City Slicker
Starting from the premise that I was born into a world about two sizes too large for my coping skills, it shouldn't come as any surprise that moving away from the backwoods of prairie farm country to the big city would be another mysterious adventure. It was more like a misadventure, which was kind of becoming normal for me. I was just barely getting a handle on all the trouble I could get myself into on the farm when dad ups and decides things might be better in the city for us.
Well, he had a point. He was thinking of my mom when he made up his mind. Having two kids who weren’t much help to the household and a brand-new baby to take care of wasn't his idea of how a woman who was even smaller than him should spend her life. What with an acre of garden to take care of, chickens to feed, a cow or two to milk, and now another mouth to feed it was getting close to the limit. Of course, he never discussed it with me. I might have advised him different. That being the case, he took a bus to town and stayed with a friend until he found himself a job and a place for us to live.
Needless to say, things didn’t get off to a good start. Dad was gone for an awfully long time - probably about three months or so. Well, he had a job soon enough. It was the war years so that every able bodied man available could get work. He worked in a foundry as a helper to start off with. All he did all day was shovel sand. Twenty-two hours on and twenty-two hours off, that was his shift. For the size of him, he was in way over his head, but that was dad for you. It seemed it wasn’t much of a challenge unless it was more than he could rightfully handle.
Finally he’d got enough money together and rented a house in the north end of the city. Next thing you know we’re packing everything up and moving in to town. I’m a little vague about that because as I said, some of these things were just a little out of my grasp.
But I clearly remember the day we got ourselves to the big city and to our new life. We were all at my grandparents’ place saying goodbye and waiting for the Greyhound bus to take us into town. My aunts and cousins were all there to see it and us off. It was kind of emotional and exciting at the same time as the big bus approached. That was exactly when my world started to unravel.
My Tante Lise says, “Well, you're not going to be a farmer anymore. Now you’re going to be one of those City Slickers.”
Oh my, how could she say such a terrible thing? I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about in her good-natured way, but how could she be so cruel? She might as well have driven a wooden stake through my heart as tell me I wasn’t going to be a farmer anymore. Didn’t she know that at the age of seven I was already half way there for criminey’s sake? I don’t think I made a scene or anything like that because I don’t remember any big ruckus about it. Finally we did get loaded onto the bus and headed for a new chapter in our lives.
In the big city, things didn’t get any better. In fact, they got a whole lot worse. Bag and baggage, we were unceremoniously dumped right in front of the old city hall. From there it was a walk of what seemed to me to be at least a hundred miles. Of course you couldn’t just go to the bathroom along the way either in the city what with houses and people all over the place. This was just not going well at all. It was just one long, miserable trek.
You’d think that once we got to our ‘new’ house, everything would be just fine. Well, wrong! Tired and hungry from all that good bye-ing, mom sought to make things right with our first city meal. We’d have some nice hot soup with bread and butter. That sounded comforting enough. Mom could make soup along with the best of them. Well, surprise! This soup came out of a can for heaven’s sake. I'd never heard of such a thing before. And that wasn’t the worst of it. It was pea soup - green pea soup! That's what it said on the label. What it looked like was ground up army pants or our new sister’s runny diapers. Anything looking like that couldn’t possibly taste good.
Bread and butter sounded more like something you could get satisfied with so I asked for some. Mom hauls out this package and pulls out a couple of slices of what she says is bread. Holy Toledo! It’s already sliced! Then she gets another package and peals it back to expose a lump of what she calls butter. Well, I never! Now to be fair in retrospect, this was our first day in the big city and even mom needed a little time to get herself organized. This alleged ‘bread’ was probably made out of the cardboard boxes the army pants pea soup came in according to my reckoning. Things were just going down hill at a serious clip.
Then there was school. Oh my, how I would ever survive that would be best left to providence. Of course we had to go to school. That was the law. Dad’s law was that you obey the law no matter what, so we somehow were registered in the closest school there was - St. Joseph’s catholic school. This was some sort of alien institution that reminded us of a place in the bible we weren’t supposed to talk about. The teachers were all women (at least we thought they were) dressed in these long black robes and hats pulled over their heads. All you could see of their mortality was the eyes, nose and mouth. They sure liked to pray a lot too, and sing Oh Canada and God Save the King. In between they would teach us sort of normal stuff.
They were mean there too. The very first day there, I had to miss recess twice because I was late getting to my classroom. When I explained that I couldn’t find the dad blamed thing, they didn't believe me. Heck, the biggest building I'd ever seen in my life was our barn and you could see how to get in or out and everything just by opening the dad-blamed door. This school building was like a maze with me as a brand new experimental rat. The simple truth was that every time I got in the front door, I was just plain lost.
Then there was these ‘catrol boys’. They were a bunch of older bullies who stood on the street corners at lunchtime and at four o'clock. They made you stand there on the corner until they said it was okay to cross the street. If you made a mistake and started crossing anyway, they yelled at you. These ‘catrol boys’ were sure bossy, but they looked good with their white belts and shoulder harness - almost like being a soldier. I'd sure have liked to get one of those harnesses.
The most terrifying thing came when one day I had managed to avoid being yelled at by the nuns and the ‘catrol boys’. Just when I was finally getting the hang of things, they sent us down to the gymnasium to watch a movie. Now you have to appreciate that I had never seen one of those before. I couldn’t have told you the difference between a movie and a nun for that matter. Well, the lights went down and this huge picture appeared on the wall - and the people in it were moving! There were a couple of guys on one of those railway jiggers, pumping the handles on it up and down for all they were worth. A giant train appeared out of a rock tunnel and was bound to mow them down in no time flat unless they could pump fast enough. I couldn’t bear to watch, and there was no escape for me. It was awful!
