and Ron caught him boxing me outside the church he stepped in and punched the guy a half dozen fast ones putting that guy on his knees.   In those days of cowboy fighting there was none of the ‘curbing’ and head kicking that came later. Ron had won. The guy was supposed to have learned his lesson.  All should have been well. But he came after me again. Ron wasn’t there. I was beat up bad. He was a barefisted puncher and I took a lot of hits to the head, cut by his ring and just generally battered. My brother pounded him good in retaliation the next scout meeting. My brother was a quiet peaceful guy but a force to contend with when you were wrong and crossed him. But I’d just lost interest in Boy Scouts after that.  The bully left too after Ron was through with him but it had soured my scouting experience.  

God I was proud of my brother and thought he was the greatest guy in the world to protect me. He did it a few times in our lives.  Whatever faults a kid can find with an older brother they all go when he’s getting his ass whuppped, things aren’t looking really good , and his brother steps in to the rescue.  That was my brother Ron, a guy to be counted on. Everyone did. They always could.

I just complained that all the teachers who had had him before me would say what a great student my brother was and why couldn’t I apply myself. My report cards always read that Bill would do better if he applied myself.

I’d get A’s and B’s but this one semester I’d applied myself and got all A’s but one. My mother had said, in typical Mom  fashion, not how well I had done, but ‘why did you get that B?” So the next semester I really applied my self.  I got all B’s .  It really is hard to get all B’s. Like target practice shooting bull’s eyes’ ,a person can get lucky ,but the success is in the tightening of the spread. I worked at getting B’s for a year or two after that and then lapsed into my old pattern of mostly A’s and occasional B’s , getting straight B’s was harder than straight A’s.  That was the way my mind worked as a kid. I played weird games, only I knew the rules to.

The YMCA Leaders Corp picked up where the Boy Scouts left off. The men were trying to teach us kids values and standards and down right manly behaviour.  Looking back , it was all ethics.  Young Men’s Christian Association was about applied Christian values. William James. Pragmatism. No one talked about Jesus. We were just expected to live and behave like Christians.  

The fights continued in the locker room.  I was kicked naked by an older boy in the groin and lay in a fetal position for an eternity.  The kid was a teen ager and picked on us kids slapping us with wet towels, punching us and kicking us little guys. He was a little twisted too.  But myself and three friends ‘paid him back’. We had become good with wet towels and we all slapped him silly with wets one day in the shower. He’d bullied all of us but after that it stopped. We also came together as a group. He was one of the swimmers and we were the Gym Club. 

The higher ups would hear and put a stop to these things quick unless we’d settle it ourselves if we could. No one wanted to be a rat or a squealer. They were the lowest. Presumably someone talked to the kid too and no one wanted to be expelled from the Y.  Getting expelled from school meant no homework but we all loved the Y.  No fun in getting expelled from gym.

Keith Carter was amazing. He was great at everything.  His summersaults in the air were simply unbelievable.  Colin Lount had an injury as a kid, some polio or something like that, making his one leg marginally less functional. Without that he would have been perfect. He was so graceful. On the rings he’d lift himself up then stretch out into a perfect hand stand. Kirk had grace too. Each of us had a niche.  Ron Brawn our new friend had muscle and was amazing on the high bar.  Me, well I was the vaulter. I could run and vault where others wavered.  It took a lot of faith to launch ones self head first, fly through the air, and hope to catch the end of the long box before shooting your knees and feet through your arms to come out standing.  I was crazy.  

I also liked the parallel bars until the other competitor before the annual competition pulled my arm off the bar, when I was in a handstand,trying to make it look like an accident. He really was  hoping to injure me before the competition.  I fell and twisted coming down hard.  I had to go home. I’d injured my back that day. Till this day I still remember him slyly grinning. Then in the competition next day he was smugly confidantly looking over at me with that superior look psychopaths have.  I competed beat him despite  the pain.  He threatened me after. But I’d won that competition.  I’ve had recurrent back pain in the same spot under duress. It’s probably psychosomatic. Something to do with having your own team mate betray you just to win a competition. A regular Judas.  I didn’t understand this and didn’t have that quality. It’s actually rare. Sociopaths only a per cent or two of society and psychopaths an even much smaller fracture.  That competition was years later wasn’t when I was 12 but years later.

At age 12 the YMCA gym and swimming club was a favourite place. We’d go after school a couple of times a week and then spend most of Saturday’s there. Our mom’s would give us money for the bus and a little more.  We loved the thick chocolate smoothies that they had in the basement of the Bay going home on SaturdayS. That was the stop after we’d showered and swum and dressed . I was on the way to the Pembina bus stop.  There were usually 3 to 5 of us coming and goin to the Y.

