On a chilly Tuesday, February 9th afternoon in 1989, I was fired from my job as a teacher at a privately-operated school for gifted children.

The principal at the school had met with the parents of one of the students in my class, a nine-year-boy, the boy’s parents instructing the principal that they wanted their son promoted from Grade 4 — the grade he was in — to Grade 7, a request the principal readily acquiesced to. After all, hers was a business bent on lining her pocket and making her rich, not education and the welfare of children, so why wouldn’t she accede to such a request?

Towards the end of lunch hour that overcast day, the principal called me into her office, and instructed that, going forward, I was to teach this young boy from materials provided for the two Grade 7 students in my 15-student classroom, explaining why I must do this, and her expectation that I would immediately act on her demand.

Unsurprisingly, for anyone who knows me, I refused her untoward request.

The boy in question had experienced problems with the Grade 4 curriculum, could barely read, with arithmetic and math skills more common for a late Grade One student. I told the principal that as the boy was already struggling with academic work appropriate for the Grade 4 level, I could not in all good conscience — and as a professional & given my obligation to the young student — would not, in the circumstance, accede to her demand.

The principal, now sitting rigidly in her chair, looking directly at me with steely eyes, asked me the following question, “What difference does it make whether the boy is working with the Grade 4 or the Grade 7 curriculum, they’re virtually the same? What difference does it make to you whether he’s working with Grade 7 or Grade 4 textbooks and curriculum? Make no mistake, Raymond: I am not making a request of you, nor a demand. As the principal of this school, I am ordering you this afternoon to move (student’s name) work to Grade 7. I hope I am making perfectly clear what is expected of you, by me, as the principal, and owner, of this school.”

At which point, I re-iterated my concerns to the principal, once again letting her know that I could not, and I would not, move the student into Grade 7.

With a cold look of disdain on her face, the principal, with a meanness I had not seen previously, in a quiet and measured tone, said, “You’re fired. I will make arrangements this afternoon to have your belongings delivered to your home. Leave the school immediately. You are no longer in the employ of (name of school), nor will you speak of why you have left to anyone.

The events that lead up to my dismissal from the school, the impact my firing had on the parents, and more particularly on the students in my class, who were devoted to me, is a story for another day, a story I am not yet brave enough to tell. Perhaps someday. Not today.

Although the headline for today’s story reads “Aftermath of Being Fired”, my use of that particular description is, for the purposes of today’s story, meant to apply only to the events of that particular Tuesday, February 9th afternoon, and not the years’ long aftermath of my employment termination, which story, as I write above, I may write another day.

Little white house: 336 East 28th Avenue, in the Riley Park neighbourhood of Vancouver, the home of my father, John Tomlin, in the 1980s and 1990s

Today, I have another story from my life that occurred in the aftermath of my firing, on that chill Tuesday afternoon, when I drove to my father’s home on East 28th Avenue near Main, where warming cups of tea awaited me, and where a story that I will always cherish unfolded that afternoon, the story I am about to tell you, that to some great extent has provided the impetus and rationale for the weekly VanRamblings’ Stories of a Life feature, as a gift for my two children, in order that they — along with you — might know me better, the stories to be found by clicking on the stories of a life rectangular box, among the highlighted links at the top of the site.

</ br>My father, John Tomlin, outside our home on Venables Street, circa 1962

As is my usual custom after an upsetting event, I got into my car and drove around town, lonely and wandering down the streets and around the city, arriving at my father’s home on East 28th, about 2:20pm that afternoon.

I knocked on the door, my father invited me in, put on some tea, and we sat down at the kitchen table, as per our usual custom. He didn’t ask what I was doing over at his home in the middle of the afternoon, and why I wasn’t at work. He was at home alone, we were in his home alone together, his second wife, Rose, at work. That afternoon it was just the two of us.

With the sounds of country music wafting in the air from CJJC radio Langley, as we sat there and drank our tea, my father now having put some biscuits on the table for the two of us to eat, I didn’t tell him of the events of earlier that day. I was feeling in a pensive mood, quieter than usual, reflective, when an idea struck me.

Here we were, just the two of us, no one expected home until at least 6pm, quiet in the house except for the plaintive sounds of country radio in the background, and I thought to myself, “Well, Raymond, it’s now or never. Ask Dad about his life. Tell him that your curious. Ask him if he would tell you about himself, and his experience of life.” So, I asked my father. He put his hand to his chin, looked down, and began …

“As you know, I was born on the prairies in the autumn of 1916, in northern Saskatchewan, one of six boys and girls, all of us working the farm from the earliest age. My father died when I was three, and given that I was the second to oldest, it was my job to take care of my younger twin brothers and twin sisters, and my older brother, too, to care for the farm, and care for my mother. It was a hardscrabble life for me from the age of six on — we struggled, often there wasn’t any food on the table, and we went days without anything more than a bit of bread and butter.

