The Power of Babble Siete: el Virus Edicion

My mother did everything around the house .. cleaned, did the laundry, hung the laundry out, brought it in and ironed it, cooked the meals, did the dishes, dried them, put them away, changed the bed clothing .. I think the old man might have done some grocery shopping ... other than that I can't remember him doing anything to help out .. I remember him hand grinding some hamburger ...so my mother was like a benevolent dictator ... If you have not figured it out there were no hugs in our household .. no 'I love yous' ... no unsolicited praise .. there was however constant attention to things that weren't right ... if I did something 90% right .. my mother would focus on the remaining 10% .. if I did it 99% right .. she would focus on the 1% .. and if 99.9% .. then the 0.1% ... I think her mother was similar .. but I am sure they both came hard wired that way ...  She loved her garden .. dahlias and begonias being huge .. both plants bein tubers requiring they be brought ...

Anybody reading this blog will have figured out quite quickly that this is not a linear story .. I don't know why ... but it feels better telling it that way ...  The next three memories all occurred very close to each other but I am not sure of the order .. so I have given order to them ... they may have occurred on the same day .. or a week apart .. or one of them maybe just a solitary memory that seems to fit .. that will be the 'kitchen one' ... There was a phone call .. someone at the cold storage where the old man worked looking for him ... I said I thought he was at work ... no ... he was dropped off earlier at his sister's place ... (I say sister .. he might have used cousin) ... just up the road and they just assumed he would be home by now ... he actually gave me the address and the name ... the old man didn't have a sister .. and I knew where he was ... this woman had come up in conversation before in the house .. don't know why ... but I was able to ...

I have already noted the old man never said anything about his family ... and as usual I never asked. It was even more unusual than that ... six of seven of them lived within five walking blocks of our house on City Line. The old man never took me to visit any of them and I only remember his half brother coming to the house once .. for what ... I do not know .. his half brothers son ran the cub troup and was involved in St Judes church so I would see him there .. when I was being forced to be part of either one. They remained a mystery to me .. and really still are .. and that is unfortunate. My mother's side of the family was just the opposite .. I knew who my mother's brothers and sisters were .. and all my cousins by name ... and most in fact ... I would see them in the summer ... and often we would be together in Nova Scotia at the old homestead where my mother spent her formative years .. there seemed to be beds for everyone ... and those times were the best my childhood w...

In the mid 90s ... I commissioned Ray Butler .. a Saint John historian and artist .. to paint a portrait of the apartment building my parents lived in on Rockland Road before and after my birth ... it stood perched high on a rock promontory overlooking Saint John Harbour .. I think the promontory was called Rockaberry Hill. Ray .. during Saint John's urban renewal phase in the mid to late 60s ... Ray took pictures of all the old wooden clapboard buildings .. and indeed streets and areas .. before they were all torn down .. the old area referred to as Portland completely disappeared ..there are actually a couple of web sites dedicated to preserving that area's legacy if you Google it. I wasn't nostalgic about the building and memories there .. so much as trying to jog some memories ... if I remember right .. to access the apartment building you had to enter through a very narrow driveway width lane between two houses which opened up once inside to a larger area in front of t...

Of all the toys and gifts I received at Xmas or birthdays or other occasions ... the guitar aside ... my favourites were a Yo-Yo ... a kite .. and a fibreglass bow ... I am reasonably sure it was Bernard who gave me my first Yo-Yo ... I was fascinated with it ... the fact that you could flick or toss this thing .. do a 'trick' with it .. and then have it return to your hand ready for the next 'trick' ... it was like perpetual motion ... there was a Yo-Yo rep that came to Anderson's store ... on the weekends I believe ... you did your 'tricks' and the winner would get strings .. Yo-Yos .. and a trick book that illustrated some of the harder routines .. I still have mine ... and I still enjoy playing with the Yo-Yo .. it's a solitary experience ... I don't remember when I received my first kite .. or who gave it to me ... they were available as kits ... reasonably straightforward to assemble ... all you needed was material for a tail to stabilize it .....

Of course with Xmas Day came the big meal .. turkey and all the fixings. My mother is a great cook ... let there be no doubt of that. I would say her specialty would be dessert and homemade apple pie would probably be on top of that list. She loves sweets herself after a meal so there was always dessert in the house. It must have chagrined her to no end that I was the fussiest of eaters. My diet was extremely narrow ... consisting mainly of canned spaghetti ... kraft dinner .. hot dogs ... grilled cheese sandwiches ... canned fruit ... cake or pie ... you stray outside that and I probably ate all around it ... I remember reading that children with the same behaviour patterns I had are 5 times more likely to be fussy eaters and restrict themselves to known favourites. Speaking of favourites ... my favourite meal was homemade baked beans .. with hashed potatoes ... hot dogs and freshly made buns and bread ... and I still make my own version of this meal to this day ... the fussy eating w...