The YMCA Leader’s Club was special. We had to show merit and pass and be interviewed with Don.  Kirk became his favourite. Don McQuaig was also one of those revolutionary leaders. A devoutly Christian man who went on to be the secretary of the World YMCA’s in Switzerland.  He really did encourage ethics and morality. he’d have these incredible discussions about life with us boys. We’d meet as a group, about 6 of us in his office and discuss life, the gym, leadership and teaching.   We’d get this pure unadulterated wisdom back.  An amazing influence. He was all about excellence.

11 years old: genius, Cold War, murder ball, slide guitar

It’s a bit of a blur. This remembering game. Humbling.  Considering all the people who are so arrogant about their memories.  I have pools of clear water but the organization is difficult.  Just like the bicycles, were there three or just two.  Now I’ve got these three teachers, gr 2, gr 3 and gr 4. They kind of morph together. All great ladies.  But I’m struggling to remember Gr. 5.

Memories are affected by trauma. Individual and collective.  The trauma is like a spirochete infection. The white blood cells can’t kill it so they wall it off.  Sometimes there are these spaces in our memories of various lengths of time which are empty. They’re like the scar tissues the body makes to wall off the infections.  Around some memories there are these walls.  Out from them the tissue is disrupted. It’s the same with the body fighting cancer how the immunological system keeps the host alive and wards off the sick. 

 The Cuban Missile or Kennedy Missile Crisis is like that.  I don’t remember much after the conclusion.  There’s a mix of the Bay of Pigs and later the Kennedy Assasination but I remember walking about in a fog after the Kennedy Missile Crisis.  It was really very quiet. Like a city without bird song. It took us kids a while to get back to laughter.  The Cold War wasn’t over and we’d all come to the brink of mutual annihilation and we kids knew fear.  The adults, after Khrushchev, the Bang the Table guy, stood down, continued to feel the menace. I continued to have nightmares of Russian soldiers with Kalishnekovs and Tanks in the streets of Fort Garry.  I took comfort from knowing my Dad’s lever action 30-30 was there and my brother’s shot gun and my 22 rifle.  I thought we could protect Mom. We all had to protect Mom. The world revolved around Mom. Without Mom even the dog wouldn’t know what to do. He was Dad’s dog mostly but he loved Mom.  A liver coloured springer spaniel central to the family. 

 So the Cold War continued. We were afraid. But there was a reprieve. The adults acted like things were okay so eventually we forgot a little. We played baseball and hockey like everything was okay. We all waited till the Berlin Wall came down. Only then could we breathe freely.

I got the strap after that. I continued to fight in the playground with the other guy. I’d take on three to one bullies and survive. The whole idea was to make the other guys suffer so they thought twice about coming back for more.  The girls continued to play “Red Rover Red Rover I call Billy over.” In the gym the boys would play “Murder Ball”.  We’d run around drill each other with this single  heavy ball. Everyone tried not to get hit. It hurt like hell if you did. Boys running and screaming around in circles in our shite t shirts and shorts.  It was crazy fun. I learned it’s been outlawed now for decades. 

We had square dancing too. I think that was Mrs. Glover and Mrs. Murray.  Country and western music and callers. “ Dosie doe.  Swing your partner to and fro!” Touching girls.  The angry ones and the happy ones..  Lots of laughter. Learning left from right. Dance was always a military tradition.

Then there was band. One of those sweet lady teachers had the band.  Probably Mrs. Murray. We each would get an instrument. She tried us each out on every one.  There was a band hiarchy.  The more training or complexity the more difficult , the higher it stood on the band scale.  Piano was the highest. Teacher played that but one of the girls played too, and one of the guys. Very simple three cord songs. Not classical by any means.  There was some string instrument but mostly tambarines and triangles and sticks. One kazoo. I loved the kazoo. The class band was heavy on percussion. I started out at the top of the band and slowly moved through the ranks till I ended up at the lowest end on sticks.  I liked to make noise and had a couple of friends who I’d get going. I was called  an ‘instigator’.  I never got the strap in band though. Just lost the tambourine , kazoo,drum and triangle positions.  I was definitely downwardly mobile in the band. You can’t make a lot of noise or cause much disruption with sticks. I eventually broke them. There was no penalty.  Band was supposed to be a fun time.  Math, Science, English and History were the serious subjects. Breaking my musical instrument, albeit, sticks, I predated heavy metal performers by at least decades.

I believe it was Mrs. Glover who taught us geography in gr. 4.   I remember her because she gave us this homework assignment to read about a country we were studying then write letters home about our trip. 

