sent for editing 4

Dear Editor,

Here is another attempt.

I was away in Pembroke with my father who drove a Ford rusted through the floor from salt against the snow. It was Halloween and he drove through the early night from Ottawa with a guy who smoked cigars in the back while I was supposed to hide in the place by the wheel well on the floor next to the chair-high seats in the front and make no noise. He was a taxi. His new idea. Dad was thinking about whether he would run as federal candidate for the co-operative commonwealth organisation or try to get a real job as a civil servant which as a bogus war hero he could. Also he was thinking how his wife and war bride had run away mad again looking for some piece of Britain on Ottawa’s Bank street which she never could find and of course she was wondering why she ever met a lying Canadian and left her Mom’s house but of course again she knew deep down it was because of the rationing.

When we dropped the fat guy off and his cigar was gone we discovered a sheet drawn across the civic square showing a silent three stooges cartoon for free amidst thousands of masked people, bears, devils and big breasted ladies, a few Hitlers, skeletons, while I rode on my dad’s shoulders for the last time laughing in a paper bag with eyes as he was still a man then as he was just back from the war only a few months and had not yet figured out what soul to give up for a wife and child. It was then the three stooges on the sheet strutting and poking as the wind blew the sheet and people gave beers to others in uniform, like my dad for Halloween.

I went again with him and the Ottawa Boy Scout Hockey Team to play the twenty second troop of Pembroke thugs and as usual the heater in the car was broken and the wind blew between the seats and floor bolts because of the salt rust. The snow like small skies against the windshield and through the cracks as freezing usual. We met the other boys on time, some were crying and we played in a dream. I lost a toe.

The next time through Pembroke again I went without dad with a bad ticket on my way to sing in a civic bonding exercise between us protestant English and catholic frogs in Montreal. Mom and dad didn’t understand it but the school insisted. It was the Messiah and the Huron Carol.

I was feverish with flu and far from home. My mother had jumped from the car four days ago by the Ottawa museum and disappeared in the blizzard. My dad had buckled his holster the next morning (he had a black one) and gone to work against the communists. I had never seen a cathedral before like that one in Montreal and sang with visions of Mary. That was Montréal. I now live in Paris and London.

But in Pembroke I only saw a vision from the bus of the three stooges in the snow. Playing and strutting. Curly in a hat. Mary cheering. In the game I scored the winning goal but dad had gone to make a phone call.