I was in Grade One at the age of six, but I had to quit because I was needed on the farm.

Life up until the end of the 1920s stayed much the same, the only relief we had from the sameness of our days, was our old Marconi radio, which had been a gift from one of our neighbours who had decided to move away, leaving his possessions behind, as he went off to look for work, and a life better than what he, or we had in our struggling farm community.

Then the Great Depression hit, and we had to go on Relief, the bottom fell out of the market for wheat, which was our main crop, people packed up and left for the city to see if they could find work, and for those who were left behind, it was devastation, Dust Bowl like conditions, with not enough coming in to keep kith and kin together. By 1930, the only option available to me became clear: like thousands of others, I would ride the rails, looking for work and looking for a handout if I was going to survive. Staying at home, all I’d be was a burden. So, I packed up an old kit bag, went down to the railyards & jumped into the first open car I could see, the surprise of my life confronting me once I was onboard, when I looked around, i saw another 20 guys, looking gaunt and worn out like me.

And that was my life throughout the Great Depression, riding the rails from one end of Canada to the other, picking up work wherever I could, spending time each summer in the Annapolis Valley picking apples, eating as much as I could to fill my belly, working long days, living in hobo camps at night — we weren’t tramps or bums, we worked for what we got — learning to cook chicken and flat bread over the camp fire. All and all, I thought we did pretty well, but near 10 years of that life, and I was ready for a change, ready to settle down somewhere. But the economy wasn’t getting any better, I couldn’t read and my prospects were poor.

In early September of 1939, I was living in a hobo camp on the outskirts of Revelstoke, on my way to the Okanagan to pick apples. There was talk in the camp that something was up in Europe, that the German Army had invaded Poland. On September 10th, I was in town looking for food out back of a restaurant when I heard a bunch of kids, saw them running down the street, screaming into the air, “We’re going to war. There’s a war. We’re going to fight those dirty …”

Next thing I knew, there was a hand on my shoulder, a man in a uniform. “Son,” he said to me, “we’re at war now, saw it comin’. I’m with the Army recruitment office just down the street. Why don’t you come with me, and we’ll get you signed up. Three squares a day, a nice clean uniform, and you’ll get to see the world. No more living in hobo camps for you.”

So, I did, I went with him, signed up. For the first time in almost a decade, things were looking up. After I signed my name on the dotted line, the sergeant handed me an army uniform, saying, “Find a place to put this on.” I ran back to the hobo camp, more excited than I’d been in I don’t know how long. There was a pond nearby the camp, I stripped off my tattered old clothes, jumped in the pond, got myself nice and wet, dried myself with my old clothes, and set about to get dressed up in my spanking new uniform. I don’t think I’d ever felt better in my whole life.”

At which point, my father got up from the table when he heard a knock at the front door. It was a neighbour asking my father if he could borrow one of my father’s tools. My father went downstairs into the basement, retrieved the tool and gave it to his neighbour. After pouring us both a cup of tea, and replenishing the biscuit tray, my father returned to the kitchen table, and began the telling of his story once again.

There were small barracks in Revelstoke, but we weren’t going to be there for long. Canada knew that a war was coming, preparation had been made, and within two days we boarded a train – not a boxcar, but a real train car with seats, and a dining room car, as we headed towards Saskatchewan for six weeks of boot camp, after which we were told we’d be shipped to London. Boot camp went by in a blur. I was tough and strong, as I’ve been all my life, and boot camp was fine, the 600 or so of us in the camp boarding a train for Halifax, a ship waiting for us to take us to London.

Upon arriving in England, we stuffed our belongings away, all 600 of us now resident in the major garrison for Canadian solidiers, our barracks in Aldershot, in the Rushmoor district of Hampshire, England, along the southern coast of the country. All looked well until I got sick about a week in, and was hospitalized with some sort of intestinal disorder, some form of hyperthyroidism, I think, causing a massive weight loss for me, until I was little more than skin and bone. Which is when and where my osteoporosis first presented itself.

Soon enough, it became clear that I wouldn’t be seeing any action on the front. One of my lieutenants assigned me to the stores, the supply centre for the camp, which is where I spent the next three years of my life. It wasn’t bad over there, I made friends, worked hard, went to dances on the weekends, did a bit of volunteering and thought that, all and all, it wasn’t a bad life.