“I’ve been giving this assignment to children all my career,” Mrs. Glover told my mother in front of me on parent teacher night.  “Billy has taken more interest than any other student ever has. He’s read more and written more about each country.”

That fall studying geography of different countries had been a magical time for me. I couldn’t wait to get home and read about another country. Looking at the pictures, reading the stories, I was transported to that place and wrote ecstatically about my encounters, the people, the land, their customs.  Funny how that is. Years later I’d be bicycling across Europe writing letters home after the real encounter with the art and people of those  dry same countries. It was eerily prescient.There I was describing what I saw and being truly overjoyed by the experience.  Loving meeting others, seeing new old architecture, experiencing man’s greatest achievements. 

James Michener would become a favourite writer. I’d read dozens of his incredibly written and researched books.  I’d study anthropology in the 80’s. I love Fran’s Boas.  My individual and academic interest in cross cultural encounters way before it was even much of a subject at university. In psychiatry I was definitely way ahead of my time in that regard. Yet there in Gr. 4 with Mrs. Glover I’d got the seed. Teachers did that. They planted seeds.  With water, sunshine and the right environment the seeds grew into adult experiences rich in breadth and depth. I was truly blessed to have those teachers and to attend Viscount Alexander.

Somewhere in these years psychologists came to the school.  They gave some of us all kinds of tests. I think it was done in gr. 5 and again in gr 7 or 8.  I just remember these tests because years later I’d give similar or the same ones to kids. What came of it though was definitely life changing.  My parents were brought in to the school. That was the first time I heard the word ‘genius’ . I wasn’t alone. I remember Kirk and I talking because he’d apparently scored so high there was talk of him going to a special school. I know they wanted to give me a scholarship to this place  but my Dad and Mom didn’t want me ‘treated like a freak.” There were two sisters too who we all knew were off all the scales. They even made Kirk and me think we were slow. There was this one girl also who was really quiet and had the cutest smile but she really rocked intellectually.  I guess I knew I was smart. I was often correcting teachers. Whenever I wanted to I got A’s and understood things really a whole lot quicker than everyone I knew. Except my brother Ron. He was way smarter, in an applied science and academic way.   My friend Kirk was even more a genius than I was. His family were all smart but I think he was smarter.  The sisters we knew were down right freaky. They’d be into goth and stuff like that way before there was a trend.  We talked physics with them as kids. We were all interest in space back then.

Looking back I was really blessed to have  these really bright and talented classmates. It probably shouldn’t have been much of a surprise.  Lots of us kids had professional parents. Lots had parents who taught at the university. This  was the closest district where lots of university folk chose to live. Lots of alumni too. My Dad and Mom had specifically picked Fort Garry because it had ’ good schools’.  I don’t know what criteria they used but it really was true. Looking back I had some of the smartest and kindest teachers.   It would certainly help make some friends who were the most exceptional human beings. Their careers in later life showed it. 

Some were slow kids for sure but a whole lot of super smart kids.  We  didn’t feel so different.  I was worried for a while Kirk was going to go off to a special school but none of us did. Instead we got a whole bunch of ‘enhanced’ studies. For a while there was special class. For the first time I wasn’t bored in class. I stopped getting the strap.  That was gr 5. I was 11 and school became really interesting.  

We had a private rich kids school built along British lines in the neighbourhood for boys. It was considered really strict and really expensive but the school never achieved anything in sports and the students we knew who went there in later years were usually kids who had behavioural problems. The parents had to have money.  We’d still see these guys on weekends sometimes but it was like they left the neighbourhood when they put on that school uniform 

The months after being told we were geniuses were interesting. The teachers treated me a whole lot better. Kirk was always a nice guy and didn’t get into trouble so I don’t think it affected him so much. But I and the scarey sisters were treated a lot differently. Suddenly the teachers were stoped getting knee jerk angry with me  and instead thought about what we were asking or saying

I’d learn years later of a psychological study where some psychologists came into a school and gave the kids a whole lot of tests then told the teachers the stupid ones were super bright.  I wondered if that had happened even though no one ever called me stupid. From as long as I can remember I was told ‘you’re too bright for your britches.’  I always felt different. Still when I read about that study I couldn’t help remembering how we were overnight ‘different’.  I sure did like the enhanced study, the biology, and history, and the extra books. By then I’d read most everything in the library that interested me. Whenever I had any free time I was reading. I loved the encyclopedia. I read it once. 

