Prompt # 30 – First Day of School

Prompt # 30 - First Day of School

When I started school I was five years eight and one-half months old and I was SO ready. I couldn't wait to learn to read. I was the oldest. I was the first to go. Even my best friends, the twins across the road, were born four months after me so they had to wait another year before they could start. That meant that when I got there, to the Grade One and Two room in Oak River Elementary School in Manitoba (this was before kindergarten was invented) I only knew one other person in the room, my cousin Ken who was in Grade Two, and maybe Brian and Gerald whose parents were friends of my parents.

I don't remember what I wore but I would have carried a book bag filled with all the supplies which had been on the list given out in August-pencils, sharpener, erasers, Hilroy scribblers, ruler. And I would have carried the beautiful wine-coloured enameled tin lunch box with the picture of the new Queen Elizabeth II wearing a blue dress and diamond crown. The lunch kit was a gift from my BC grandmother. I remember my Dad asked me when I got home “Did you sing God Save the King?” and I answered, “No, silly, God Save the Queen (and O Canada).”

The school van would have picked me up at our front door at 8:25 am and driven us into town. School must have started at 9 but there were other stops on the way of the four mile trip. Private cars were contracted as school vans, different drivers each year, from someone along our route-Blacks, Brays, Burts, Haggertys, Bridgemans, Browns, Powers, Thompsons, and sometime others, usually those with fathers who worked at the military base ten miles away and their families were renting empty farmhouses along our road. We were often nine or ten children in the car with the driver, the little ones sitting on the knees of the older ones. This was also before seatbelts were invented. In twelve years I never heard of one school van accident. The vans picked us up again at the school at 3:30 and we were home by 3:55.

My first day of school was a day of happy surprises. The school used to invite future Grade Ones to attend one day of school in the spring, so that we could observe the classroom routine, find out where the washrooms were, meet the teachers. I was thrilled by the Grade One teacher who hosted me on my prep day. She was beautiful-Miss B-and she charmed me by telling me her name was Joan too, the same as mine. I was so sad over the summer when I learned that my Grade One teacher in September was going to be Mrs S. But when I got there, who could believe my good luck! Mrs S was Miss B. She had just married over the summer, but her name was still Joan. It was my lucky day.

Mrs S is in our class picture for that first year, but you can tell, she didn't come back for my Grade Two year. The photo also tells me what I wore. I forgot that we wore tunic uniforms that first year. Navy blue, with a white blouse. Of all the kids in this photo, I can still name each one. Of the ten Grade Ones, only four graduated with me twelve years later, along with some of the Grade Twos and others from Cardale, a nearby smaller town. Walter, Ricky, Ken, Carol, and Gordon moved away. Their fathers worked in town jobs—municipal clerk, hotel operator, construction, garage operator, mechanic. John and Harriet, centre row, L1 and L3, only spoke Dutch when they arrived that year. The tallest boy, Pond, was sixteen years old and had just arrived from China. He was only in our room for a short while, until he learned enough English to move to the next grades. This was before ESL was invented too, but Pond did get English immersion. He finished school and was working in Brandon before the rest of us finished Grade Twelve.

To the best of my knowledge, all these kids are still alive, but I don't hear a lot of news from Oak River as I have no family still living there, and none of us stayed. We left for post-secondary education or employment opportunities. Only about two still live in the district. The farms are bigger than they used to be, but they require fewer workers, fewer farm families. The old elementary school is gone now. The kids go to school in the “new” high school building, opened in 1961. The high school kids are bused to Rivers. The town is smaller too, so small that when I try to list it as my hometown, Facebook won't even accept it, as if it no longer exists. But I know it's still there. Also, note to genealogists. The date on this photograph is incorrect. My first day of school was in September 1954 and the photo was taken in May 1955. Honest. I am sitting front row L5, with the centre part. 

Prompt # 29 - Carry All - What's In Your Bag?

Prompt # 29 - Carry All - What's In Your Bag?

I never leave the house without my bag, even if I'm just going for a walk. I have several, which I change for the seasons. Always a shoulder bag. Often received as gifts. The winter black, from Molly. The feathered blue, from Candace. The striped blue, from Karen. The gold one I found at a garage sale. I prefer fabric or leather.

