Forced Away

Forced away. 600 kilometres beyond the wartime house.

I have a shtick that I perform and have performed for a decade or more. Yes, it is true. I left Shaughnessy Heights. Perhaps I abandoned it. I did not simply move across town. I left that land, that city of bridges and impossible, unnumbered grid-patterned streets that would always be stuck in my memory as rhymes. Memorized, as my Dad had coached me to do:

Tinniswood Radford
Monreith Dalton
Robertson Kildaroch
Cairnesmore Minnigaffe
Seymore Sinclair.

Or the alphabetical names of street women:

Dagmar Ellen Frances Gertie
Harriet Isobel Juno Kate
Lydia Olivia Pearl.

I always wondered if the N was for Nancy, but it was probably Nelly.

I left that city of people moving toward and away from hubs of malls and parking lots to their fully detached, amply landscaped, totally fenced houses on streets in their separate neighbourhoods.

My parents defined their marriage by the Red River Flood of 1950. They got married on Thursday, April 6, before the Good Friday holiday. A month later, on May 8, the dykes gave way and bridges collapsed and Winnipeg saw 100,000 people evacuated and every able-bodied woman and man worked around the clock to shore up makeshift dykes with sand bags. And my Mom and Dad were on that front line. They had the photos to prove it.

My dad’s death, for me, is defined by the Flood of the Century. In 1997, on Easter Sunday, at the crack of dawn, with the comet Hail Bop adorning the dark blue sky outside the window of his room at Seven Oaks Hospital, he took his last breath. It was warm for the end of March, and it was water water everywhere. The staffers at Brookside Cemetery wondered whether they’d even be able to put him in the ground beside my brother. Everything was pretty soggy and we all knew about the limited drainage hassles of the Winnipeg gumbo, but we managed. No sooner had we buried him than the Wrath of Eric fell upon the flat lands and the early April snows began. They came and they came. The rivers rose and they rose.

I returned to my forest refuge, high above the Manitoba Escarpment and listened to the aftermath of the unprecedented spring blizzard. The dykes at Grand Forks had given way and that city went up in flames above the river, water spilling northward with nowhere to go but overland because the frozen white expanse of Lake Winnipeg could not yet budge. No amount of water could push aside ice of such mammoth proportions. The water would move instead upon the path of least resistance, overland.

One morning, I woke to the news that the town of Ste. Agathe had not held back the monster. Their dyke had failed and the people were fleeing.

“Fleeing?” I wondered. “Hmm, to where?”

The somber voice on the radio, in a serious 1960’s radio style, reported that the town of St. Norbert was accepting refugees from Ste. Agathe.

“Huh?” thought I. And then I found myself standing and yelling at the radio, “Go Up Hill! Go Up Hill!”

But no, these flatlanders ─ and I had been one of them ─ had no concept of uphill! Indeed, when the LaSalle burst its bank and the St. Norbert hosts themselves became refugees of the Flood of the Century, they too had to flee, and where did they go? Did they go uphill? No! They went to St. Vital! These educated people, these witnesses of floods of years gone by, these generational flatlanders were running downhill with the path of the gushing waters at their back. They could go west, above the escarpment, they could go east, beyond the eskers, but not even the City Fathers, not the engineers, nobody offered this advice.

They put all of their money on Duff’s Ditch. They only cared about their concrete zone. They showed no mercy for the lake-land folk to the north.

In my inescapable and honestly earned Shaughnessy Heights cynicism, fed by years and years of being told by the boys that I was a lowly scab, and by the girls that I was a freaking jock, and by the city folk that I was a useless hick, my shtick was born.

I decided to write a TV sit-com and call it “Tales from the Flat City: The City with No Perspective.” To get perspective in the flat city, you’d have to go up on the Arlington Bridge or up in the Richardson Building. It’s like living in a pac man game. There is never a view of the distance to the other side. In the flat city, they have neighbourhoods called River Heights and Silver Heights. But there ain’t no heights in Winnipeg! Their laughable pitiable useless plight. True, Winnipeg isn’t the only flat city on the planet. I’m told New Orleans is pretty flat, and Amsterdam, too, but I think they realize it there. And Barcelona is pretty flat, and even Chicago. But these are coastal and shoreline cities and the people there understand their landscape.

But Winnipeg flatlanders don’t get it. They call their land the Red River Valley. Hello! It is not a valley! It is a lake bottom. Plain and simply, it is a lake bottom. The confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers is literally the navel of the province, the drain hole.

