When I was a little boy, we went to visit my Grandparents, Thidder and Eva Collar, in a little hamlet in Ontario called Glen Miller. They were my Mom’s parents. It was 1964 and I was six.
I remember their house had a hole in the floor upstairs from the kitchen where the stove pipe used to go through. You could drop stuff through it and watch it hit floor way far down below you (I never lived in a house with two storeys, so this was a huge thrill.)
I remember walking up to the corner store with my big brother Rick, 12 years older than me and possessed, as I believed, of all knowledge. He would get me a treat like and Aero bar or Jersey Milk bar and I would ask him about life, the universe, and everything. I was surprised to discover that he did not know the name of the man who invented the first shoes. It was the first time I had ever heard him not know something. The walk to the store and back was long. Probably a hundred miles or something like that. It took about ten minutes.
I remember taking a bath in the tub upstairs one night, and then climbing in bed in my jammies with my other brother, Mike. Sharing a bed was a new experience for me, but necessity being the mother of invention, we made it work. He was 9 years older than me and patient.
I remember my mom making me salmon sandwiches from tinned salmon that still had the vertebrae of the fish in it. It had been cooked in such a way as to render the bone soft as a chewable calcium tablet. I also remember her making me white bread sandwiches with butter sprinkled with sugar. It was a different time.
Across the road from Grandma and Grandpa’s house was the Trent River. I remember dabbling in the shallows and my Dad going water-skiing.
It was the one and only summer I got to spend time with my Grandpa Thidder and Grandma Eva. Grandpa and I fed his pigs together and I still am taken back to those warm summer mornings by the smell of pig manure, which I love. He died that Autumn. I have memories (augmented by home movies) of my Grandma at the locks on the river and a giant whirlpool. She had diabetes, something I inherited from her. It had killed her brother and it terrified her. My grandma died a couple of years later.
Not far from Glen Miller was a wide spot in the road called Carrying Place in the Bay of Quinte (pronounced KWIN-tee). My grandma and her sisters bought a former hamburger stand and turned it into a summer cottage. It was a piece of Lake Ontario with a big flat rock about two feet under water. I would swim with my Dad there. I remember the thrill of discovering that sound carried underwater even better than in air, and banging rocks on the flat rock underwater. I also fished sunfish off the dock there and then tossed them back.
The last time I was there was the summer of ’83 for a family reunion. My brothers and I went to Belleville on a joy ride and we stopped in a little store that sold generic stuff in white cans with black block print on it such as artificial whipped cream labeled, “WHIPPED OIL PRODUCTS”. Mouth-watering. For old time’s sake we had more Aero and Jersey Milk bars. I had a bad headache but swimming at the Flat Rock made it vanish.
When I came home, I wanted to share my joy at the trip with somebody. So I went to a buddy’s house but when I got there he my former girlfriend (who I had broken up with a month prior, swearing not to date anybody for a year) was there. So I went to the next closest place: the house where Janet Humiston lived. We talked long into the night and three months later we were engaged. It was a wonderful summer.
My Dad died that November and I was married a month later. It was an emotional roller coaster of a winter. 42 years, four boys, and seven grandkids later, here we are!
My point is: It’s Lake Ontario. It always was and always will be and the whole world knows it and I pay no more attention to this manchild defacing a map with his crayons than I do to a swatted fly. Just get on with your life and refuse to give him the attention he craves.
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