Kirk and I were good in sports too.  Just natural athletes. Again, even though Kirk and I excelled we never thought we were that good because we knew other kids who were great. Parents and teachers were always concerned about us ‘thinking we were so good’ but kids just naturally compare.  They don’t necessarily compete. We had Keith Carter in our class. aKeith was unbelievably athletic, a truly talented  gymnast. He  went onto compete in the Olympics representing Canada. We didn’t think we were ‘better than’ the other kids. We just knew that each kid was different. We saw kids had some gifts.  

One kid who was into mathematics wasn’t good at murder ball but he was more coordinated in square dancing.  Another kid who wasn’t very bright at all academically could throw balls like no tomorrow. He went on to be a foot baller. 

Kirk, Boris, and I and a few that  were ‘all rounders’. Everyone excelled in some things, some in two or three things.  We three were really good in most things. Success in one thing brings confidence and confidence then spreads. I didn’t know what I excelled in athletically at first. We just tried everything which itself made us different fro a lot of kids afraid to fail or content to be one trick ponies. 

I had excelled in writing letters home to my mother from imaginary travels.  But in sports I was just generally good at stuff.  It helped that I coordinated. I was called a ‘Billy goat’ because I was so sure footed. I ran up hills leaping from boulder to boulder.   School was good for kids. It gave us so many opportunities.  In later years I’d look back with amazement and realize the ancient Greeks understood this when they set up the first games.  Only last year I met a national champion shot putter. You’d never think this doctor friend was an athlete but sure enough he was. Just like the national champion dart thrower I met. They’d found a niche and capitalized on it, becoming the best. I even met a champion horse shoe pitcher.  

The key was participation.  The kids broke up into those who tried and joined and those who had attitude.  We saw that the smokers stopped doing sports. Yet in track and field it was clear there were so many opportunities to excel.  It would become even more pronounced a couple of years later after we had our growth spurts and kids found their natural grooves. I was never a sprinter but being ornery I could run long distance. Not that I won anything but I was one of the hundreds of kids that ran miles.  I never did do a marathon. I was so proud of my brother when he was older, trained and ran a marathon.  Here in Vancouver hundreds of thousands come out for the walk and run 5 km events. They’re so different from that whole bunch of people who say “I could do anything if I was interested.”

The fact was the successful simply were more willing to fail and take the humiliation and get back up, like a baby learning  to walk. Everything I did I started out bad at.  I was ‘lucky’ (we say that’s God acting anonymously and I really got a lot of prayers from my mom and a lot of encouragement from my Dad). I was a fairly quick study.  

I’ll never forget when a couple of years later Kirk got interested in volleyball.  He had a thing for it.  So as his friend I’d be out in the back lane with his volleying until it was dark. My supergenius friend was this obsessed volleyball nutbar who needed someone to play with. We’d both end up on the provincial championship team years later because of his insanity and weird drive.  That’s just how it worked.

There were so many things that were offered in school. Chess clubs. Debating societies. Science clubs. Long Jump. High jump.  Cheer leading.  Drama. Choir. I’d play chess and later get involved in photography too.  There was literally something for everyone. The kids that participated really did do well and succeed in life.  I’d learn later that the kids who had problems usually just isolated or didn’t want to stick to things.

When a study of childhood was done years ago, every intelligence test known was given these kids but years later looking back the researchers found that the  ‘marshmallow test’ was the one that was most likely to difffentiate the ones who went on to be most successful, rich, powerful, in life.  In the marshmallow test the teacher put a marshmallow on the desk of the gr 1 students later in the morning.  She said the kids could eat the marshmallow while she was out but if they waited till she came back they could eat that marshmallow and get another marshmallow as well.

The kids who waited, having the capacity for ‘self control’ and ‘delayed gratification’ , were the ones who were most likely to complete phd’s, become professionals, get journeyman tickets , run businesses, and/or become millionaires.  

Kirk and I and the crazy sisters would have passed the marshmallow test hands down. Years later working in the field of addiction I’d see that drugs affected the reward circuit in the people’s brains.  The last part of the brain to develop in the human species was the fore brain, sometimes called the human brain , because it was so associated with planing and organization. McLean described the basal brain as the lizard brain. It did all those basic housekeeping tasks like feeding, defecating, breathing, sleeping, digesting, fighting and flighting, aggression and territory and basic reproduction. This was all located basically in lower brain and brain stem.  Reptiles , like psychopaths,developmentally missed the  more advanced functions. McLean’s described the animal brain or emotional brain that was  found in the ‘mid brain’ . It was what gave the kinship and relationship world of the animal. The whole Jurassic Park backstory was that the dinosaurs and birds had developed this capacity for group behaviours. Reptiles in our world didn’t work together or hunt together but some dinsosaurs grouped together and had coordiated attacks.  This ‘cooperative behaviour’ had previously been considered purely an ‘animal’ or ‘warm blooded’ development.  Animals have the capacity for familial love.  