The farmer to the south of the flat city and the farmer to the west of the flat city, and the inter-lake farmer, relentlessly struggling with the gumbo clay, the flatness, and the uncooperative drainage, tamed the mighty John Deere caterpillar to do their bidding. Ditches and ditches and more ditches were dug so that the water would flow off my land and onto yours until, when the Flood of the Century reared its ugly head, the Red River and Assiniboine River watersheds came within metres of becoming one vast body of water, spilling back into Winnipeg from the west! Spilling through St. James and possibly all the way to Shaughnessy Heights! The Brunkhild Dyke, just west of Winnipeg and south of the Trans Canada Highway was the last hold-out. The man-made drainage patterns had left a mere sliver of land between the LaSalle and the Assiniboine.

I can still see Diana Swain standing on the dyke telling the wrong story. It was all a story of hope and work and miracles, when it should have been a story of misperception, stupidity, and exploitation. I wish it would have spilled over. I wish there was a way to wake the flatlanders up.

Settlers who moved across eastern Manitoba through the Winnipeg flats came from landscapes with mixed terrain. They preferred it and they settled above the escarpment because of that. They settled where the farmland drained and the forests flourished, where they could find a vantage point to see overland for a great distances.

In the North End, in Shaughnessy Heights, I could not understand the perspective that was missing from my life. My two yearly visits to Granny and Grandpa’s was not enough to grant me that, but we would hoot and holler at every landmark valley along Highway 16 or 45 and we’d climb hills and roll down them, just for fun every time we went.

I don’t know why my dad opted for the flat land. But it couldn’t hold me. My mom was a great lover of her flat city. She’d stand at the party and defend it with all her ninety-eight pound might, “Winnipeg born and Winnipeg bred, and when I die, I’ll be Winnipeg dead.”

Maybe that’s what kept Dad in Shaughnessy Heights. While all of Mom’s friends from Eaton’s were moving to the heights from Elmwood to EK and from the West End to St. James or from Fort Rouge to St. Vital, Mom silently waited for the opportunity to get out of Shaughnessy Heights. But they never left the wartime house. I made plenty of visits to the old neighbourhood, long after I had gone up land.

I watched the back lane evolve from a wide-open zone to a corridor of two-car garages. I watched the saplings grow to become fully valid trees with birds and everything! I saw house after solid wartime house with big extensions built onto the back on those nice sixty-foot lots. I watched the old dirt road, Keewatin, become a mighty commercial thoroughfare, a four-lane, with new neighbourhoods well beyond, all the way to Park Royal.

The Boys

Boys and Girls:

The Boys. Drifting in schools, a safe distance from the wartime house.

Eventually, every kid raised in a wartime house with more than four people in it learned to smoke and drink. You hit the age when clandestine activities become the norm because you are coming of age. Being the middle child in the middle of the baby boom, I was lost. I was too young to be cool and too old to be cute. One time I managed to find myself in a field of people partying, drinking, smoking dope far past deGrave’s, down a dirt track out in someone’s farm field. The underage booze of choice there was Villaberry Cup. It came in a potbellied bottle with a jug-band style handle and a very long neck with a screw cap. It was a lovely coral colour and has long been off the market. They called them fortified wines. They were cheap and potent. I didn’t have any, or maybe I did. Everyone was listening to “Whole Lotta Love” and Gasoline Alley on eight-tracks, and we piled into the cars to head to the Lincoln. The drinking age had just been lowered to eighteen, so many high school kids could fake IDs and hang in there for the angel dust and joints and Standard Lager, but not me. Not yet. I still looked fourteen, but at least I was on the fringe. Some of my classmates who had big tits could get into the Lincoln. I would hang around on the fringes of these cool teenagers.

I was usually fortified with something. Maybe with some beer that we’d had up the street at Marlene’s. Her mom was never home. And we’d hop into and out of cars, and go over to Dunlop, then back to the Lincoln, hunting for a party. I still didn’t have a boyfriend, but they all knew me because I had a brother, a cool brother, who could fight, and party, and play football, and have girlfriends. All of my girlfriends wanted to be around him and his gang, so I got to be on the edge of the cool gang, unless he saw me and punched me and told me to fuck off.

But this time he was too drunk. He didn’t give a shit. Man, what a night. Everyone was wild. Maybe this would be my chance to find a boyfriend! Drunk kids are mean and irrational. I must have said something about wanting a boyfriend. The next think I knew I was in the back seat of someone’s car and there was a guy leaning on me, trying to kiss me. He smelled like puke. My heart was pounding. Wow! Someone wants to neck with me! Wow, this is it! But the puke was horrible. And there was so much else going on.

