She's
wearing a spring coat, and I'm wearing a pale green cotton dress, a
favourite,
because there's a cat embroidered on
the pocket, with a white starched border to match my white starched
Peter Pan collar.
I
look at my mother and father with the new baby, standing near the
bottom
of the staircase. It's a jolting
moment for a small child, a new baby appears on the horizon.
Hundreds of other memories, either neutral or quite happy, fill up the
time period
before I begin school.
The rooms of the small house are large to me. Then there's the yard
to
play in, and the streets around LaPalme.
In
the den, the room to the left as we come in, Dad teaches me how to read
my
Little Golden Books. I learn the
words by hearing him repeat them, and on my volition, I use a lead
pencil to draw a
line through each word as I know
it. My early books are full of these lines.
His
few picture books interest me. One is a book of types of dogs.
Another is a Teach Yourself French
book, always a big topic in Quebec. The French book features stick
people roaming
the world learning French at
circuses, ballets, and department stores. Alas, the French book
dominates my visual arts
imagination, and I begin creating
hundreds of sketches of stick people roaming through the streets of
Montreal, eating ice
cream cones, playing in sandboxes,
flying kites, taking their dolls to the Montreal Doll Hospital.
My
parents are tolerant of all my leisurely activities. I learn to
read, I
skate in the winters and swim in the
summers. One effort to impose maturity upon me, Modelling Lessons to
combat shyness,
backfires totally.
My
mother enrolls me at Child Modelling Classes, they've promoted
themselves
as teaching children to be more
outgoing, less shy and introspective. The prize students are two
obnoxiously conceited
golden haired twins, with flaxen
ringlets, I pass them quietly, like a tabby cat walking past two costly
Siamese.
At
our end-of-course fashion show, I make a permanent impression upon the
school
and all the parents in attendance, I
am so totally nervous due to my uncured shyness, that I cannot open my
easy-to-open winter
coat, the buttons are so large they
stick in my tiny hands.
Because
no one is on the stage to tell me what to do, I keep trying and trying
to get it right, instead of just
giving it up, and going on to the next thing to do, running off the
stage. Finally
a mother in the front row gets up
and helps me unbutton the coat.
So, a success at reading and books, and a total flop at glamour and self-promotion.
Our
mother all stayed at home then, with no exceptions. Our fathers all
held down paying jobs, with no
exceptions. And we all lived in Real Houses, houses that had lawns and
trees and flower
beds and driveways.
We
drew these houses in our drawings with red bricks for walls, and
chimneys
with smoke puffing out of them for
Santa to find in the winter, and windows with wood shutters.
The
den was mostly brown and blue, Dad's colours, and the living room to
the
right was red and blue. This was
where the television set went. It was exciting then to have television,
a new
invention. I can well understand
how people in China felt when they first received televisions, because
we shared that
feeling too in Canada.
No
worries about too much sex or violence on television then, because
there was
no no sex or violence on television,
and not much anywhere else, except for the sort of sexuality that went
on discreetly
in the bedrooms of married couples.
With
so much time on our hands, fun occupied a place in our domestic days.
Neighbours dropped in and out
throughout the week. Mostly mothers for coffee and goodies from the Pom
Bakery Truck.
Not only did we have more time, more
trucks came right to the doors of our homes.
Every morning held its Canadian excitements.
First
the clinking of real glass milk bottles, and Mom calling out, Don't
forget
to put the milk bottles out, Ross,
as your dad left for work. The local milkman was the first to arrive.
Then
the excitement of real letters, arriving from other parts of Canada.
These were not ads nor government
letters - they had real stamps on them, and a good day contained three
or four real letters.
As the cost of postage stamps rose,
the inflation took away this great daily joy.
Best
of all was the Pom Bakery Truck man, whose truck opened up at the back
to
showcase raspberry Danishes,
cinammon buns, raisin breads, butter tarts, bran muffins, plain donuts,
jelly donuts, and a whole
world of accessories for morning
coffee time.
A
diaper service truck, boring yet necessary, might pull up around the
same time.
And every few days a department
store delivery from the mail order pages in the Montreal Star newspaper.
Eva,
a Hungarian Canadian, dropped over most morning to have coffee with
us.
She had a pretty yet saddened face I
associated with the sufferings of the people of Europe. They had lived
closer to
the war than we had, and you could
see that in their faces. Her eyes were large, brown, longlashed, and
sensitive.
Later her son became my brother's
best friend.
Our
friends in Montreal were quite international, I had two Irish Catholic
friends
a couple of blocks away, a
Greek Orthodox girl up at the end of Rue Lapalme, and other Jewish
friends.
Montreal
like New York City or London or Paris had a certain wonderful Organic
Multi-culturalism to it, that
enriched our lives so much, we would not see that this Organic
Multi-culturalism differs greatly
from legally enforced
Multi-Culturalism, a political idea that carries political bias. (More
on that idea elsewhere,
as these stories are about childhood
really.)