Santa Claus has always been good to me .. in fact he ... the tooth fairy .. and the easter bunny .... have never  .. ever ... let me down. Every Xmas ... all you have to do is believe and the old boy comes through .. every single time. I have received some very interesting gifts from Santa over the years ... gifts that seemed to test the limits of my abilities ... gifts that in other hands would have sparked an educational or artistic endeavour .. but in my hands seemed to fuel something else altogether. The first such gift of this kind was a wood burning kit ... it consisted of small wood panels with lightly lined art work already outlined on them ... using a soldering iron like tool ... and different interchangeable tips .. .the idea was to burn in the lines in an artistic way such that you would have a framable piece of artwork ... I tried that for a while but found the tool was better used for burning through the torsos of my small plastic toy soldiers ... I don't know how many...

Other than traveling to Nova Scotia to visit my maternal grandmother .. I have no memory of any family outings together except on Xmas Eve when we would all go down City Line to Clarence Street to visit the old man's aunt ... Hazel Lundy and her son Joe .. Joe would have been in his mid 40s when we were visiting. Bernard would visit his mother and brother in the afternoon and then come up to our house to exchange gifts and then after that we would head out. This was one of my favorite parts of Xmas ... because Joe was a binge drinker ... and he spoke truth to power ... you did not want to tangle with Joe Lundy ... he had no fear ... and that is the strongest weapon in any physical or verbal battle .. and it being Xmas  .. Joe was sure to be drinking. Hazel had an artificial Xmas tree and it was Joe's job once a year to put that tree up in the foyer off the main entrance in this very small house. Now ...  the tree had taken a beating over the years ... because when Joe set it u...

If you go to Google Maps .. type in Saint John, NB .. and then zoom in on the west side .. look for Martello Tower ... you will see that it is basically a peninsula ... bounded on three sides by the harbour to the east .. Partridge Island and and the Digby Ferry to the southeast and Bay Shore/Bay of Fundy to the south. As a kid .. and whoever I was hanging with at the time until about 12 or 13 years of age .. this was our stomping grounds .. we roamed far and wide across this area on foot .. on tricycle.. and on bike. Back in the day the harbor and the sheds were not fenced in ... we could roam freely on the docks .. and we did ... before the ferry terminal for the Digby Ferry was built in the west side .. you can access that area of water and walk along to the causeway going to Partridge Island .. and just above the last section of beach before the causeway were old gunnery placements from the war ... and above that a gravel pit where there was an old road that ran down to the that ar...

When our house was being built on City Line ... and I believe this was the summer of 1955 ... at some point we moved in with Bernard Lundy's mother ... my father's aunt ... I don't have any sense of how long we stayed there before moving into the house ... Bernard's mother Hazel lived with her son Joe ... Joe was 16 years older than Bernard and was a force of nature ... like Xmas .. his part in this is coming ...  I remember being at the house when it was being framed .. the old man was obviously involved with working on it ... because I remember something had broken the lens in one of his glasses and he and another guy were trying to flush glass out of his eye ... I have a strong image of that .. I also remember a Mr. Peanut truck driving by and the old man yelling out to it .. I guess he knew the driver or hated peanuts ... It was around this time that I started lobbying for a baby sister ... now that idea had to have been planted in my head .. my mother must have bee...

The first real friend I can remember having was Ronnie Richard ... he lived 4 houses up the street ... the house was adjacent to a large marshy wooded area .. and that was adjacent to a ball field ... we roamed miles through there ... fire seemed to be a big matter of study for us ... we tried to burn everything .. rubber .. plastic ... of course we had fire crackers .. they came in a braided pack .. you could either light the whole pack off .. or peek them one by one and fire them off singly ... we might have a dropped a few through some door mail slots .. memory fades ..  I remember one time we were in the attic of his house and we had candles burning ... christ knows what we were up to .. the attic was full of dry wood and house was clapboard .. all wood .. if we had dropped those candles .. everything would have gone up in an instant inferno ... the landlord caught us in there and read us the riot act ...  I remember another time we made matchstick guns out of clothes pins...

During my time with my parents ... they never owned a car. They could not afford one .. and therefore could not afford to operate one. I don't know if anyone can appreciate or imagine how small your world is without a vehicle. You are dependent on public transportation, family, friends or taxis for getting about. Going anywhere required advance planning and it was a big deal. That said ... there was a grocery store just up the street .. Anderson's ... and another on St. James Street ... Young's ... the post office was further up the street run through another small store operation ... the bus stopped one house down ... so you could exist right there without ever leaving a 4 block radius .. and a lot of folks did just that .. that was their universe. I started Saint John High School in the fall of 1965 ... it was located in downtown Saint John .. to get there I had to take a city bus to Market Square .. get off .. and walk two blocks to school .. and reverse that coming home...