Wait, what is that? People? Lights? Yes. I’m still in the parking lot at the Lincoln. Is that my brother?

He was laughing. People were putting their faces against the car window and looking in. And my God. The stench. What am I doing here?

“Go Irwin Go!!! Go Irwin Go!!”

That was his name. Irwin. I didn’t know him, but they did. And who else is out there. Oh! Linda! Susan! My friends are watching too. He couldn’t even talk. He tried to put his tongue on my face and lean on me, but he was too drunk. His eyes were not even open. I got out of the car. I walked home. Nothing was ever said. My brother was too self-absorbed to care about my humiliation.

I grew to respect Irwin. He was a Rosser kid, a real farmer. He was older, an early phase boomer, and I think he really did like me, but neither of us recovered from the humiliation in time to become friends. We met a few other times, but to my recollection, never spoke. He was a shy guy, too shy for necking in the parking lot of the Lincoln.

“You need schoolin’
Baby I’m not foolin’.”

And I did. I was a tomboy and everyone else had boyfriends. I was just not pretty or I was too smart. I had a handsome brother and all of the girls really liked him. But I was not allowed there, with them, so I had to wander into other fields.

It had become embarrassing. Everyone had had a boyfriend or two by then. It was all they ever talked about. But how did they do it?

I could feel the surge of love beneath my ribs. There was no denying it. I’d drop my head on the pillow every night dreaming of Patrick or John or Raymond, anyone who had paid the least bit of attention to me. I was baffled. Not a single solitary boy had indicated in any way that he was interested in me. I guess I’d have to be more assertive.

I heard there was kissing at the New Year’s Eve parties and everyone had boyfriends, but I’d go anyway. This one was way across McPhillips. It was past Mountain and well beyond the rules and routines of Shaughnessy Heights. I had to walk, but it would be worth it. I would find someone to neck with, if it was the last thing I ever did.

I would get drunk enough, or someone else would. Yes, I’m proud to say, I found success and necked with Truss on the couch right through midnight, to Led Zeppelin, right in front of everyone. Of course, I fell in love with him. He went to a different school though, so I never got to see him after that. I think he was younger than me. But in my mind, we were destined for each other, and the pattern was established. I would find another boyfriend, now that I knew how to neck.

Anna was a good teacher. She wasn’t pretty either, but somehow she had lots of boyfriends and everyone laughed about it. Even the cool guys used to talk to her. She was really loud and crazy, just like me, and she knew where the parties were and always went, and she always found someone to neck with.

Pretty soon, I realized that most of my friends had been fucking the guys, not just necking with them. Especially Anna. Everyone liked fucking her. I was so jealous. How did they do it? How did they find boyfriends to fuck them? It was very embarrassing for me. I had to be the only virgin left who drank and smoked and hitch-hiked. What a loser.

I wondered if I would have to start telling lies and pretending that I’d been fucked in order to get my friends off my back. Most of the girls who were hanging out with my brother and his friends were two grades behind me and they were getting fucked and taken to parties and driven around in cars. I had to talk fast and keep my ears open to figure out what was going on, and usually I ended up hitchhiking to the parties, and showing up like an old shoe, just to be included.

I never had trouble getting rides, but I never got picked up at the parties. It was like I had rabies or something. I would party with the boys and laugh and be clever and crazy, and end up hitchhiking back to Shaughnessy Heights alone.

I had some friends who lived across the tracks by this time and even further up McPhillips in the nice bungalows and slab houses, on the expensive streets, almost in Garden City. They were a gang of Major Work girls, a grade behind me and they were paired up. Judy and Marlene. Debbie and Lorraine. And then there was me. Unpaired and alone, as usual, but kindly, they included me. They were pretty good at getting boyfriends. And they knew Anna from elementary school, from before they were in Major Work.

Their parents were more protective than any of the ones in Shaughnessy Heights. They always had family plans on the weekends in the summer. They had cottages to go to or their boyfriends did. My weekends were just the same once summer arrived. I was on my own and headed off to Grand Beach to party there. There were no plans. It was just a matter of sticking out the thumb and heading north. On one of those weekends, I decided I would get fucked, once and for all.