I carry a shoulder bag in order to keep all the things I need together and accessible. My keys for house, car, mailboxes are in an outside pocket or attached to the handle by a safety hook. My billfold wallet with cash, drivers licence, ID, health card, bank cards, credit cards, business cards, numbers, etc. My blue beaded heart change purse found at a garage sale. Cell phone. Calendar. Pen and note pad. Hairbrush and comb. Cough drops and/or breath mints. Lip balm. A flashdrive. Can't remember if it is my trip pics or my CanLit presentation. My digital camera. Extra batteries and memory card. My tablet which I use mainly for taking photos. (There is free wi-fi up town.) Each of these in pink paisley quilted cases made by my friend Joyce. Gloves. Toque or beret. Sunglasses. Sun screen. Umbrella. This is BC. We have “Irish” weather, when it is not snowing. On longer trips, I'll include a thermos of water, and a skinny pocket book to read if I have to wait (or I can download books on my tablet). On Thursdays, my Scrabble dictionary. A quick check reveals: car insurance documents, coupons, shopping lists, map, and a metal art trading card case. Forgot about that. It did cause some concern the last time I went through the airport scanner.

I do hate having to dig around in the dark trying to retrieve something in the bottom of the bag. But, as an exercise in personal archaeology, what does this inventory reveal? Lifestyle and concerns. Security. Transportation. Communication. A sense of identity—who I am, what interests me. Words. Images. Ideas. Travel. And a circle of generous friends. I've said this before too. I am blessed.

Prompt # 28 - Parents

Prompt # 28 – Parents

My father, Donald Albert Bridgeman, was born in Brandon, Manitoba, June 24, 1920, and grew up on his parents' farm near Bradwardine, MB, the third of fourteen children. Although he liked school, when he finished Grade 8 he had to go out to work, usually for other local farmers. It was the Depression so he and friends including his brother Jim took the train to BC looking for better prospects. He was hired on at the Harpur Ranch in Rock Creek. He loved working there and forever after called Mrs. Harpur “Mum” which was a shock to me, that he would call another woman besides Grandma “Mum.” Although they didn't get together until after the war, Dad met my mother on the Harpur Ranch when he was eighteen and she was thirteen. A group of teens were at the swimming hole. Mum was there with her sister Betty who was closer to Dad's age. Mum wrote about the day in her journal. Mum's mother and Mrs. Harpur were the best of friends.

Dad joined up in 1940 in Brandon, spent many long months training in England, and then went with Canadian forces on the invasion of Italy. At the end of fighting, he was wounded in Italy and spent a couple of weeks in hospital, joining a different group for the final weeks of the war in Europe. He returned home in November, 1945. He bought a farm with the assistance of the Veterans Land Act. His farm, in Oak River district, the old Henderson place, was three miles from his parents' farm. He had asked to buy land in BC but was told that the economy was too depressed and Manitoba would be a better prospect. He farmed for approximately thirty years before selling the land and retiring back to BC. In Manitoba, his pastimes included curling in the winter, fishing in the summer, and poker every week. When he retired, he continued these activities and added lawn bowling and bridge. He would play any card game if there was a nickel riding on it, but bridge and poker were his passions. He died of cancer in Vernon on May 16,1984.

Dad was always called Don. His nickname in the army was Dinty, it think, not sure why. When he used to manage my brothers' baseball and hockey teams, I heard others call him “Chief” but I think that was because he used to stand tall and walk proud as soldiers are trained to do. Once when my little brother was about four, I watched him and Dad walk from the woodpile to the house. They marched in perfect step, arms swinging, and my little brother's right shoulder was sloped down at the exact angle in imitation of my Dad's, a result of the damage to the neck and shoulder muscle he sustained when wounded.

My mother, Margaret Norah Bubar, was born in Greenwood, BC, December 26, 1925, the fourth of six children. She grew up on her parents' ranch in Kettle Valley, BC. Her nickname was Bunty, given to her when she arrived home from hospital all bundled up and her three-year-old brother George said “bye, baby Bunting,” a popular English nursery rhyme. She was called Bunty all her life by family and close friends. To newer acquaintances, she was Marg. She and Dad married in Kettle Valley, BC, on Easter Monday,1948. Their honeymoon trip was the drive home to Dad's farm in Manitoba, from buttercups to mountains of snow.

Although she was a great housekeeper and loved knitting, most of Mum's favourite activities were outdoors. She was an avid swimmer, having learned from her mother in the Kettle River. She could beat most men who were foolish enough to accept the challenge of a race. She also lived for baseball and later took up curling and bowling. She pressured her children for grandchildren so that she would be eligible to curl in the Granny bonspeil. Luckily, the younger of my two brothers complied. Mum had walls of trophys. She also loved to fish and to play bingo. In their retirement years, they enjoyed travelling to visit family and to places like Reno and Las Vegas. As a widow, she travelled with a friend on a cruise to Australia. When she was diagnosed with Parkinsons, most of her pleasures were no longer attainable. She died in Vernon, BC, August 8, 1993.