My father was raised as an Anglican ... my mother as a Baptist ... what is the Baptist ethos ... the fear that someone .. somewhere may be having fun ... 'our' church was literally just up the street .. St. Judes ... I have no idea what St. Jude did or didn't do ...  I can remember attending Sunday School ... which was just before Church proper .. I think ...  or it may have been during the service ... I am not sure ... I just had no interest ... dressing up in a small suit with a bowtie? ... and then listening to stories about what amounted to armed conflict .. plaques .. pestilence ... an angry supernatural force .. and a man who was hounded, betrayed and tortured to death .. I made up my mind early that whatever this was ... Santa Claus was far superior ... and he always came through on the 25th December ... but my mother did her duty exposing me to this part of life .. I was baptized .. and I took communion somewhere in the 12 - 14 year old period .. I still have the co...

Reading indeed fueled my escapism ... but my biggest reading guilty pleasure was ... magazines and comic books .. and by magazines I mean Mad Magazine .. Cracked .. and National Lampoon (this one a bit later) .. and by comic books I mean ... Disney ... Batman .. Superman .. and Marvel. While I loved to read .. my retention has always been lower than average ... so the books I read satisfied the moment ... but the visual frames of the comic books lasted a long, long time .. I don't remember the first comic book I read .. but I am willing to bet it came from Bernard Lundy .. where all such revelations were sourced ..  I remember having a box of them ... the box was the same size as the comic books plus 1/2 inch on each side plus about 12 inches high .. that made them portable .. which means I could take them with me if I wanted to trade them with someone .. which I did often ...  Now Marvel comics were like The Beatles ... there was music before The Beatles .. and then there was...

I may have given the impression that my life growing up was a living hell ... not really .. remember most of the strife came from who I was and how I accepted or didn't accept what went on around me. I always had clothes .. I always was well fed .. and I had a roof over my head .. a lot more than a lot of folks in Saint John could say in the North and South Ends and the West Side. So let me give you the good things .. good things that were good on their own .. not because everything else was so bad they were good .. but just plain good on their own .. between my birth and my 20th birthday.  The guitar I talked about .. the Sears one .. that was a damn good thing ... a guitar has accompanied me through life since then and has been a good friend ...  Reading was a great thing ... I have always enjoyed reading and learning since I was able to ... and I still do .. the best book I ever read? .. Godel, Escher, Bach .. not for everyone ... but we knew that by now didn't we? Movies w...

Lets see .. can we sum up 9 years at Beaconsfield School in one post? I think we can .. we will take in it thirds .. Grade 1 to 3 ... ages 6 - 9 ... 1956 - 1959 ...  I remember smelling the pulp mill at Reversing Falls for the first time in the Grade 1 classroom ... I remember an older teacher showing us how to walk like the queen .. toes forward .. feet pointing straight ahead ... I remember the Xmas pageants ... my favorite part of those years .. I was a Xmas tree in one .. I remember saying I didn't want to do it .. the teacher yelled do it .. and I immediately recited the rhyme .. she could barely stifle a laugh .. I learned to read and write ... and reading was a big deal for someone living in their head ...  Grade 4 ro 6 - ages 10 to 13 - 1959 - 1962 - I was getting tall enough that I stood out ... and I was becoming a target for teasing because of the size of my feet ... also negative body esteem kicked in ... large lower trunk body .. 90  weakling upper body ... m...

I attended Beaconsfield School in West Saint John from the fall of 1956 until June 1965 .. if we had lived on the other side of the street .. putting us in the 'west side' proper .. I would have attended New Albert School .. a closer walk and  .. I would not have to walk by the Catholic School. It was about a 20 minute walk .. the last third being all up the hill of fundy heights .. the highest point in that area of Saint John and the location of Martello Tower ... which overlooks the complete Saint John Harbour. I was a shy kid ... I was scared of anybody that represented an authority figure .. and at 6 years old that is just about everybody. I remember my mother taking me to the school and going inside this large old building ... and then being left there ... was this my new home? I remember the desk I had ... it had a rotten apple in it wrapped in kleenex I think. I just assumed it was supposed to be there .. and it would stay there until my mother came to school for a paren...