I was sick of being a virgin and embarrassed about it. I had my period, so I knew I wouldn’t get pregnant. I was on the prowl. Through Grand Marais and Grand Beach, party after party, beer after beer, joint after joint, I’d wander with one idea in mind.

Eventually, I found a guy, a nice looking drunk guy. He got me in the bedroom of the cabin we were partying in and started to go for it. I yanked out my tampon and shoved it between the wall and the bed and he fucked me. The sun was already coming up by then and people were sleeping all over the place, so I just left the party after that. I felt pretty proud of myself.

I was walking past the place that sold the deep-fried mushrooms and saw Anna there and was so excited to tell her my good news. I remember the look on her face. I’d expected her to whoop up and say, “Way to go!” but she didn’t. She just smiled and kinda softly nodded. I tried to fall in love with him. I can’t even remember his name. Foster? No. It started with F. A few weeks later Judy and Marlene and Debbie and Lorraine, who all knew him, invited him to a party in the city and made sure I was there so we could fuck again, but it didn’t work out. That was nice of them.

The Girls

Boys and Girls:
The Girls. Fifty metres west or in the backyard of the wartime house.

I’m not a lesbian, I guess. I’ve never worried about that. When you are a kid, it’s safer to be with the girls than with the boys. You are part of the clan, especially with the big girls. One summer I was at Winnipeg Beach, or Ponema maybe, and there was a bunch of families staying in one cottage, one of those that had the wind blowing underneath. The water pump was down along a soft grassy path at the corner and we’d run there, barefoot all the way, in our pajamas. The outhouse was, yes, disgusting. And the outhouse was a dangerous place, too, because the boys would grab you and force you and lock you inside. The big girls were there to protect me.

When we all piled into the cottage at night, after dark, and my sister was in the crib, I was declared to be a big girl now and went into the big bed. I awoke sometime in the middle of the night. I was on top of the stomach of a big girl and the big girl’s friend, my face in their breasts, and I had no clothes on and they were laughing. I totally didn’t get it. They were my heroes. My protectors. I must have started crying because the next thing I knew my mom was in and dragging me out of the big bed. It was never mentioned.

As I grew, the girls back in the neighbourhood played lots and lots of doctor. It started to get exciting when their tits started to bulge, even though mine never did. We’d be under the shed or up in the bedroom closets of the wartime houses, or out in a makeshift fort in the fields, and eventually, in the back seats of derelict cars along the back lane. It involved mainly showing and touching. There was never any kissing. It was a show-off experience, not really a lesbian thing. Once I reached puberty, it ended and was never mentioned again. Not by any of the girls.

I did eventually find some lesbian friends. I didn’t know they were lesbians, though, until much later. I thought that laughing about tits and hugging in tears was all quite normal for jock girlfriends. There were no lesbians in those days. There were old maids and tomboys. I qualified as a tomboy because I had no boyfriend. My brother had convinced me that I was an ugly scab. In grade eight, when I finally started to grow, I became a jock because boys weren’t an option for me. I hung out with other jock girlfriends. Some of them had boyfriends, but there were lots of us who didn’t.

My first drinking experience took place with a gang of my sports friends. I was in basketball, volleyball, track, fastball, tetherball, all of it. This was my world. My high school was located just outside the edge of my neighourhood and I was living it all. We somehow aquired a six pack of Standard Lager and went to Barb’s house, way out of Shaughnessy Heights, past Redwood in one of those really old houses that were scrunched together, before you hit Mountain. After we had drunk some beer, Barb went ballistic and started going on that there was no God and that men were weasels. And the other girls were all with her and I was trying to convince her that God was good, but I simply lost the battle. I puked and somehow got home. The next day I realized that they were lesbians, lezzies, they were called back then. It didn’t matter to me. I was very upset about her loss of belief in God and not at all upset about their gayness. After that I easily recognized my gay friends. But it was never mentioned. There was no phobia about it.

Several years later when I was back in Shaughnessy Heights visiting my folks, showing off my first born, I found out that Sharon, my summer camp friend from the West End, was living just a half block away in one of the slab homes. This was the friend, who was so interested in testing which girl’s breast could hold a pencil or a hair roller or a soup can beneath it. Needless to say, mine held nothing. There was no droop whatsoever. What an athlete Sharon had been, right up to the university level, until she buggered up her pinky in a motorcycle accident. They fused it in the tea-cup position. I guess you can’t make set-shots with a fused pinky.

