Recollections Of An Earlier Time

 

I am thinking back to beginnings, about the things in our early lives that may have impacted the kinds of people we became.

On the street where I lived during my pre-teens, in the terraced housing, drunken fathers beat wives and children. In one hovel, a woman drank peroxide to escape her unbearable existence. The neighbor’s oldest daughter dated a bootlegger with a shiny car. The younger children of our neighbor marched outside our door, shouting catcalls and throwing stones at our windows.

This is the world I inhabited, with solicitous parents and two sisters, one older, one younger. Being the sole male offspring was a matter of some importance in the context of that time.

My early years paralleled the years of the Depression in Canada. In that world, my father was unemployed and we were on Welfare.

I had to scrabble around on the ground,  fighting my contemporaries many times, for no reason I could understand, except that only then could I walk upright on our street. We were at the nadir of a life-style descent that had led us, in our home city of Winnipeg, in Canada, from treed areas around Magnus and McPhillips, to stark Powers and Stella, and finally, to slummy Jarvis. If one wants to rise up, why not start at the bottom?

Directly across the street from our home was a coal and lumber yard, large, and occupying much of the street frontage. Behind the yard were Winnipeg’s famous rail-yards, stretching back seemingly without end. We often wandered there in our explorations, the far extremities, a “terra incognita”.

Behind our home was a junk yard, a destination for discards, and treasures, for those with eyes to discover the hidden values. My grandfather, with his horse and wagon, was there occasionally, seeking a favorable appraisal of his gleanings. For me, when it was closed to others, it held the mystery of the unknown. I would sometimes build dams and rivers in its muddy puddles and rummage for curiosities.

One day I found a sodden book of writings, and discovered something that would open my eyes to my future. I encountered William Shakespeare, poetry and prose, and stories of villains and heroes. I ran to my bedroom, with that book held close to my chest. I read from its contents night after night until it was consumed. I had found the fantasy world wherein I could imagine a future for myself.

I remember like it was yesterday. I had managed to find a trowel, a little metal shovel with which to dig into the hard ground. I dug a good-sized hole in the little patch of grass beside our house. The neighbor’s house,  that of our landlord, unlike ours, was set back a little from the sidewalk. It had a small lawn. It even had a tree. This was precious territory in the urban desert that was Jarvis Street.

Into the hole went the tableware over which I poured the boiling water I had carried from the stove in our kitchen. The water drained away quickly. I wrapped the utensils in a tea towel, being careful not to burn my hands from the heat the objects retained. Back into the house I went to get another kettle full of boiling water and the dishes. Into the hole went the dishes. Then, again, I poured the boiling water over the contents stacked into the hole I had dug. I gathered the plates up, wrapped again in tea towels, carrying them back into the house to be washed with the utensils in the kitchen sink.

We were preparing everything in the house for Passover. Not for us a second set of everything to celebrate the holiday. Guess why? Every year we would carry out the ritual cleansing, along with the requisite blessings, so that we would be properly prepared. Through this mysterious alchemy, we would be ready for the first Passover meal in the evening.

I never questioned the rituals, carrying out Mama’s instructions. These were just the things that Jews did. Didn’t everybody? How exposing the things we used to eat with into the mud on the ground somehow made them clean, was never explained.

More mysterious, my mother each year, at the prescribed time, shook a chicken over my head, accompanied by Hebrew blessings. How they somehow saved me from a horrible fate, and guaranteed my life for another year, never prompted a question from my lips.

This was the world I lived in, a much different world than the one inhabited by those who lived around us, a much different world from the one I found in my school books and on our streets.

Inside the four walls of our home we lived our secret private life, unknown to those outside our circle, where family was everything. The warmth of parental concern for we children’s well-being, and the peace and beauty of our Sabbath, existed here. The inner life we lived there was a fantasy we accepted without question. We were transported by it temporarily from the brutal reality we experienced when we went out into the streets. It was one of my consolations at the time.