Most people,I think hate moving.I'm no exception.Most people,I think find it hard to change,even when they want to.I've moved many times,sometimes from coast to coast and sometimes just a few blocks away.Sometimes I had a lot of things to move with me,and at other times, just what I was wearing plus a few clothes and maybe some books.A paperback copy of "East Of Eden" made several moves with me,until it became so tattered from all the moving that I eventually refused to carry it further.My reasons for moving were various:a separation,an eviction,moving to better accommodations,a fire,moving in with a new room mate.Twice I moved to Alberta,to find better employment opportunities.Once was in 1979,and once earlier this year.Both times I didn't have a lot with me.In 1979,it was just what I could take in my car,and earlier this year,just what I could carry in a backpack,a black hockey bag and the case carrying my new guitar.The train was leaving on a Tuesday night,so I spent all day Tuesday running about,trying to return library books and find a new pair of boots in Kensington Market.They could be purchased for far less there than they could in prosperous Alberta.It was hot,that moving day,and I found it sweaty and uncomfortable walking around.It was the first day of spring and already in the mid 20sC.At home I winnowed out the few items of clothing I planned to take,gave away some canned food and some bottles of spices to my room mate,then packed up the hockey bag for the first time and took all those clothes to the laundry,so that I would have enough clean clothing for a couple of weeks.I packed up the coil notebooks in which I had been doing all of my writing while I lived in Toronto,then returned my key to Mr.Sharma,my landlord,who was sorry to see me go and said if I was ever in Toronto I should come see him about a place to live.Then,with everything gathered together and packed into my bags I called a cab and the Jamaican driver drove me to Union Station.As we passed Kensington Market,I thought about asking him to let me out there so I could walk around for a bit,not knowing when or even if I would ever be able to walk there again.There was enough time,but my bags were too awkward,so I went directly to the station.Nearly two hours later I was seated in the observation car of a Via train as it drifted slowly away from downtown Toronto towards the west.For the second time in my life I was moving to Alberta,I thought as we crossed Dupont street near the place I'd lived until just a few hours before.I caught a quick glimpse of the graffiti on the railway overpass as we crossed,then all the surrounding became unfamiliar as we rolled along through the night.
Sunday 30 September 2012
memoir chapter II
I suppose being born and growing through to adulthood is a bit of a Big Bang sort of experience.At first you don't remember anything,but as you get farther and farther from your point of origin,you see a few things flashing by you.You have no idea that ,at some time it may be useful to think back to those things,so that you might tell others of them at some point in time.They are isolated events when they happen.There is no sense of knowing what history is.As you grow,there are more and more things rushing by,and they become easier to discern and to understand You are not in any one place for more than a moment,though at the time,when you are a child things can seem to move very slowly.It seemed we were in Redmondville forever,but,as time goes it was really just a moment.For me though,a year was a third of my whole life,so it seemed a very long time.Not only a very long time,but a seeming eternity in which the view never changed very much.
And then we moved.It seemed very sudden and the world became very different overnight.One of the things that seemed very clear to me,throughout life,was that if I went very far from home,in any direction,is that things became very different.As a child ,when we traveled I had a sense of being in very foreign surroundings when I was only a few miles down the road.Whenever we traveled by car,getting anywhere seemed to take a very long time,but that was just a child's illusion.We lived on a busy road,with a lot of woods around and not much water.Just down the road,the whole world changed.There were army trucks and even planes at some of the places I went with my father.There were lighthouses and fishing boats and piles of lobster traps in other places we went.In those places it was often a bit cooler than it was where we lived and you would have to take a coat along.Sometimes,in some of the driveways,there were seashells instead of the gravel in our own driveway.And the people,not really so very far away,spoke differently,in a language I did not understand.We were not native to the region where we lived,and so,I did not know that there were French Acadians living all around us,as we spoke English,and my parents had friends who likewise spoke English.I had no sense,at the time of there being any more than one language.
Moncton,though had plenty of people who spoke French.Nearly as many as those who spoke English.And so,I came to meet and know both kinds of people as soon as we moved.My world was expanding and I was gaining a sense of our tongues being confounded that would follow me throughout my life,up until I moved to Toronto,where you can hear a babel of many different tongues while out for a short walk or train ride.That's the thing about being Canadian.It is all about encountering a huge plurality of cultural realities in a country that is so very large.Sometimes those realities are only revealed over the vastness of area that our country takes in,and,over the passing of decades.But,sometimes it's true,that things change a great deal only a few miles from home.