Prompt # 27 - Cars

Prompt # 27 - Cars


We lived on a farm so we always had to have our own transportation. My parents drove home to Manitoba from BC on their honeymoon in an old model-T type car which I have only seen in photos. In winter we still used horses as the road into the house was not built until the year I started school. So I came home from the nursing home/hospital where I was born in Rivers, MB, in December, in a horse-drawn wagon across fields drifted with snow. Very romantic, but I don't remember anything except the white sparkle of sunshine on snow. I remember Dad had a really old grain truck with a long stick shift in front of the bench seat and holes in the floorboards where you could watch the road go by underneath. The first family car I remember was the new white 1952 Pontiac, licence number Manitoba 1P 719. My favourite was the new 1957 Pontiac because it was turquoise and white.

Although I knew how to drive the tractor to pull the stoneboat or the hayrack, my mother taught me how to drive the car. She said she never had any gray hair before then. I failed my first test so then I took some lessons from an instructor in Brandon who seemed to give his directions by hand movements along my thigh. I didn't go back. I remembered this later when one of my students went for her driver test and she wrote the big letters R and L on her jeans so she could remember which was Right and which was Left on her test. When the instructor asked her what the letters meant, she said they were her boyfriend's initials. 

I bought my first car the second year I was teaching, when I just had my learner's licence. I had to get permission to leave school, walk down to where the testing was done, where I had left my car earlier that morning, and take the test with the sixteen-year-old kids. Thank goodness, I passed, as when I got back, all the kids in class sang to me “Happy birthday, Sweet Sixteen.” I bought that car, a blue Pontiac Ventura, from my dad's dealer friend, and when I went to trade it in, he said he wouldn't have it back in his district. It had all that newfangled pollution prevention equipment on it and because of that, it got about four miles to the gallon. (See, that was so long ago, it was before metric conversion.)

In a car I look for value, environmental friendliness, and function, never for status or for national pride. I still like to think that it should have features which will allow me to sleep in it if necessary (camping, forest fires, homelessness.) After that first car, I switched to Toyota. I kept my first Corolla, gold, more than ten years, so long that the driver-side floorboard wore out and the gas pedal dropped off. I took it to my brother's mechanic to fix. He called it “my Flintstone car,” you know, the ones they wear, with their feet pedalling out the bottom. After my second, blue, Toyota died a natural death, I switched to Hyundai. I had my black Hyundai for seventeen years. Can't complain. Since then I just buy old cars, good enough to get me around town, and I take the bus if I have to go into the city, or bus and taxi to get to the airport. My next move will be to some place I can live without owning a car. Haven't figured out where that will be yet. Because I love my house and where I live right now. I've said this before. I am so lucky.

Prompt # 26 - Technology

Prompt # 26 - Technology

When my two grandmothers emigrated from England to Canada before WW I, they travelled by boat and the trip took about three weeks. When I visited England to see the places they were born, I travelled by air and the trip took about nine hours. Transportation seems to be one of the more obvious changes in the last one hundred years. When they arrived in Canada, both would have crossed the continent by train, one half way, to Manitoba, where they probably transferred to a branch line and disembarked right at the train station in the small town where she met my grandfather. The other crossed from Montreal to Kaslo, BC. Did the train go right into town, or did she have to transfer to the paddlewheel boat for the last jaunt up the lake? I don't know. But I do know that when the new Kettle Valley line was constructed within her first two or three years in BC, she rode the train to Kettle Valley, to work for another doctor, who just happened to live up the creek behind the ranch where her future husband lived. I have a picture of her on horseback which I am sure she only did for transportation purposes. It was her husband who loved horses, bred them, raced them. Both grandfathers worked their land with teams of horses and also had modern machines, tractors, swathers, rakes, thrashing machines, combines. In both cases also, half a continent apart, in Manitoba and BC, their farm and ranch are now owned by international conglomerates. Where the land once grew wheat for bread and pasta, now it grows canola for cooking oil. Where the ranch grew alfalfa to feed beef cattle, the fields are covered with shade netting over rows of ginseng.

