The street where we lived:
My house, ever and always:
It was blue when we lived there. Scott is on the upper left. He let me read a story of his there, about a man granted immortality by some Robert Howard-like eminence. Then said eminence lopped the man's foot off. I remember well how Scott described that foot, spinning and spraying off into the corner. "Enjoy your eternal life," sneered the demi-divinity.
Whoa! A brutal genius in our midst. Evidently with a degree of ambivalence on the subject of religion!
Lisa is in the middle, Susan on the right, eventually to be joined there by Sharon. Lisa was my friend, when she wasn't intermittently playing the role of antagonist. She had a sweet, crinkly smile, a sweet, crinkly personality. I'm afraid that we did sometimes send her running down the darkened upstairs hallway, shooting hockey elastics at her bottom. Susan seems a more distant presence, off on her own probably, dreaming about Dale Salmon.
The vegetation has advanced. The boreal forest! Let's get a load of that lawn, or at least part of it:
That's the living room, through that bow window there. The site of a lot of piano practicing! Piano playing too, eventually, for pleasure. That console stereo and the record cabinet. Lying in front of the heat register on a winter morning, listening to the CBC before it was tie for school. Or to Eskimos games on CJCA, on a darkening late fall Sunday evening. Or working our way through Mum and Dad's lp's. Or bringing our own music upstairs from the basement.
Blessed, blessed nerf hockey!
And every Sunday, post-roast beast, putting on one of those Funk & Wagnalls classical albums, arranging the pillows just so on the big chesterfield, lying down beneath one of Grandma Duncan's beautifully fashioned afghans, and drifting off for as long as I wanted ...
The driveway:
Hockey! Shooting at or defending one of a series of nets, with a series of sticks, and tennis balls. A variable array of combatants. But first and last and always, Brother Scott.
Also, just as much, we shoveled, to clear space, or at the behest of the Patriarch. In 1973 we had nine feet of it. Scott and I, down the centre, then one on one side, and one on the other.
More kids? Make it street hockey, right here:
Remember that time our neighbour David Boake tripped me, and I rolled over and whacked him on the ankle with my stick, really hard? And his dad came out and yelled us?
Here's the back, from one of the broad expanses of public land that stretched out behind us, to the north toward and around the ravine (of which more, later):
Do I remember a hedge back here? I remember mowing! And playing, endless games of catch/CFL/dynasty. With Scott of course. Catch with our ball mitts. That crazy throwing a golf ball game, trying to sink it in the hole Scott made with his knee when I managed to tackle him one wet day.
The folks' room on the upper left, and mine on the upper right. Dad's den in the middle.
Dining room, down below to the left. Prime rib, of course. Plus the miseries of Chemistry 20 and 30 (flunked it twice!), and of Math 13, 23, 33 and 30. An expanded kitchen window in the middle. Brutal winter mornings. Or luminous winter mornings. Deer and rabbits and a bunch more sometimes surprising fauna in the back yard. Porridge, with the brown sugar dispersing in it. School lunches, prepared and eaten at home, while Mum read to us books that were sympathetic to socialism ...
The family room, lower right. An oft-used fireplace, and Dad's recliner. Hockey Night in Canada, and Star Trek, Walt Disney, The Beachcombers, and Coming Up Rosie. And Aunt Maude's Charles Dickens books. A VCR! Christmas.
P.S. The phone number was 403 434 0528.
