Generation X A Nonfiction Blog

May 13, 2012, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

Tall Trees

One summer when we were up at Sakinaw Lake, Mom explained to us that there were some tall trees behind the cabin, and that the next day there were going to be some loggers come by to top the trees, otherwise they would risk the cabins nearby, namely ours, our Uncle’s and a couple others. The trees were not that close to the cabins, but they were in the actual forest area behind it, set back which was pure trees, pure forest. The trees were so tall, not like any tall tree you would get chopped around home. They were kind of cranky looking, missing quite a lot of branches and stretching way into the sky where only the seaplanes and the eagles went.

So the next day the loggers were there, and they would have come in a boat, because that was the only access to the cabins. There were no roads. On that day Mom said we could take the paddle-wheeler across the lake and sit across on the big rock across the Bay and watch the loggers fall the trees from there in the sun.

The big rock was only accessed by us by paddlewheeler or canoe. If you were my older cousin, (I had a couple, and one was 10 years older) then you could swim to the rock and back to the dock again, because you were showing off. Or something that made me even more envious, was that when they swam to the rock, then then climbed up on the rock, sat down and had a rest in the sun, then dove off the rock and swam back again.

The big rock was covered with moss, and had a smooth rounded sloping face, with easy ridges to climb. It grew warm in the sun, and you could see the peeling bark of the arbutus trees as you climbed up the side of it. In those days, Mom used to take arbutus branches and macrame owls and things onto them and then hang them in the cabin, or, sometimes hang a plant from them.

The paddlewheeler was a large boxy thing, painted bright yellow, with a long yellow box on each side that it floated on, a seat in the middle for everyone to sit on, and then there were pedals to push to make it move, and a lever to steer it. I can’t remember what time it was, in the middle of the day, and it was sunny, that we got into the paddlewheeler, probably with something to drink and some sandwiches, and paddled across the bay to the rock. There was three of us, so one of us didn’t have to paddle, and that probably was me, so that I just sat on the paddlewheeler bench with my life-jacket on. And probably not a lifejacket that I liked. It was probably the one that was like a red pillow with a hole stuck in the middle.

The lake water amazed me, it was always so dark, almost like black velvet, and I knew that at the bottom of the lake it wasn’t like a swimming pool, there was a layer of old trees, who knows how old the branches were or how long they were down there for, or how they got down there in the first place. Sometimes, if I was playing by the dock, and I concentrated, I would grab onto the ladder on the dock and sink down with my eyes open and try to see the bottom of the lake, and I could see some of the slimy grey branches, because it was more shallow there, but farther into the lake it was deep. I would also sometimes see little schools of tiny fish. And no matter how sunny the day was, the lake water was always like dark velvet.

At the rock, there was an old rope that was tied to the pole on the seat of the paddlewheeler and we just tied it to an arbutus tree with a fisherman’s knot. And the paddlewheeler just sat in the water waiting for us, occasionally making a bit of a squeeking noise, with being tied to the tree, or brushing up against the side of the lake or something.

So we climbed the rock, so we could have a view, and we could see the tall tops of the trees, all scraggly towering above the others, and the sound of the chainsaws. There were two trees that would be trimmed. And when the top of the tree fell, it made a sound like someone smashing an enormous pile of peanut brittle with a mallet. Sort of a muffled crashing, and I was imagining what I couldn’t see – the tree top (which was about the size of a normal tree) falling below the tree line, and how it fell onto the forest floor. And the gap in the sky which was now blue.

And later when I was asleep that night, it was the longest sleep, in my sleeping bag, the zipper pulled up, in the bottom bunk, in the little green cabin with the white face, and the footworn paths still leading from the little cabin’s door to the dock past the firepit and to my uncle’s cabin past the huckleberry bush, the lake still velvet and quiet at night, and the forest sleeping too, only a little shorter in places.

April 29, 2012, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

Black and White

Categories: England, Poetry Writing, Travel
Tags:: Catherine Byron, Heptonstall, Lumb Bank, Mahendra Solanki, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes

Lumb Bank

I am sitting on the couch looking through the photos I took in Yorkshire when I went to that poetry workshop and feeling like I want to throw them out. I know I shouldn’t throw them out. Why should I? They were nice photos of the Yorkshire countryside, taken with black and white film. They were more than nice – they were bleak, and you could see the textures in all the stone and the trees. The skies didn’t look happy in the photos, but that made the photos even more moody and spectacular. Even if I felt like throwing them out now, even if it did make me feel better now, and for a while later, like I was getting rid of baggage, I knew one day I wouldn’t feel that way. This is back in Cheshire when I am thinking all this, probably about 2006.

Heptonstall Old Church around 1890 (from the tower of the new church)

Why should I throw them out? It was a memorable, productive workshop, and a wonderful opportunity. It was a Arvon workshop in the fall of 1992. I had gone to a part of the world I had never been before, had an opportunity to stay in an 18th century house, originally a mill owner’s house, where the late Ted Hughes once lived, and was able to see the resting place of one of my favourite poets, Sylvia Plath, at the churchyard nearby. I had read most of her poetry, most of the books written about her, and The Bell Jar.

Painting of Lumb Bank that hangs in the house

I had also met two interesting poets who were tutors, and who were influential to me, and who had made the experience at the Arvon Workshop well worth the while. Catherine Byron, a poet from Ireland, who gave me the tip of which University to take Creative Writing in England (I had started a Creative Writing degree at UBC when I had left Canada). I had also later interviewed her in Leicester, when I was working on a project at University as to why women poets began to start writing poetry.

In fact, I discovered, a lot of the women poets I interviewed, began to write seriously after the death of their father.

Sylvia Plath's grave at Heptonstall Cemetary

The other poet who was a tutor there at Lumb Bank was Mahendra Solanki, who teaches at Nottingham Trent University. Mahendra was the tour guide who escorted the students who wanted to go on the half mile walk up to Heptonstall to see the church there and Sylvia Plath’s headstone. On our walk up the road to Heptonstall we were discussing poet’s ambition, and how it fades as one gets older, and the demands of family – of which I didn’t have then and still don’t. Mahendra was born in Nairobi to Indian parents, and his poetry was an cultural eye-opener to me.

I had an adventure, venturing into an area of England I hadn’t been before. To get to Yorkshire I took the train from Buxton, and then got off at Piccadilly in Manchester and transferred across to Victoria Station, to take the train to Yorkshire, on the line to Leeds. I had to get off at Hebden Bridge and then find my way to Lumb Bank. I was in a new situation, new place, with people I hadn’t met before where there were writing exercises and you had to share and be quite open with people you didn’t know well, so it was challenging in a good way.

In actual fact, I remember what the countryside looked like there pretty well, and I can now find photos, which were similar to those I took that day by looking on the internet, so it’s not that I’m afraid I’ll forget what Heptonstall or the countryside looks like.

Heptonstall Old Church

The truth is, that at the time, I was seeing somebody, who I had started to see a short time before I had gone to the workshop. I ended up going out with him for a year and a half, before a break-up which was quite painful to me. So on the way to the workshop, on the train, as I looked out the window onto the moors, despite the fact I was seeing someone, and it was a new relationship, I still felt alone. I guess I blamed my loneliness on the landscape, and maybe I thought I was still getting used to being away from Canada.

That day, I did throw out those photos, and on that day I did not have the buffer of a relationship, and I guess I was in yet another awkward time of my life, when I thought I would feel better without the memories.

I think the issue was that when I threw away those photos, I was being impatient with myself, and I wasn’t giving myself time to heal. I had cheated myself of the chance to look at the photos one day, like today, at another awkward time of my life and appreciate them for what they are, and what the experience was.

Ted Hughes’s brother to publish memoir(guardian.co.uk)
Sylvia Plath – a poet to remember(sheisnotfrench.wordpress.com)

April 28, 2012, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

Suckered in, set up…

Categories: Crescent Beach, The Seventies

In the first neighborhood that I ever lived in, there were some other kids on our street, next door, that we sometimes hung out with. Two boys about the same age as us, maybe a little older. One was called David, I can’t remember the name of the other one, Anyway, across the street from them was a family that also had at least one kid. I didn’t really know this other family, I know there was a boy who seemed older than me, he seemed quite tall (at least to me). I remember his mom wore a red handkerchief on her head quite a lot, but that was the style back then and I know I often saw my Mom wearing a blue one a couple of times, like when she was doing chores around the house, or sometimes when she went out grocery shopping.

I remember the woman across the street to be tanned and quite slim. I know I thought I never saw her looking especially happy, nor would I describe her as having a sweet face – I guess I would describe her as being rather harassed looking, but then I was only 3 or 4 then. They had a fairly large yard with a wooden picnic table and a place to hang laundry and a fence around part of it. Right by their house there was the bushes which led down to Crescent Beach area, and my friend Colin’s house.

It was a very sunny day. I was on the street, probably playing with rocks or something. I noticed it seemed that the people across the street with the older boy were having some type of a picnic, maybe it was a birthday party or something. They had all the stuff for hotdogs on the table, hotdog buns, ketchup, mustard, relish, chips and pop. All the stuff was sitting there, but people must have been inside the house. The yard was deserted.

So David came up to me, where I was playing with rocks on the street, or drawing with a stick on the road’s shoulder or whatever I was doing, and said he wanted me to do something. I wasn’t too happy about this at the time, as I usually like people to tell me about things before they ask me to do them. I didn’t know what he had planned. He took me over to the deserted yard across the street, to where the picnic table was, and picked up the jar of mustard from the table. He then called me into the trees and opened the jar of mustard. I asked what he was doing. He picked up a lump of dirt from the ground, told me to take it and to put it in the mustard jar. I had no clue what I was doing, but I put the dirt in the mustard jar. He handed me some more dirt, and told me to put it in the jar, which I did. The jar was then full of quite a bit of dirt. At that point, the woman came out of the house and saw us there in the trees.

She approached us, took the mustard jar out of my hand, looked in it, aghast with anger and said, “Why did you do that?” I was speechless and embarrassed. I had no clue why I had done it, and here I was the one getting into trouble. I just looked at her and said nothing. Anyway, we all got out of there, I went home, I presume Mrs. “So-and-so” went to get some more mustard, I don’t know, maybe she had an extra jar in, or at least the corner store was about a 50 yard walk up the street. Anyway, that smarted. I don’t know how I had got suckered into that one.

April 27, 2012, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

Some days…

Categories: Rant, Running

A few years ago I had moved in with my partner at the time I had noticed the inside of the front door of the house, in the hall, was covered with a thick plastic and stapled all around fairly roughly, so as to keep out the cold, but it was all rather ghastly to look at. I said to him, “What, you just plastered all that plastic all over it and didn’t care what it looked like?” He said, yes, he did that at a time when he didn’t care.