I dont' know how old I was when I started rocking myself to sleep ... maybe rolling is a better term ... to simulate this ... lay down on you bed ... if you are right handed you will roll to your left .. and vice versa .. roll over on your less dominat side, arm staright down beside you ... crook the right arm so your hand or fist is under your chin and now roll to your dominant side so you are on your side and then roll back ... keep doing this until you fall asleep.  I couldn't just lay there and go to sleep ... I needed to do this ... and it became quite humorous for family and family friends ... but when I did understand what I was doing .. it became not just a habit and a pattern but something I needed to do because I was afraid to go sleep ... so why would a young kid be afraid to go sleep ... let me give you a few reasons ...  1) the evening prayer ... 'now I lay me down to sleep .. I pray the lord my soul to keep .. if I should die before I wake .. I pray the lord m...

My parents lived in a small bungalow they had built in 1955 I believe ... moving from an apartment they had on Rockland Road ... the bungalow was on City Line ... the municipal bouindary between Saint John and Lancaster .. my father returning to the stomping grounds of his youth .. it was about a 15 minute walk from where he grew up ...  They slept in 2 single beds in a the master bedroom at the south side of the house ... the old man had a chest of drawers on his side of the bedroom .. my mother had a dresser and mirror on her side .. the two pieces didn't match ... metaphor I guess ... Every once in a while when my mother was gardening and the old man wasn't around I would rummage through the top drawer of his dresser ... there was all kinds of interesting stuff in there .. jack knives .. old coins .. tie clips .. cuff links .. old watches .. and .. two old cameras. I was infatuated with those cameras .. because they made the photos that I so enjoyed looking at ... the old al...

My father was a stationary engineer at the Cold Storage Plant in Saint John, NB .. it was part of the  CPR ... in West Saint John ... the West Side .. you usually worked for the railroad or were a long shoreman on the docks. I knew he worked for the CPR directly before moving to the cold stoarge operation ... but how I knew that ... I don't know ... he obviously got his engineer's ticket somewhere alomg the way and transferred but he never said and I never asked. I worked there for 2 summers and part of a third. I worked with a general handy man who did odd jobs around the plant keeping things in shape ... the plant mangers son worked there as well .. the old man tolerated the plant manager but couldn't stand the crew foreman .. who was always turning the screw into him .. I am sure it reminded him of home. The Plant Manager's son also worked there but doing his own thing .. he was a go getter and he and his older brother .. who worked in the office .. had rented a blue...

Before I venture any further ... let me say that this blog is not dedicated to slagging my mother and father .. it is my story .. not there's .. but naturally they play a large part ... I was screwed up enough on my own ... the only thing I can blame them for is my genetic make-up ... which I think plays a major part in this story ... let me give you an example ... The old man every once in a while would take it upon himself to try and repair something .. in this case it was a lawn mower ... now my head does not handle sequences or patterns ... or three dimensional space ... North .. South .. East .. West ... are simply concepts to me ... in first year university, we had to take drafting ... given objects to measure and then plot out in three views .. top .. side ..end .. I did it but with great difficulty. So my job in the lawn mower repair was to remember the order of the dismantling and therefore be able to pick the right part at the right time for re-assmebly ... and this was a...

I have always loved music ... I can remember the first song that made an impression on me as 'music' ... I was probably 1 1/2 ... 'Too Old To Cut The Mustard (Any More) ... I used to sing 'Bimbo' when trying to go to sleep ... and apparently I was a big fan of ... 'Its Amore' ... music was just there until for some reason .. years later ..  I locked on to Cliff Richard with, 'Bachelor Boy' .. I bought the single and played it on a portable record player I had .. I think I taped a nickel on the cartridge head to keep the stylus in the grooves ...  I am sure there were other singles that I purchased ... I don't remember ... everything changed with Ed Sullivan and The Beatles ... music was never the same ... I tried to scrape enough money together to buy the album ... bottle money ... shoveling snow ... that was huge for me being as shy as I was .. music must have emboldened me ... I didn't have enough money ... the big assist came from my fathe...

Yvonne and I were in Mexico from the end of January until mid-March earlier this year ... returning two weeks early becuase of the expanding Covid-19 pandemic. We left at the right time because the very next day, the bars and beaches where we had stayed (San Patricio de Melaque) were closed .. sheer blind luck. We quarantined for two weeks and it was during that quarantine that I decided to get serious about guitar and start studying it ... and so I did ... working on it for 4 hours a day. One day with an acoustic guitar I worked on finger picking ... starting with acoustic rock songs but then moving on to steady and alternating bass songs that most people will have heard over the years. On alternate days I work worked with an electric guitar ... dedicated to pentatonic scales, arperggios, guitar physical techniques of bending, hammer-ons, pull-offs, vibrato, etc. and memorizing notes and intervals on the fret board. Before recently returning to Mexico, I ordered two cheap guitars on A...