But I got in with a bad lot. There was money to be made working in the stores, with a big black market for all sorts of goods that we kept in the supply warehouse at the garrison. A few of the hustlers in the camp, soldiers who had also gotten a deferment for some other phony malady or other, ended up as a group taking over the camp’s stores, and ran a racket out of there you wouldn’t believe. I’ve always been a ‘go along to get along’ kind of guy, but what I saw worried me. Still, there wasn’t much I could do. It wasn’t as if I was going to go to the commander and rat these guys out.

Next thing I knew, I was in hot and heavy in all the schemes dreamed up by these creeps, who were inventive in how they could rip off the camp, curry favour with the girls in town, making a killing through sales of tens of thousands of dollars, and more over a period of time, of Canadian army goods. I knew it couldn’t last, and it didn’t. One morning I was rousted out of bed by the MPs, and taken to the brig to await trial on charges of theft and conversion and what not. I served most of the last two years of the war in the brig.”

When the war came to an end in May 1945, my father told me, almost the entire camp went into London to celebrate V-E Day. “It was quite a day, let me tell you,” he said, almost wistfully.

Soldiers and friends celebrating V-E Day on the streets of London, May 9th 1945

At this point he realized he hadn’t had a cigarette all afternoon, and told me, “I’m going out back for a cigarette. You can stay in here for awhile. I need some time to myself.” Moving slowly, he left the house.

When my father came back into the house and returned to the kitchen, pouring himself a fresh cup of tea, he sat down once again at the kitchen table, asking me, “Do you want to hear anymore?”

Yes, oh yes, oh yes, please God, let this story of a life continue — but all I said was, “Sure, I’d like to hear more. Can I ask you a question, though? How did you meet mom?”

“Once the war was over — surprising to me, I got an honourable discharge — it was only six weeks before I found myself on board a ship headed for Canada, but not Halifax this time, because the port was too small to handle the tens, the hundreds of thousands of returning troops. No, the ship I boarded was to travel through the Panama Canal towards our destination of Vancouver, British Columbia.

Arriving in Vancouver, I was able to find a small room in a boarding house — there were lots of those that cropped up to house returning soldiers like me — and set about looking for work. Fun was to be had on the weekends, at dances mostly, which is where I met your mother. Man oh man, could she dance. Your mother really liked to have a good time. She was kind of a pretty young thing, too, eight years my junior. We got to dancing one evening when she told me that I was “the one”.

“The one?” I asked, to which she replied, “Yes, you’re the one I’m going to marry.” I suppose I was kind of handsome in those days, with a kind of rugged if gaunt look, a three day growth wiry beard most days. Your mother’s proposal got me thinking. That night, your mother and I became an item. She was working, slinging hash at some diner or other, while I was still looking for work, living off the re-establishment veterans benefit that the Canadian government paid us. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get by on.

Things went on like that throughout the summer, and into the early fall, and your mother was always on me to set a date. But you know me. I have an impossible time making up my mind about almost anything. One morning your mother came to my rooming house, told the landlady she wanted to see me, and marched right upstairs to my room, busting through the door like a force of nature, which you and I know she always was and continues to be, I imagine. Your mother confronted me, saying, “I’ve waited long enough. You’ve got to make up your mind. I want to be married by the end of the week, if not sooner. Either we get married now, or it’s finished, we’re over.”

I hemmed and hawed. I just didn’t know if I wanted to get married. And your mother, she was a piece of work, not often easy to get along with, demanding, opinionated, loud and like I said, a force of nature. I thought to myself, “Mary is too much woman for me. What would my life with her be like?” Not bliss, I knew, but something, although I wasn’t sure what.

Your mother, looking me right in the eye, said, “I’ve got a job waiting for me in Drumheller. I’m going down to the CN station on Main Street, and I’m catching the 5 o’ clock. Once I’m on that train, you’ll never see me again.” And then she stomped out, slamming the door behind her.

I just sat there. I thought to myself, “You know, Jack, you’re almost 30 years of age. When are you going to get married? When are you ever going to find another girl?” And I just lay there, thinking and thinking and thinking. I didn’t know what to do. I got on the bus, headed downtown, and walked to Stanley Park from there, because I needed some quiet, and some time to think.

