to contact him to see if he has any interest in that concept. We could recreate the worm scene in the bathroom with my mother. We could burn things up. The Scotch tape people could sponsor us.
Davey is my age, so I am sure he’s still somewhere out there in the world. Maybe he became a fire warden or a zookeeper. I highly doubt it, though. As you know, according to my mother he had a crazy mother, so that was half of his problem. I don’t know what the other half was. Well, Davey was the other half of the problem, and I think my influence was mixed up in there somewhere too.
When I feared losing touch with my friends after we moved, mom told me that Gary could come to visit us. She didn’t mention Davey. I think where we were going had way too many trees to risk allowing Davey and me to spend any kind of quality time together there. As it turned out, Gary ended up coming out to our new house only once or twice. I learned early on that people come and go in your life—and most often they go.
I don’t know how my parents managed to buy land in the country in the first place, because they didn’t have any money to speak of. My mom said it took them a whole year to pay off their Bay card after they maxed it out buying Christmas presents for us. This went on every year for about fifteen years. They never seemed to be able to get ahead. “We would just get the credit card paid off and it would be Christmas again,” she’d say.
My mom has always been very matter of fact. I have never had the sense that she felt sorry for herself about anything. Even though her young life was very hard and often lonesome, she never complained about the hand the universe had dealt her. My mom’s dadwas a miserable drunk who verbally and physically went after his wife whenever he came home plastered after a bender. Mom would always say that her dad drank all their money away and left them with nothing. They often had to scrape together meals and they seldom, if ever, bought new clothes or treats of any kind. Mom’s dad worked in logging camps way up north, and he dragged his family with him, literally to the middle of nowhere. In fact, they were even farther away from civilization than that!
There weren’t many other kids for my mom to play with in the camps. She told me that one of her favourite games when she was little was “funeral.” She’d wrap a stick up with some old cloth and deliver sermons. That always makes me feel so sad for her. I can picture her there, mumbling humble words over a little grave for a dead stick doll. My mom was witness to a very abusive relationship between her mother and father, but she simply refuses to dwell in the past. She throws her shoulders back and always faces forward.
I am the same way. Life is life. You just get on with it. You do what you have to do to make it work. My dad always said, “The harder you work, the luckier you get,” and I believe that with all my heart. My parents are the salt (and the pepper) of the earth.
I didn’t have a clue about how much money we didn’t have. They sold the house on Louise Road for $24,900 in 1971, which was a whopping $14,900 profit. I spend more than that on feminine protection every month. (Would someone please take my uterus from me and give me a new liver? My uterus is costing me a small fortune that could be going into buying wine.) I can’t even get my head around the fact that they bought an entire house for ten thousand dollars in the sixties. It doesn’t seem possible.
My parents purchased five acres of land just a few miles west of Calgary with the few thousand dollars they’d made on the sale of thehouse. Then they had to figure out how to pay for the new house they were going to be building. Interest rates were beyond out of control, and getting a mortgage from a bank was literally signing your life away. You’d be looking at a document that would basically say that you’d have your house paid off in sixty years. My parents
Davey is my age, so I am sure he’s still somewhere out there in the world. Maybe he became a fire warden or a zookeeper. I highly doubt it, though. As you know, according to my mother he had a crazy mother, so that was half of his problem. I don’t know what the other half was. Well, Davey was the other half of the problem, and I think my influence was mixed up in there somewhere too.
When I feared losing touch with my friends after we moved, mom told me that Gary could come to visit us. She didn’t mention Davey. I think where we were going had way too many trees to risk allowing Davey and me to spend any kind of quality time together there. As it turned out, Gary ended up coming out to our new house only once or twice. I learned early on that people come and go in your life—and most often they go.
I don’t know how my parents managed to buy land in the country in the first place, because they didn’t have any money to speak of. My mom said it took them a whole year to pay off their Bay card after they maxed it out buying Christmas presents for us. This went on every year for about fifteen years. They never seemed to be able to get ahead. “We would just get the credit card paid off and it would be Christmas again,” she’d say.
My mom has always been very matter of fact. I have never had the sense that she felt sorry for herself about anything. Even though her young life was very hard and often lonesome, she never complained about the hand the universe had dealt her. My mom’s dadwas a miserable drunk who verbally and physically went after his wife whenever he came home plastered after a bender. Mom would always say that her dad drank all their money away and left them with nothing. They often had to scrape together meals and they seldom, if ever, bought new clothes or treats of any kind. Mom’s dad worked in logging camps way up north, and he dragged his family with him, literally to the middle of nowhere. In fact, they were even farther away from civilization than that!
There weren’t many other kids for my mom to play with in the camps. She told me that one of her favourite games when she was little was “funeral.” She’d wrap a stick up with some old cloth and deliver sermons. That always makes me feel so sad for her. I can picture her there, mumbling humble words over a little grave for a dead stick doll. My mom was witness to a very abusive relationship between her mother and father, but she simply refuses to dwell in the past. She throws her shoulders back and always faces forward.
I am the same way. Life is life. You just get on with it. You do what you have to do to make it work. My dad always said, “The harder you work, the luckier you get,” and I believe that with all my heart. My parents are the salt (and the pepper) of the earth.
I didn’t have a clue about how much money we didn’t have. They sold the house on Louise Road for $24,900 in 1971, which was a whopping $14,900 profit. I spend more than that on feminine protection every month. (Would someone please take my uterus from me and give me a new liver? My uterus is costing me a small fortune that could be going into buying wine.) I can’t even get my head around the fact that they bought an entire house for ten thousand dollars in the sixties. It doesn’t seem possible.
My parents purchased five acres of land just a few miles west of Calgary with the few thousand dollars they’d made on the sale of thehouse. Then they had to figure out how to pay for the new house they were going to be building. Interest rates were beyond out of control, and getting a mortgage from a bank was literally signing your life away. You’d be looking at a document that would basically say that you’d have your house paid off in sixty years. My parents
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