The human brain carries this greatest capacity for ‘delayed gratification’.    I did try to teach my dog to let some meat sit on his nose until I gave the command to eat. He did it  but it’s not one of his better skills.  Advanced civilization required planning specialization and a whole lot of delayed gratification.  I remember medical school as a whole lot of delayed gratification.  It was worse than early days of courtship and some might argue the instant gratification of the ‘sex, drugs, and rock and roll generation was a set back. 

Drugs disrupt this capacity. Discipline certainly can enhance it.  The marshmallow test showed this in 5 year olds.

Kirk had me playing volley ball with him hours past when I thought it was fun. 

Erickson called the years between 5 and 12 the ‘industrial years’. That’s when kids do things with their environment, art, sports, all the exploration.  Today when I meet people thoroughly defeated in life I ask them about this time. Often what gave them joy then and was forgotten goes on to be the cornerstone of a new life, new career or new hobbies. These were the years when another friend was shooting at the goal all day long at the ice rink. He put up targets.  He’d go on to play in the national hockey leagues or near to it. Kirk did the volleyball thing. That started in Gr. 5..  I don’t know what I was doing. Mostly I remember muddling along. Not that I wasn’t keenly interested and learning vociferously.

My aunt Sally had this expensive guitar. She gave it to the family. Ron wasn’t interested in guitar so it was decided I’d learn guitar. I began lessons in ‘slide guitar’. No one we knew in the city played ‘slide guitar’.  Dad was from the north,  everyone in the country and especially in the north admired the country and western ‘slide guitar’ players.  Rock and roll, Elvis, Holly, and the lot were coming in at that time. The contemporary music in my child world was anything but country western That was old fogie stuff like square dancing.  I did my lessons. I wasn’t interested. I’d practice in front of the tv. A year later Dad got angry and said he wasn’t going to waste any more money on a kid learning to play guitar if he wasn’t going to practice.  So I stopped playing ‘slide guitar’ not realizing that a few years later a ‘slide guitar’ player could have joined any band. Even the Beatles and Rolling Stones would have benefitted from a slide guitar in some of their songs.  I was a kid and missed a great opportunity. The  tv was far more interesting than learning to read music.  I had my year though. It would stand me in good stead for later endeavours.  I’ve always enjoyed messing around with guitar. I was Like all those guys and girls who learned classical piano but really wanted to play honkey tonk.  As kids we were so often playing out our parents fantasies. We could do a lot worse.

Years later Dad who hated the Beatles and wouldn’t allow me to play Bob Dylan in the house, told me he thought Gordon Lightfoot was good music. At least he liked one of the artist I did. Dad never stopped loving country and western, Hank Williams and Gene Autrey being favourites. I did however grow up in a home  where music was appreciated.  My mother loved gospel.  My own life was enriched with music even though I never liked my parents interest in music till I was much older.

At school I played sticks in the band.  As for the scarey sisters whatever they did they did really well. They were ahead of their times in everything.  They  would go on to be so weird and cool.  Kirk and I liked that they liked us but once they became beauties they were intelligent enough to go out with guys twice our age.  I liked my friends who were nerds before nerds were a things, kids who would tell me about their chemistry sets or tying flies .The guys down the street made a car that was totally illegal. Intermittently it would suddenly speed around the neighbourhood then go back into the garage, just a frame, an engine and wheels. Those were the older guys. In Gr. 5 we were just beginning to soup up our bicycles.  We were riding a lot together as groups of three or five.  

Gr. 5 and being 11 was a good year I guess. My grandmother , my mother’ s mother died around then. She’d come to live with us for a number of years in the front room.  Her death  sucked big time.  I cried and missed her. Don’t know why I took it so hard.  I took death hard as a kid.  I’d been able to sit with her and she loved to listen and she loved the dog.  She was all crippled with arthritis, slow and old. Mom was happier when she was alive.

My father’s father and the cowboy and logging uncles would visit from time to time most years. That was a big event. They’d stay for a week. The house would be rowdy, lots of men and noise.  Granddad had the big boat of a car. They’d always arrive with four or more. All of them wore suits like Elliot Ness.  We’d go out to restaurants, talk of cows and logging. Stories of moving outhouses and community dances, northern neighbours and all that sort of stuff would go on. Dad would become more connected.  We’d listen with rapt attention as kids.  My grandfather and uncles loved that I was learning guitar.  They’d want me to play. I’d play the slide guitar for them. They’d  love it. I knew maybe one country song. But it was what they wanted every year for several years.. You’d think I was Waylon Jennings the applause I got.  

