Thursday, April 12, 2007
December, 1970
The first year of the 70’s is coming to an end. 1970 was a year of firsts – first time the family had moved, first time my mother piloted a boat, first time a child left home, my first friend, my first memory and, just under the wire, my first love.
My sister Sharon has returned from university for the holidays and she has arrived home with fuss and liturgy of a prodigal son (or in this case daughter). Everyone but my sister Debrah is happy to see her as she will be once again bunking with Mary for the duration of Sharon’s stay. Sharon is brimming with excited energy and anxious to tell tales about the city and her roommate and the university. If there is a common denominator of all our familial lot it is that we are prone to spinning the yarn. Telling tales to anyone who will listen is proving to be genetic. Best of all, Sharon has returned with new records and I for one am bursting to hear some new songs. Music has been a little absent since she left for school. Oddly, my father has yet to set up his room (the tiny room at the front of the house from which Matthew, at my goading, tossed away his bottle habit) since moving to Bay Roche. So, with Christmas tree, a Menorah and family about Sharon presents her stories to the eager audience with the new songs playing in the background.
I am not sure if I remember this or if it something told so often to me that I’ve made the recollection my own. One of the new albums has caught my attention. The cover features a bright blue sky at the top, white houses on either side drawn in perspective and at its center there is a hand pointing to the sky. I pull the record out and interrupt my sister in the middle of a story. I tell her I want to listen to this record and she tells me she will play it after the current one is done. I stand by the turntable (my father’s set up in the living room for now) holding the record in both hand waiting for m my sister to put in on the player. After what seemed like an eternity – which for a boy almost three years old is any span of time longer than five minutes – Sharon put it on the platter and placed the arm on the first track. I am told I got immediately excited and started dancing around holding the record with its finger pointed at the sky. There was a photo of me taken that night looking, in retrospect, the most excited I have ever looked in my life. Holding the album sleeve close to my chest with my face peering over the top with bright wide eyes and a big smile I am undeniably in love. I had just discovered my first love and my first favourite song.
From December of 1970
Come and Get It by Badfinger
Thursday, April 5, 2007
November, 1970
My earliest memory… I think.
Mathew is still a toddler in diapers and I am helping him crawl up the stairs of the house. The stairs, most likely some type of northern pine, are painted in a glossy brown paint. I help Matthew to crawl, one step at a time by grabbing the back of his diaper and pulling him until both his knees gain one more step. The effort is made all the more difficult as Matthew, at 18 months, is still refusing to relinquish his bottle and is insistent it come up the stairs (as with everywhere else he goes) with him. The bottle dangles from his mouth as he clenches its nipple between newly formed teeth. After several minutes, and unknown to anyone is the house who surely would have been horrified to see me dragging my younger brother up some dangerous and slippery steps, we reach the top of the stairs. Matthew gets up to his feet and takes his bottle in hand and we both walk down the hallway to a tiny room at the front of the house. The room is, for now, being used as storage for things not yet unpacked – predominantly my father’s stereo equipment and records.
I walk across the room, Matthew, chugging away at his bottle stays close behind, and I open the little window that looks out over the small front yard. I pushed the lower half of the double hung window up, letting in the cold November air. I then proceed to pull an unopened box over to the window. I lift Matthew up to the box so he can see outside and I then point to the walkway below that leads up to the front door. I am not sure exactly what I said to Matthew that day but essentially I challenge him as to whether or not he could hit the walkway with his bottle. Also unknown to me if it took much coaxing to make him throw his bottle out the window but the sound of it smashing onto the concrete below prompted my mother to yell. A few moments later my mother was standing at the door of the small room, her black hair, pulled back into a ponytail and wearing a dress with large flowers printed on it. My mother - the first words I can remember her saying – asked, “What are you up to, Cyrus?”
I am not sure if Matthew willingly gave up his bottle afterwards or whether his old bottle was just not replaced but from that day on he had to live bottle-less. I like to think I helped him through a small portion of his childhood development.
