Halcyon Daze - Growing up Canadian

by N. A. Dalbec

  I wanted the car. The price was right. One hundred dollars. We already knew that the car was in need of knee action shocks, a resonator, and a tune-up, among other things. I made a commitment to buy the car and gave my brother a deposit.

  On a super bright late afternoon in the summer, I went over to my brother's place with my father. I had made arrangements to have the car fixed, and my father had consented to join me. I'm pretty sure I needed my father there for insurance purposes. My brother was not at home when we got there, but his girlfriend was. I explained to her what we were going to do and where we were going with the car. There weren't too many shops that sold knee action shock absorbers.

  Driving to the shop was a bit scary. There was lots of traffic, and the car's column shifter was cantankerous at the best of times. You had to lead it into another gear before it would go into the gear that you wanted to go into. The car also wallowed tremendously because of the bad shocks. To be perfectly blunt, it was a piece of crap.

  There were a few complications, but the car eventually became mine. My first car. I even painted the thing, seeing all the taping had been done. I roller painted it dark blue. It didn't come out too badly either.

  It was a bird killing car. I remember taking a couple of my friends out for a drive to one of the passenger's cottage. There would be flocks of birds standing on the road, and I guess the car was either an invisible color, or very silent, but it ate two or three birds at different points along our travels. We only had twenty-five miles to go in one direction.

  I also got to take a girl I knew out to the Lane where people went to park. The car turned out to be a good car for making out.

  The car turned out to be a better car parked, than running. I wasn't making very much money at the time, and the thing was bleeding me dry. By late summer I'd had it. One day the car didn't want to start, and I asked the brother who had sold it to me if he wanted it back. He took it back, and for not much more than what I had paid for it. That was my first experience at car ownership. It was an experience that taught me a lot about old cars. It would turn out to be the first of many experiences with old cars.

  Roll Those Dice

  There's an old saying that goes something like this: “Youth was misspent on the young." Something like that anyway. There is quite a bit of truth to that saying, but some of the blame must go to society, and how it views growing up. School, more school and some work and discipline and more school. You've got to be kidding. I remember when I was a teenager, we felt as if adults were often wasting our time, and so, we didn't feel too bad if we on occasion wasted our own time. That was usually the night time.

  I remember spending entire evenings and sometimes whole nights sitting with friends and listening to Jimi Hendrix and The Cream over and over till the morning sun would sort of peak through the basement window. My gosh, a lot of time was spent in basements. Maybe that's why I hate them so much now. I wouldn't think twice about building a house without a basement. The music was good, and we'd get into a funk. Just put the album on the turntable, and let the repeat mode do the rest. If the album skipped a bit, we'd throw some change on the tone arm. I'm surprised we never got to hear side two while playing side one. We didn't have much money, and you could only do so much school work, and when it got cold outside, you could only stay out there so long. So we listened to a lot of music, very loud, over and over again. It was great if there were some girls around. You could listen to music and try to make out with the girls.

  On a more sedate note, I remember going over to one of my friends' place. He had a small stereo in his room and his parents didn't mind how long we would stay up. They were happy to know that their kids were at home, whatever they were doing. We in effect were not doing a whole lot. We would smoke stinky brown tobacco French cigarettes, or roll up some Dutch blend tobacco, and maybe throw in some wacky to make things more interesting, and we would play sixty or seventy games of Yahtzee, interspersed with games of One Thousand. All the while we would wax philosophical, and listen to a lot of the same records over and over again, until the sun made its way into the sky.

  There was something whimsical about nights like that. We were young, had lots of energy to stay up all night, and the exercise was very much like a form of meditation. The repetitiveness was not boring but soothing. And every once in a while, a revelation, as we called them. would surface out of the conversation. I don't think any of these revelations would usurp Plato or Socrates from their philosophical thrones. Nonetheless, whatever we figured out was something we had figured out by ourselves, and that was a refreshing change from the beat-it-into-your-brains methods that were being used at school.

  And in the morning frostiness you would make your way home. You smelled like a giant cigarette, and you were looking forward to brushing your teeth with lots of toothpaste and a really super scum removing extra hard bristle toothbrush that you found out in later years scraped all the enamel off your teeth. And you looked forward to hitting the pillow with your head. And you asked yourself why you stayed up all night, and what was the name of that tune.

  Fun Jobs

  The work world can be a strange place. A lot of people can't wait to get into it from school and others long for school when they get into the workplace. When you're still in school a summer job is a somewhat refreshing change.

