Chapter 2

Hal and I were both average middle children in a family of three well spaced offspring and statistically we were cinches to raise two-point-two children, drive a navy blue sedan and play Canasta every Tuesday night. Listen, in time we had a shot at all those things; but we skimmed over the ‘point two’ so quickly, we were forced to consider buying a station wagon or a bus unless we wanted to make two trips, and we lost the energy to play cards or do anything that required thinking after nine o'clock at night.

We were raised in adjoining Vancouver neighborhoods and shared many of the same friends, although we never met until we were grown. All of us kids knew how to make slingshots out of forked branches, fastening them with red rubber bands cut from old inner tubes. We played in the plentiful vacant lots, building forts and preparing for battles. The fun was in the preparation, so we didn't actually spend much time at war. Our parents seldom intervened and children were left on their own a lot, despite what you might have read.

We knew that wearing your rubbers or gumboots all day in the house or school could affect your eyesight permanently and I know my mother tried the cabbage patch birthing theory on me because I used to leave my dolls out in the vegetable garden under the cabbages at night. In the morning I was bitterly disappointed to find the dolls hadn’t become live babies. And if you caught measles, and everyone did, you had to rest quietly in a dark room and avoid reading or you might lose your eyesight. My mother also solemnly told me that swallowed cherry pits would sprout in my throat and eventually cherry leaves would grow. And gum—if you swallow gum it sticks to your stomach lining forever and impedes digestion.

About those gumboots; eventually they developed a leak, generally at the toe end and my big brother was delegated to patch it. He’d take a piece of that everlasting red inner tube and glue it to the leak. This red patch was mortifying to me and I can’t recall anyone else suffering that fate. Everyone else had black patches or replaced the boot, I was never sure which it was. On rainy days, when I needed the boots, I’d find a big Maple leaf and plaster it to the patch and then shuffle along carefully to school.

Our mothers were home coping with ice- boxes and wringer washers and waiting for the Chinese greengrocer to come by the back alley in his ancient model T Ford with the back part cut out to resemble future flat bed trucks. The fish man came on Tuesdays in his old modified Ford and the bread man and milkman came every day with their horse-drawn carts. Mr.Philps, who lived two doors away used to run out with his dustpan and broom to collect the horses’ leavings for his garden. The rag and bones man called his arrival with his horse drawn cart, down the back alley. No one ever seemed to stop him because we wore our clothes until they turned themselves into dust cloths and bones went into the soup pot.

In my mother’s circle, it was assumed that if a woman worked outside the home it was because her husband couldn’t support the family on his own. They said to one another proudly, “My husband wouldn’t think of letting me take a job.”

Mom had a maid until the onset of World War Two so she managed to get away to play bridge once or twice a week and attend frequent tea parties. Our maids never wore a uniform but we hadn’t reached the democratic manner of all eating together. She ate her meals in the kitchen and came to take away plates when Mom rang the little hand bell on the table.

For a long time I was the only girl in the neighborhood and I spent a lot of time in my room
writing stories and poems, drawing and planning an adult life with plenty of children, although I don’t recall that a husband fitted into my plans.

There was always a tiny store standing kitty? corner to our schools, run by a husband and wife who blended in comfortably with the rows of boxed cereals and tins of beets. The big attraction for us was the candy display by the cash register where we bought jaw breakers and gum balls for a penny. If you gambled your nickel allowance on an all day sucker you might win a lucky coupon tucked under the wrapper, entitling you to a second sucker.

The girls traded theirs for tasseled hopscotch beads which someone's fond aunt had painstakingly fashioned out of sparkling jet beads. I remember thinking it would be exciting to have a glamorous aunt who wore those flashing, daring earrings.

The boys negotiated their extra suckers for lacrosse balls or better still, golf balls cadged from the nearest unprotected golf bag. They bounced smartly if you exerted every scrap of muscle power, and later you used your jack knife to peel them open, gushing out worm?like strings of rubber.

One ritual was still going strong when I had children. Each spring, on exactly the same day through some mysterious unspoken, unseen signal, children set off for school in the morning with a drawstring bag full of marbles, the bags hurriedly stitched together the night before from an old pillow case in a solid color. Any mother who produced one with stripes or worse, flowers, would carry her shame to the grave.