Number one from November, 1970
We’ve Only Just Begun by The Carpenters
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
October, 1970
With one less sister in the house my two younger – and constantly quarreling sisters – no longer have to share a room. This not only pleases them but everyone else also as we no longer have to endure their screaming matches – at least not as much. My mother is driving up the phone bill calling Sharon almost every day just to ‘check in’ and make sure she is not wanting for food and money. This habit would decrease as each child left home and by the time I was in university it was me calling her (usually for money).
As autumn settled over Bay Roche fisherman were busy ‘wintering’ their boats and repairing fishing gear. The site of men mending nets was a wonder. They would hang what looked to be an infinity of a nets up and down the docks and mend the holes left behind by fish too determined to live, at least for another season. The fishermen would use a wooden tool that looked like hallow blade with a needle at its center and with a rounded wooden block in their other hand they would knit fresh netting over the holes. All along the wharf men sat on either side of the nets, chatted, smoked and knitted their nets. The Early 70’s was a period of great change both for the province and for the county and the nets demonstrated this transition. The old timers mended their hemp and flax nets while voicing their derision about the new fish plant and the younger men mended, with the same old wooden tools handed down to them by their fathers, the newer nylon nets and praised the convenience, if not the lower cost per pound on their catches, of the fish plant.
My father, usually on his way home after work, would often have to field questions about the lower cost on the inshore fisherman’s catches. He would usually skirt the question saying something about it being the head office decision and that he had nothing to do with prices. Unknown to almost everyone in Bay Roche was what my father was actually responsible for at the new fish processing plant. My father was managing the purchase of large new stern trawlers – five to be exact – that would essentially put almost all of these inshore fisherman out of work. It was not something my father was not proud of and, in fact, in later years the subject was verboten. Most of the smaller inshore fisherman would be hired to crew the stern trawlers and many of them would even make better money than before, but the smell of diesel and offal would soon replace the earthy smell hemp netting and the belching and chugging of the plant and large steel boats would soon replace the annual gossip fest of the fishermen as they mended their nets.
From October, 1970
The Love you Save by the
Thursday, March 29, 2007
September, 1970
September, 1970 is the month that bore witness to the
Unlike most provinces, the students here graduated high school at grade 11 so kids leave home for university, if that is their plan, earlier than most. Years later a grade 12 program would be implemented. On one hand this would delay the parental anxiety of kids leaving home for a year. One the other hand it meant parents had to wait an extra year to get the kids out of the house. My father was very excited about his daughter not only excelling academically but also getting accepted into a great school. I would learn later that my sisters always felt extra pressure from my father. For my father, education - especially in his case - was an escape to a better life and one can only assume that he did not want his daughters unable to fend for themselves. Perhaps this is why all my sisters became working professionals. Whether or not my father’s tactics of putting an added onus upon his daughters worked is something to which only they can attest. Sons, as most parents seem to believe, do not need the extra heed.
Today,
Number one hit from September of 1970
Rose Garden by Lynn Andersen
19 years later I would get sweaty and overly familiar to this little number heard in clubs almost always located on the wrong side of town. Canadian outfit Kon Kan with I Beg Your Pardon.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
August, 1970
In late summer of 1970 toilet training isn’t going well and despite the many efforts to get me to go to the ‘big toilet’ I am still pretty much obstinately committed to using my Johnny Jr. But this month, more important than my toilet training, is the family returning for a visit to our home town. My parents want to check out the old house and then go to the cottage for the traditional family vacation. My oldest sister is only a few weeks away from leaving the province to go to university and this would most likely be the last family vacation she would be joining us on.
