Butting in and butting out: Childhood, adulthood, and cigarette smoke (Georgetown, Ontario and beyond) (38) smoke smoke smoke that cigarette Tex Williams with Lyrics – YouTube From earliest childhood, I was constantly engulfed in a toxic cloud of cigarette smoke, and growing up in Georgetown, Ontario in the 1950s, I was mad keen to butt..
La version française de ce texte suit la version anglaise. Excremental vision By her own admission, my mom began toilet training my sister and me when we reached about six months of age. Her fervent desire to get us out of diapers was a rather extreme reflection of the prevailing zeitgeist of the 1950s where..
Georgetown, Ontario, 1962, Chapel Street School: Skipping Grade 5…a crippling blow My grade skipping saga began oh so long ago, in 1961, when I was in 4th grade. Back in the day, kids were routinely “skipped” if deemed academically meritorious by some individual or board. This fate was my social undoing. During first term in..
Reigning cats…and dogs When I was a small child, I had the gooiest of soft spots for all animal creatures, fictional or otherwise. Every night before bed, my dad would read me a story featuring the little forest and meadow people of Thornton W. Burgess, including Grandfather Frog, Jimmy Skunk, Johnny Chuck, Jerry Muskrat, Paddy..
Tarpon Springs, Florida 1959…and 65 years later When I was seven years old, our family made a trip from Georgetown, Ontario to Tarpon Springs, Florida, on the train. (My father worked for the CN railway, so we had a family pass.) Tarpon Springs, Florida – Wikipedia We made this odyssey to visit our mom’s favorite..
Gender-bending for Halloween “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world…” – Lola, The Kinks Born in 1952, I grew up in what was then a small southern Ontario municipality called Georgetown, an epicenter, I decided later, of what has been dubbed the Southern Ontario..
Let me tell you about the birds and the bees (photo of my mom circa 1950) I was born in 1952, the year that Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president of the United States. Growing up absurd in a small southern Ontario town in the 1950s and 1960s meant being fed a steady diet of..
Are the bees for the birds? The custom of “telling the bees” is a charming and ancient tradition where beekeepers inform their bees about significant events in their lives, such as deaths, births, marriages, and other major occurrences. This practice is believed to have its roots in Celtic mythology, where bees were seen as messengers..
Good Neighbor Sam What was the first film you ever saw in a “movie theatre”? I saw my first such movie in July of 1964 when I was 12 years old. Starring the iconic comedian Jack Lemmon, the film was a piece of fluff called “Good Neighbor Sam”, but for me this foray..
Bug-Itis got a-hold on me …or don’t let the bedbugs bite About 400 years ago, when I was a student at Oakridge Secondary School in London Ontario, one of the major events of the institution’s social calendar was a yearly dance featuring a group called the Mandala, commonly referred to, for some unknown reason, as..