Finally, by around 3pm, I’d decided. For better, or for worse, I’d marry your mother. I got on the bus, and headed in the direction of the CN station. When I arrived at the station, I walked through the big front doors, and found that the place was packed. Even so, I spotted your mother, who was in line getting ready to board the train. I ran up to her and said, “Will you marry me?” And with that, this petite 21-year-old girl jumped into my arms, and said, “Yes, a million times yes.”

I moved out of the rooming house, and your mother and I found a basement suite up by Fraser and 57th. By year’s end, your mother was pregnant with your brother Robert. Oh, I forgot, no one’s ever told you that you had an older brother. He was born in the summer of 1946, but was kind of sickly. Within three months he was gone.

Your mother was so sad that she told me she needed to be near family if she was going to get through the loss of your brother. So, we packed up, and a few days later, we were on our way to Drumheller, Alberta, and that job your mother had been promised, where she had friends and work, and a place where she could recover, not that she ever did, I don’t think.”

And with that, my father got up, gave me a hug, and said, “You better be on your way. I think I’m going to pick Rose up from work today.”

“I love you son.”

And thus ends the saga of my father’s life, in the years before I was born, a story that was mine to cherish — for the rest of my life. It is the telling of that story that has led to Stories of a Life on VanRamblings.

I have often thought to myself, “Fire me any day of the week, and twice on Sunday, if the result is a story like the one my father told me that day.”

And so it is, and so it always will be. A gift of deliverance as told through narrative, my history laid bare through the words my father spoke to me that afternoon, and a life lived that much better and with more meaning, in the knowledge of where I’ve come from — although the details of that story, the story of my young life beyond, is best left for another day.

In November 2017, I wrote of a signal event of my life — a 7th birthday present from my mother of a transistor radio, on August 11th, 1957.
The acquisition of the leather-encased transistor radio — I was the first boy in my neighbourhood to own one — so influenced my life that I developed not only a lifelong love of pop culture as a consequence of receiving the present, but a lifelong love for radio, which less than 10 years later would see me working at CFUN — then Vancouver’s rock ‘n roll giant — studying with Red Robinson (at the time, the programme director), producing the station’s Sunday night programming, and occasionally going on the air.

The gift of the transistor radio also meant that after going to bed at my usual bedtime of 8pm, I could turn the radio on to CKNW and listen to the classic radio programmes of the 1940s and 1950s: The Shadow, Our Miss Brooks, the Jack Benny – a favourite – and Red Skelton shows, and George Burns and Gracie Allen, and The Charlie McCarthy shows.
Summer 1957 also had a darker aspect.
For the first five years of my life, I didn’t speak. I sang, but I didn’t speak. Early childhood trauma, I expect — neglect, a lack of love, and darker goings on I won’t write about today, but there was joy in my young life — the Sunshine Bread truck that would situate itself in the park at the end of Alice Street, over by Victoria and 24th, providing the young children who lived in the neighbourhood an opportunity to ride on the tiny merry-go-round on the back of the truck, the children running home to their mothers saying, “Mom, oh mom, you’ve got to buy some Sunshine Bread.”
During this period, though, and throughout my life, there was not a mother at home for me to run to. My father, too, was absent; I’m not sure where he spent his days, all I knew was that he didn’t have work — my parents argued about it all the time — and neither was he a fit parent, as he proved time and time again. There were nannies at home, recent immigrants from Germany, mostly, from whom I acquired my love of warm & filling oatmeal for my breakfast in the morning, for there wasn’t much food in my home, and often that oatmeal breakfast would constitute my meal for the day.
At age five, I began to speak, first haltingly and then in full sentences. For anyone who knows me, they’d probably say that for many years now, I have been making up for the lost words of the first five years of my life.

In my home, there were no bedtime stories. Not that either of my parents were inclined to read to my sister and I. My father had a Grade One education, and couldn’t read. My mother had a Grade Three education, and she could read — but not to either me or my sister. Not that she was ever around the house long enough to read stories to us, even if she was so inclined — which she wasn’t.
My mother was the breadwinner in my family.
From the earliest years of my life, through all the years of my maturational growth, my mother always worked three jobs — for many years she worked days at Bonor and Bemis, just off Strathcona Park, a factory job where she worked in the part of the factory responsible for making paper bags; afternoons saw my father lifting my sister into the back seat of the car to pick my mother up from work, to drive her to Lulu Island and the Swift Meat Packing Plant, after which my father, sister and I traveled home in our 10-year-old Plymouth, the car barreling down Victoria Drive, with my sister far too often opening the back door of the car, spilling out onto the roadway, as my father’s car sped away down the street, me screaming, “Dad, dad — Linda’s jumped out of the car!” at which point he would stop, turn the car around and head back to where my sister lay in the middle of the road, a car having stopped so he wouldn’t run her over, holding up traffic, my father rushing over to pick up my sister to take her home.
In any one of those incidents, my father never thought to take Linda to the hospital. Sometimes the driver of the car that had stopped — to prevent himself from driving over Linda — would repair to my home, on Alice Street, or East 2nd Avenue, with me screaming at my father or the man or men who were standing around in the kitchen of my house, Linda laying bruised and bleeding on the hard melamite kitchen table, me now screeching at the adults gathered around my sister, men hands held to their chin, doing nothing, my screaming at them to take her to the hospital.
But they never did.