Well sometimes lately, I know how he feels.

Which is probably why I don’t really care if I wear a lot of black lately, and I don’t really care if I wear my cowboy boots a lot as long as they don’t have holes in them, and sometimes I have to wear them even if they are like that. And I don’t really care if I’m wearing any colour with the black for god sakes. And as I work my ass off running up all the hills in New West, and my ass isn’t hanging down to my knees, there’s probably a good chance that I’ll be wearing leggings again this summer because they are $15 instead of the $70 for pants, or the $500 it takes to put an outfit together with a skirt and the rest of it. And I don’t really care if I’ve worn the same $15 cardigan from Rickis practically every day for the last 2 years, because at least I like it and for a change I’ve got my money’s worth.

Sometimes my care account is quite overdrawn like my bank account. I don’t care if the kitchen is messy or if my bed isn’t made. Sometimes I try to eat healthy, when actually I’d rather just have a hotdog.

Am I happy sometimes. Yes. Am I sad sometimes. Yes. Am I angry sometimes. Yes. I don’t know why people aren’t allowed to be angry. Supress anger it becomes depression. I know what depression is. I know what can happen from that.

So I don’t know why we aren’t allowed to be angry, or bitch about things, as if everything that comes out of our mouths has to be neutured in some way. Or someone who says, “Maybe you should go talk to someone,” so I can have some miserable faced counsellor tell me shit about my grandparents dying which I could have figured out writing a poem for 5 minutes. Or for some doctor can prescribe me an anti-depressant after talking to me for 10 minutes because, “Yeah you’ve got enough trigger points there.” Never again.

Will there be a time when I will care more? Yes. Am I grateful I am not dead, or have cancer, or live on the street, or without a job when I need it, or disabled or any of those things. Yes, most of the time.

Yes the ideas are all very nice, the bikes and the backpacks, and the bright rubber boots. But has anyone seen my bank account lately? If I was my bank account I’d run away from home. I’d run off to Switzerland.

So before you decide to put any american-actor-like-Kevin-Costner- voiced types along my running route grumbling at me, just be glad I was in a hurry to beat my time and get ready for work that day, or they will be the ones that are sorry.

Or pick on someone who makes 100k a year and can afford to live in this city. Or just give me the $300 so I can afford to get a new pair of glasses.

And you know what? I will be drinking beer this weekend, because I can.

Happy Friday Folks!! Go Philly!

April 19, 2012, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

What’s Going On

Categories: Crescent Beach, Local History, Music
Tags:: Alexandra Orphanage, Camp Alexandra, Marvin Gaye

Picnic at Camp Alexandra in the 1920's

It was April 1, 1984, and my friends and I were at Camp Alexandra in Crescent Beach. It was a school event. We were camping there for several days. We weren’t counselors there yet but would be next year, when we were in Grade 10 and the whole idea of that amazed me, because we had never been in charge. I was 14 at the time, 3 months before my 15th birthday.

The Camp had been there in Crescent Beach for years. I can remember my mom taking my sister to Camp Alexandra for dance lessons when we were both small, me tagging along so that I wasn’t left behind at the house, and I can remember my sister finishing up her highland dancing class or whatever it was, as I waited till she got her stuff together. And I used to see the Camp all the time when I went to music lessons every week at a house near there in Crescent Beach. I remember the dark shingled buildings, the wall around the camp, and a flagpole that stood in the middle.

I had never realized the history of the camp when I was staying there. The camp had originally been started in 1916 as a summer camp for children from the Alexandra Orphanage in Vancouver, which was originally on the corner of Homer and Dunsmuir. It also assisted needy mothers and children from Vancouver, allowing them a place to go on vacation, when they couldn’t have afforded to go elsewhere.

Children and mothers waiting for train at Crescent Station.

In 1925 it was used as the first camp for delinquent boys, 9-12 year olds, 60% of them being repeat offenders. Unfortunately though, as the area expanded, there was some class prejudice between the people who were summer residents in cottages in the area, and the orphans and poor people. Sadly, the summer residents didn’t want their children mixing with the orphans that attended the camp.

Over the years the camp expanded the opportunity to attend to others. In 1960, 72% of the children at the camp were from low income families or from broken homes. It eventually became a neighborhood center.

The four or five days we were at camp, we stayed, two or more of us in each cabin. I had brought magazines – Seventeen and Glamour, and had kept them under my bunk. I was in a cabin with two close friends. I remember we were fed well, gossiped and laughed lots, and probably had to wake up too early.

There were two things I can’t forget about that stay at Camp Alexandra. The first was that we were there on April Fool’s Day and on that day our camp counselor had been a victim. We had toilet papered her car and we all thought this was hilarious. The car was parked outside of the camp wall by the road. I had never toilet papered a car before, and I felt kind of guilty for doing it, but it was funny. Also, I think there might have been a bit of rain that morning which would have made the toilet paper stick to the car.

Marvin Gaye

Secondly, it was the day that I heard that Marvin Gaye had been shot. I remember I had just crossed the lawn and was going into my cabin. The toilet-papering had already happened, and I was probably coming back from breakfast from the main building. We had a radio on in the cabin, and someone had left it on. And as I walked up the steps, I heard them say that Marvin Gaye had been shot. The broadcaster was explaining what was happening and said that there had been an argument and that Marvin had been shot by his father. It was the day before Marvin’s 45th birthday. I was stunned by this news and told my friends about it when I saw them.

I guess I was shocked by the tragedy of it all. Marvin Gaye had come from an violent childhood where his father had been quick to strike his children, he had been depressed as a child and afraid he was going to become a statistic. Back then it was his mother’s encouragement to pursue his music that saved him. Gaye’s father eventually left his job as a minister, couldn’t keep a job and developed alcoholism which made for a difficult home life for the family. This eventually led to Marvin running away to join the Air Force to be a pilot. However, as he had begun to hate authority, he found he wanted out and rather amusingly, faked mental illness in order to get out of the Air Force.

In the lead-up to his death there seems to have been a decline in mental and physical health for Gaye due to life stress and perhaps other things. There had been a string of arguments with his father. The shooting had happened when Marvin had tried to intervene in an argument between his parents, and his father had shot him. Marvin’s father was eventually charged with voluntary manslaughter, as it was found out that Marvin had beat his father (Marvin Sr.) before he was killed.

I never went back to Camp Alexandra after that. We went to another camp when I was a counselor the next year. Luckily the camp was not on April Fools Day so I was safe. It seems in my life I’ve been listening to the radio when I have heard about things that have impacted me and stick in my mind. Now, I read them on the computer, and I know where I am when I find things out now – at the computer. I don’t know how I feel about this, and I guess it is just how our tools of communication have changed.

Reading about the history of Camp Alexandra, I found out that apparently social workers took notes on each camper to submit to the Family Welfare Bureau. One of the assessment notes described a young girl who, “sucks hair and wears bathing suit under dress to meals…”. The social worker was probably just making observational notes, but I laughed at how judgmental they seemed of this poor child. If the Camp hadn’t existed thousands of disadvantaged children and families would not have been able to enjoy any type of vacation.

As for Marvin. Thanks for your music. Almost 30 years later it still keeps me going.

Stand By Me – Marvin Gaye(dfolstad58.wordpress.com)
Happy Birthday Marvin Gaye!(hellobeautiful.com)

April 17, 2012, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

Safe and a porch-light

Categories: Music, The Eighties
Tags:: 54-40, Ater All, Grapes of Wrath, The Waterwalk

When I was 18 I was living in White Rock and had finished school, had finished working at McDonalds that summer at Expo ’86 which was my first job. I was then working in White Rock, part-time at Muffin Break, and also at a gift shop in the mall. At the time I had tried briefly to get into modeling. I had taken a course, and had done a couple of fashion shows and had put some pictures together. I had even been in a mall once where Monika Schnarre’s agent was and I asked her if it was worth while me trying to get into it, and she said yes. So I had sort of tried at the time, then nothing much at happened. I had gone into one agency at 5’8 1/2″ and 125 lbs and they had told me to lose weight and then “maybe” they said.

It wasn’t long before I was at a stage where I would move into Vancouver, but at that time I was still in White Rock, as I said, and I had been listening to music from the Vancouver scene, 54-40 and Grapes of Wrath, and had heard some other local bands, and that was my new thing. And I guess what it meant to me was that it was something new, and I had already had thoughts of moving away from White Rock because I could sense that I was becoming aware of someplace else where I could see myself being. The next year I would move out to Vancouver and would see a lot of local bands like 18 Factory and The Waterwalk and After All and it would all be new to me because before that I had been used to listening to whatever was on the radio, and not much of it had been local music. I knew it was good for some people to stay in one place, but I had gone to school there, from one school to the next, and I had found it hard to have the room to change.

So at that time, living and working in White Rock, it was late spring or summer, and one day when I was working in the gift shop in the mall, and this guy walked in there, an older man, unattractive. I would say at least 55, and he probably looked a lot older than his age. He was a small man, with grey hair and bags under his eyes. I asked if he needed help finding anything and he said no he didn’t but he wanted to speak to me about something else. He said that there was some hair products that his company sold and they needed a model for pictures, would I be interested. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, he was quite vague, he didn’t look like someone who worked for a hair product company, and I didn’t know why he wouldn’t have gone through an agency anyway. But, he was saying he wanted to talk to me about it and he was only saying I could meet him at the White Spot nearby, so it wasn’t as if I had to go to his house or anything. So I said ok, I would meet him there but I had to go home first. So I took the bus home, and then told Mom about it. I said I wasn’t sure what it was exactly. I changed and grabbed something to eat, and then my Mom gave me a lift up to the Town Center.

When I got up to the restaurant I ordered a coffee. The man showed up and sat down in the booth I was sitting. It wasn’t long before he cut to the chase and said in fact he hadn’t asked me there to talk about modeling for hair products. He said in fact the pictures were going to be of me naked. I think the general idea was somewhere along the lines of taking pictures of me at his grubby apartment wherever that was, I imagined in was some scuzzy part of Vancouver, something about this job involving being “on the road” and satisfying his disgusting perverted needs along the way. I think I was like in a deer in headlights, in shock. As it was, a friend’s older sister was waitressing there at the time, I had said hi to her when I had walked in. She could then tell, I guess, by the look on my face that something was wrong, and was looking at me concerned. So I was trying to look like I was ok, so as not to alarm her. All this was going on and as this man was talking I was thinking about how I ended up in this nightmare.

