A Good Day's Work (2 page)

Bobby Orr and Napoleon Solo were our transcendent heroes. Since we had yet to discover Dad's
Playboy
stash, the only printed material most of us came in contact with outside the classroom was the pile of
Dr. Strange, The Ghost Rider
and
Rawhide Kid
comics under our bed. Halifax, in those days, had a pair of television stations, three radio stations and morning and afternoon newspapers. We might as well have been ancient Mesopotamians scanning the skies in search of signs of enlightenment from the gods, because the sum total of what we knew was nothing.

If any of the dads were hitting the Canadian Club or the wife, none of us knew it. If any of the moms got wrecked on tranqs and ran off with a hairdresser, well, that was news to us. Big sisters undoubtedly had abortions; older brothers were getting their first taste of blotter acid. All this would have come as revelation too.

Where we lived I thought of as central Halifax or “Quinpool,” after the main drag; or “over by Dal,” a reference to Dalhousie University. But some people thought of it as the edge of “the South End,” where the city's most comfortable burghers lived. Our parents were members of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire and the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks of Canada. They paid their taxes. They voted in Bob Stanfield, a stolid long-johns magnate, as premier for four straight terms. We were the offspring of small-business owners, bank managers, accountants, teachers
and university professors. The daughter of the owner of both of the city's newspapers was a classmate. So was a young woman whose dad would later become president of Dalhousie. A couple of classmates were, I guess, genuinely wealthy by the standards of a Maritime Canadian city in the sixties. But the only way we might have understood their privilege was when they got new hockey gear every Christmas or could afford a Mountain Dew to go with the popcorn in the box with the scary clown face for the Saturday matinee at the Oxford Theatre.

Our city, with a population of just 93,000, was small. But we didn't comprehend that either. Nor did we know that Halifax, a port town, was once considered the wickedest town in North America. During the war years, it was still a place of whorehouses and opium dens, a town that exploded in an orgy of drinking, looting and public fornication when peace was declared on VE day. In 1967 hookers strolled in front of the Lieutenant-Governor's residence and Hells Angels were muscling into the drug trade. Of the 134 listings under restaurants and taverns in the 1967 city directory, only seventeen had lounge, bar or tavern in the name. But libations, I later learned, could be had at Billy Downey's Arrow's Club, where great soul and R and B bands performed, or at the Resolute Club, habituated by the city's expat Newfoundlanders, or the Surf Club on Barrington Street, home to navy men. I never knew what exactly was served up at the Prize Fighter's Club on Creighton Street. But a double rum and Coke was forever available at the Greco-Canadian Social Club, an establishment with which I would one day become well acquainted.

That, though, came far later. For kids careening toward teen age in 1967, this place, where men still wore hats and every
crossing guard was named Al, was a whole world of bygone glories in a few city blocks. All you needed was a bicycle with a banana seat, and a Sandy Koufax card clipped with a clothespin to the spokes of the rear wheel so that the bike sounded like it was motorized. Or just a pair of Adidas sneakers, the white ones with the blue stripes, You could pump up leafy Jubilee Road, past Murray's, where moms sent their progeny for smokes, and Payne's with the glass showcase manned by a real-life butcher in a white apron and hat. You might veer down Edward Street, past the little stone post office, then cut up Coburg Road, where for a dime and a used Fanta Orange bottle you could pull the latest
Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos
from a wire rack inside a drugstore that had relocated from the city's downtown after the VE-day riots. You might take a detour through a cemetery where Confederate soldiers, Norwegian, Dutch and British sailors from the Second World War, a few Fathers of Confederation and an industrialist or two are buried. Then you might fly steeply downhill to the Horse Field, the playground on the edge of the railway cut, where in a year or so my compadres and I could be glimpsed sitting in the branches of a big tree, smoking wine-tipped cigarillos. If you went far enough, you could strip off T-shirt and shorts and dive into the waters of the Halifax Arm, back in the innocent days when people still did such things.

Whichever way you went you passed places of worship because the spirit mattered in this small city, which at that point boasted ten Anglican churches, as well as seven for Baptists, three for members of the Salvation Army, two synagogues—both in my neighbourhood—and a smattering of worship homes for Christian Scientists, Jehovah's Witnesses,
Pentecostals and the Greek Orthodox. The city had eleven United churches, including St. Andrew's, which the DeMonts regularly attended. Adherents of the Roman Catholic faith, in 1967, could choose from ten churches for Sunday mass. The closest was blocky, stone St. Thomas Aquinas, not a hundred yards from our house. But at that point, the Catholics in the area had their own nun-taught school system, which meant that other than the occasional bout of after-school sectarian violence, we didn't mix much with the Catholic kids.

All paths, sooner or later, seemed to lead to Quinpool Road, which carried traffic from the fishing villages and bedroom communities back and forth to the downtown. There we bought Black Cat bubble gum at the Candy Bowl and caps for our six-shooters at the 5¢ to $1 Store. At the Bluenose Hobby Shop we stared reverently at Aurora model kits of Godzilla and a Japanese Zero. Inside establishments with candy-striped barber poles at the entrance, we'd climb into chairs you could adjust up and down. Their owners, overjoyed to see that not everyone was letting their hair hang down, would unfurl white aprons, tie the ends around our chicken necks and ask our moms, “How short?” We usually went to Saturday matinees at the Oxford, one of Halifax's eight movie theatres, and sometimes, for birthday parties, headed for the Hyland on the street's westernmost end. In a couple of years, when we were old enough for paper routes, we would gather after delivering the
Chronicle Herald
on Saturday mornings for pancakes at the Ardmore Tea Room. But at age eleven a few of us already knew enough to make our way past the Blossom Shop, Leverman Credit Union, Reliable TV, Quinpool Shoe Repair and Dorothy Richards Corset Specialty Shop to the
Maritime Campus Store in the hope of glimpsing an honest-to-goodness co-ed.