In September 1956, I entered Grade One. My mother was actually present to enroll me my first day of school at Lord Nelson Elementary, at Templeton Drive and Charles. Miss Pugh was my Grade One teacher. The only memory I have of her involves asking the children in class to put our heads down on our desks when her boyfriend would come to visit, as I peeked toward the front of the class, where I would see the two of them kissing — the only affection between adults I had ever witnessed to that point in my life.
Grade One was, for me, a blur.
I was, I suppose, unmanageable, full of life, although I don’t have any strong memories of my attendance at Lord Nelson Elementary school, from September 1956 through June of 1957 — I had never been socialized, no one had ever made demands of me in regards of my conduct, although I would receive hard spankings if I got out of line, although it was always difficult to determine what “getting out of line meant,” as there were no boundaries around my conduct that I can recall having been set for me.
I enjoyed my pre-school days (read: before I attended elementary school), and I suppose I enjoyed school, my memory of playing marbles at recess acute. Quite honestly, though, I can’t remember anything else of my first year of school — apart from the kissing at the front of the class, from time to time, between my teacher and her boyfriend. As my mother was working three jobs — 16 hours a day, six days a week, 24 hours on the 7th day, the unskilled factory jobs paying, early on, about 25 cents an hour, climbing to 35 cents by 1957 — I was lost, there were no governors in my life, no love, no affection, I felt alone, and more often than not, full of dread and fear.
My most cogent memories of September 1956 to June 1957 are this …

• Walking to school alone through billowy white fog, so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of you, arriving at school on time, and settling into a day where I would learn nothing;
• Running to Joy and Louise’s house after school, and playing with them for 2 hours, their parents at work, just the three of us at home playing make believe;
• Spending occasional afternoons at my best friend John Pavich’s home, his mother with fresh-baked, warm cookies at the ready, a glass of milk on the table. I would often stay for only a half hour, after which I would walk down Charles Street in the rain, towards Nanaimo, rumbling thunder and lightning in the steel blue skies a wondrous delight for me.

I have always felt most secure in overcast weather. Clouds in the sky, particularly the dark billowy clouds that covered the sky on those most overcast of days, offered me a secure and reassuring blanket, a security I lacked in every other aspect of my life, my love of darkened — some would say, forboding, but not me — a feeling that lives in me still.
I love the rain, I love leaden skies, I love the security that those overhead clouds continue to provide me, as if nothing bad can or will happen to me — and in a life, as far back as my pre-school days, an ever more present and necessary feeling as I glided through my Grade One year, untouched, unaware, when I raised myself alone (who knew where my sister was?), the clouds in the sky offering me the only security that was available to me.

Six-year-old me, Raymond Tomlin, on my bike, outside my home, in the spring of 1957

As the school year was ending, the sports day complete, the warm summer days having now just begun, on the last day of school in June 1957, I received my report card, taking it directly to my home as instructed by my Principal and my teacher. There was no one home. I played make believe all on my own. I left my report card on the kitchen table. Alone, I felt fatigued, and went to bed early on that June 30th afternoon, unsure of what the summer would bring, and what life held in store for me.
Early the next morning, following 12 hours of fitful sleep, upon opening my eyes, I was surprised to see my mother standing over my bed. She looked at me, seething, her lips pursed and tight, her face purple with rage — next thing I knew, she hit me across the face, hard. “You failed Grade One. No son of mine is going to fail Grade One. You are in for a summer of hell!”
And so it proved to be.
For the only time in all the years I lived at home, my mother left her employment, staying home with me through July and August, the renters in the downstairs suite evicted that summer, my days of hell beginning at 8am, tied to a chair in the kitchen of the downstairs suite, from 8am til 8pm Monday through Friday of each week of summer 1957, for near on 60 days — save my birthday, on August 11th, when I was given a day off — I was beaten, the rope tying me to the chair cutting into my skin, the early part of the summer finding me screaming in fear and in pain.
Hour upon hour upon hour.
Of course, in those days, there was no definiing concept of child abuse, no such thing as a Ministry of Human Resources or Ministry of Children and Family Development, no one to look after the welfare of children. A child screaming, most parents — at least in my east side Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood — thought the child probably had it coming to them.
Over the course of the thirty-one days of July 1957, something of a miracle occurred amidst the tears, and the now lessening screams of the day: I learned to read. I learned arithmetic. I learned to print. I learned everything I had not learned in ten months of enrollment in Grade One.
By summer’s end — as would soon be discovered, I knew how to print and to write in cursive longhand, my arithmetic skills progressing far beyond basic addition and subtraction into fractions, and elementary algebra and geometry. I learned to read, I read for hours every day.
I memorized the small dictionary my mother had purchased for the express purpose of teaching me language. I learned the meaning of thousands of words, and I learned to spell those words correctly — lest I be beaten, or slapped hard across the face. That summer I learned to love learning.