If I had my brain today, I probably wouldn’t have met up with him in the first place, or if I had got that far I would have called him an old gross pervert or something like that in the restaurant. But I was so petrified, so afraid that my Mom would find out, that my friend’s sister who was waitressing would be able to tell what was going on. And I couldn’t really believe what I was hearing. So I think when he finally asked me what I thought of his offer (he actually asked me this) I said I would have to think about it and let him know. I didn’t mean I was going to think about it, I just wanted to try and get out of the situation. I think I was afraid of making him angry.

And then I did the most incredibly stupid thing. He said he would give me a lift home and I was afraid to say no. So I got up, waved to my friend’s sister, walked out the door and crossed the parking lot to his car. Inside I buckled up my seatbelt, he asked where where we were going, I explained, where I lived and he turned the radio on. So as he was driving I was hoping for the few minutes to pass, looking out the dark window, listening to the radio, and the dj said something about bands playing. I then said the strangest thing to the pervert next to me. I said, “Have you heard of the band the Grapes of Wrath?’. He said he had heard of them. I think he was bullshitting me. Then I saw the porch-light go on automatically, and a minute later I was getting out of the car out where the salty air off the bay swallowed up that hour or so of the evening that I wanted to forget and I didn’t speak of it to anyone. For a long time.

April 10, 2012, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

The Big House

Categories: The Seventies
Tags:: frogs, house fire, our neighbourhood, street-light tag

When we used to live in White Rock we lived on a street, in my second house I lived in and it was like an afterthought, a street that curled down from Marine Drive as if it was actually trying to get down to the ocean but the trees grew up from the beach and stopped it. It actually was quite popular with the skateboarding crowd, most of which were about 10 years old.

We lived on a 1/4 acre lot which had a garden at one end and a garden at the other and quite a few fruit trees. There was a basketball hoop and a garage that we kept an old speedboat in. My bedroom was the room up by the front yard. One window looked onto the yard, and the other on the side had a holly bush outside it that scratched against my window sometimes.

I used to wake up quite easily sometimes. I wasn’t always a light sleeper, but would be woken by the usual things that woke people – fireworks, mosquitoes, bad dreams about vampires, cats fighting. There was one night where something major happened in our neighborhood, and I slept right through it like a great big log.

Our street was a good street because we could play on it, because those were the days you played out on the street and also our street was a dead end so there was only the occasional car that would drive down there by mistake, then turn around in the last driveway at the end of the street, or they were just Sunday drivers just having a look around. So sometimes when I played on the street I would take the box of colored chalk from downstairs in the basement and I would go out and draw chalk drawings in the street, or I would draw a hopscotch, or at night me and my friends on the street (before they all moved to Alberta) and would try to find frogs in the ditch, because that’s where we could hear them, or we used to play street-light tag, which would be trying to catch someone else’s shadow with your own. Then my Mom would call us in and that was it for the night. There were different houses on the street, but one of the houses was a great big white mansion that looked like it was about 90 years old. It had a door for a mouth and windows for eyes with black shutters and it was quite a large imposing structure. We didn’t really know the people that lived there. And to be quite honest, they seemed to be a bit of a mystery to us.

Down the street from that was a whole lot of blackberry bushes in the summer, and then Starlight, or Twilight the horse, or whatever it was called. I used to go to see how it was doing sometimes and maybe shove some grass through the chain-link fence.

So anyway, one night after everyone had been called off of the street, and we’d had our cinnamon toast, or whatever and had brushed our teeth, and I had gone to bed, and maybe read my book with it angled so I could still read from the light seeping in from the hall, and then I had fallen asleep, I slept the whole night through till morning. And the strange thing about this was that my Mom had come in to try to wake me a couple of times. The reason being that during the night, after I had gone to sleep, the big house caught fire across the street. Not only did it catch fire, but it turned into a big blazing inferno. There were sirens, and fire engines and police cars and everyone was awake and talking loudly and shouting and I suppose the sky above the trees by our front yard would have been all aglow with orange. And there was talk the next day about there being a cigarette burning on a couch. But I had slept through it all.

I must say that nobody was hurt in the fire, and we were all glad about that but were sad about the loss of the beautiful old house. The next morning, I went up on the road to see it. The back facade of the house that we always saw was least damaged, and to me then it still looked like a face, only the eyes and mouth were darker and sadder than they used to be. And if you looked behind the face you could see the burnt charcoaled timbers hiding behind it. And of course everything stunk like smoke and of things that had burnt that shouldn’t have been burning in the first place.

Eventually though the burnt wood was cleaned away and the house was rebuilt to retain some of it’s former glory. The frog chasing and the street light tag continued, and I spent many a night, not as well rested as the night the big house burnt down, because of the usual things.

April 8, 2012, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

Happy Easter: Running, Rabbits and Joy Division.

Categories: England, Music, Pop Culture, Running
Tags:: Ian Curtis, Joy Division, Macclesfield

Ian Curtis

When I used to live in Macclesfield I used to go running. In the summer I would have a route that would leave Macclesfield, go out to Prestbury, then up Chelford Road and I was in the Cheshire countryside. I used to run between the villages. If I ran to the end of Mottram St. Andrew and back it was 10 miles. If I ran to Alderley Edge and back it was 16 miles. If I ran to Wilmslow and back it was 20 miles.

The countryside in that area was narrow winding roads lined with hedgerows, no sidewalks, I just ran along the road. Wildlife and farm animals- pheasants, sheep, owls, highland cattle, Clydesdales, rolling green fields and stone fences. On a clear day, I could see the haze of Stockport and then Manchester on the horizon.

Chelford Road, Cheshire

I always found that Mottram St. Andrew had strange weather. It could be perfectly sunny everywhere, and then when I went to turn around to head back home, sometimes it would be pouring rain, or hailing, but it was a beautiful place, full of farms, cottages, gardens.

In the winter, I ran a winter route around Macclesfield, because it was too dark to run in the countryside, there weren’t any streetlights in most of it. I would run down Bond Street across Macclesfield and then turn left or right. Macclesfield streets in the center made me miss Vancouver. I found the houses too close to the street, there weren’t many trees in that area, it just felt very grey and colorless. I would sometimes run early in the morning, through some parts which seemed extremely bleak and dark. I can remember one part I used to run through that wasn’t lit, it was on a street between industrial buildings that must have been a couple of hundred years old, and I used to run very fast through there. I was always glad to get back running out in the country when it got light enough after work.

Joy Division

I had never planned on living in Macclesfield. It had just happened. And when I ran down Bond Street I was only about a block away from where Ian Curtis from Joy Division had lived and died. When I was younger, I had heard some Joy Division, but I don’t think I really understood the music at the time. Now I was in my late 30’s and I was listening to a lot of their music. I put it down to maybe my musical taste maturing, but also I think understanding the environment gave me a new perspective on music from the Cheshire or Manchester area. I listened to music on my mp3 player when I was running, and I put Joy Division songs on there, and I can remember listening to She’s Lost Control running down Bond Street. Every once in a while I would take a detour around to Barton Street to see Ian Curtis’ old house. I think it was for sale at the time when I was moving back to Canada.

Countryside near Mottram St. Andrew

But when it was light, in the summer, when I ran outside of Macclesfield Centre, in the countryside I would see rabbits around there, small ones. Sometimes I would see them in the fields, sometimes I saw them lying dead after they had been hit on the road. Once I saw a rabbit hopping along the green grass on the side of the road that had something wrong with it’s legs, they didn’t seem to be moving very well, all though externally I couldn’t see anything wrong. It could have been diseased. It hadn’t been hit or anything. It was trying to walk along the grass but was having some trouble. Not sure what to do, and afraid that it might be hit, I picked it up. It started to freak out, kicking it’s legs, extremely uncomfortable with the fact I was holding it. I wondered about where I could put it where it would be safer. I obviously couldn’t take it back to Macclesfield with me. I was five miles away from home, and I had trouble imagining me running 5 miles carrying a rabbit with legs that didn’t work.

So I called the vets in Macclesfield on my cell phone. I knew that their vets’ actually had a wildlife unit that would treat local wildlife if needed. I said that I would leave the rabbit in a safe place, and they said they would send someone out to try and find it, as there was a vet going to a farmers nearby. So I set the rabbit down on the grass in an area set back from the road, where it seemed to just freeze in fear. I don’t think it was very happy with me. Anyway, that was all I could do. And then I started my run back home.

When I lived in Macclesfield, occasionally there would be a conversation in a pub about Ian Curtis. Someone would say something like “ blah blah’s aunt was living in the house behind his kitchen at the time,” that type of thing. I preferred to think of the positive things he did, even if they were struggles, firstly of course his music. But also his work as a civil servant. Starting around 1978, Ian Curtis was still working in Macclesfield at the Job Centre, assisting people with special needs to find work, and to keep the jobs that found. The people he helped had special needs, either mental or physical. One of the reasons he changes jobs was so he didn’t have to make the arduous commute into Manchester, (one that I know well, and must have been even worse in those days).

Part of Ian’s training would have focused on specific types of disabilities, including epilepsy, looking at symptoms, causes, the stigma of it, it’s limitations and treatments. He would have seen the affects of epilepsy in his clients, and probably meant he was able to provide helpful advice to them as he suffered from the disease himself. He would have also had to convince employers to understand his client’s disabilities and capabilities, in a less forgiving time. His boss, who he worked closely with, was supportive of him, would have helped him, eventually, to make the decision to register as a disabled person himself.

Macclesfield

What can I say about Macclesfield. I had some nice memories, and tough times there. I was living there when I started taking running seriously and did my first marathon in 2005, and I met friends which I still stay in touch with. I also probably wasted a lot of time there when I should have been doing a lot more somewhere else. However. I guess I have made my peace with it, and am proud to have lived in the same place that Ian Curtis once did.

April 6, 2012, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

Elgin Hall

Categories: Crescent Beach, Local History
Tags:: Crescent Road, Elgin Hall, Elgin School, Mud Bay School, Nikomekl River, Semiahmoo Trail, Surrey

Elgin Hall on Crescent Road, Surrey, BC.

There were hundreds of times growing up in the Surrey/White Rock area where I was in the car with Mom and Dad and we for some reason or other drove past the Elgin Hall on the way to go shopping somewhere or visit family. Me sitting in the back seat watching all the green trees on the winding Crescent Road, that always ended with the car dealership on the corner, and the driving range where Dad sometimes went.

I would always see Elgin Hall sitting there. It kind of looked like an older building, but I had no idea of when it was built, or of the history of the Elgin area, which was what we were driving through. Now I find myself looking into the history of the area, and there was quite a lot of it.