We are taking the steamer back to our home town and on Bay Roche’s newly expanded wharf – thanks to the fish processing plant – we all waited. While the steamer line was a favoured way to travel for most of the locals, the service was not known for it punctuality. Today, it meant an hour of waiting and during the delay passengers had a choice of either milling about the wharf or going inside the tiny steamer line office which contained a purser’s window where one bought their tickets, a wooden banquette, and what was even then an ancient Coke machine which still functioned. With her kids getting increasingly restless and some still too young to wander about a potentially dangerous wharf, my mother decided that it would be best to sit in the steamer line office. It wouldn’t be too long from now that me and some other young kids would hang out on the wharf on our own. The steamer line had the only coke machine in town and the price was half of that at the store. Also, the wharf would be where a horse would nearly chew off my right pointer finger in a couple of years. But for now we waited for the big blue and white passenger boat to pull in and dock. 24 hours later, be back in our home town.
My mother was elated back in her town. Her best friend and neighbour greeted us at the wharf and was literally hopping with excitement to see my mother again. At the house, we all spilled out of the neighbour’s car and my father unlocked the front door, proceeded into the cellar, turned the electricity back on and opened the old valves that fed the water pipes. The house creaked and rattled back to life as the water found its way through the piping. Blinds were lifted and curtains pulled back and a spirited energy once again filled the rooms. Home, for everyone, does not only mean a specific place but also a particular time, never duplicated just emulated.
Summertime traveling music in 1970
Get it On (Bang a Gong) by T Rex (with Elton John helping out)
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
July, 1970
The province, in a controversial act, decided to drag the province “kicking and screaming” into what was then the 20th century. The idea involved offering incentives (initially this meant money) to families to move from their small villages to larger towns in an attempt to streamline and centralise services. This resettlement plan, taking place over two decades, involved the ghosting of 200 towns and villages and the forced move of 50,000 people. Predictably, the resettlement plan did not go as smoothly as the government had hoped. After several years they realised that people were in no hurry to leave their homes and way of life and, in an absolutist move, the government closed all essential services like ferries and mail finally forcing the holdouts away from their towns and homes. In a family outing from which my older brother and sister opted out of, we are going to take the boat to visit one of these ghost towns.
This outing was going to be different in one key way - my mother would be piloting the boat for the first time with passengers. After we were all aboard, my father untied the stern and bow of the boat. After tossing the rope onto the aft deck, my father kept one foot on the wharf and with the other he kicked the stern of the boat away from the dock. Making his way to the bow of the boat, my father hopped on as my mother pulled back on the gearshift lever causing the engine roar into life. With the water churning at the rear, the boat slowly pulled sternway away from the wharf. With a quick turn in the harbour, we were on our way around the steep rocky point that marked the entrance to Bay Roche.
On a clear warm midsummer afternoon the sea is a deep sapphire blue. The colour of the ocean fades slightly as it comes close to the rocky cliffs where waves break in soft white folds over fallen rocks worn smooth by millennia of waves and wind. My mother holds the boat close to shore as my father keeps an eye on any hidden dangers like sudden shoals this close to land. After about an hour, my mother pulls the boat into gap in the cliffs to reveal a rocky beach. At the center of this beach there is an old wooden wharf supported hundreds of spindly legs. Just beyond this wharf are grassy slopes on these gentle hills were the abandoned houses in various states of dilapidation. Some looked as if they were lived in only yesterday while others leaned at such precarious angles it felt like one might actually catch the moment when the house would loose its battle with the physical laws and fall in a flattened pile of broken glass and shingles. Some houses were gone completely with just the stone and mortar foundations remaining. These were houses the owners could not leave behind. These homes were literally lifted from their bases and floated to their new town and it was not an uncommon sight in the 1960’s to see a two story house floating by, being towed to its new town.
My mother rather expertly pulls the boat up to the old wharf and my father tends to the mooring. Moments later we are running on abandoned paths and wooden walkways. My mother has packed a lunch and a short time later we are sitting on blankets eating sandwiches and sipping Kool Aid next to an old cemetery filled with graves now only visited by occasional strangers on warm summer afternoons. Eventually the houses, walkways and even the wharf will be consumed by rot and time but these lonely ghosts will remain.