Both grandmothers were married before 1920. Both would have received electricity in their homes well into their married life. By the time I remember visiting their homes, both had telephones—the wall-mounted kind with a mouthpiece on the wall and a bell-shaped earpiece that you picked up as you listened to see if the party line was busy, before you cranked the crank to call the operator and to give her the number you wished her to connect you to, literally, physically, at her switchboard in the telephone office in town.

Luckily, my family has not had a lot of medical difficulties, so the scientific advances in that field are less obvious to me. However, convenience and communication developments are everywhere. Rural electrification reached Manitoba in the 1950s. I remember when we got hydro on our farm. Electric lights replaced kerosene and gas lamps. A fridge replaced the icebox. A water heater replaced blocks of ice melted on the stove for laundry. A pump moved water from a cistern instead of buckets bringing it in from the rain barrel outside. Mum received a large Mixmaster kitchen appliance for Christmas. These conveniences never reached as far as flush toilets in that old farmhouse, but certainly in every home since that first, all the “modcons” have been present.

With electricity, we could then get television. A very wise retailer in town sold tickets to the first television which he displayed in his hardware store window. Our nearest neighbours and best friends won the television. We would all go over to their house to watch. Soon everyone in the area bought their own, installing the tall aerial on the roof to receive the only station, CKX Brandon, Manitoba. After that, we stopped visiting people because my dad would get so annoyed, going to someone else's house and all sitting quietly in the living room watching the television, not being allowed to talk. We could do that at home.

Electricity also meant new radio, record players, then stereo, electric sewing machines, electric washing machine, clothes dryer. As a teen, I had a precious transistor radio, and a small portable manual Underwood typewriter. As the eldest child and only girl, I got to drive the tractor while the boys picked up stones and hay bales. And I learned to drive a car when I was sixteen, although I didn't get my licence until I was twenty-one and bought my own car. A computer came into my home in 1981 and played a part in the end of that relationship. However, within ten years, I had my own PC, and today I have a PC, a laptop, a tablet, and a cell phone, but not a smart phone although if I had kids, I'm sure I would pick up on this one too. I don't like electronic “facetime.” Even selfie's require a Halloween wig and much cropping.

I still own four televisions and four radios. I do cling to the past, with my land line, and my DVR player, and a TV that plays old VCRs. Although I don't like to admit it, I guess I have to confess that I embrace technology hesitantly, slowly. Last year I bought a new-to-me car which I'm proud to say is from this century, 2005. It has a stick shift and driving it reminds me of when I used to drive the tractor and my brothers would complain about the jerky ride. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

Prompt # 25 – What Do You Love?

Prompt # 25 – What Do You Love?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. A great title, by a great “local” writer, Raymond Carver, who, although he was American, lived and died a few mile from here in Port Angeles, Washington State, on the northern tip of the Olympic Peninsula. He grew up in Yakima, in southwestern Washington, inside the curve of the Columbia River. Usually I'm a passionate, even radical, fan of Canadian literature because I love both this place, Canada, and literature itself, especially the way it holds up mirrors and forces us to see, to look at and to see ourselves. It celebrates us. However, I make three exceptions for American writers who have lived near here, in Washington State, on the US west coast, in what they call the Pacific Northwest (because, of course, for us, it's really the Pacific Southwest.) The Americans? Gary Snyder who lived along the Skagit, which rises in Canada. Raymond Carver. Jack Kerouac of On the Road fame, who came from a New England family which had migrated from Quebec, and who through his friendship with Snyder, found summer work on a fire lookout in the Cascades, his eyes on Canadian mountains and Canadian sky. He wrote about it in Desolation Angels and The Dharma Bums. (Desolation Peak is the name of a mountain almost on the border.) I should also add Annie Dillard who for some years lived on Lummi Island, near Bellingham, between here and Seattle, and wrote one of my favourite pieces. It's Chapter 7 in her The Writing Life, about flying and art, about a pilot friend at the Bellingham Air Show (but in my mind it is the famous Abbotsford Air Show) and about flying around Mount Baker, “the old man with white hair who sits there smoking,” the mountain we watch all the way out from Vancouver to Abbotsford and Chilliwack. 

Am I ducking the question? Love is not an easy topic, because instantly my brain says Who? Instead of What? And Who crosses privacy lines. Who wants to intrude upon other people's privacy? And I think there's something else. Scripts in my head. A former lover who pleaded: “Don't say that. Everyone who has ever said 'I love you' has left me. So don't say that.” And my late mother who had similar advice when referring to pets. “They just die. You can always get another cat or dog, but you know that like all the rest, they're going to die too.” Love and death. It's as if daring to love is daring death, giving the finger to death. Seizing and living in the moment, for this too shall end. Like the Lone Ranger and Tonto duking it out. Oh, yes, I should add another American writer. Sherman Alexie. From Spokane, Washington. When they made the movie of his Smoke Signals, two great Canadian First Nations actors played the leads—Adam Beach and Evan Adams.