I wonder whatever happened to the crazy sisters.  I must ask Kirk. Last I heard they gone academic in some field as an after thought.  I read about them in the news, one of them overseas doing something unusual.  A lot of kids from those years really did interesting things.  I loved going to a high school reunion years later and learning about the kid who was a playwright on Broadway, another girl with three children and a guy who built computers.  It was a real blessing to be surrounded by such bright and sometimes brilliant friends.  I didn’t feel different or out of place then .  We were all accepted . We had these great teachers, this great neighbourhood and a whole lot of great parents.

Years later I’d read Alice Miller’s, Drama of the Gifted Child. I realize Kirk and I and the other few kids had got everything she said was good for a year or two at least.

10 years old: Blue Lake, Minaki, Kennedy Missile Crisis, Andy Warhol, UFO’s

With time the years seem to blur together in the past.  I don’t remember if I learned to ride a bicycle at 7 years old or 9 years old.  I know by 10 I was riding bicycle all summer.

I was cutting the lawns of neighbours for a dollar an hour by then too.  I had a manual push lawn mower. Dad said if I mowed our lawn I could use the mower to mow the neighbours lawns for a business.  I don’t remember getting an ‘allowance’.  When we ‘needed’ money for something out of the ordinary we’d ask. Mom would give us ‘candy’ money along with the money for the tickets when we walked up to Pembina and Point Road to go to the movies there on Saturday afternoon.  ]

Camping is what I remember doing a lot.  At first we had the brown canvas tent with the centre pole that slept two adults, 2 kids and the dog Sonny.  Next we had a blue six man tent. That gave us lots of room. The truly skookum tent mom loved was a 6 man tent with the mosquito netting extra room.  She had the Coleman gas cookstove on a little collapsible table in there.  There was a 4 man collapsible metal table and 2 camp stools for us kids and two camp chairs for the parents.  

I remember Blue Lake the best.  The setting was pristine.  We’d camp in the trees right by the lake where the boat launch was.  Mom would stay home in the tent reading in her chair inside the mosquito net.  My father, brother and I would go out fishing each day in the boat with a 5 hp Johnson motor.  I remember first going out fishing with my mom in the boat. She and I spent most of the time untangling knots.  I remember whining about that and Dad complaining about my whining. My brother would stoically sit through we squabbles. Mom would defend me as the ‘baby’ and eventually I’d cast the hook before it was time to go back in.   

Next I’m on the same lake in the same boat and Mom no longer comes with the ‘men’.  The ‘red devil’ lure was the best. I caught pike or jack fish while Dad and my brother seemed to always catch pickerel.  Sometimes we’d go ashore and explore. There was a great wooded path to another lake beyond a fall.  We couldn’t get the boat there but we’d walk up there and cast from the rocks. 

I can remember going back to Blue Lake for years, not consecutively but repeatedly. Dad had 2 weeks holidays in the summer and if we weren’t going on a road trip with camping and the occasional motel then we were camping.  Blue Lake was a favourite because of the pickerel.  You could look almost to the bottom of the lake.  

Kirk’s family would go to their cottage on Minaki Lake.  The Minaki Resort was a great old 30’s classic with stripped logs, a true work of wilderness beauty.  Part of the CNR CAnada resort system that included Banff Hotel and other famous luxury accommodations. Apparently in the 30’s Canada was a favourite place where the elite could take a wilderness train trip and see bears and moose.  Minaki was that sort of resort place.  

Jake MacDonald years later would write the quintessential book about the place, The Houseboat Chronicles, a genius of a read for anyone whose spent time in the Canadian north.  

I joined Kirk for a week or so once or twice at the cottage.  His mother was the best of cooks and she would make these fabulous meals in the kitchen that looked out on the lake. A loon would be landing always. Ducks taking off. Fish jumping.  An eagle overhead.  Mr. Laidlaw when he was there would run with his crutches and jump into the freezing cold water naked.  The boys, Kirk, Tom and I would cannon ball off the dock in the morning too. The family ritual. The beautiful older sisters would with the mother later swim.  If the girls were there bathing suits for the boys were necessary. Otherwise Kirk and I went naked.

We later belong  to the YMCA where all the boys swam naked. Skinny dipping wasn’t unusual.  My family, my mother being Baptist, didn’t do that sort of thing but it was fun at the Laidlaws.  Running naked down the dock full speed as a kid then launching oneself off into the cold water.  Now that’s the way to wake up.  

During the day Kirk and I would explore the back woods. I remember a morning spent making spears and then the rest of the morning trying to spear a grouse. The grouse is the dumbest bird alive but somehow we could not hit it despite it’s running and stopping a few times to let us each get a throw at it.