From July of 1970
Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
June, 1970
The first month of summer and school is out. The new house now feels even smaller as there are kids hanging about. Most of my siblings are getting to better know their new friends and if there is one thing about living in a small town is that friends are automatic. With the limited pool one cannot afford the luxury of choosiness. My mother and the mother of my new friend, Mason, have become close and this Saturday afternoon in June, the air is warm, the town, which at first seemed grey and barren is now surrounded by greenery spotted with patches of coloured flowers both wild and tamed. There is also something new to everyone in town this summer; the distinct smell of offal fermenting in the early summer sun. Offal is a slurry-like substance made from the inedible parts of fish that the new processing plants cooks into a fertilizer. The smell, somewhere between rotting fish and urine, is lingering and to palpable as it sits in open-topped loading bins. The smell, the plant promises, will only occur once a month and since the new plant has brought good playing jobs to the Bay Roche, the townspeople are feeling expansive enough to tolerate the stench. The smell notwithstanding, my uncle has come to visit.
My uncle Joel, my mother’s younger and only brother, is the quintessential product of the 1960’s. After earning his degree in education he bummed around for a year traveling, camping and ingesting social chemicals. After he was done his “sojourn of self discovery” he found a position teaching in the northern part of the province. As my grandparent’s youngest and only son his visit to Bay Roche was treated like a celebrity had come home. It was noted on this visit that me and my uncle Joel bore a striking resemblance to each other, although I, at the time, lacked the mutton chop sideburns and shoulder length hair. What I remember most about my uncle Joel is that his love of music rivaled my father’s. My uncle brought with him a collection of records and on my grandparent old console he played songs that he brought back form places that seemed exotic and distant; or at least made to seem exotic and distant as recalled through the halcyon tales of uncle Joel’s travels. I, of course, do not personally remember the first visit of my uncle Joel but he, like my grandfather, was enjoyed an audience and could spin a yarn as well as his father. The difference being Joel stories had a level of veracity (and groovy soundtrack) lacking in the far fetched anecdotes of my grandfather Pryce.
In later years, it would be my uncle Joel who would first introduce to music that would stay with me up until the present day. Music that remains important to me.
One of my uncle Joel's favourites in 1970
Volunteered Slavery by Roland Kirk
Monday, March 19, 2007
May, 1970
May brings us my brother Matthew’s first birthday. Matthew’s arrival to the family brings the number of people who have birthdays in the same week to three. Sharon’s, Matthew’s and my father’s birthday all fall within five days of each other. In the future, in the interest of economy, these birthdays would be celebrated together rather than separately but as it is Matthew’s first and he gets his own party. Matthew, already well ensconced as the adorable star of the family, is enjoying with a natural ease the attention. And I, being just slightly over two years old, am trying to find a way to make as much noise as possible. At this time my preferred noise-maker is a Fisher Price toy telephone - a peculiar toy shaped like a classic phone but had a face with bobbing eyes and bulbous red wheels. The telephone made a clacking noise when pulled by the receiver and for a period of time this annoying sound was my entrance and exit music. I am told it drove people nuts so it must have pleased a two year old me.
My father had recently returned with the family boat and he was more than a little apprehensive about teaching my mother how to pilot. One couldn’t blame him, his first and only attempt at teaching a family member how to drive ended with him nearly ending up in the harbour and an expensive repair bill. In the the coming weekends he would be occupied with teaching my mother a new vocabulary like headway instead of forward and sternway instead of reverse, call commands and the basics of engine repair. My older siblings remember these weekends very well as every Sunday dinner, mixing with the smell of roast chicken and gravy, was my mother smelling like diesel fuel and hard grease. My mother was very excited about the new things she was learning and was, for the first time since moving to Bay Roche, returning to her normal self. My father admitted that she took to boating easily.
