Van Morrison was crooning on the radio as we drove along the highway from Halifax to our Big Valley. The scenery was breathtaking and was nearly undisturbed by other motorists. We were in our little cocoon of a car and enjoying a gorgeous drive. Why then did my belly feel sick and dread? I was coming to the realization that this feeling and this music was linked to a bad memory. I told Dean that Van Morrison was incredible – an incredible icon of a musician and lyricist but I really did not like Van Morrison.
Why? he asked.
His music reminds me of an asshole I encountered when I was nineteen.
Do you want to tell me about it? You don’t have to, if you don’t want to, said Dean, being sensitive and sweet and kind, as was his usual.
I said, well, I’m into it now. May as well…
My story began and I can’t believe I had never told him this one. We have been married for thirty years!
When Mom and Dad got divorced, Dad and his new wife bought a motel in Niagara Falls. He was therefore unable to help me with my University fees at Waterloo U. I left school and headed back to Barrie but not before applying to get into the Canadian Armed Forces. For a while I stayed with my Mom (and her drunk of a boyfriend) in her tiny apartment but, this wasn’t ideal. Since I had found a full-time job at LaFayette Restaurant, I decided I had enough money to get a place of my own.
I found a room for rent in a house just down the street. It was walking distance to my job. The room was large and bright and had a shared kitchen and bath. The owners were a young Asian couple. There was only one downfall of the room – it was an attic bedroom with an open staircase leading up to it but there was no door – neither at the bottom of the stairs nor at the top. I wasn’t super bothered by this because the house was quiet and the couple was very sweet.
For a few weeks it was fine but then another boarder moved in. Cue the ominous music. His name was Charlie. He was small, skinny, unattractive and he did not smell good. His mannerisms were awkward and he was opinionated and outspoken with a strange cackling laugh. He was instantly overly familiar with me as his eyes travelled the length of my healthy, curvaceous body and my long dark wavey hair. A few days later he would remark that I really needed to lose a few pounds. Yes, back in the 80s some men used to openly make remarks like that. They would police women and try to ‘keep them in line’ with hurtful, personal remarks. What a fucking jerk.
The next thing that happened was I was watching tv in the living room when he came and sat down too close to me. Yuck, I thought. There was only one ottoman and he put his feet up and made sure to caress my feet with his, by accident. Ew. I moved away and shortly thereafter, I went up to my room. I could hear that he had switched to playing guitar and was belting out some, you guessed it: Van Morrison. He would play his guitar and sing Van Morrison every chance he got. I think he thought it was cool and that he would attract me. All that happened was it made me hate a great musician.
Late that night the worst happened. I was asleep in my bed, up in my attic bedroom. Suddenly I became aware that someone was in bed next to me. Uninvited! When my eyes opened and landed on his sneering but hopeful face on the pillow next to mine I nearly lost my mind. I jumped out of bed. My body involuntarily shuttered as I did a little dance to get his cooties off of me and simultaneously thanked the lord that I was wearing pyjamas. I screamed at him to GET THE FUCK OUT!!! Perplexingly, he seemed surprised.
I called the police and this bastard somehow convinced the cops that I was the problem because my bedroom had no door. I mean, what was I asking for without a door on my bedroom? What could you expect of a red-blooded male? The misogynistic pig cop actually went along with this pervert’s thinking but not before he questioned me in such a way that shamed me instead of the pervert. The perv stood there watching this procedure in which the cop actually asked me how many sexual partners I had had. What the fuck?
I was in shock and had a pronounced sinking feeling of hopelessness. Now I would have to move again. I had basically no money and no help from parents or anything. Moving again was daunting.
For some strange reason, probably to help make me like him, which it did not, the asshole had given me a set of glass, nested, lidded mixing bowls the previous week, which he said he had found. (Whatever!) Before I left the house with my bags packed, he asked for the mixing bowls back. To borrow a phrase from my hero the fictional character of Ruth Langmore on the hit tv show Ozark, that’s the calibre of fuck-nugget I was dealing with.
I am still troubled by this all these decades later. But if I could go back and do one thing differently, I wish I had walked up to the pervert to return the mixing bowls, smashed them on the floor and then taken his shoulders and kneed him in the balls- really hard.
I still can not handle the music of Van Morrison. What a shame.
After a couple months, I was sent to CFB Comox, BC, up island, for administration support at the Air Traffic Control Tower. That was interesting. Ironically, the best thing about it was learning how to use a new word processor called Word Perfect. That came in handy later.
