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..
Terminal tartar When I was about five years old, growing up in Georgetown, Ontario, a first visit to the dentist yielded the most perplexing diagnosis: I was afflicted with terminal tartar. Now in our home, in honour of my mom’s vestigial Catholicism, combined with her ardent desire to be a contemporary 1950s housewife, we always..
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..
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..