It turns out, Elgin Hall was built in 1922 by the Community Association. Everyone in the valley and in the area at the time helped to clear and grade the land for the hall to be built. On the night of the opening on March 23rd of 1923, they hired a six-piece orchestra for $45, bought a stove to cook on from Fraser Valley Co-op in Cloverdale, and borrowed the old wood stove from Elgin School.

Map showing Elgin Hall and other places of historical interest in lower mainland

There was a Scottish man named J. Alex MacDougall. He acquired the land around the Nikomekl River and he named the place where the Semiahmoo Trail met the Nikomekl River, Port Elgin, after his hometown in Scotland. The town he was from in Scotland, called Elgin, is in the region of Moray, and is the smallest city in Scotland (and famous for its whiskey, such as Glen Moray).

The Semiahmoo Trail was a wagon road built in 1873 so that people could settle in the area of Surrey. Before that, you could only get there by water. When the Semiahmoo Trail was built you could then travel from the U.S. all the way to New Westminster. It ran from what is now Blaine, Washington, to an area near where the Patullo Bridge is today.

The Elgin Hotel 1887

Around the same time they also built a bridge over the Nikomekl River (which was later replaced around 1911). And they built the Elgin Hotel which had a barn, blacksmith’s shop, a post office and a county store. People could rest there and give their horses water. It used to be located on the land between the King George Highway, and where the Semiahmoo Trail is marked on the south bank of the Nickomekl River. The Elgin Hotel was torn down in the 1940′s.

Elgin United Church

In 1885 pioneers built Elgin United Church with lumber that had floated down the Nikomekl River. The Church was located at Semiahmoo Road and Wade Road (now King George Highway and 44th Avenue). It was torn down in 1966, and now Art Knapp’s nursery is there.

Starting in the 1880s, a 9-seat stage coach made two trips a week from one end of the Semiahmoo Trail to the other. It shared the Semiahmoo Trail with people walking, or on horseback, and also ox-carts. As the area grew, then the built Elgin School in 1921 – this was to replace the condemned Mud Bay School.

The Mud Bay School

The Mud Bay School was built across for the Elgin United Church and operated as a school until 1921, when it was closed for health reasons. It became a tramp shack during the 1920′s until some students cleaned it up, and it operated for a short time as a manual training centre.

Elgin School which replaced Mud Bay School

I am glad to know that Elgin Hall and Elgin School are Protected Heritage Sites. Crescent Road is also considered a heritage site, and it protected by a Heritage designation bylaw. Crescent Road is considered the last built by pioneer engineers of Surrey. It was built from 1910-1923, following the natural shape of the landscape, joining Elgin with Crescent Beach. It is important to preserve our older buildings. The buildings have their own stories, and when we look into their stories, we understand our own much more.

April 5, 2012, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

The Lions

Categories: Crescent Beach, The Seventies
Tags:: Blackie Spit, The Lions, Vancouver Canucks

View of The Lions from Crescent Beach

A few years ago when I was first back in Canada, I was staying in White Rock, and I ran 10 miles one day from the pier, to 28th, the old street that we used to live on above Crescent Beach, when I was only little. I wanted to stand on it again, and see the view I saw when I was three, and where the corner store used to be, and where our neighbours had lived. There had been so many times where I had sat on our lawn, in the middle of a huge green expanse on a sunny day, and listened and taken everything in.

There was a ravine at the end of our road, and on the other side of the ravine was the church we went to, but I only thought of the church bells being there, because that is all I could hear. You could hear them even when you were in the house. But when I heard them, I only thought of the green leaves of the ravine.

In our house there was a hallway that was circular, and I used to run around it for entertainment, or something to do. We had a rock fireplace that was en-route. One day I ran into it head-first and I had to be taken to the hospital where they had to put a special bandaid on the cut, and I was good as new, after that.

The first goal for the Vancouver Canucks in their National Hockey League debut

Part of my world centered around the television. There was hockey on it that my Dad watched – the Vancouver Canucks , and the Banana Splits, which I watched, along with The Bugs Bunny Road Runner Show, and frankly I got tired of the coyote’s bad luck. And I wondered where all these ACME products came from anyway. I had never seen anything like them before. Then there was that commercial for Grange Mattresses that was on TV constantly. The commercial was a silent film, “Gotta Getta Grange” it said. And it had a woman and a man in it, and I think something to do with a mattress and a flight of stairs.

And there was a back yard that we had. It had a sandbox at the back, and a couple of big trees in the middle, and a porch where Mom had hung the bird feeder above. Once we had guests, our cousins over, and my cousin, who was about 10 years older than me, stole my Barbie and climbed up one of the big trees with it and wouldn’t come down, and I was mad at him and wanted him to give it back to me. Another time one of the neighbour’s kids got on my horse with the springs that was set up in the back yard and broke the thing, and that was frustrating. So it wasn’t always good times.

Train going past Blackie Spit Park

Below our street there was Crescent Beach, which was like a little village that had train tracks, and a store where you could buy icecream, and a bunch of little cottages with pretty lawns. My Dad on occasion would take us down to Blackie Spit Park, by Crescent Beach, and he just had to drive around down the hill. And we would take a kite and fly it. It wasn’t always on a sunny day, sometimes it was grey, and the kite was up in the sky against the grey. And I found the hardest thing was when the wind dropped and then the kite came careening down to the grey sand and you didn’t have time to pull in the string. But lots of the time it flew fine and I liked being out on the sand with the salty air.

Up on our street when I sat on our lawn I could look out at the ocean view and across the water, or the Mud Bay Flatlands when the tide was out and all you could see was mud. Once I asked my Mom if you tried to walk on the mud, would you sink into it, and she said “I think so.” And above the blue water or muddy bay I could see the Lions, the mountains far away. And some days it seemed that they were calling to me.

So all I can say, as I stood and had a drink from my water bottle on my old road, was that the road seemed very small. It was good to be back, for the first time in 35 years, but after having a look around, I still found myself going back to the memories. The view when I was three, was still in my head anyway.

Vancouver Canucks: 5 Most Hated Opponents(bleacherreport.com)
NHL playoffs: Vancouver Canucks fans dejected after elimination(thestar.com)
Report: Vancouver Canucks G Roberto Luongo Willing To Waive No-Trade Clause(tracking.si.com)

April 3, 2012, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

Drama in Real Life

Categories: Cloverdale, The Eighties, The Seventies
Tags:: Air Florida Flight 90, Frys Corner, Readers Digest

Fry's Corner 1962.

My grandparents on my Dad’s side lived in Cloverdale. Like my other Grandparents (fortunately I knew all of my grandparents) we would often go to stay there for a night or two on the weekends. They lived in an apartment. When we went to the apartment there were several activities we did. It usually started with my Grandma saying, “Lorn, are you going to take them to…” or my Grandpa saying, “How ’bout we go for a walk to….” and my Grandpa putting his leather jacket on. Sometimes my grandpa took us down to the exercise room (this was just for fun) so we could try out the funny machine with the band that you put around your stomach and made a vibrating noise, the purpose of this we could not understand. Sometimes we would go down to the pool room and have a game of pool if nobody else was playing.

Sometimes we would also go for walks. Walks down to where the rodeo grounds were, or to his friend’s house, or just around the streets, which seemed to me to have quite a few apartment buildings and telephone poles. When we were lucky, in the winter, Fry’s Corner, in the flatlands had frozen over, and Grandpa would drive us out there, and we had brought our skates and we would maneuver ourselves around the tufts of grass at the edges and get to the good part of the ice, and Grandpa would stand on the end of the frozen ice watching us and waving, until we were cold and tired and had had enough. But also sometimes, we were content to stay around the apartment. Grandma was getting dinner ready and Grandpa was watching news, or wrestling or Lawrence Welk, and I would look around the living room for something to do.

One thing my grandparents did have was a bunch of Readers Digests. There was a love seat with a brown swirly pattern near the shelf. The digests were on a shelf along the far wall. I liked reading them, especially the section called Drama in Real Life. I think I read Drama in Real Life in every one that was there. I remember in particular reading the story about the Air Florida Flight 90 crash into the Potomac River, about the flight attendant who had survived, about the rescues of the very few people who had survived, and about the snow and the icy water. I remember there was an illustration of the crash with the story, and I found it to be quite haunting.

And whether it was around the apartment or out walking my Grandpa was always showing pointing things out to us and explaining what they were, or showing us things, and so a visit there was almost like an escape, because you were learning so many new things.

Lawrence Welk

Once though my grandfather and I got talking or rather, he started to tell a story. It was the story of his life really. We were standing in the hallway in the apartment, and he explained about where he had come from on the Prairies and what growing up was like for him, and some of his experiences, and I just listened. I must have listened for quite a few minutes, not saying anything, just listening to the history of his life, until he was finished telling the story, and then it was probably dinner time there, which meant the scones were in the bun warmer, and there were hot steaming things on the table, like potatoes and carrots, and it was time to go wash our hands and go eat.

It wasn’t much longer after that day when it was my birthday and I received a card from my Grandpa and Grandma Stewart. Inside the card had the usual birthday greeting and under that my Grandpa had written something in particular. It said “Happy Birthday Wendy,” “Thanks for listening.”

I was so excited about what he had written in my card. He was thanking me for something that I had done, and it made me feel very important. I remember showing my parents what he had written, and feeling proud of myself.

Thinking back, I remember once when Grandpa had taken us to the racetrack in Cloverdale, and he let me pick a horse, anyone that I wanted to place a small bet on. I picked a horse called Joe Kool because I guess I liked the name. My Grandpa didn’t try to persuade me otherwise, or advise that I should pick a different horse. Of course my horse didn’t win. He said nothing about it, and that was the freedom for me. I was free to take a chance. So I had listened, and he had given me the freedom to lose a bet.

March 10, 2012, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

Shine

Categories: The Seventies, Travel
Tags:: 8-track tapes, California, California State Route 1, Hearst Castle, San Simeon, Seattle

During the dark mornings lately, there are times when I wished I could have had a do-over of decade old decisions, a chance to clean up messes. I missed sunlight waking me. Family vacations. When I was a kid there were times we went to California. When we did, Mom and Dad used to wake us up at about 4.30am to make it through Seattle before rushhour. I thought it was a crazy time to wake up in a good way, which meant it was exciting. We packed everything the night before. In the morning we would just wake up, get dressed, eat cereal. We’d brush our teeth, and grab our pillows from our beds. It wouldn’t be long before we slipped through the border. Soon I drifted off, the car still dark, passing lights outside.

