Monday Memoirs: Just trying to have fun and survive until I was seven

I lived in the hamlet of Burgessville for the first six and a half years of my very exciting life.

Because the public school in Burgessville had no kindergarten I was transported by car to Norwich, five miles away, with a small group of other wee tads for my first year of formal book learning.

I was introduced to play time in a sandbox, painting with fat brushes, taking a break for cold milk and sleeping on the carpet. Though I should have excelled at the above activities my report card informs me I was “a restless child”.

Hey, who could sleep after designing a new system of road ways in the sand?


[My first hot rod; circa 1954; for quick get-a-ways.]

Each child carried a quarter to school on Mondays to pay for the milk and because 25 cents was a ton of money I kept the quarter to myself one week, told the teacher I forgot or lost it and then hid it in the middle of the creek that ran under the road between Wettlaufer’s General Store and my home.

I remember hiding and retrieving it from the water and buying chewy raspberry candies and a bag of blackballs - hard as a rock, three for a penny. Though I can’t remember getting caught for my first crime my luck soon ran out.

Rhonda Wettlaufer, my first girlfriend, cried a lot when she was in grade 1 so I was occasionally asked to walk her home during school hours. Her parents ran the corner store and Rhonda’s mother gave me candy in exchange for her daughter.

I returned the favour by skillfully stealing my first comic book right from under her nose. However, I didn’t even get to the end of the first story. After taking two steps into the house Mother spotted the comic, asked me where I got it, smelled something fishy about my reply and marched me back to the store in very short order. I made my first tearful public apology to a shopkeeper. (It wouldn’t be my last.)

When I wasn’t ripping off local merchants I was climbing on rafters or high stacks of feedbags at the local Co-op mill where my dad worked, looking at the pigs in our barn, running from snakes in our backyard, throwing stones at passing cars, kicking slats out of the upper bunk causing it to crash on my head, covering myself with bright red lipstick, frightening the life out of my mother (who thought I was bleeding to death), eating mud pies under the back steps of the house with my sisters, licking blocks of salt (cowlicks) in the field behind our yard, telling mother I didn’t like my name and fussing about a new one, climbing into a large round hot-air vent after my father told me not to, getting stuck, crying for help, or making sharp tin swords with Danny Bucholtz on his dad’s eavestrough machine - sharp enough to cut through a corn stalk.

Though I sometimes wonder how I survived long enough to blow out seven candles I wouldn’t change a thing.