While the family was accepting of my mother learning to pilot, for the townspeople it was an unusual sight to see a woman at the wheel of a boat. And if my mother was hoping to make friends in Bay Roche she was cutting the potential field down considerably. Even my grandmother, a woman used to having to struggle to fit in, felt that my mother was putting herself on the fringe. My mother did not put much weight in the opinions of others and in the end, she would provide a very convenient taxi service for many women in town tired of the limited selection at the local store. They would have no qualms about asking my mother for a lift to Val Bois or other little towns in the immediate area and the men in town, perhaps relieved that someone else could help their wives run errands, seemed comfortable with the idea also. With her Our Boats, Ourselves example my mother brought a little bit of feminism to Bay Roche.
Hit from May, 1970
Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell
Friday, March 16, 2007
April, 1970
Bay Roche was a settlement created over 200 years ago when the British tried to purge the area of all French settlers. The French, fearing reprisals, hid themselves away in tiny coves and inlets: not too far from good fishing grounds, but hopefully out of reach of the British. The whole coastline was dotted with small villages bearing French names. It was much more the fish that dictated where these settlers lived rather than geography. How else to explain why people would choose such an untenable hillside to turn into a town. Decades later the French were patriated when
After two months here the family is still a bit frazzled from the move. My Sister Sharon, despite kicking up the most fuss about moving, is having a better time of it at she counts down the days until she goes to university in the Fall. She has decided to go to a university in city a thousand miles away so her stay in Bay Roche would be relatively brief. In the meantime she is enjoying her star status in her senior high school class. It does bear mentioning, however, that there are only three other students in the Bay Roche senior high school class.
My mother and father are not having as good a time as my father bears the weight of my mother’s displeasure of being in Bay Roche. My father has his job to keep himself busy and while he does not report to like or dislike his work, it does afford him a daily distraction. My mother, on the other hand, has a house that still needs settling which only stands to remind her of the move itself. One of the biggest irks my mother endures is that the local store carries none of the brands of food she likes (or at least used to) and she is told constantly that there is a Grandy Mart in Val Bois, a town about 6 miles by water. The ferry runs back and forth a few days of the week between Bay Roche and Val Bois. Oddly, it was this minor inconvenience that prompted my mother to demand that the family boat be brought to Bay Roche from our home town and that she be instructed on how to pilot. For a woman whose lifetime fear of drowning was family legend, this comes as not a little shock. In the coming months my mother learned how to pilot the small longliner and this would serve as her substitute for the family car. My mother was a very skilled captain.
Hit from April, 1970
Your Song, by Elton John
Thursday, March 15, 2007
March, 1970
The family is settling into the new town. Calling it a town is actually a stretch as Bay Roche was a village of around 500 people. A town made slightly larger by our arrival. We were not the only family to arrive as three other families had moved to Bay Roche to help run the newly opened fish processing plant. Bay Roche was having a veritable population boom.
The new house was a two story eastern salt box with a steeped pitched roof. It was different only from most of the other houses in town in that it was slightly larger. Larger yes, but much smaller than the house we left behind. A smaller house meant sacrifices and none greater than siblings, previous used to having their own bedroom, were now forced to share. My oldest sister, citing seniority, claimed a small room as her own as did my older brother Ben. I got to bunk with my 10 month brother Matthew. Mary and Debrah, never civil to each other at the best of times had to share a room; a room easily found if you followed the distinct caterwauling of fighting sisters. My parents took the only bedroom on the main floor. But what the house lacked inside it made up for it on the outside. Behind the house was a natural playground. The back yard was created by cutting a shelf of land into the steep cliff behind the house. The yard was deep recess of a grassy land held back by a tall stone wall which was banked on either side by the natural slope of the cliff; each slope flowing into either side of the yard. The stone wall would prove great for climbing (and falling from). At the top of this wall grew a thick copse of spruce trees. In winter, we would discover, the slopes would be perfect for sledding. In summer, the cliffs and tress beyond the top of the wall were prime for exploring.
