Our
fathers all went out to work, there were no exceptions. When
I went downtown to Eaton's and
Simpson's and Morgan's and Ogilvie's department store with my mother,
all I ever saw were women!
That's
because the dads were tucked away in offices
and factories, working Monday to
Friday. I held my mother's hand and saw sometimes children also with
their mothers.
I saw Roman Catholic nuns scurrying
in their long black robes through the squares of downtown Montreal. I
saw women
so stylish that their hats and their
belts and their gloves and their purses and their shoes all
co-ordinated with one another.
That
was our city. We liked it, though we complained
about our cars not starting in the
winter, and all the snow that needed to be shovelled before you could
even get the car
out of the driveway. We enjoyed
complaining as well about the corruption of local politicians, and
comparing our situation
to squeaky clean Toronto.
Our
mothers too stayed at home. All of them.
They did not complain about that,
because after World War 11, everyone was happy to be alive, to have a
man out working, and
a woman home to take care of
things. The mood was good for most people.
The
third surprising difference was that we all lived
in houses, not rented ones, ones our
fathers bought in the post war years with easy financing and the
lifelong promise of
steady employment.
On
LaPalme Street, there was a Jewish refugee from
Europe, Mr. Abraham, who had a
locksmithing business. No university degree there, yet he owned a
pleasant house just like
ours. A few doors lived a school
bus driver, Mr. Moran, no academic degree either to buy his family
house.
Our
mothers did not even work part time. There
was only woman in the entire
neighbourhood who rebelled against our way of life. She was spoken of
in hushed tones,
yet I was a sensitive child. There
was no envy in the neighbours' voices, a slight bafflement perhaps.
What
she did was truly shocking in those days.
She ran off with another man,
leaving her husband and four children behind in St. Laurent. My mother
did not know her
at all. The story was repeated as
though a green alien had landed down on the parking lot of the nearest
supermarket.
The
supermarket was Steinberg's and featured tiny
shopping carts for little girls to
traily behind their mothers wirh. I grabbed chocolate animal cracker
cookies with
a cellophane window to simulate a
zoo, marshmallow candies shaped like ice cream cones, and always a
Little Golden Book as
we reached out the check-out till.
My mother
gently removed some of the candies, and
allowed me to have a new book every time we went shopping for food.
Books,
books, books. My West Vancouver grandmother
mailed me heavy parcels at birthday
and Christmas time of British children's books, with little boys in
short pants, and an
odd usage of language, such as
sweets for candies, and cocoa for chocolate.
My
dad started me on Classic Comic Books, so I began
with David Copperfield and Oliver
Twist reduced to a size a five year could handle. My parents later
suscribed me a children's
book club, that sent me books
monthly.
I
had mainstream tastes and loved Little Lulu, Little Audrey, and my
favourite,
Little Dot. Dot rebelled against
adult authority by painting the entire world with dots, she painted
lawns, schools,
cakes, dresses, furniture with
perfect round dots.
I
think now of the part of the world I live in, where children of four
compete
viciously in competitions, and for
places in kindergartens, day cares, nursery schools. This is Hong Kong,
China.
Be your best,
my parents and teachers instructed me, in those more leisurely
days in Montreal. What is our life
without an inner world? Our dreams, and hopes and fantasies.
As
a child, to find an inner self, you must stand very still, not looking
over your shoulder to see what is
coming up behind you, not to fear you will lose if you do not move fast
enough, when your
legs have only begun to take shape.