As boys we always had knives.  Little closing blade ‘jack knife’s that would in years to come grow to be the hand sized multi tool creations put out by the Swiss Army Knife company.  

We’d whittle and talk and hike.  We’d canoe a lot too. Just the two of us. 10 years old and maybe later again when we were 12.

I especially remember one shenanigans we got up to. Don’t know why this one sticks.  We decided we were so dark with the summer. We walked around shirtless, in sneakers and shorts,  and turned almost black with the summer sun. We picked berries which we mostly ate ourselves.  Delicious ontario blue berries.  Competing with the black bears we’d avoid.  If they were in a patch they got there first. We left them to their feeding.

The CNR Passenger train went by each day and we’d often see rows of cars with passengers looking out the window at us kids. We’d stand and wave.  We figured we were part of the ‘experience’ of the ‘north’ for these travellers. I don’t know who thought it up but when the train came next we were standing on a hill as it whipped by at 80 miles an hour. We had taken off our shorts and were standing waving, big smiles on our face.  They were taking pictures.

We figures we must have shown up on a Japanese tourist picture at least. We laughed so much thinking they’d think we were Indians (indigenous), because we looked so brown. We poked each other and giggled about them telling their folks overseas about seeing bears and native children.  We didn’t tell our parents. There was a lot Kirk and I didn’t tell our parents. We were often getting into situations that would have caused a parent nightmares.  At the time we were reading the Hardy Boys and that was us. Also Kipling was big and we’d imagine we were behind enemy lines sneaking up on turtles and gophers.  We laughed a lot.  

Later in the day we’d return.  

I liked to fish and took the boat out but Kirk got bored fishing. It was an issue. I really liked to fish so here he was with his friend visitting and I’d be up fishing and he’d want to go hiking. His mother actually told me they didn’t need any more fish. I loved fishing at Minaki and caught my first bass there.I couldn’t imagine Kirk not liking fishing. Instead he’d like to talk and walk so we did more of that.  Kirk was always the greatest guy to talk with.  

We’d share all manner of ideas about parents, school, God.  For as long as I can remember Kirk and I talked about God, how we came here, what we were.  We talked about what we were going to be when we grew up. I wanted to be a jet fight pilot then. I don’t remember what Kirk wanted. Wish I did. I’d love to be a fly on the wall and hear those conversations again. I have the flavour of them.  Philosophical ,theological,curious,and pure.  Untainted by so much that came later.

I loved the gas lamps at Kirk’s Minaki Cottage.  The lighting of these. His mother asking his father if it was time. The discussion of the lighting of the gas lamps.  The decision to light the lamps. The circles of yellow light that appeared in the dusk around the lights.

That was at the main cabin. We slep out in another cabin called the ‘boys’ cabin. I never even went in the ‘girls’ cabin. Totally taboo. Though not like the ‘boys’ cabin.  Everyone came and went there.  But at night the lamps would come on and there’d be a time for reading.  Listening to the night creatures. Winding down of the day.  Quiet time.

Then ‘remember to brush your teeth’ and ‘off to bed’.  We’d giggle in the cabin and fall asleep while the parents stayed up later sitting around the soft glow of the gas lights.

The moon and stars were something over the still blue lake.  An occasional cloud floating overhead.

In the summer too Kirk’s two older sisters would put on plays in the back yard of their house across the back lane from us in Winnipeg. They’d write them themselves and then they’d recruit us kids to be the actors and actresses. It was not uncommon for there to be 5 or more in the ‘cast’ and the plays would go on for hours in preparation.  It really was fun. As a kid coming up with things to do in the summer was a challenge as that is so hard to believe for an adult. But the older sisters and older brothers usually were doing ‘neat’ things and would include us.  More often than not a parent would tell them ‘watch your brother’ and we’d be included. With my brother Ron, it would be making and fixing things. Going to the store could be an event. I look at my dog when he follows me and think of myself following older children in much the same way.  Happy to be part of the pack, a part of an ‘adventure’.  

The biggest event of 1962 was Space. NASA was big in my home. I had NASA paraphernalia from somewhere.  I had a picture of Cape Canaveral too.  We all watched the rocket launches and the space men in their astronaut suits. Scott Carpenter orbited the earth in a space capsule, the first man in space. We’d paid attention to the monkeys. It was the “space race’.  I think the Russians put up a dog too.  The first man in space was the big thing. As a family we were all in front of the tv with mom making pop corn. Star Trek wouldn’t begin for another 4 years.

