About me and this blog

I was born on a native reserve in Ontario, grew up on the west coast of Vancouver Island (as far west as you can go without running out of Canada), came of age in Mexico City. Between times, I lived in the Fraser Valley, Texas, Seattle, Oklahoma, Bella Coola, on the BC north coast, and the Fraser River Delta, just south of Vancouver. For now, I'm "settled" in Campbell River, on Vancouver Island.

I have a boatload of stories to tell. These are some of them.

Sunday, August 21, 2022

Snow

 Sometime in the fall, when every day was grey and wet, when the coal-oil lamps were lit as soon as supper was over and the eaves dripped all through the long night, the weekly boat delivered a spark of colour; the Christmas catalogue from Sears-Roebuck, one per household. Two inches thick, smelling of fresh ink, glossy and bright. The Wish Book, Dad called it.

The first half of the book was the clothes section. Women’s clothes first, starting with the cover; the most elegant lady in a long coat. Gloves and hat and jewelry; city clothes, Sunday morning clothes. Inside, more of the same, then housedresses, jackets, shoes, purses. Underwear, pages and pages of it. Corsets with whalebones, with hooks and eyes, with laces. Stockings and garter belts. I studied it all carefully. Someday I would be a woman and wear things like that. It all looked very uncomfortable, though.

Men’s clothes came next; I flipped the pages quickly. Children’s clothes; little girls in perfect ringlets wearing birthday-party dresses. On to the tools, the washing machines, the dishes.

And finally, the toys. A dozen or so pages near the back of the catalogue. Dolls and looms for the girls. And the important part, the purpose of it all: the boys’ section. Trucks. Black metal trains that shot real sparks. Meccano. Tinkertoy. Microscopes. Ah!

In these pages I would find Christmas presents for my brothers. And wish. I knew I would get doll clothes or a loom or a sweater, as usual. But just look at that chemistry set! Just read the list of items in that box! What I could do with that!

I read every word of that toy section, even to the descriptions of the extras: “XY94357 – Batteries for the XY94356, set of four. $0.99.”

Eventually the order form was filled out, with the code numbers double-checked, the totals added up. I passed the catalogue on to Dave, reluctantly.

When the 1951 catalogue came, Mom told us to just look at it, but not to order anything; we would be getting money for Christmas, and we would go to the city – to the States! – to buy our own presents. She gave me $5.00, all for myself. I folded the bill into an inch-wide square and put it into the coin purse I used for my candy money at camp. But what would I buy with it? There was nothing in the girls’ section of the catalogue that appealed to me. I had my doll. She was old and half-bald, but I didn’t need another. What for? I had two looms already. And I couldn’t buy boy stuff; people would laugh. I checked the prices of Meccano sets, though.

In December, we took the boat down to Vancouver. We did the normal things: ate in Chinatown, visited some people in stuffy houses, waited for Mom and Dad in church offices. At a lot where a row of pointy flags flapped in the drizzle, Dad bought a car.

And then it was Christmas Day, and there was no more business to be attended to, and we had eaten pie and pickles and cranberry sauce in a brown house with a monkey tree in the yard,  and we were free at last. We crossed the border with the last shred of daylight.

It was snowing when we drove into Seattle. I rolled down my window and caught some on my sleeve until Mom made me shut the window again. Dad was driving slowly, looking for a motel.

It’s Christmas,” he said. “We’re going to find a place with television.”

I thought he was joking at first, until he passed several motels without stopping. And then, there it was; “Television in all the rooms,” the sign said. And below, in blinking blue neon, the magic word, “Vacancy”. Dad pulled into the driveway.

We sat on the beds in the semi-dark, watching. I had never seen a television before; it was like seeing a filmstrip without the projector. Except that the picture was much smaller. Greyer, too. And there was something wrong; the voices were staticky and snowflakes blurred the image. “It’s the weather,” Dad said. “Can’t be fixed. I’m sorry; should I turn it off?”

Mom said yes; we kids said no. The television stayed on.

The movie was a story about toys who had come alive. Tin soldiers marched and saluted, stuffed animals rushed about, a ballerina doll got off her pedestal and danced down the street. There were doll-house castles with towers and drawbridges, prancing wooden horses, a marching band. And around it all the snow swirled. At times, a deep fog would sweep over the screen, a fog that permitted only glimpses of moving figures, a flash of bare arm here, a carriage wheel there.

The voices were no clearer. A soldier talked excitedly with the ballerina; I could hear his tone but not his words. Trumpets blared, then faded in mid-note. A town crier shouted – I couldn’t make out what.

I couldn’t follow the story. But it didn’t matter; it was still wonderful, magical. Just right, really; why should mere mortals expect to see clearly into this other world?

The weather worsened, outside our window and on the screen. Just before the blizzard struck, I got a final glimpse of the ballerina back on her stand, on the tip of her left toe, arms over her head, the right foot pointing at the horizon. She was spinning slowly.

She danced through my dreams that night.

The next morning, Boxing Day, we went shopping. “Everything’s on sale,” Mom said. “We’ll get really nice things this year.”

In a store where the boys bought trucks, I found a new wig for my doll, marked down to four dollars. Back at home, Mom helped me glue it onto her head. I combed the hair back and tied it in a bouncy pony-tail just like the one the ballerina wore.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I remembered that story about the catalogue you shared. I, too, looked at the catalogue longingly at what we dreamed of buying .