Moncton was,by the standard of the day,a medium sized industrial city,located nearly in the center of the four Atlantic Provinces.It was about eighty miles from where my father worked,and from where we had lived up until some time in 1964.The city of Moncton was,in those days all about trains.There was a switching yard out in the east end,and a huge locomotive repair shop in the heart of town.You could hear trains off in the distance most of the time as they shuttled cars into the shops for repairs,or,as they hitched cars together.You could hear the whistle at the shops,throughout town I suppose,but certainly at our house.Always there was a sense and a sound of trains moving,always you could feel them move beneath your feet.The repair shops were the largest buildings I had ever seen and they looked dark and dirty,but also fascinating,to a child who had never seen trains before.You could never escape the reality of trains here.Many of our neighbors worked at the train repair shops,including our next door neighbor.
I've said that things are often very different when you travel just a short distance.I suppose that living in Moncton was a great way to gain an appreciation of that fact,as demographics seem to make that a larger truth there than,perhaps in many other places.If you can imagine the province of New Brunswick as being a square,then divide it geographically in a diagonal from Northwest to Southeast,what you find is that the Northeast part of the province is largely French,Acadian and Catholic.The Southwest is home to English speaking peoples,Irish,Scots,and the like,many of them United Empire Loyalists.Moncton,of course lies exactly on that dividing line.In fact,Moncton seems to be more French in it's eastern extremities and more English to the west.So.you can travel only a short distance away to the Northeast and find villages where everyone speaks French,and,a short distance to the Southwest where no one speaks a word of French.So.on the one hand, with Moncton lying where it does,there have always seemed to be tensions.On the other hand,it also seems to be a place where such tensions tend to be accommodated,and even resolved.
And that the cultural setting of our new home.For my father,who would have just turned thirty,it was time to find a place to settle down.For myself,it wasn't my first home,or for that matter even my second,but it was the place where most of my growing into adulthood took place.Once my father bought our home there,he never left.There came a time when I couldn't wait to leave,but that was a few years off.
And then we moved.It seemed very sudden and the world became very different overnight.One of the things that seemed very clear to me,throughout life,was that if I went very far from home,in any direction,is that things became very different.As a child ,when we traveled I had a sense of being in very foreign surroundings when I was only a few miles down the road.Whenever we traveled by car,getting anywhere seemed to take a very long time,but that was just a child's illusion.We lived on a busy road,with a lot of woods around and not much water.Just down the road,the whole world changed.There were army trucks and even planes at some of the places I went with my father.There were lighthouses and fishing boats and piles of lobster traps in other places we went.In those places it was often a bit cooler than it was where we lived and you would have to take a coat along.Sometimes,in some of the driveways,there were seashells instead of the gravel in our own driveway.And the people,not really so very far away,spoke differently,in a language I did not understand.We were not native to the region where we lived,and so,I did not know that there were French Acadians living all around us,as we spoke English,and my parents had friends who likewise spoke English.I had no sense,at the time of there being any more than one language.
Moncton,though had plenty of people who spoke French.Nearly as many as those who spoke English.And so,I came to meet and know both kinds of people as soon as we moved.My world was expanding and I was gaining a sense of our tongues being confounded that would follow me throughout my life,up until I moved to Toronto,where you can hear a babel of many different tongues while out for a short walk or train ride.That's the thing about being Canadian.It is all about encountering a huge plurality of cultural realities in a country that is so very large.Sometimes those realities are only revealed over the vastness of area that our country takes in,and,over the passing of decades.But,sometimes it's true,that things change a great deal only a few miles from home.
Moncton was,by the standard of the day,a medium sized industrial city,located nearly in the center of the four Atlantic Provinces.It was about eighty miles from where my father worked,and from where we had lived up until some time in 1964.The city of Moncton was,in those days all about trains.There was a switching yard out in the east end,and a huge locomotive repair shop in the heart of town.You could hear trains off in the distance most of the time as they shuttled cars into the shops for repairs,or,as they hitched cars together.You could hear the whistle at the shops,throughout town I suppose,but certainly at our house.Always there was a sense and a sound of trains moving,always you could feel them move beneath your feet.The repair shops were the largest buildings I had ever seen and they looked dark and dirty,but also fascinating,to a child who had never seen trains before.You could never escape the reality of trains here.Many of our neighbors worked at the train repair shops,including our next door neighbor.