I remember one night when all the men gathered in the back lane on a summer night. A huge cigar shape had appeared in the sky. Saucer like lights were leaving and returning to it.  Ed, the pilot, my father, ex Air Force with the best 10 power binoculars, and Kirk’s dad the chemist and University alumni were there with others. Us kids were standing around knowing enough to be silent.

“It’s definitely a UFO.” Ed said.  He’d gone back to the house and phoned the Air Force that night, some number he knew. “They said it was a weather phenomena.”

“I’ve never seen a weather phenomena like that.” Said Dad.

“It’s got to be a UFO. They seem to be just stopping and starting with those little ship leaving and coming.”

‘That’s what I see, Gord.”

“Can’t see much more in the binoculars. The saucers seem to be spinning maybe but the cigar thing is just all a light.”

“They wouldn’t be landing with the ships coming and going.” Said another adult, I think the school teacher.

“They could be getting water.” I don’t know why someone thought about water but as earthlings we obviously prize our water so assumed others would too.  

“I think they’re just looking about. An exploration.” Said Gord. 

“I saw some mighty strange things flying and I don’t like that they won’t tell us what things are. That’s sure as hell not a weather phenomena.” Ed said. 

All the men agreed. But most had been in the military and knew the ways of the ‘higher ups’. 

That observations and several others were common that summer but that one was the most memorable.  I expect in retrospect the launching of a man in space attracted attention from elsewhere but as a kid we were just blown away by the idea of aliens visitting earth,  hoping they’d land and tell us stories of what it was like where they came from. Maybe we’d meet alien kids our own age.

The Kennedy’s were in the White House. Everyone agreed that Jackie Kennedy was the most beautiful First Lady.  We all loved President Kennedy. He was so young but he’d been wounded in the war. 

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out that year in the New Yorker. I’d read it 10 years later and be all concerned and then 10 years later wonder why the fish hadn’t all died.  Acid rain was a scarey idea but no one melted like they did in the horror movies. I just kept fishing and remembering noticing that what had been said simply wasn’t true. I was studying science by the time I made that realization so had one less thing to worry about. As a kid I had a lot of worries. I’ve always tended to be a worrier. My aunt said worrying ran in her family. We were all kind of high strung. Dad was more down to earth. 

We really did worry the Russians were going to invade through the arctic or that we’d be hit by a nuclear bomb.  We knew as kids we were on the flight path of the Russian missiles. The news gave us hog prices and grain prices. We were on the prairies.  Trains and great graineries really mattered. The stockyards were important. Grandad had a ranch and conversations about agriculture were a matter of news and topics in the kitchen.  The radio was in the kitchen and that’s where we all heard CJOB.  “Beefs and bouquets” was the radio call in talk show my parents listened to in the morning.  

I first learned about Cuba then.  

It was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was the year everything changed.  That was the year I learned that I couldn’t trust adults. That was the year I saw all the adults were afraid.

Looking back in the Encyclopedia at that year I see the Navy Seals came into being. Adolf Eichman was hung.  There were plane crashes and train crashes. There were snow storms that got front page news because they happened out of season. Extreme weather events occurred but weather was weather. Engel vs Vitale cases against prayers in school were rulee prayers unconstitutional but in exchange male nudity was also ruled as not pornographic.  The first Walmart and first Kmart appeared. Andy Warhol premiered his Campbell’s Soup Cans exhibit.  The Rolling Stones made their debut in London.  Telstar relayed the first live television signal across the Atlantic. Marilyn Monroe died. Nelson Mandela was arrested. Typhoon Wanda struck Hong Kong. China and India conflict over borders lead to the Sino Indo War. Canadian Alouette 1 , the first spaceship built outside the US or Soviet Union was launched from California. Johnny Carson took over the Tonight Show. The Beatles “love love me do’ was released. Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf appeared on Broadway. . Dr. No ,the first James Bond Film premiered.The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred. I said that already. It warrants repeating. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life was published. The Vietnam War continued. Lawrence of Arabia, featuring Peter O’Toole, premiered

Jim Carey, Canadian actor and comedian and Eddie Izard, British actor and comedian  were  born. Mathew Broderick American actor was born.  Bon Jovi and Jan Arden, American and Canadian singers were born.  Tom Cruise and Wesley Snipes American actors were born.  Demi Moore and Jodi Foster, American Actresses, were born .

Writers, William Faulkner and Herman Hesse died. Marylyn Monroe died.  Neils Bohr Died. Eleanor Roosevelt died. 

The Nobel Prize for Medicine went to Watson and Crick

The Nobel Prize for Literature went to John Steinbeck.

  

The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred.  I said that. It changed my world. I knew a new kind of fear. The lonely kind.