April, 1968

I am the fifth child born into what was even then considered an unfashionably large family. I am also the second son. With my mother being out of the game for a while, my grandmother - my mother’s mother - came to help out. A Jewish émigré from the Soviet Union, she was an oddity in our little town and if it bothered her to stand out it certainly didn’t show. My grandmother met her future husband and my future grandfather in another town in another province and from the start it looked as if the only thing they had in common was that they were both far from home. My grandparents married and my grandfather took his new wife with him to his home back east. He returned to the comforts of the familiar and she remained a long way from home.

My grandmother meant food, and warmth and songs sang in a wonderfully strange tongue. She was a mother of three and grandmother to many more but at that point in time she was the person who changed my shitty diapers, wiped my snotty nose, fed my hungry face and sang to me songs now long forgotten. And in month that witnessed worldwide student protests, the introduction of the movie’s puritanical rating system of G, PG, R and X and the assassination of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, my grandmother made my first month as good an introduction to the world as one could hope for.

Number 1 song in April, 1968
Thanks to MickaMan for the video montage