The first time we went we had an orange truck with a matching camper (it had orange stripes). We drove past Portland, my sister and I had our gigantic puzzle books on our laps, 3 inches thick, with 500 crosswords. I tried to finish the ones that I started, but sometimes if I was stumped on figuring out a word the books were so thick that I could find an entirely untouched section on it’s own. We listened to the radio when we could. The Eagles, or The Doobie Brothers, or whatever we managed to listen to without it being

The Doobie Brothers

switched away. The truck also had an 8-track cassette player. The tapes were big and clumpy and were kept in the glove compartment. They would get warm, so the title labels on the tape would wrinkle in places, and develop a melted plasticy smell.

The Eagles

We took the coastal route, along the Cabrillo Highway and along by San Simeon. My mom mentioned Hearst Castle, and pointed out the road going up to it. I couldn’t understand how there could possibly be a castle that wasn’t in England or Europe somewhere. Worn green slopes slipped down to the water and the waves rolled in uninterrupted by islands.

Farther down the coast we stopped at a place to park the camper for the night right by the ocean. It was hot and sunny and there was a pier. Before dinner, I walked out on the pier and there was a man fishing. They were not large fish he was catching, but big enough. He had them in a bucket. I went and asked him about them and he gave me two fish. He said I should clean them and explained to me how to gut the fish and then cut the bones out so you were just left with fish and no bones. I was so pleased about this and thanked him and went back to the camper and told my Mom about what the man had given me. I had started to clean the fish as he said, I gutted them, on the cutting board, and then went to fillet the fish and was not successful. I ended up butchering the dead fish even further, instead of making a tidy fillet

Hearst Castle, Veranda looking west (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

like I had hoped. When we ended up frying them for dinner, there wasn’t much of them still intact. I remember feeling bad that I hadn’t done a better job of the fish.

But at least the man had given me the fish, and I was in California. I awoke in my sleeping bag, with the sun pouring in the window and could hear the seagulls over the bay.

A tour of Hearst Castle(sfgate.com)
A Trip Along the Central Coast: Day 3, San Simeon(thecentralcoasttraveler.com)

December 20, 2011, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

800 Square Feet

Categories: Cloverdale, Pop Culture, The Seventies
Tags:: Christmas, Frosty the Snowman, Grandparents

Frosty the Snowman (TV program) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I remember being at my Grandma and Grandpa’s, on my mother’s side, at their old farmhouse in Cloverdale at a very early age. And I remember the Christmas Eve there I first watched Frosty the Snowman on the old tv. I think my parents had probably gone to Harrison Hot Springs or something, and we had gone to stay there. Their house was a two-story house, bedrooms upstairs, with a big yard, garden, barn and garage and there were fields behind with cows. I don’t think the cows belonged to the neighbour.

Old white Ford - Grandpa had something similar

I just remember in the summer the garage had big open doorways, and it had kittens hiding in it, and my grandpa’s old white ford with burgundy seats that had that wonderful smell of old leather. And the garden had corn growing in it which was so much taller than me. This was the house that my Mom was a teenager in and had graduated from high school. My Grandma had an old fashioned ringer washing machine – I didn’t know quite what to make of it. And once I sat at the kitchen table and chopped my barbie’s hair off, because I had it in my head I

Old fashioned washing machine

wanted to be a hairdresser. And I remember my Grandma sounding a little cross as I sat at the table and saying , “I should really spank you for that.” Woops, I thought. I don’t think she really meant it though. Upstairs there was a room I slept in with my sister. There were 2 beds and old sash windows and the floor was covered with cracked linoleum and the pillowcases were embroidered. The room seemed absolutely enormous. I know, it was probably, in reality very small.

So, there was the old tv, with Frosty on it, the tinselly Christmas tree. Above the tv on the shelf was the old Grandfather clock that my sister ended up with. My grandparent sold the house and moved to an apartment in White Rock when I was probably about 7. There, all the old memories of the house were fit into 800 square feet. To me as a kid, it never made any sense to me why they would move from a house like that.

The room was dark so we could see the Christmas lights on the tree. Even the cartoon scene in the greenhouse, I was somewhat distracted from. Probably shortbread did the trick. And years later, as a teenager I visited my grandparents as they lived not far from Johnson Road, not that far from junior high or highschool, I would sometimes go there after school and it was like a neutral escape, it was like stepping off of the world for a while and having a breather. Grandpa used to sit in his recliner and look at his old photos of the war, explaining them to us. As the years went by, the Christmases seemed to get smaller. I got farther away, and soon, my Grandparents were no longer.

Then it was a kiss goodnight from both, and up the stairs to the beds with the embroidered pillowcases, where I lay, just wishing I’d fall asleep quickly.

Forgotten Christmas Movies(greensbythedoor.wordpress.com)
Why Frosty Made Mommy Cry(lifewithconnorandthetwins.blogspot.com)

August 10, 2011, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

June 1992

Categories: England, Music, The Nineties
Tags:: Buxton, Derbyshire, Echo and the Bunnymen, Lloyd Cole, Rose & Thorne, The La's

The La's

When I think back to 19 years ago, it surprises me how time has passed, and I wonder why I write about things when I do. I think sometimes it helps to distance myself geographically first. Some times it matters if I am in a relationship or not. Other times, I am sure there is a time of healing needed before anything.

When I was first in England in 1992, I met my friend John almost right away, and within a short time we were seeing each other. Within the first few days I was there, my friend Collette and I walked into Chatters, a pub on the marketplace, the first pub we went into in Buxton. I can remember The La’s There she Goes was playing, and we met him and his friend Philip. Of course we were noticed immediately as not being from anywhere near Buxton, and they came over to talk to us.

John was living at his Grandma’s, his grandfather was in the hospital, and they were like parents to him, as his own father he never really knew, he lived in Australia or somewhere, his mother was a kind woman, but she had been in a difficult marriage that had ended, and she had a career with a lot of responsibility. Everyone thought John staying at his grandparent’s was the best thing.

Echo & the Bunnymen (album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

He was unemployed, and at the time there were no jobs around. But he had wanted to work. And I know that he was frustrated that he wasn’t working. He was only 20, and I was close to my 24th birthday. I remember us playing his records that he had at his Gran’s.

He had The Fall, which I wasn’t really a fan of, but he had Lloyd Cole. Lloyd Cole had been born in Buxton. He also had quite a lot of Echo and the Bunnymen.

It all seemed so small-town there, everyone was close and looked after eachother. Relatives and neighbours were always dropping by for cups of tea at his Gran’s, and there seemed to be a lot of communication between different generations, even in the pubs it struck me as being that way. I had been living in Vancouver, and hadn’t been in any long term relationships. I found living in the city I had just missed being out in the trees, as I never seemed to get out of town, and Buxton was a breath of fresh air, even just walking out in the fields, there was just so much space surrounding it.

A couple of weeks later, John’s Grandad died, and I think this affected him more that he let on. I can remember talking to him about it. A bunch of us had gone back to a club in Manchester that night, and I remember sitting in the car and talking and I suggested he should come live in Canada for a while. Maybe he might have some luck finding work there, and it would be a change of scenery.

And so our relationship continued. We would sometimes just drive out and go for walks, or go to the pub, or hang out at the house I was staying in, and wonder what to do with the long overgrown lawn. The house belonged to the parents of my friend I was with from Canada and the furniture was old fashioned, like something retired people would have. It was weird having young people sitting in it. Also, I remember John at the time, had been talking about some rally car event that was local, that he and Philip were going to race in.

One night, the plan was that we were going to go to The Queens pub, four or five of us, including Pete, Philip and his friend with the dreads that went to Glastonbury. John (his other friends called him Johnny) was going to Manchester to get some car parts, and he said he would meet us at the pub when he was back. I remember the first time I went to that pub, I had been used to drinking pints in the Rose & Thorne, and when I went in there and ordered a pint, they looked at me funny, because even then, most women drank half-pints. It was the kind of place where if you went in at 8 o’ clock on a Friday night, and went in at the same time the next Friday, you would see the exact same people sitting in the same place, drinking the same thing.

So we went there, around dinnertime, early evening and we hung out, played some pool, had a couple of pints, bought some crisps, played a couple songs on the jukebox. And a couple of hours went by and I had kept checking my watch, and my friend Pete was checking his and thinking the same thing, wondering where John was. I guess, because it was still a new relationship, I was still a bit insecure, and admittedly, I started to get a little cross. I thought maybe he had just decided to do something entirely different and not show up. Pete said maybe he had stopped to see some friends he had just outside Manchester and just got talking. Of course nobody had cell phones back then, so we weren’t expecting him to call us. Well, time went by and then it got later, and then it was last call and time to go home. So we were still left wondering what had happened to him. And I went to sleep wondering what had happened, and why I hadn’t heard from him.

The next morning, I heard the phone ring downstairs and it woke me up, so I had to rush down to answer it. When I did it was John’s mother on the phone. She told me that she had some bad news.Then she said that last night John had been killed in a car accident on the way back from Manchester.

Both John and Philip, both being young and into rally driving, drove too fast, and on the country roads around Derbyshire there was plenty of opportunity to do that. I remember being in a car with John once and actually veering off the road into the bushes on a corner on a country road where he didn’t quite make the turn right. I remember being petrified but somehow laughing nervously about it at the time. But after he died I had such guilt for not telling him off for driving so quickly. I was a little older than him, I could have said something. But I didn’t think it was really my place.

To be honest I think I still had culture shock as I had only been in England for a few weeks. I hadn’t been this far away from home before, and I was probably a little stunned by everything. To add to this, when I had first come to England, I assumed everyone spoke English, I would have no problem understanding what people were saying. On the contrary, they had different words for things there. For instance, once John asked me mid-morning if I wanted a brew – which I thought meant beer, and I thought isn’t it a bit early? But it was actually tea, he meant. He had quite a strong Derbyshire accent and sometimes, quite honestly, I had trouble understanding what he was saying. And I told him this one time, I told him in actual fact I could understand his friend Pete’s a lot better (I think Pete was from down south), and he seemed a slightly offended by this.

So he had said he was going, that afternoon, to get some car parts in Manchester. He had gone to Manchester and got the parts and was going along Long Hill near Fernilee, when he went off the road and crashed in a farmer’s field, where the farmer found him a little while later. He had been wearing a seatbelt, but it had been torn by the force. In fact afterwards I had seen his leather jacket that he had worn, and I could see the impact marks from the seatbelt scarred into the shoulder of the jacket. The police speculated that maybe he had gone to change a tape or the music somehow in the car and had lost concentration and left the road. People wondered too if he had just had a lot on his mind, thinking about his grandad etc and wasn’t concentrating on driving. Despite the impact the car parts were all neatly laid out in the trunk of the car. And he was three quarters of the way home when the accident happened. And his mom had gone to the scene and said that from the road it hadn’t seemed so steep but when she had gone down to where the car had ended up she said that it was. She said that he must have been so scared.