A typical day of Recruit Term began with pounding rock music at 5:30 am. The wake-up song for our flight was April Wine’s What a Night. What a Night starts with a fire alarm bell mounted on a cymbal stand being rang at a fast pace. It truly was the perfect harsh sound to get the heart racing and the panic started for the drills of the day. We had until the end of the song to be up, dressed, to the bathroom, bed made and ‘layout’ ready for inspection. Everything in the room had to be prepared to specific, exacting standards. For instance, our uniform shirts had to be folded to exactly 25 x 30 cm, ironed and TAPED into our top drawer. Socks had to be rolled into a tight little ball, in a specific manner that we were shown and TAPED into the drawer. Same with pants. Boots and leather gators had to be polished and spit-shone to a high-gloss. We had three uniforms in our closet which had to have all buttons done and all lint removed and hanging exactly two inches apart with all sleeves perfectly positioned. The problem was, there was absolutely no free-time to do these things. So, we did them in the middle of the night and we were all quite sleep deprived already from basic training.
One long weekend, the following year, a friend – Cindy and I, decided to get off campus and away from it all. We had been more or less locked up and scrutinized for months and ready to just wear our jeans and hit the open road for a wee adventure. With a back pack each, we hitch-hiked a couple hours up island to Lake Cowichan where we had booked a cabin for two nights. Our first ride got us most of the way there. Then, we were stuck for a bit on some country road with the sun going down over the next hill.
The first year, however, Dad put Luke and I on a Greyhound bus for the forty hour trip. We had to change buses at 2 o’clock in the morning in Detroit, Michigan which is known to be one of the most dangerous cities in the US of A. Let’s face it, Grey Hound bus stations are not usually located in the nicest parts of town. I was 16 and Luke was 13. Dad’s best advice was to use my scarf to tie my purse tight to my body. Luke and I found a seat on the dingy molded plastic chairs and linked arms with eye-balls peeled. We were terrified. Since I am writing this today, I guess we survived the Detroit Bus Station, twice, actually. We were there on the way home too.
Luke and I spent many hours on the beach and walking around the town of Fort Myers. We didn’t have much spending money so we would usually have an ice-cream and maybe some fries around lunch time. Then we would walk all the way back the couple miles to where we were staying with Dad and Wen. By that time, we were wiped. We had swam, sunbathed, played frisbee plus the walk to and from the beach. Luke would carry his boom box on his shoulder and play music for us all the way.
Wendy found this beach park for us to go explore. No one was there and it was gorgeous. We walked along the sand and found wee little treasures while a very relaxed Dad slept on a towel on the beach. Luke and I jokingly calling him a beached whale, when we were out of earshot. After a good snore, he awoke and sat up with sand all over the side of his face and pine needles in his hair. Oh my, we chuckled. Perhaps he did these things on purpose to get a reaction. I’m still not sure about that.
(All photos courtesy of google images — I would have loved to have some of my own photos but I didn’t own a camera back then and there were no smart phones either.)
I have many fond memories of canoeing on Cecebe. Like the late summer of 1983 when my little brother Luke would canoe into ‘Mag’ to pick me up from my shift at June’s Diner. He would slowly and quietly walk up from the dock, having tied the canoe there, to the diner to get me. I would be in my simple cotton uniform holdng a carton of to-go food. I would follow him down to the dock and take up my place in the bow and eat, famished, while Luke would paddle and tell me about his day and usually about his struggles with Dad.
picture taken just before we started to take turns getting on the rope to drop a few hundred meters down the mountain. Thanks to my fear of heights, my bowels were basically turning to fluid as I sat there waiting. When my name was called, I staggered over to the cliff’s edge trying not to peer down down down that rock face. I had my rope Swiss seat with steel carabiner hook on and somehow willed my shaking hands to hook onto the rope. Even now, I feel a bit sick thinking of how scared I was. I searched the eyes of the Sergeant telling me to ‘get the fuck on the rope Cadet’ but then with a quieter, ‘you can do this’ (which today would have been ‘you GOT this’). I shook my head subtly but I did the friggin’ rappel anyway and I did not scream dropping down. I was frozen stiff. I’m surprised I didn’t smash into the wall and hurt myself because I sure as heck didn’t have my legs at a ninety in order to bound off the rock. At the bottom I kissed the ground and vowed to NEVER do that again. Some of my mates were heading up the cliff face for another turn. Oh sweet Jesus. That was a difficult moment and it may have been the single most challenging item on my course for me.. (A few years later I forced myself to rappel again – oh, but that’s another story.)
as I was thankfully 
Situation Normal 