On the first day of school in September 1957, my mother — as you may have gathered, a force of nature — marched me into the school office, confronting the Principal, an anger in her that had transmogrified into rage, my mother fierce and unrelenting in a barrage of hate-filled words that filled the room, fear and dread also filling the room, the Principal clearly unsettled, teachers running towards the office to see what this mad woman who had taken control of the office wanted, was demanding.
“My son is ready for Grade 2,” my mother screamed at my Principal, whose complexion now was ruddy, his face shuddering, his eyes wary, wide, concern – perhaps for his safety, perhaps for me – spilling out of his eyes.
“But Mrs. Tomlin, your son can’t read, he doesn’t even know the letters of the alphabet, and he doesn’t know how to do even the most basic addition and subtraction, not even one plus one equals two. I cannot place your son in Grade Two, just because you wish it to be so.”
My mother looked around the office. There was a large plaque on one of the walls, with 20 or so lines of print on the plaque.
Turning to me, pointing to the plaque, she bellowed, “Read it.” And I did. While I was reading the dozens of words on the plaque, my mother looked around the office, spotting a Grade 5 Math book.
Handing the Math book to the Principal, her eyes now in a squint, she demanded of the Principal, “turn to any page, ask him to solve any problem on that page. Now!” The principal did as he was instructed to do by my mother, asking me one question after another, as he flipped through page after page of the Math book. I answered every question correctly — and quickly, as I had been instructed in my basement dungeon at home.
The Principal turned to me and said, “Wait here son, take a seat over there. Mrs. Tomlin, please come with me to my office.”
Twenty minutes later I entered Mrs. Goloff’s Grade Two class, in a portable outside along Charles Street, beginning what would be one of the best years of my life. The school had spelling bees. I won every time, not just for Grade 2, but for the whole school. I breezed through Grade 2. Somehow, over the summer, I had gained a love of learning that resides in me still, and informs my life each and every day. I loved to read, spending hours in the school library reading whatever I could get my hands on.
I loved challenging myself, my facility with math always not just functional, but acute. And memory — looking back on it, I suppose the summer of 1957 was when I acquired my near photographic memory. I loved challenging myself to remember facts and information, discovering a way to achieve near perfect recall by inventing context through narrative. I suppose, too, that the summer of 1957 was when I first gained my love for narrative — as a tool and as a means to create recall and meaning, and a feature of how I would bring myself to the world, from my years in radio having to memorize how long the “musical beds” were for hundreds of songs, so that I could speak over the musical beds right up to the beat just before the lyrics to the song would kick in, or when in high school, taking the lead in school plays, and learning three hours of dialogue with ease.
The summer of 1957. A pivotal summer in my life, not just my young life, but the whole of my life, the most impactful summer of my near 68 years on this planet. In retrospect, looking back on that summer of what began as misery and pain, and what it has meant to me over the course of the next 60 years of my life — I love my mother for what she did for me.
As I have written previously, and as I will write again, I am who I am because of the tough, caring women who have come into my life, who have been demanding of me to be my best, to give all that I can give.
As is the case with most of the women with whom I have shared my life, my mother was a tough, bright, brooked no nonsense and driven woman, someone you did not want to cross, ever, who was also — not to put too fine a point on the matter — crazy (a consequence of childhood trauma), but a survivor nonetheless, and was in her own way, loving, but in terms of the woman who was supposed to raise me, in large measure and for the most part, absent — save one particular summer, the summer of 1957.