And there we all were. Some of us in a new place in a new situation with a new person taken away. Others with an old friend suddenly gone. I remember we all sat in the old furniture in the living room in the house with the long overgrown lawn that still needed to be cut, rather speechless, like a very big part of everything had been taken away. And then Pete rolled some of the biggest spliffs I have ever seen. And it was a bit like that for a while.

June 8, 2011, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

Off Course

Categories: England, Poetry Writing, The Nineties
Tags:: Ambit, Michael Foreman, Poetry

Quite a number of years ago, I had accumulated a plastic bag full of small poetry magazines that I had poetry published in. I had spent quite a lot of time writing and the magazines were ok, they were just small magazines. There were a couple of poems in better literary journals – I kept them separate, treasuring the copies. I still had wanted to get into magazines such as Ambit because I had loved the artwork by Michael Foreman.

I was probably going through a difficult time – one relationship had ended with my boyfriend being killed in a car accident when I was first in England, and another relationship had finished after that. Friends that I had first known in Derbyshire, (we were now in our mid-twenties) were now getting tired of the town we were in and were moving on to interesting places like Dublin or London, or even Glasgow. I was waiting to put my 3 year residency requirement in so I could go to university for free there, and was working in pubs or bookshops. When you are feeling a little off course from where you should be, then you become vulnerable to people who aren’t the best thing for you and at the time I was. I had somewhat befriended a son of a neighbor and his somewhat dodgy friend, I guess at the time because I was at a low point. They were nice enough (just barely) I guess, and it was just a friendship of sorts and nothing more than that.

However, at the time he wanted to read the poetry I had published, and I guess, not caring, I had said sure, and gave him the plastic bag with all the small magazines. And then after a little while, maybe a couple of weeks, I decided I wanted it back. Nothing happened. I asked again. Nothing happened. I asked him again – as if what was the problem here, still nothing. So after a while, we had stopped hanging out, and I had stopped asking, because I was getting tired. I just assumed maybe he had lost it when he was drunk, and dropped it down a ravine or something. Chalked it up to being a bad decision. I could always write more and send it off.

Illustration by Michael Foreman

And when I try to remember what music I was listening to at the time. I can’t remember. I can’t remember what happy songs I liked, or what sad songs I liked, because I probably felt quite misplaced within my life. It was a time when I didn’t feel amidst friends.

Sometime later when I was in a relationship, I had seen him with a girlfriend, she seemed quite nice, and I would see them out walking with their dog in the park. I felt glad for him, it appeared that things were going ok in his life. I said hello to him if I saw him.

It was a couple of years later, I was living with my partner of the time and his children on a nice street near the center of town, a row of Edwardian houses, with front gardens and old iron fences. Down one part of the street though, near by the off-license, apparently there was a dealer that lived there. There were also some homes with families there, and the homes had a front door and a back, the back “yards” actually small cement areas connecting to each other. Every once in a while we saw police pull up at that end of the street and then disappear again.

There was a gorgeous summer day when everything changed. It was the time of year when the kids were almost out of school for the summer but not quite, as my ex was just leaving with his blond-haired son who was probably around 8 at the time, bag on his back with all his gym kit and books in. The flowers were blooming – it was going to be hot and beautiful, when we noticed there was a steady stream of police tape going down the road.

Apparently my old acquaintance had paid his friend the dealer a visit, and had been snorting heroin and had overdosed and died as a result. His friend had dragged his body out the back entrance and left him there and then promptly vacated the scene. Then whoever had woken up first on that sunny morning and looked out the window into the back garden must have called the police. A woman we knew on that corner, with children, had gone out the back to put something in the bin, and the covered body was still lying there, right in front of her.

I didn’t go to the funeral, although I did think of him a lot those days. I think the problem was that he had always been at a low point, even if he didn’t think he was – always vulnerable to something that was not good for him.

And as for the poetry, well, I tried to get over it. It’s just paper, I told myself, and the funny thing was, I still had all the rejection letters kept neatly in a folder at home, for the poems that didn’t make it in. But even those eventually, years later, got binned. You can only fit so much of 16 years into two suitcases, to go back to Canada for good.

November 13, 2009, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

The Pogues

Categories: Music, Pop Culture
Tags:: Ian McCulloch, Kirsty MacColl, Seattle, Shane MacGowan

macgowan-bpfallon02 I lived in England for many years, and when I moved back to Canada I realized I had forgotten something.
I had forgotten to see the Pogues.

What could I do? I was always too skint most of the time to see bands when I lived in the UK (the council tax was expensive and my electric was pretty steep). Okay, I managed to see Ian McCulloch at the Leadmill in Sheffield, and Shed 7 at Rock City in Nottingham, and Julian Cope at the Manchester Academy. How could this have happened? At this I panicked. What’s Shane doing these days? When was the last time they played Vancouver? Looking at the Pogues’ upcoming touring schedule, I started to think I may have to travel to the House of Blues (which would be cool), but still a long way to go (though not as far as back to England).

I had special memories of the Pogues. The Pogues were one of the bands that lived in the old ghetto blaster in the kitchen in Derbyshire. They lived there along with Steve Earle, and occasionally some Waterboys, and quite a lot of Nirvana. The Pogues really reminded me of coal on the fire and brandy by my bedside. So when I found out they were playing Seattle, I was determined.

Strangely enough, I had been through Seattle, but I had never actually stopped in Seattle and seen what was in it. Seattle was why we left Vancouver at 4:30 in the morning as a child when my family were driving to Disneyland, and the rush hour traffic was what we wanted to miss. All I ever saw was some of the I5, the presence of other cars and the outline of the Space Needle and some other tall buildings. Most of the time then I had just got the pillows right in the back seat and was ready for a doze off. Since then I associated Seattle mostly with Nirvana, Frasier, Grey’s, rain, and the furious cloning of coffee shops. At the same time I was bringing metal-head Brad who said he would accompany me because there was a bar at the back, he could drink there, he said.

So Seattle we went. And to the Showbox Sodo, which I had read horror stories about, about the heat, and bouncers that didn’t tell you where the will-call window was. But actually it turned out to be quite a good venue. Like the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver but without the pillars. I thought we had already had the long hot summer, but I had it again as I stood in line for a drink. Was this the Green Mile? How long would it be for a drink? I decided since I liked whiskey, that I would alternate between Sol (they didn’t have Corona) and Jameson (fitting for the evening). We were waiting for the Pogues to go on at the sold-out show. There was sort of a fetching tango style music that went on for quite a while, and I wondered whether they were just trying to psyche up the crowd, or trying to get Shane on stage. I didn’t know what state Shane would be in. I read in an article that he was intending to go down to Mexico and get his teeth fixed. It doesn’t appear he got around to it.

He wandered on in a blue shirt with a cigarette suspended from his mouth. I then said to Brad what was probably the stupidest thing you could say at a Pogues concert -“ I think he’s pissed.” Brad’s response was laced with disbelief – “If he didn‘t have that mike stand he would fuckin’ fall over.” It looked like it was going to be a good night.

Shane slurred, “ I didn’t get much sleep last night”. Regardless of Shane’s lack of sleep, he had not suffered from lack of drink. He obviously hadn’t had the same bar service that we did. On one of the long bar waits, I met a lady from Montana who was shocked at the prices – $18 for a couple of drinks – “I’m from Montana she said. I am not used to this!” She said she was a relation through marriage to Shane MacGowan, and it had been arranged for her to meet Shane backstage. She said she wasn’t familiar with the Pogues at all, and here she was, she said she couldn’t believe it – the crowd here was wilder than at an AC/DC concert.
She was right – the place was packed and right from the first song, the whole floor had instantly transformed into a happy, wild, jigging mosh pit.

Shane dedicated Rainy Night in Soho to Kirsty MacColl, who would have been 50 years old on that day, October 10th. There were many Canadians in the crowd shown by the amount of hands that went up when one of the Pogues asked, “How many people here are from Canada?” Most of the hands that went up were at the front. And like any self respecting Canadian, they brought their joints, so the smokey essence in the air made it feel quite homey.

Unfortunately, there was also an arse there. Having just survived a bar wait, I wanted to rest my drinking arms by setting my Sol and Jameson glass down on a ledge. A woman standing nearby said, that ledge is taken. I looked around the ledge, there was no one on it or around it. You mean just the ledge, I asked, or the space around it? The ledge and the space. Oh, I looked at her with disbelief. As usual, when somebody says something extremely stupid, I am too shocked to engage my normally quick wit, so I could only muster a raised eyebrow and a mumble, but that was about it. Okay – so I found another ledge a bit further down. Then I did the next best thing when my wit was too slow, I tell other people what so and so just said, and aren’t they silly and stupid, and we all have a good laugh about it at other people’s expense. And I concluded with the couple that I laughed with that dogs and cats are nicer than people.

And a good night it was. It was then I realized I had remembered something. The Pogues were great. And they were loved. Despite Shane’s slurring, it had been the best gig I had been to. I asked the metalhead what he thought. He said it was wicked.

Setlist:

Streams of Whiskey
IISFFG
Broad Majestic Shannon
Turkish Song of the Damned
Brown Eyes
Boys from the County Hell
Tuesday Morning
Sayonara
Kitty
Sunnyside of the Street
Repeal
Body of an American
Lullaby of London
Greenland Whale Fisheries
Thousands are Sailing
Dirty Old Town
Bottle of Smoke
Sickbed of Cuchalainn

Sally MacLennane
Rainy Night in Soho – dedicated to Kirsty MacColl – would have been 50th birthday
Irish Rover

Poor Paddy
Fiesta

Kirsty MacColl son: ‘I feel lucky to have Fairytale Of New York’(digitalspy.co.uk)
You scumbags, you maggots… leave that sacred Pogues song alone | Stewart Lee(guardian.co.uk)
Sally MacLennane(highlyirregular.wordpress.com)
A St Patrick’s Day Playlist(dpmcbride.tumblr.com)

UK: The Pogues – Dirty Old Town - (jobblog2011.wordpress.com)

August 15, 2009, Author: Wendy Stewart, 1 Comment

Whistler: Changes in the Weather

Categories: Travel
Tags:: Black bear, Blackcomb, Lost Lake, Sea to Sky, Whistler

whistler-lakeview We were at Whistler last month in the middle of one of the heat-waves. I say one of the heat waves because although it has just felt like one biggy, it was a few days before the day I stood on my sundeck at home and gagged in amazement at the thermometer outside that said 38 degrees ― 100.4 Fahrenheit. That’s considered a fever. On the day we went up to Whistler, a few days prior to that intensely hot day, it was still hot, though probably a mere 29 degrees. Our car doesn’t have air conditioning, and I could feel a migraine developing nicely on the way up the Sea to Sky. Despite this, I love the Sea to Sky. And there’s nothing better on your 41st birthday then a trip up the Sea to Sky with the sun beating down on the beautiful water. Needless to say, as soon as I got to the hotel I had a little prayer vigil with my Advil, hoping for the migraine to bugger off so it didn’t take hold of my entire birthday. I was also pleased when my legs returned to their normal color, as the heat from the sun shining into the car had somehow turned them pink. Oh well. In the end, it did, and I had an enjoyable day.