  I was sixteen and going into grade thirteen in the fall. Summer was on and I had two months to get some work in. I had been lucky to work at school during lunch hours, throughout the year, and I was hoping to get something for the summer. It wasn't easy that summer, and at one point I thought I might not find anything. I even went to a TV interview that dealt with job searching. The night of the interview my eldest brother clued me in on a job that was available at the university.

  It was a neat sort of job. It involved running a photocopying machine, and I had my own office, and my own hours, as long as I put in twenty-four hours in a week and spread the time over at least three days. It even paid well. Great job when you're sixteen. I read a lot of books that summer, and I had lots of time for fun activities.

  The following year, the year I finally got out of high school, I was all of seventeen. I went to the student employment office to see what was available. I looked around and found a job for a delivery driver. This was for me. I loved driving, and would take anything that involve driving. I was a little worried that they would find me too young, but I decided to give it a shot anyway.

  I got to the paint and glass shop that was located downtown. I went in and asked to see the person whose name appeared on the employment slip. The name belonged to one of the owners of the store. He looked just like Chevy Chase. He asked me a few questions about where I had worked in previous summers, and I mentioned the shop where I had worked as a stock boy when I was fifteen. It turned out that this guy knew the two Jewish women that I had worked for, and he gave them a call. I got a great reference, and he hired me. I had worked for two Jewish women, and now I was going to work for two Jewish guys. I was starting to wonder if I should have been born Jewish.

  The job was pretty straightforward. I took care of stock, cleaned the store, and delivered paint. The stockroom was in the basement. I was used to that. The basement had a low ceiling. I was used to that. I'd be hitting my head on the floor joists. I never got used to that. Nor did I ever get used to rodent traps. More karma?

  The very best part of this job was that I got to deliver paint in the bosses' cars. One of them was a real sled. It was a green Mercury Monterey convertible with white interior and a 289 V8. The other car was a gold Pontiac four door with blah interior and a hefty 350 V8. I was in heaven. Whenever I could, I took the convertible, even on cloudy days, and I'd put the top down as soon as I got in the car. If it was really rainy, I took the Pontiac. It laid a really good patch of rubber, and looked like what the police were driving in our city that year, so people always got out of the way when they saw the bland beast coming. The Merc was a boat. It wouldn't la
y rubber, but it was smooth and comfortable.

  Thank goodness there were lots of deliveries, because I hated working in the store. It was usually hot as hell in there and certainly not as exciting as being outside, cruising. The only good thing about being inside the store was watching the glass cutters do custom work. It's really something to watch. The glassmen will tell you that glass has a grain to it, and you have to learn to feel glass as you're cutting it.

  Good things sometimes come to an end sooner than you want them to. I was cruising down one of the main streets downtown with a full load of paint. I was using the convertible that day. I was driving down the left lane of a three lane one way street. The other two lanes weren't moving. As I approached an intersection, some asshole darted out into the intersection without looking to see if anything was coming. I slammed the brakes on, but there was nothing to be done. The Merc broadsided this car and just sucked its side window out. The whole thing looked like one of those pin-ball machine situations, where the little man with the gun pops out of the side. The Merc wasn't too badly damaged, except that everything on the car was pushed back about one inch. It didn't show too much on a car that was almost nineteen feet long.

  Well that sort of screwed up the delivery end of the job. The bosses wanted to keep me on, but only for in-store duties. I couldn't take it. I had been spoiled. It was late summer, and I decided I would get something else to finish off the season.

  I'll always remember that Mercury convertible, and so will the boos who owned it. For years after that, whenever I would go in to buy something at that store the guy would look at me, smile, and say to whomever I was with: “That’s the kid who wrecked my car." He even delivered a joke like Chevy Chase.

  The Black Room

  Everyone needs their own space at one time or another. Some have the capacity to create that space in their minds. Others need to define the space physically. In either case, the space is needed.

  It was the strangest thing. We were living in a big house, but the place just didn't afford any privacy to speak of. Sure, you could shut a door, but you couldn't shut out the sounds from the rest of the house, and the rest of the house couldn't shut itself out from you. The fact that we were a family of seven living there probably had something to do with it. I envied a lot of my friends because a lot of them inherited entire basements that were finished and were reasonably soundproof.

  At one point I got fed up, and I asked my parents if I could have a part of the basement to do something with. They agreed, but I couldn't finish the room in permanent fashion. My parents were a little neurotic about municipal taxes, and they figured if we added rooms in the basement, we might get taxed more.

  I was working in a paint shop that summer, and I came up with the concept of the Black Room. This room would not be a permanent room, but it would certainly be visually set apart from the rest of the basement. I began by painting the walls and floor flat black, hence the moniker, Black Room. I then loosely spilled fluorescent orange paint on the floor and painted designs on the walls using the same color. I then made a paper wall, a la Japanese, using checkered black and white wallpaper. Are you getting a feel for the room yet? I then threw in the old RCA stereo console, some couches, a bunch of lamps, fish nets and candles. The room left no one without an opinion.