Everything came together in the wondrous year of 1967. Jim Grant was definitely one of the best teachers I ever had. One of our crew—may the gods to this day still reward him—convinced the Miller sisters to play tackle football with us. We won our Little League baseball championship when the best athlete I had ever seen—a guy who would only live another six years before hanging himself in a vacant lot—drilled a ground ball toward third base at the same time as I put my glove in front of my face in self-defence.

Sometimes I think about how little has changed since that glorious summer of '67 when a guy named Irwin nearly left me in a vegetative state. Mostly, though, I think that forty-five years is a very long time. And I find myself increasingly driven to explain to everyone who will listen what Halifax used to be like.

THIS did not happen overnight. There was no single moment when I ceased looking hopefully forward and began peering mournfully back. I did not stop mid-sentence one day and slap my forehead in the realization that I had become one of those old coots who believes that the past is the only place where anything monumental occurs. Nor do I see myself as one of those reactionary tools longing for the good old days before same-sex marriage and turbans in the RCMP, when blacks, Jews, Indians and girls knew their place. I acknowledge that this neighbourhood where I live, this city—heck, the entire
country—is getting better, every day, in so many ways. In the twenty-first century of this global world, change is a necessity along with a virtue. That doesn't stop a person from thinking about how things used to be.

I just have to look out the window, at the elementary school next door. Each noon hour a few dozen parents show up to escort their kids the few blocks home through the mean streets of residential Halifax, where, I guess, gangbangers and pedophiles roam. I went to the school that carried the same name nearly half a century ago: I can remember precisely one child whose parents showed up to walk her home: the dad wore a hat, suit, tie and overcoat in the hottest weather; the mom had the whiff of religious fundamentalism.

The schoolyard where we used to throw the football, skate and play Red Rover until it got too dark to see is now vacant minutes after the bell rings. Halifax kids, you see, don't wander free and mess around in schoolyards and vacant construction sites the way we used to. They're in daycare now, on parent-organized play dates or enrolled in swanky after-school programs to learn Irish dance and tae kwon do.

That's a little sad. It is also what people today call a “First World problem.” Except sometimes I actually get out of my neighbourhood and drive through the close-knit towns my parents grew up in. To hear them tell it, home was a place where the smells of comfort food floated from open windows, lovable oddballs roamed the streets and everyone looked after everyone else. Now, with their mines and steel mills gone, those towns are harder places in which the young no longer stick around. All over this country, it seems, the dream of a sweet life in a small town is dying; rural areas are hollowing
out. Most Canadians now huddle in cities along the Trans-Canada Highway, where they live in houses surrounded by hedges or gates in suburbs where farmland once rolled. Roots can be shallow in communities without sidewalks or central gathering places, where everyone must get behind the wheel of a car to take the kids to school or buy groceries. Neighbours don't necessarily watch each other's backs at a time and in a place when we're more likely than ever before to let others fall by the wayside.

I know what you're asking: What about the shining example of a modern-day multinational melting pot that Canada sets for the world? What about our tolerance? What about our modesty, sense of proportion and inherent fairness? I don't dispute any of that for a second. Except I still feel the urge to tell my kids that as good as things are, once it was different in this country. I want to tell them that there was a time when our hockey teams did not suck and our health care system was not a leaky sieve. Once we had our own retailers like Simpsons and Eaton's, and our most recognizable brands like Tim Hortons and Labatt had yet to be sold off to foreigners. Once a person could buy a book, musical recording, chair or pair of Stanfield's boxers in this land somewhere other than in a store the size of an aircraft hangar owned by rich Southerners. Once our national political ethos was not dominated by the kind of mean cant that used to make Canadian blood boil.

What I'm trying to say is that all progress isn't necessarily good. And when things go, they are gone forever. It's hard to imagine a day when we'll no longer be able to glimpse prairie tall grass. Just as the spirit sinks a little with the knowledge
that at some point in the foreseeable future someone will lick the inside flap of a manila envelope, open a mailbox slot and send the last letter ever written by hand in this country on its final journey.

I mourn for other things too. The ephemera that you don't miss until it's just a wistful memory (a stubby beer bottle, a rum and butter chocolate bar). The bits and pieces that populate our collective imagination—grain elevators, lighthouses, drive-in movies, family farms, train whistles—bestowing context and colour on Canadian lives. Where, even, did the plain names we used to call ourselves—Bud and Clyde, Maggie and Ann—go?

One day I went to a library and pulled from a shelf a Canadian census from a century ago. It made a person wonder. What happened to the abrasive goods makers, the asbestics workers, the canal and commission men who then toiled in this country? Admittedly a hundred years is a long time, but where are the bill posters, the button makers, the liverymen, the gate and bridge tenders? What happened to the trappers, the matchmakers, the mica workers, the milliners and the pattern makers? Where, oh where, have the pork packers, the sash and door makers, the section and trackmen, the tanners and curriers gotten to? What in God's name has become of all those cartage men, pickle makers, yardmen and roundhouse men? Where did you go, you bleachers and bootblacks, you felt makers and fruit canners, you platers and pump makers?

If you're like me, you would be left slack-jawed upon learning that this country once had more conductors on trains than bank managers. That a century ago more people worked in boarding houses and hotels than built new homes in Canada. That this big land of ours used to have as many engravers and
blacksmiths as miners. And that once hundreds of thousands of men in hats dragged sample cases from dusty town to frozen enclave, peddling their goods.