Sea to Sky Highway

On the second day we were at Whistler a surprising cooler breeze was building up throughout the day, reportedly there was a thunderstorm due that evening. We had been shopping, or rather I had been shopping mostly, especially after I saw Brad had fallen asleep on the couch that afternoon. As soon as I heard snoring, I took that as my cue to go back to the Nike Store. But I knew that day I had wanted to walk up towards Lost Lake later on. I wanted to show Brad the spot I had seen the young bear, when I had been up at Whistler one summer, at least ten years ago. We were wondering where this thunderstorm was actually coming from. Later that day, we set out to walk and we could see some rather ominous clouds forming above Blackcomb. Didn’t know how long we had, but we wanted a walk, and to see how far we could get. There was the odd crack of lightning and thunder in the distance, but nothing major. Of course we were the only two people heading towards Lost Lake. Floods of people from Lost Lake were going the other way, like rats leaving a sinking ship, or maybe people fleeing an erupting volcano, making me note to myself that I definitely wasn’t being sensible.

Bear cub at Whistler

I had wanted to get to the point where there was the two small bridges, the second bridge the location of the little bear I had seen years ago. After a few minutes the storm was moving in and the only person out besides us was the odd crazed mountain biker, we turned around to head back to the village. It’s funny with the timing of storms. Ideally if we had turned around five minutes earlier we would have been fine. As it was the downpour started when we got back to the village’s edge. So in the end we got soaked. We were drowned rats walking up the steps of our hotel.

Whistler Golf Course

Road Trip | From Whistler to Vancouver – April 2012(selectism.com)

July 26, 2009, Author: Wendy Stewart, 3 Comments

School Days

Categories: The Seventies
Tags:: Big Wheels, Ding Dong, Hostess Brands, Twinkie

One of the items that made up my school lunch, if not my mother’s home made chocolate chip cookies (Chipits recipe – it’s the best) were Ding Dongs – and they improved my day greatly. Unwrapping the foil, which enabled young cretins to be able to take it in our lunches without the chocolate glaze melting, it was the dark chocolaty coating and the cake inside and the white centers that created the awesomeness. Just a few months ago, I had a shock, after living away for a few years, of noticing in the section of a shop in Vancouver – the section where the Twinkies and other processed cakes that are really really bad for you are, something that looked like Ding Dongs, but were masquerading under the quite stupid name of King Dons.

What the hell? Why are they calling Ding Dongs, King Dons? What is a King Don? So I did my research. I wondered, did they think the name was not politically correct, or that it sounded too much like a winky? The story behind it is this. Hostess starting marketing the Ding Dong in 1967, they called it Ding Dong to fit it in with an ad campaign with a ringing bell. So then it gets kind of complicated. Ding Dongs were called Big Wheels in the eastern US, so as not to get confused with another similar product called Ring Dings, made by Drake’s.

After a company merger with Drake’s and Hostess’ parent company, for a while there was no issue. But when the merged company broke up, there was once again the same concern. They couldn’t sell Ding Dongs where there were Ring Dings, they had to call them something else. They developed the compromise name of King Don. This was used until Interstate Bakeries merged with Hostess’ parent company, and they bought Drake’s in 1998. The snack is still sold as King Dons in Canada but in the States- there the Ding Dongs are still Ding Dongs! (Those Americans get all the good stuff, don’t they). No offense to King Ding Dong, but Ding Dongs they are and Ding Dongs they will stay. Petition anyone?

July 22, 2009, Author: Wendy Stewart, 5 Comments

Lunchbox

Categories: The Seventies
Tags:: Froot Loops, Nutella

seuss_cat_in_the_hat_soft_sided_lunch_box What I had in my lunch for school as a child was fairly standard. I would have the typical sandwich, piece of fruit, plus fruit cake or homemade cookies or something similar and a cut up vegetable like celery or carrots. Often at lunch the topic of conversation was about what kind of sandwich you had. I sometimes had tuna and mayonnaise, or egg salad, or cheese and ham, etc. I would put my lunchbox in the cloakroom which sat there until recess, when I made a choice for a snack. I had a friend who , when I asked about what kind of sandwich she had, said chocolate. What do you mean you have chocolate, I questioned. How did you manage that? She just shrugged as if having chocolate sandwiches was the most natural thing in the world. On several occasions I asked her again about her lunch and she said again – chocolate.

I obviously wasn’t one of the lucky ones here. I think I had more of a chance of being struck by lightning than my mother putting chocolate in my sandwich for lunch. I still wonder to this day how she managed to have chocolate sandwiches. Nutella had limited availability until 2000 in the States and Canada, and was only an expensive import until then. Perhaps she was following a French tradition of putting a chocolate bar between two slices of bread. Anyway, she was a lucky duck. I bet her mother let her have Froot Loops at home as well.

July 20, 2009, Author: Wendy Stewart, 2 Comments

Radio

Categories: Music, Pop Culture, The Seventies
Tags:: Bay City Rollers, CFOX, CFUN, Jackson 5, John Lennon, Madonna, Moody Blues, Motown, Music for Unicef Concert, Neil Diamond, Radio One, Simon & Garfunkel

Retro Radio When I was young we used to have a radio that sat on top of our green fridge in our kitchen. It was old for a modern radio, meaning it made a funny staticky sound when you turned it on, and it made an equally staticky sound when you tried to turn it away from the station that my parents listened to. I wondered if they had some sort of arrangement with the radio gods, to deter the changing of stations so they wouldn’t have the hassle of changing it back to their station. There seemed to be a good deal of dry talk on it, and not an abundance of what I would call good tunes. I would usually change the radio station when I was washing dishes, to ease the boredom and monotony of the same scrubbing and rinsing over and over. I would still rather wash than dry though.

This was the radio that I heard that John Lennon was shot, that winter’s night, windows all black with darkness on the outside, mom making dinner in the kitchen― I had just walked into the room when they announced the breaking news on the radio. These are the things I learned from the staticky radio.

I started listening to the radio early. I remember looking back at when I listened to some Motown songs, and thinking they were released less than ten years before back then. The 110 top ten hits they had between 1961 and 1971 were not even oldies yet then. Jackson Five’s “I Want you Back” had only been released in 1969, and “The Love you Save” in 1970. I remember listening to Moody Blues’ “Knights in White Satin” while I played with barbies. I remember listening to the radio the night of the Music for Unicef Concert, January 10, 1979. Much later, I remember the first time I heard Madonna.

I used to listen to CFUN and my next door neighbor, who was probably about ten years older than myself, said I should be listening to CFOX. This was in the mid to late ‘70’s. She brought me over to look at her record collection and showed me the Bay City Rollers album. Would CFOX been playing the Bay City Rollers back in those days? They must have been. I was a bit taken aback by all the plaid. I think it took me a couple of years before I finally made the switch.

Radio was important because it was the first source of music for me before I had any babysitting money or allowance to buy records. Though my parents had some albums that I loved. I can remember the Simon and Garfunkel albums they had ― Sounds of Silence and Bridge over Troubled Water. And my Dad had Neil Diamond, who I also liked. So I think of something that has been constant, I can say it is music, and particularly the radio, whether it was Radio 1 in the UK or CFOX here. It’s not that I don’t like the sounds of nature or just complete and utter quiet. But music relaxes me, makes me think, and makes me happy. Sometimes it makes a very nice background for life.

The Inevitability of Internet Radio(thecollegeradiozone.com)

July 14, 2009, Author: Wendy Stewart, 1 Comment

Creature Comforts

Categories: The Seventies, White Rock
Tags:: cocker spaniel

lake-tahoe-campfire It is funny that when the mercury rises up near 30, no matter how hot it gets in the apartment, no matter how the steering wheel tries to fry your hands when you go to drive the car, no matter how you complain about the heat and assess your immediate surroundings for anything that could possibly be used as a fan, when the temperature suddenly drops to around 10 Celsius the first thing we do is say how freezing it is and seek the closest heat source. This is what it felt like for many people on the weekend who were out enjoying the sun. They were suddenly caught off guard and outside in chilly weather after a quite sudden change of temperature (alright, maybe it just felt like 10 degrees).

The weather is changeable, and is something that we cannot control ― like many factors of our life. However, on the occasion when a heat source is needed, there is something about a fire, the warmth and sparks of a campfire at night, or the heat on your face of a fire in the fireplace, whether it is wood or coal, that makes it one of the most satisfying heat sources.

When I was a child we used to have a cocker spaniel named Tiger. He was rusty colored and my parents had bought him even before I was born. We used to live not far from White Rock beach. Or rather we lived on top of the hill which led down to the beach if you went down our trail, winding and very muddy if it rained. Whenever we had birthday parties we would cart everyone and everything down to the beach (my birthday was in July so it was usually fine weather) and we would cross the Burlington Northern Railway tracks and set up on the barnacled beach for a campfire where he would have a hot-dog roast. When we went down to the beach, we sometimes brought Tiger. He would enjoy digging in the sand and running along the edge of the shore, all the strong smells and weird wiggling creatures that lived there.

One year we went down with our friends for my birthday and we brought Tiger with us. It was a beautiful sunny day when we started out, but after we were down at the beach for a while, the weather turned, the dark clouds came, the rain started to spit and the wind picked up and so my mom got us all together and we headed back to the house. After we were back at home, my mom noticed that Tiger wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the garage, where he slept. He wasn’t laying on the porch or down in the garden chasing crows. We couldn’t see him anywhere. It had begun to rain and grow quite cold, and my mom, concerned, said she would walk down to the beach to see if she could see him anywhere. She searched down the trail and crossed the tracks until she got to where we had the fire on the beach. There in the rain and wind was Tiger. He was sitting in the middle of the beach, right smack in the circle of stones where the fire had been, warming his rear on the remaining ashes of the now extinguished fire, the rain falling and soaking his fur.