  One of the most interesting things about the room was the walls. Having painted the concrete left sketches of faces where the paint had not covered completely. They were so visible that a friend and I took black and white pictures of the caricatures to see if they would come up well on photographic paper. They did.

  The Black Room was used for some nine years, and saw a great number of people during the course of that time. I guess it wasn't too scary because a number of girls that I dated over the course of those years did not mind taking their clothes off in that room. But enough of carnal thoughts. The Black Room also served as a place of conversation and discussion. It hosted many, many music sessions and saw a lot of good talent play within its walls. It even served as an amateur music studio. If those walls could replay the music that was created there.

  The Black Room stood silent for another nine years after being used regularly for the first nine. It eventually became a storage area for household goods. When it was time to sell the house, the Black Room was painted a non-committal beige, along with the rest of the basement, in order to make the place more sellable. Fortunately, I still have the photos of the faces that were on the walls, of, the Black Room.

  The Wrap-up

  Motivation was waning in grade twelve, and virtually non-existent in grade thirteen. I had not gotten the marks to get into pre-university, and the problem was being compounded by the fact that I was thoroughly fed up with the high school environment, where the administration had to deal with twelve-year- olds and twenty-one year olds.

  There were some pluses though. It was the first year since grade four that I was in a mixed school. It was so nice to see something other than guys day after day, year after year. It also allowed for a normalization process to take place. After all, some people would be going into the work world at the end of the school year, and it would be good for guys to know what girls think like before they worked with them. So far all they had done was work on them. The other good thing about school that year was that we had to share the place with a bunch of other kids while a school was being built to accommodate the growing student population in our area. That meant that our group started school at about one in the afternoon and finished at around six in the evening, which meant you could stay up late at night, do your homework in the morning, and not be any worse for the wear.

  You would think that I would have been ready to get the lead out, but it wasn't happening, however there were lots of girls to chase, and lots of parties to go to. I knew that if I got through the year, my motivation would be right back up there when I would

  get into university, and until that time it was a matter of enjoying what was going on, and try to keep the grades up.

  Some things I had trouble keeping up, and some things I had difficulty keeping down, especially the thing in my pants. There were some incredibly good looking girls when we were in high school, and I maintain to this day that the girls were prettier then than the ones they're churning out now. Girls like Locker 231. I dubbed her that because I didn't know her name and I never could look at her in the face long enough to ask her. She had this angelic face surrounded by soft blonde hair. She had pearls for teeth, full lips and an immaculate complexion. Her body was the picture of perfection, and she carried herself elegantly.

  There were many others of course. I did manage to talk to a number of them, and I managed to get a good number of dates that year. A lot of the guys were very steady. They found a girl that they liked, and stuck with her throughout the year. I was not so steady. I felt like a kid in a candy store. I didn't see the point of just sticking to one type of candy, so to speak. Although it would have been sort of nice to have a steady girlfriend, there was the distinct advantage of meeting more people and finding out more about human nature.

  The year came to an end. I was seventeen and fed up with the place. The guidance teacher, who had been my Latin teacher for something like three years at the previous high school, looked at my marks, then looked at me. I looked at him and told him it was imperative that I go to university. He looked at my marks again, and he looked at me inquisitively. I explained to him that it wasn't a brain thing, it was a motivational thing, and I would do well once I got into the environment that I sought.

  We did some averaging and came up with a sufficient mark to get me admitted to university. I was very happy.

  I proved myself right. At the end of the first year of university I achieved a solid B+ average.

  Alma Mater

  Wow, what a mess-up! Here I was at last, but the bureaucracy and the confusion were overwhelming. This was what I had been dreaming about for years?

  I'm pretty sure this is wher
e I began to shine as an organized person. It was early September, and enrollment time at the university. The beautiful late summer days were now being dedicated to the choosing and planning of subjects for the coming academic year, and organizing a schedule that would, as just about twenty-thousand other students were trying to do, leave Mondays and Fridays open. I was familiar with the campus from having worked in the Administration building a year before. That helped out some. I couldn't believe the stock exchange floor system that was being used for course selection. You made up a list from a university calendar, then you placed your choices on a form, then you waited in line with the rest of the world, then you handed in your form, and someone on the other side of the glass would tell you if your shares were bought or sold. All of this would go on for a week, unless you didn't mind going to school Monday morning, then Monday night, with an early class Tuesday morning, with nothing again till Tuesday night, and then a cluster of classes on Friday afternoon. Well I caught on to this right quickly.