I've said that things are often very different when you travel just a short distance.I suppose that living in Moncton was a great way to gain an appreciation of that fact,as demographics seem to make that a larger truth there than,perhaps in many other places.If you can imagine the province of New Brunswick as being a square,then divide it geographically in a diagonal from Northwest to Southeast,what you find is that the Northeast part of the province is largely French,Acadian and Catholic.The Southwest is home to English speaking peoples,Irish,Scots,and the like,many of them United Empire Loyalists.Moncton,of course lies exactly on that dividing line.In fact,Moncton seems to be more French in it's eastern extremities and more English to the west.So.you can travel only a short distance away to the Northeast and find villages where everyone speaks French,and,a short distance to the Southwest where no one speaks a word of French.So.on the one hand, with Moncton lying where it does,there have always seemed to be tensions.On the other hand,it also seems to be a place where such tensions tend to be accommodated,and even resolved.
And that the cultural setting of our new home.For my father,who would have just turned thirty,it was time to find a place to settle down.For myself,it wasn't my first home,or for that matter even my second,but it was the place where most of my growing into adulthood took place.Once my father bought our home there,he never left.There came a time when I couldn't wait to leave,but that was a few years off.
Saturday 29 September 2012
Friday 28 September 2012
memoir writers homework-discrimination
Everybody discriminates even if they don't know it or think about it when they are doing it.We certainly didn't think about it much when we were growing up.Sometimes discrimination is a good thing.My parents certainly thought so.Much of our childhood was all about learning to discern good things from bad things,and good people from those who were not so good.And in this we had my parents constant guidance."Try to stay away from those who are mean,or like to fight,or do break and enters or don't respect authority.Hang out with kids from the church,or people we know,or kids who are kind and intelligent.That policeman's kids are alright,but stay away from that unwed mothers child.Nothing good can come of that"
My parents were good judges of character,so they taught me fairly well how to discriminate.But not all discrimination is good.Mostly I've learned to think of it as a bad thing.Often it was.When I was growing up there were very few visible minorities in our town.Town was divided though,.Right down the middle between Anglophones and FrancophonesAll the kids I played with as a pre- schooler looked pretty much like me.That is to say,they were white.And I didn't really care when they spoke a language I couldn't understand.We were very accepting at that age.When we all went off to school,some of the children went to the French school,while we went to the English school.But some of the children at our school were French too.I'm not certain why they didn't go to French school.Maybe their parents thought that it would be a good idea for them to learn English at school and French at home.
When I first saw how some of these children were being discriminated,it wasn't really obvious to me what was happening.I've thought about it many times in the years since though,how that teacher really didn't treat those children right.We were playing at recess when one of the kids said something in French to another kid,who answered,also in French.There was a teacher standing nearby and she immediately came running over,as though there was a fight going on,and scolded the child speaking French saying that he could not speak French,as not all of the children could understand what he was saying.Why,I wondered were two French boys not allowed to have a private conversation between themselves.Children told secrets all the time and that never seemed to be any business of the teachers.But,because I spoke English,the whole incident made me feel somewhat superior to these other children,without realizing that this was unjustified,or without even understanding why.All I knew was that there was a somewhat favored status attached to being English among the teachers we were expected to respect.It took many years for me to unlearn this lesson.
My parents were good judges of character,so they taught me fairly well how to discriminate.But not all discrimination is good.Mostly I've learned to think of it as a bad thing.Often it was.When I was growing up there were very few visible minorities in our town.Town was divided though,.Right down the middle between Anglophones and FrancophonesAll the kids I played with as a pre- schooler looked pretty much like me.That is to say,they were white.And I didn't really care when they spoke a language I couldn't understand.We were very accepting at that age.When we all went off to school,some of the children went to the French school,while we went to the English school.But some of the children at our school were French too.I'm not certain why they didn't go to French school.Maybe their parents thought that it would be a good idea for them to learn English at school and French at home.
When I first saw how some of these children were being discriminated,it wasn't really obvious to me what was happening.I've thought about it many times in the years since though,how that teacher really didn't treat those children right.We were playing at recess when one of the kids said something in French to another kid,who answered,also in French.There was a teacher standing nearby and she immediately came running over,as though there was a fight going on,and scolded the child speaking French saying that he could not speak French,as not all of the children could understand what he was saying.Why,I wondered were two French boys not allowed to have a private conversation between themselves.Children told secrets all the time and that never seemed to be any business of the teachers.But,because I spoke English,the whole incident made me feel somewhat superior to these other children,without realizing that this was unjustified,or without even understanding why.All I knew was that there was a somewhat favored status attached to being English among the teachers we were expected to respect.It took many years for me to unlearn this lesson.
Monday 24 September 2012
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