So. What do I love? Canada, and especially the places where I've lived and visited. Manitoba. BC. Montreal. Toronto. Kingston. Whitehorse. Literature. Especially Canadian Literature (CanLit.) See my CanLit Reading List. http://www.CanLitPlace.blogspot.ca/ Literature in general, especially Thomas Hardy. I love Beauty, especially Nature, natural beauty, flowers, landscape, cats and dogs (remembering my beloveds Julie and Cami .) I love houses, history, heritage. Sunshine. Lightning. Snow on a sunny day. Fog on a misty day. I love poetry and narrative. Stories, especially British television dramas—Coronation Street, Heartbeat, Foyles War, Morse, Lewis, Midsomer Murders, Downton Abbey. Some American drama—The Good Wife, Grey's Anatomy, Bones. Canadian dramas—Republic of Doyle, Arctic Air, old DaVinci's Inquest. I also love shows about houses, and about treasures hidden in houses--Antiques Roadshow, Canadian Pickers, UK Pawn Stars.

I know. I know. I watch way too much television. I have the TV or CBC radio on sixteen hours a day. I live alone, work at home, and prefer to shop and drive by myself. Introverted. Focused. Sometimes too anxious to be able to enjoy the luxury of other people's driving. Of course, I love my family members. My late parents. My late grandparents. My brothers who both have families and lives of their own thousands of kilometers from here. I am lucky to have friends and good neighbours. Good friends from high school and from work over forty years. Good friends here who walk with me, meet for coffee, pizza, play Scrabble, talk art and books and genealogy, and the disappointments of politics. Share holidays.

Sometimes it's easier to ask the question backwards. What do you not love? What do you hate? I hate cruelty, bullying, meanness, abuse, violence, injustice. I hate boxes into which parts of us are scrunched, forced to fit at the expense of our true shapes and sizes. Boxes labelled: Class. Gender. Sexuality. Income brackets. Nations. Races. Professions. Couples. Cliques. Location. Location. Locations. (I've always felt that I have to defend rural living.) And what is it that I do about this? I write. Dancing With Ghosts: A Cross-Cultural Education. http://www.dancingwithghostsaneducation.blogspot.ca/ In Your Dreams. A Modest Proposal. Anything You Say. The Truth About Reconciliation. Imagine—Canada 2017. The Annotated Morag. Here In Hope: A Natural History. And my Earthabridge blog which I seem to have abandoned while I tackle these prompt. http://www.earthabridge.blogspot.ca/

I'm going to finish by going back to Raymond Carver who died in 1988. “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so? / I did. / And what did you want? / To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth.”

Like I said. Lucky. (Delusional perhaps, but definitely lucky.)

Prompt # 24 - Colours

Prompt # 24 - Colour - My Favourite Thing

Colour is one of my favourite things. “Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes.” The first speech I ever gave in high school was about the psychology of colour. The first time I had a project displayed in class at university was in a colour lab when I made a swatch by pasting stripes of yellow peas, red and green lentils to a base, like those avocado greens and golds of fifty years ago. I always search for colour to create compositions in my photography (as opposed to other less obvious elements such as line or texture.) On reviewing my hundreds of photo files, I see that the most dominant colour I feature is red. Of course I shoot a lot of green, living as I do here in the temperate rainforest. I like to play with colours and light, sometimes with more success than at other times.

I love almost all colours (except orange) but if I have to pick one, it will usually be turquoise blue. Maybe because turquoise is my birthstone. I don't think it's because I am blue or depressed, but rather that I'm just a nature lover and blue is found in rocks, sky, and reflected in water and glass. And it is often used in man-made things like paint and fabric dyes.

I usually wear muted colours, shades of black and grey, with bright accents like hot pinks, reds, and purples. I never wear earth tones with the exception of sand/beige used as a basic which goes well with black. I never think of black as a colour of mourning or “goth.” I think of it as elegant, as “the colour of knowing.” I associate my mother with greens which is why I describe her as being moss, cedar, jade in “Bridal Falls.” If she had been able to work it, she would have lived her entire life outdoors.

Here are some of my Turquoise shots. Enjoy.

All photos © J.M. Bridgeman