I wandered up to the house where she was staying, knocked, and entered right into the front room. There were no front hallways in slab homes. I sat on the chesterfield and they called from the back hall to say they’d be right there. Out came two young heavy-breasted women, my age, wearing only t-shirts and panties, and they were very giddy. They had come right out of the closet and into my face.

“You are married?” Sharon asked. “Why?” I admitted I wasn’t sure why, just that it seemed like time. They made me feel the fool for my choices.


I found Sharon one more time after that. We met for a drink in Osborne Village. She was a computer programmer. Today I can’t find her anywhere. Not on Facebook. Not on Google. I do miss her. My favourite memory of Sharon involved an incident that happened back in our wartime house. My parents had left us alone for the weekend, so it was time for the party. Sharon came over in the midst of it and my brother’s friend, Bob, drunk out of his mind, tried to seduce her at the bottom of the stairs. In a wartime house, the stairs go up on a corner making the bottom almost like a chaise longue. She was just around the corner hugging the banister and sitting on step five, and he was sprawled at her feet, mumbling lovely enticements to her. She was loving it.

“He’s sucking my toe! He’s sucking my toe!” She reminded me of the toe-sucking moment when I visited her and her girlfriend that day. It meant a lot to her.

VLA

The VLA design of the wartime house.

In Shaughnessy Heights we played outside. Even if the weather was miserable. The wartime houses had no such thing as a “rumpus room” like the bungalows or the peacetime houses had.

The wartime house is made of cedar and fir, so it will be there for a long long time. That should have been a basis for pride, but for sixty years the wartime house has been shrouded in a cloak of shame. The shame was not because of the materials. Its parts were harvested in the late forties. It was good and honest work that took the timber from forest and to train. Many seeds of hope and much optimism moved with the lumber down from the mountains and across the dry rolling prairies. But when it arrived in Winnipeg and rested on the pallets of the vast rail yards beneath the Arlington Bridge, all sense of pride and hope that had surrounded the house vanished.

The house became part of a circus of assembly. As its parts came together, its scope shrank and its destiny to sit as a clone of other houses on Manitoba Avenue was approaching. It would begin to absorb humanity’s aura, but because of its natural oils, it would not head back to the earth any time soon, unless by stroke of fire, perish the thought.

This house was dropped from one flat car to another and another and moved from the pallet to the ground on the edge of Shaughnessy Heights. It had been in Winnipeg over the winter and was adapted to the winds and the absence of the forest noises. The clanking and banging of boxcars, the stench of diesel and Black Cat tobacco, the running engines, and the slamming truck doors became its new atmosphere. It was dropped off the tracks and taken by truck across the muddy clay, west, about 300 metres where its assembly began.

Parts were measured. The men put it together and spoke about the wartime house.

“I wouldn’t live in one of these cracker boxes.”

“Mostly charity cases are moving in down here.”

“Can’t even get a house on their own.”

This was a VLA neighbourhood. By law, the Veterans Land Act, every soldier, unless he was too rich, was entitled to return from war to a home of his own. Everyone in Shaughnessy Heights knew this about each other, and there was some shame in that. Nobody talked about it.

Then the wartime house started to go up. It sat on a pony wall, only a measly pony wall. A circumference of cement about two feet high supported the house instead of a properly poured basement. Some of the people who were really ashamed about the pony wall got conveyer belts and sent kids crawling underneath onto the clay to send the dirt out into the backyard, scoop by scoop, until they had a hole that they could call a basement. They gained prestige by having another room in their house. But I never had a chance to go down into any of those basements.

There was, however, an attic in every house, but most people called it a cubby hole. It had a short, kid-size door with a large, adult-size doorknob. The door gave this part of the house some status because none of the bedroom closets had doors, just a shelf and a pole for coat hangers. The cubby hole was the short part under the slant of the roof upstairs. It was as long as the house was wide, and the place where the suitcase full of Christmas decorations was stored. Of course, we played in there amid the pink insulation and the cloth-covered electrical wiring.

Each wartime house had a back shed that had no inside walls. It would have been good for muddy boots if people used the back door. Our shed got fixed up a bit and they tried to keep it warm in there, even though it had no pony wall underneath. It was always pretty cold, except in the summer, because it was on the south side of the house. Eventually, the hot water tank, the freezer, the automatic washer, and the dryer got sent out there and our parents found ways to keep it as warm as the rest of the house.

The front hall was just a wall that separated the kitchen from the front door. Our first wall phone was in the front hall, so we could lie under coats to talk on the phone, if we needed privacy. Some houses had no front hall and you walked through the front door right into the kitchen. The front hall was a place to throw your coat and other stuff, like school books.