Things obviously didn’t go that smoothly for my folks either. To start with, our rented house was not, to say the least, Buckingham Palace. It was right next door to the main CPR Railway lines, which will give you some idea of the noise adjustments we had to make. Not only that, but mother’s English was even worse than mine. That made it all the more difficult for her to get her household in order. I guess she and dad must have had a little chat because it wasn’t long before we were out of there and in the upstairs of a quasi rooming house right across the street from a regular school. The landlady was a Mennonite woman, so at least mom could communicate with her.
Now this had possibilities, I thought. The first morning we were awakened by a commotion out on the street below at about six o'clock. When we peeked out of the window, there was a whole column of army recruits marching in formation. Holy cow - real soldiers! Now this was more like it!
That street, it turned out, was good for much more excitement than soldiers. I had made a friend in no time and he liked to play in the schoolyard across from our house. When he’d call, I’d run across to join him, never thinking about the cars squealing their brakes to avoid splattering me all over the pavement. Some would say I had a guardian angel watching over me, but I think now in hindsight, the poor unsuspecting car drivers had their own guardian angels to prevent them from turning me into road kill and ruining their day. The ever-present danger of this just never dawned on me.
The thing that got my attention finally, was the chain link fence around the schoolyard. Usually, after running blindly across the road, I would obediently walk to the open gate to get into the playground area. My friend saw the folly in this waste of steps and convinced me to just climb over the fence. Well, you must know that an eight-foot chain link fence is no match for a seven-year-old farm boy. It wasn’t until I got to the top that I ran into a problem. Somehow my left hand got stuck on it. Quite naturally, instead of looking to see what the trouble was, I started to yank and pull until it got unstuck. I was about to go over the top when I noticed a whole lot of blood coming from the stuck hand.
Blood oozing from parts of your body - that spells trouble! I knew that much. What I couldn’t figure out was that there was no pain. That wasn’t normal. The only thing to do was head for home. Across the street I went with my eye on our front door. The cars that had to squeal their brakes were of no concern to me. Neither was the substantial trail of blood. What was on my mind was that I’d messed up again, and now I’d be in for it.
As luck would have it, mom was at the store and my long-suffering sister was in charge. Well, her and blood outside the body never did get along very well at the best of times. Now here she was with a sleeping baby to look after and now a broken brother who had blood where it hadn’t ought to be. I probably felt sorry for her even then ‘cause she couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Mercifully, mom finally got home and soon figured out that I’d skewered my hand on the top of the fence where it had been cut, leaving sharp barbs sticking up. What with all that pulling and yanking, it had gone from a simple puncture to a tear that resembled the outline of a slingshot. Well, within a couple of days my whole hand and wrist were all swollen with the telltale red streaks indicating blood poisoning. Old Doc Oelkers managed to patch it all up and give us some medicine for the blood poisoning and the whole affair was more or less behind us.
There was something sinister about this place too - just like the place on the farm near that Indian burial mound. First I got punctured on the chain link fence, then another time when mom was trying to have a visit with an old friend of hers, I accidentally sat on the crochet work she had left on the couch and ended up with a crochet needle stuck in my rear end. Getting that out of me was a whole lot more painful than the fence incident, probably because the ladies were trying not to laugh at the sight of me.
Well, the place held no magic for mom either. The landlady might well speak our language, but she and the other boarders weren’t fussy about a baby crying at night. To show her disapproval she would leave the floor in front of our rooms soaking wet every time she washed it. If you weren’t careful when you went out in the hall, you could have an embarrassing fall. That wasn’t the worst of it though. Mom could put up with grouchy people who didn’t have the courage to tell you what they thought. But she was terrified of the kitchen stove. The place was equipped with central gas and every time you needed to light the dad-blamed thing it would make a poof kind of sound as it flamed up. That was just too spooky for her. I think she and dad must have had another chat.
Of course dad had another solution. He had the uncanny ability to ignore the fact that he’d fallen short of the mark again and optimistically searched for new answers until he got lucky. Not that mother would ever put him down for some of his colossal misadventures. There were lots of things they didn’t have, but devotion to one another wasn’t anything they were ever short of.
Well by this time dad was already an apprentice molder. Firstly, he was starting to earn a decent wage - somewhere in the neighborhood of forty dollars a month. Not only that, but he was also working a regular shift fit for humans. So he splurged and rented a house in the suburbs for twelve dollars a month. The place had a yard and everything. There was a little garden that pleased both of them no end. Unfortunately it also had a lawn that I was in charge of. How many hours didn’t I spend on my knees with the hand clippers to keep it in order? But that was just one of the chores. We also had to haul our water from two blocks away at the municipal pump, chop our own firewood and haul our own coal. As I say chores are chores. They are like breathing. You got to do them anyway so what’s the point of grumbling about it? There were much bigger things to think about anyway. Adventure lay around every corner. There was enough room here for a person to focus on the important things in life.
For once dad got it exactly right too. Mom was back to her wood cook stove with its water reservoir and warming oven. Now she could make a decent meal and start baking again. It wasn’t long before the normal thing around our house on Sundays after church was a house full of dinner guests.
It had been a bumpy start to this monumental change in our lives. I never really did get over not being a farmer anymore, but I soon forgave my Tante Lise. After all, I got to spend a lot of my holidays back there anyway. Not only that, but our place was also a safe haven in the big city for her kids. Come to think of it, we kind of ended up with the best of both worlds. Maybe our dad was just a little bit wiser than we gave him credit for.
