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