memoir chapter II-continued.

I wish I could remember the whole day that we came to Moncton.But in my mind,it's all in bits and pieces.I don't recall the trip down the coast at all,though I must have awakened in Redmondville,and we must have come down the coast in the family car.There must have been a moving van,but I don't recall seeing it,or any of the men moving our furniture.

We went to a supermarket at some time during the day.Of that I'm sure,because I can recall the huge sign above the plate glass windows.The letters were in red,the kind that light up at night.To me it was an amazing sight.I had never seen such a huge sign,or such large windows before.I could see everything and everyone inside the store as I waited in the car.People were coming and going and it was a bustling place with a lot of cars in the parking lot and carts full of groceries in brown paper bags.All the streets around were busy too.Having only lived in the country,I'd never seen so many buildings and cars and even busses in one place before.all the houses seemed very close together,and there were no barns.I recall wondering where we were going to put the chickens.

In my mind,our house,on the day we moved there looked very much as it does today.Red and white.It had wooden steps leading up to the door then,and a gravel driveway,but otherwise it was pretty much the same as it is now.there were two windows on one side of the steps,and one very large window on the other side.there was a screen door and a heavy wooden door inside of the screen one.The street in front was paved and the lawn was fully grown in with grass,but ours was the only street anywhere about that was paved.There were no willow hedges around the yard then either,nor do I recall a garden.The driveway went clear to the back yard and there was no garage or barns.In the back were three trees that seemed very large to me.Maples,though in reality they were not so large,even years later when they were cut down to make way for a garage.And we were surrounded by houses that looked just like our own,though there were some older houses around too.In those days,I guess,subdivisions were just built around existing houses,so,even though our neighborhood was new,there were some old houses around too.But the only differences between the new houses was the way in which they were placed on the lots.Some had the two bedroom windows on one side of the front entrance,while some had them on the other side.One or two of the houses were even turned end wise on the lot,but essentially,they were all the same.Well,they were different colors of course.There were no uniform builders colors back then.So the house across from us was pea green,and one just up the street was a bright yellow,like a lemon.

The mover must have been busy at our house when we first arrived in town.We were out for most of the day and it must have been to allow them to do their job.I don't recall how much furniture came with us from our old house and how much came from the furniture store,but there was furniture I'd never seen before when we came home that night.

One of the things our new hometown had was a park.A huge park,with swings and see saws and monkey bars and a wading pool.I'd never been to a park before,at least that I remember. Centennial Park(it wasn't called that then) was located in Moncton's west end,across a busy road from a place that sold Volkswagens.

All of that first day we spent in the park,swinging and riding the see saw and just running about.We brought food to eat at the picnic tables,but the pool was not opened that day.The park seemed such a fun place,and I really liked the hundreds of trees.My father would get on the big swing set,under some maples and swing up as high as he could and grab a leaf from the trees between his two feet.I tried to do that too,but it took me a few years before I was able to swing that high.

In one corner of the park there was a ride which everyone called the witches hat.It was called that because that is what it looked like.It was a sort of a carousel that you pushed with your feet while you sat on it's wooden bench.As well as going around it would also move in and out from it's center,so that it was higher on one side as it went around.It was,to a three year old,an exciting ride and perhaps just a bit scary as well.I rode it for what seemed like hours,but,as much fun as it was things  did not end well.Around the post holding it in place was a concrete pad,a few inches high.As I was riding around,my foot slipped into the middle of the witches hat and I scraped my ankle on the cement.There was a lot of blood,or so it seemed to me.The strange thing about the whole incident is the way I remember it.We were going around from left to right.Left to right?That would mean that the inside of my ankle was traveling away from the cement pad.But still I managed to hit it.Well,that's the way I remember it.It was the inside of my left ankle.But that seems to be improbable given the direction the thing was going at the time.In any event,it hurt and I was bleeding all over the place,though the cut could not have been bad.I'm certain it's not the first time I'd hurt myself,but its the first injury I can remember getting.I never forgot that witches hat,and was afraid to go on it for a few years.It was still there a couple of years ago,in pretty much the same place as it was then.That memory always comes back to me,vividly,as skewed as it seems,every time I go to that corner of the park.

Moncton also had another thing I'd never seen before.An ice cream parlor,located,it seemed,not far from the park,among some very large,very old looking buildings.It was in a little shack of a building.There were people lined up at it's windows waiting for the person inside to bring them their ice cream cones.Before we went home to our new house,we all had an ice cream cone.I don't recall what flavor I had,but my father got an orange one.Orange Pineapple,as it turned out.I've never known him to eat any other kind of ice cream.as a very small child,ice cream was more a matter of color than it was flavor.

We must have all been very tired when we got home that night.The day would have began with the eighty mile drive down the coast,then a visit to our new house and a trip to the supermarket,and likely some other errands as well.Then there was the afternoon in the park,which ended with a bloody foot,and the trip to the ice cream shop.It was still light when we came back to the house and I played for a while in the back yard,which was so very different from the driveway I used to play in before.There was a lot of grass,and trees all about.At the back corner of the yard there was a large pole with a clothesline attached.I tried to reach up to the clothesline,but I was too small.Just before we all went inside,I met the neighbors boy.He was much older than me,and I recall being told that his name was Danny.They lived in a green house.He had two older sisters too.

That night I don't recall going to sleep at all.Sleep must have come very suddenly.I don't recall which of the rooms I slept in.For my parents I'm certain it was a monumental day.they were young,with two small children,and about to spend their first night,with their family in their new home.I'm certain they were both proud of their accomplishments and looked forward to their coming life in this new community.

calgary-sunrise,36 street,northeast

memoir writers homework-moving day.

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.

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.

autumn colors calgary III

calgary/nose hill park II-early light

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.