August 1968

It is late summer by the sea and blueberries, blackberries, partridge berries and a little local fruit called the bakeapple (whose name was derived from baie qu'appelle... berry called what?) are ripening in the marshlands and wooded areas that surround the town. From every house comes the smell of baking and what was once, centuries earlier, a vital source of vitamin C, has now evolved into pies, tarts, cakes and all manner of “grunts” and “duffs” speckled with red, black, orange and purple juices. In backyards all over town spindly, tripod-ed barbecues are being fired up to cook foil-wrapped cod, salmon and trout and people will eat outside most evenings until the first chill of autumn sets in.

But before I got to enjoy my first idle, august supper on the grass it was time for me to have my immune system boosted. I am barely just able to sit up on my own and it is decided that this rudimentary motor skill is as good a benchmark as needed to begin the needle work. My father drove both me and my mother to the hospital in the big Buick. The car was wide and low and lolled over the street in an almost indolent fashion. Given the lack of child safety in this springy, rolling tank of a family car, the drive to the hospital was probably more dangerous that the threat of tetanus, polio, and diphtheria that I was being taken there to be inoculated against. Resting comfortably in my mother’s lap with her arms being my only seat belt, I had a perfect view of the hard, sharp edge of the dash that would stop me in the event of that perfectly executed head-on collision: just before the momentum-increased weight of my mother came crushing from behind to finish me off. In such incident I would become a tiny crushed corpse that could only be identified by his omnipresent hat! No, the typical mid-sixties sedan was not designed with family safety in mind and any allusions to passenger protection were long lost down the crack where the back and the seat met. What would prove even more perilous is the impending event where my father would have to teach my sister how to drive less than a year from now.

I do not take kindly to needles and my recently discovered vocal prowess is put to good use as my screams echo throughout the same hospital in which I was born just 5 months earlier. And as I am being skewered against exotic and extinct diseases, my mother, in an act perhaps deemed progressive, or at least representative of its time, left my father to deal with me and my gripes as she left the room for reasons then unknown. Many years later, my aunt told me she went to find the nurse my father with whom my father has had the affair in their one and only confrontation. Whatever happened, from here on my father is seen more and more holding me in old family photos.

Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In, 5th Dimension