The space under the stairs also had a door of its own, with the same painted doorknob as the cubby hole. Originally, the wringer washer was kept in there. It was a great hiding place. Later, after the oil furnace broke and they sealed off the chimney in case of a fire, they put a natural gas furnace under the house and you had to go through a trap door that was under the stairs to get at it. What a fiasco when the meter reader came. It was so embarrassing. Most people put their furnace in the back shed, but not us.

The parents’ bedroom was beside the door to the closet under the stairs. Most parents couldn’t wait for their kids to move away so they could knock down the wall between their bedroom and the front room to make an L-shaped bigger room. My parents did that and got a dining room suite. It all happened after we moved away. They even pounded through the outside wall of their bedroom and added a TV room south of that! They should have done it when we lived there, but that would just have given us more space to mess up.

The top of the stairs was a dead end with a door on each side. One door led to, the girls’ room that I shared it with my younger sister, and the other to the room for my older brother. These rooms had those slanted ceilings and crazy corners so you could either fit a big bed and a dresser into them, or two small beds and a dresser. In one of the bedrooms there was a floor vent that opened to the kitchen. My brother’s room had the vent, while ours had the cubby hole.

We played outside. There simply was no extra room to play in the wartime house. There were only the two bedrooms upstairs for the kids and most houses had more than two kids in the family, so everyone was sharing, and nobody was allowed in, especially not with their friends.

In our house, we were coached in bed-making. It would happen on a Saturday afternoon every year during spring-cleaning while the music from Broadway shows rang forth on the hi-fi.

“Whoa hoe the Wells Fargo wagon is a-comin’ down the street oh please let it be for me.”

“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plane.”

“There ain’t nothin’ like a dame, nothin’ in the world.”

It must have been raining outside on those Saturdays, otherwise we would never have been in the house on a Saturday afternoon. We were shown how it was done in a hospital or maybe in the army. We were given clean sheets that smelled sweet. We would place our little pajama dolls on our beds, mine pink, hers purple. It was a very special time. And again, the following spring, our beds would get made. Between bouts of spring cleaning, our room was a free-for all. It was designed for rumpus. We had the small door that led to our cave along the slant of the house and we would never worry about the itchy stuff while we built our hidden forts in there. We had a dresser, but usually it had no clothes in it. We’d sit in the drawers, playing ship, and over she’d go, spilling the whole thing on the floor. A laundry basket? I don’t think so. Not that I remember. We played school up there, and business girls. And probably doctor.

From my perspective, everyone’s house was like this although I didn’t see the inside of very many of the other houses on the street. These were big families in small homes and there was no such thing as décor. There were no “light fixtures,” no wall-paper, no bathtub surrounds. What for? The matching melmac belonged in St. James and the doily-covered china cabinets belonged in Elmwood. Here, all we needed was ordinary stuff. An aluminum pot full of pea soup and a fist full of crackers would sustain us so we could run the lanes and the sidewalks, and cut through the yards. In the back doors and out the front we’d go. Slam! Calling and hollering. Laughing and crying. By and large, ignoring the grown-ups.

There were no fitful nervous mothers in Shaughnessy Heights. Well, maybe one. She never came outside and we’d chew grass to make our teeth green and sneer at her in through the back bedroom window. I think she was French, so maybe she worried about her kids. But the rest of us would get home at dark or when we were hungry and there was always something on the go. Mom was always busy. Canning. Rolling smokes. Gardening. Cooking. Laundering with the wringer squeezing into the kitchen sink. Ironing in front of the TV. Shake shake that 7-Up bottle of water with the thumb, letting just the right amount out to dampen the clothes. Roll them up. Roll the socks. Maybe do some dishes, if the washing machine wasn’t in front of the sink. Save the housework until Saturday, if it rains. And the dads were at work, somewhere. Labatt’s, Esso, Dominion Bridge, Kleysens, CPR, Motorcoach. They would come home and sometimes they would have a beer. Round and round it went. The dads grunted at each other. There wasn’t much fun to be had. After all, every single dad in Shaughnessy Heights had been in the war.

Even though every one of our dads was a veteran, they didn’t talk to each other about the war. Each of them knew their war was much worse than the other guy’s war. It would become a pissing contest over who had the worst experience. There was no such thing as sunscreen or gor-tex for protection from the elements and there was no such thing as Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. The dads had nothing to talk about.