My grandparents were always around and so I was happier. There were very pleased about us being within walking distance now even if my mother was not happy to be there. This is the month I celebrated my second birthday and the party was held at my grandparent’s house. A lot of people from around town came by to meet my parents and from this gathering I made my first friend. He was a boy my age by the name of Mason and the only son of a young family. All in all, it was not a terrible way to begin one’s terrible two’s.
A song my sister danced with me at my second birthday and a hit from March, 1970
Lola, by The Kinks
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
February, 1970
It would become a question that would be asked for years. Why would our parents plan a move in the middle of an east coast winter? It was often noted that my father could have started his job and a few months later, after school was out and the weather was more agreeable the rest of his family could join him. Whether it was my father not wanting to be away from his family for that long or my mother not wanting her husband left alone for months is not known.
Most of the house has been packed up and sent on ahead and would be waiting for us. Items of furniture, deemed too large or unnecessary for the new house, sat in various rooms: abandoned for the sake of space. Three of my older siblings had left a week earlier to stay with my grandparents in Bay Roche. Sharon, Debrah and Ben were getting transferred to a new school there (a school that was considerably different from the modern one they were used to). Mary, Matthew and I would be going by car in a couple of days. Going by boat would have been preferred but they did not run the steamer service in the winter months. The journey by car would be long and tiresome over some rough rural roads. We would drive to a small town close to Bay Roche and take a ferry from there. The car, having recently been repaired, would be put in storage and used infrequently for the next few years.
It was a Saturday morning in late February when the rest of us finally left the house. Outside the car was packed and ready for the 16 hour drive. Prior to leaving the house behind, my mother busied herself by sweeping each and every room. My father shut off the water and drained the pipes. My mother, having swept up the last piece of visible dirt, picked up Matthew, and took me and my sister out to the car where our neighbours, and my mother’s best friend, were waiting to say good bye. Inside, my father pulled the main switch on the fuse box, shutting off the electricity. A few minutes later he stepped out of the front door, locking it behind him. Te big old house was vacated - empty and quiet - for the first time in 100 years.
Hit from February, 1970
War by Edwin Starr
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
January, 1970
It is a new year – a new decade. A decade in which I will forge my earliest memories. The basic constructs of who I will become is going to be built in these years and the person I am today would be seeded in the 1970’s. For better or worse my value structures, the basis for my trust, an the groundwork for emotional being – all that was not genetically predisposed – would be the result of my experiences in the next few years of life. But before my developmental actualization is to take place the house needs to be packed up. The place is in chaos as a lifetime of living makes its way from the cupboards, off the walls and out of closets and into packing boxes. This house has been home for as long as anyone can remember and it does not bear the efforts of storage easily.
My mother, other that the occasional admonition of arguing siblings, is keeping quiet as she carefully removes dishes from the china cabinet, most decorative and rarely used, to wrap them in towels to better protect them. My father is down the hall, boxing records and packing up his little den with the fastidious care. The older siblings are each responsible for getting packing everything of theirs that is not essential and for my oldest sister Sharon this would mean the tedious removal of the hundreds of photographs with which she has wallpapered her room. Not everything in the house is to be packed up as the new house is smaller and many items are going to left behind and the old place becomes goes from being a home to a warehouse. The arguments are yet to happen as to what stays and what goes but if one thing is certain my father will not leave without his records and books.
In a few weeks the house would be locked up and the keys handed over to the neighbours who my parents have made arrangements to take care of the place. The idea of renting the house was not an option. The notion of strangers living in her house was out of the question to my mother and although my father saw this as a lost of potential revenue he was not about to push his luck debating his position already having convinced my mother to move.
I am 22 months old and still completely oblivious to what is happening. Instead I delight in, as is the wont of most young children, an empty box.
Number one hit from January, 1970
I Want you Back by The Jackson Five
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