It is many years since Tiger has been gone, but he taught me something about creature comforts that day. When you have forgotten where you are and it’s raining, find somewhere warm to sit.

And since that day I follow that rule. Though we are between heat-waves, we are still far off from the chill of winter, though Christmas is only five months away. And what will I do to tackle the heat when the sky-high temperatures arrive back? For that I have devised a second rule to follow― when your car feels like it’s the brazen bull, and dreams of air conditioners dance in your head as you sweat at night. Add some more ice to the gin.

July 12, 2009, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

Ice Cream

Categories: The Seventies

Yesterday we went to Canada Superstore and amongst other things, we bought ice cream. One chocolate, one vanilla, in the big round buckets like I had when I was a kid. These were the same buckets that my mom would save for berry picking after the ice cream was gone, blackberries from the spare lot down the road or blueberries from the farm, or even picking peas from our vegetable garden.

And when my mom started working when I was 11 in 1979, and I walked home from school and let myself in with the key, I thought nothing better of going to the freezer, getting out the ice cream, scooping out two or three big scoops into a bowl and sitting in front of the television. If it was ripple ice cream, like butterscotch, I have to admit, I would do some vein digging. And if it was Neapolitan, I would probably avoid the vanilla.

I would be alone with my ice cream in front of the television, watching the after-school re-runs like the Monkees, or would watch shows like Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. My sister was at Junior High then so she was often at sports after-school and would be home later. No doubt my Mom would find the bowl in the sink every day, she never said anything about it, or told me off for eating ice cream after-school. I could have had an apple, or some cereal if I was hungry, or even a peanut butter sandwich which would have been healthier.

However, the ice cream was the gift to myself, for being the first and only person home, for being in an empty house besides the natter of the television, for being the person who had to put the key in the door, knowing there was only a soulless place behind it (ok, my Maltese Poodle Muffin was home, but she wasn’t allowed upstairs). So I would sit and spoon the cool metal and creaminess into my mouth until my face was numb and I had a small milky brown pond of melted chocolate ice cream at the bottom of my bowl, which I devoured as well. And then after the television was finished, from the couch I would look out the window onto the water of Semiahmoo Bay and watch the white triangles of sailboats on the blue foam until my sister came home.

The main problem yesterday was not being home alone in any way, but getting the ice cream from the trunk of the car into the freezer as fast as possible in this heat.Then I just needed to download some old re-runs and I was set.

Important Avalanche Research Could Lead To Better Ice Cream Technology(gizmodo.com.au)

July 8, 2009, Author: Wendy Stewart, 2 Comments

Sakinaw Lake ’76

Categories: The Seventies
Tags:: 1976 Summer Olympics, Archie comics, Horseshoe Bay, Nadia Comaneci, Sakinaw Lake

Years ago, my Mom and Dad used to have a cabin at Sakinaw Lake, alongside my Uncle’s cabin. We drove up there every summer― caught the ferry at Horseshoe Bay, then off the ferry and kept on driving past Sechelt and farther until we reached the lake. We would pack everything we brought with us in the speedboat, fastened up our lifejackets and crossed the blue expanse of the fir-rimmed lake to our cabin. Our cabin was green with white trim around the windows, and always looked like it had a face ― windows for eyes and a door for a mouth, looking out from the trees at us as we arrived in the bay. Stepping onto the shore, the smell of the rich ferns behind the cabin, the mineral scent of the soft lake water, always greeted you, and there were huckleberry bushes along the path covered with berries. It was heaven.

After everything was unpacked and set up, one of our favorite activities at the lake was doing nothing. This often entailed sitting on the dock reading comic books. The box of comics was kept under the stairs in my uncle’s cabin. This is also where all the board games were kept, right by the giant poster on the wall of all the kinds of whales in the world. The blue whale looked like it could eat all the other whales for appetizers.

Any day, after the morning was gone and the dock was covered in sunshine we would collect the box of comics, most of them Archie, and bring them down to the dock to sit and read in the deck chairs, or sometimes we would just sit right in the speedboat that was tied to the dock, and listened to the sound of the fiberglass squeaking against the dock posts. When we got hot, we would swim in the lake, then we would get out, dry off and go back to reading Archie. I think out of all the characters I liked Betty Cooper the most, although Veronica did have a talent for bitchiness. I also liked the fact they always had somewhere to go for milkshakes and burgers at the drop of a hat. No one seemed to be telling them they were spoiling their dinner.

Up at the lake there were no telephones, no one had even talked about computers yet, and cell phones had yet to be invented. There was also no drinking water. When we wanted drinking water, we used to take the canoe across Turtle Bay and walk along the forest path to a stream there to collect two or three buckets of water for drinking, and we had to carry them back to the canoe, and make it back to the cabin without spilling or getting pine needles in the water.

There was no television, only my dad’s staticky radio when he desperately needed to listen to some type of sports event. At night we would sit around the campfire and eat smores, and then we would lay back in our bunk beds and listen to the loons crying on the lake.

That was until the summer of ’76― the summer of the Olympics in Montreal. That summer my uncle brought a small black and white television to the lake with him, and we sat out on his sundeck on the bench just under the tree with the hummingbird feeder, and watched 14 year old Nadia Comaneci score seven perfect 10’s and win three gold medals. The television was also staticky, and the picture was grainy, but we were still able to be part of the excitement and witness what everyone outside of our paradise, back in the frantic, busy world, was witnessing. I thought it was incredible that someone so young could already be famous in the Olympics and winning gold medals.

Of course after the Olympics the cheers and scores on the television were packed away, not to be heard again, and the sounds of the forest got their audience back, and so did Archie. But if anyone asked me where I was when Nadia won those gold medals, I will say I was up at Sakinaw Lake, taking a break from the Archies, watching a girl a little older than myself make Olympic history with a hummingbird buzzing behind my ear.

July 5, 2009, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

Green Day, Independence Day

Categories: Music
Tags:: GM Place, Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots

Last night (July 4, 2009) I went to GM Place in Vancouver to see Green Day. Some fascinating aspects of the evening: the energy, the volcanic black hair, the collection of confiscated spiky belts in a plastic bin outside the gate (by request of the band). I hoped that no one was depending on their spiky belt to hold up their pants. I was also surprised to see the age of the crowd, ranging from kids the age of nine or ten to people in their fifties.

The show was a non-stop 2 hours of melody, guitars, and firework-like explosions. They had fire shoot up from their set from time to time. I could feel the heat from the gigantic flames where I sat in the upper section by the stage, much like a hot flush. I had great delight in watching the mosh pit churning and spitting out its victims, and the security guards struggling to lift out the ejected (some of which were rather un-waiflike, it must have been a struggle), and pat them on the back to send them back to the floor. Boy was I glad to have a seat and not be sweating and wriggling with people stomping on the top of my feet (flashback to early nineties at typical grunge band gig).

During this concert there was an early occurrence of the standing phenomena. In this case people stood for the first song, and many did not sit down for a long time after. There was also an occurrence of the shrinking seat phenomena. I was sure my personal space allotment was bigger, the last time I was there, which was for Stone Temple Pilots last summer. The fellow sitting next to me likened the GM Place seats to those of WestJet: they decided they could fit another few thousand people in there if they put in smaller seats. If you are over five nine, there is the question ‘where do my legs go?’

Billie Joe Armstrong is big on crowd involvement as he was on the search for “friends” and he brought several people up on stage. I seem to recall …lets see..a girl, two boys, one which had a mohawk, and a guy who could sing and move about the stage so well, I was confused – who was this guy – well only just a guy it turns out. Billie Joe with his black hair and red guitar strap reminds me a little of the British version of Dennis the Menace.Green Day were certainly crowd pleasers – lots of singing along, hands in the air, applause. It was a good night, and we finished it off by walking up to Granville to get a slice of pizza. The best way for a Canadian to celebrate Independence day.

July 1, 2009, Author: Wendy Stewart, Leave a comment

FF

Categories: Pop Icon, The Seventies
Tags:: Charlie's Angels, Farrah Fawcett

Three girls stand in the dust of the playground making a decision as to who is going to be who. We are playing Charlie’s Angels and if you want to bagsy the role of Jill Munroe played by Farrah Fawcett, you had better be quick about it. We wondered why she was replaced with Cheryl Ladd. She just wasn’t the same. It was part of a whole aspiration – the hair was the main thing, we all wanted hair like Farrah, and we had curling irons at home in our quest to get that look. And then there was the poster. We wondered, what God or devil did we have to give our allowance to in order to look like THAT when we grew up.

The morning that Farrah Fawcett died, even though I had heard she was nearing the end of her life, I guess you always think there are going to be a few more days, and the finality always takes your breath away. I was in the lunchroom with a colleague at the time, although the news came too late for the morning papers, she said she had seen it on the internet.

In 1976, when I was 8 there was no death. Well only if you were my cat Misty, but don’t get me started. There was only buying candy from the store, and playing after-school, and building forts out of driftwood on the beach and bedtimes. To look at Farrah in photographs and on television, there was so much youth and beauty it almost seemed indestructible. In particular, I remember the photo of her on the skateboard. Although I never learned to skateboard (it is still #43 on my to-do list) that was certainly the craze at the time, resulting in so many “skateboard boys” as I called them riding their skateboards down the street we lived on (my family lived on an excellent hill). Of course I needed the Nike stripe as well – and in red.

And so I wandered back to my desk after hearing the news and sat at my computer like a dutiful child, amidst an accumulation of filing, pens that don’t work and post-it notes, I knew that something was missing, and sadly I knew what, or rather who it was. It was my childhood, my icon, my aspirations, or at least one of my first sources for hope and ambition, standing on a skateboard in the back of my mind for the last 30 years.

For many women, especially those who grew up in the seventies, she is the first female pop culture icon from that decade that has left us, and she was taken from us by the big C, a source of so much fear. Farrah was still beautiful when she died, and still an inspiration. Because of the youth and vitality from those days, because of her bravery, and willingness to fight in her last days. Thanks FF for showing us the way.

Daniel Young Skateboards(formatmag.com)

Generation X

Tall Trees

Black and White

Suckered in, set up…

Some days…

What’s Going On

Safe and a porch-light

The Big House

Happy Easter: Running, Rabbits and Joy Division.

Elgin Hall

The Lions

Drama in Real Life

Shine

800 Square Feet

June 1992

Off Course

The Pogues

Whistler: Changes in the Weather

School Days

Lunchbox

Radio

Creature Comforts

Ice Cream

Sakinaw Lake ’76

Green Day, Independence Day

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