I picked up Steven at the Charlottetown airport last week. The Air Canada flight from Toronto was late. It had been deiced twice at Pearson. When it finally took off, I started my 100 km drive over snow-drifted highways, and the plane touched down just a couple of minutes after I got there.
I haven’t been in the terminal since before the pandemic. They’ve done a bit of renovating, removed the Cows Ice Cream cow that used to greet travellers in the arrivals area. A much more multicultural array of folks were waiting with me than in the past
Two children tried to find a place to hide so they could surprise the person they were meeting. A young man held a bouquet of flowers, shifting back and forth and looking at the floor, thinking hard. A Buddhist monk in orange robes and the biggest snow boots I have ever seen came in decked out in a couple of DSLR cameras. There were the pasty potato-faced people like me.
I was sitting on a bench far enough away that I couldn’t see the when the doors opened, but I knew a couple of seconds before they did because those waiting near the doors suddenly started to crane their necks to spot the person they were meeting. There are no jet bridges at Charlottetown, so people have to make their way across the tarmac through whatever weather awaits, emerging from the darkness at night.
The passengers trickled in at first, and then suddenly they burst forth, a flock of black four-wheeled suitcases with long handles, twirling and pirouetting across the bumpy tiles, click click click, a ballet of surcharge-dodging swans. Their human handlers seemed to have the most gentle of grips on them, just a couple of fingers, and that let them deftly maneuver around the people hugging babies and kissing grandmothers and out to waiting conveyances.
A few people carried those bags too tired to swivel or were reluctant to bump over the snow from the plane. A couple of my hens don’t like walking on fresh snow and will insist on being carried when they tire of the uncertainty of the puffy white, so I expect the bag owners faced the same thing.
In just a couple of minutes, the clattering cases were gone. The children were hugging a tall man, the youngest clinging to his leg so he sort of dragged her around, everyone laughing. I lost sight of the man with the flowers, so don’t know if the person he was meeting arrived. The monk was talking to a family with a young boy, no photos being taken yet. Steven grabbed his backpack off the conveyor belt and we stepped out into the drifting snow.
The Charlottetown Airport arrivals area, July 2014. The Cows cow was joined by Anne of Green Gables that summer, both patiently waiting for Matthew Cuthbert.
When I wrote about discovering an audio recording of our neighbours Margaret and Kevin Kilbride, I said I was sorry I hadn’t spent more time with Margaret in her later years, wished I had asked her more questions about her nursing career and military service. I knew a little bit, but not much, and didn’t know a way to find out more.
So imagine my delight when I was contacted by a woman who grew up in Foxley River and had interviewed Margaret in 1985. Susan Bulger Maynard was a neighbour of the Kilbrides, and of ours, and her parents, Roger and Norma Bulger, were close friends and great supports to both Kevin and Margaret.
Susan’s interview with Margaret was for an assignment for one of her university courses, and thankfully she saved the paper, kindly sent a copy to me, and has generously allowed me to share it here on my website. It is an absolute treasure and helped to fill in so many blanks about Margaret’s life.
All I had previously known about Margaret’s Second World War service was that she had been a nurse in Europe and somehow lost a finger during that time, but Susan’s interview uncovered many more details, including that Margaret had been a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps (Nursing Division) in charge of operating rooms in Belgium and France, and had been night supervisor of a 1,500 bed military hospital in England.
I can’t even begin to imagine what Margaret saw during her years with No. 10 Canadian General Hospital, and what she had to live with for the rest of her life. Her time as the head nurse of our little 13-bed Stewart Memorial Hospital in Tyne Valley would certainly have been a very different experience, and there probably wasn’t much that could rattle her.
Margaret would often drop in to our house on her way home from work for a quick visit, sometimes still in her white uniform, so I was surprised to learn from Susan’s paper that after Margaret married Kevin in 1954 and moved to Foxley River, she took a few years off from nursing and worked at home. I expect that after having nursed full time for 22 years, 5 of those her service in the RCAMC, those few years of home life were a very welcome and necessary break.
While I went to school with some of Susan’s younger siblings, she and I have not often crossed paths, but we both feel that Margaret had a hand in bringing us together; if anyone can make things happen from beyond, it would be Margaret!
Margaret Kilbride, RN, in the kitchen at Stewart Memorial Hospital, 1970s
From about the age of 75 up to a couple of years ago when she was 98, my mother walked on a treadmill twice a day, every day, for 15 minutes each time. After breakfast and after lunch. Not fast, not trying to break any records, just walked at a good pace. She listened to Anne Murray and John Denver cassette tapes and hummed along.
She’s 101 and in remarkable health, so I try to follow her example and keep moving. I enjoy walking, especially in our woods, but the conditions around our house the past couple of weeks have been treacherous. Ice has completely covered our driveway and we wear grippers on the bottoms of our boots to go out.
So I’ve been forced onto the treadmill in our garage. It’s an old one, but still in good shape. I know if I can watch movies or videos I will be distracted from how boring the whole enterprise is and stay longer, but there isn’t a device holder on the treadmill console. I tried putting my iPad on an old music stand, but it was a bit tippy and awkward to reach. I considered buying a holder that would attach to the machine, or trying to build something myself, but just never bothered and listened to podcasts instead.
Then today I was putting a piece of paper in a plastic sheet protector and bingo, problem solved! Five minutes later I had hung a sheet protector from a piece of dowel and attached this to the treadmill console with two pieces of duct tape. It’s not pretty, but it works (which would also be the title of my DIY book, if I ever wrote one). The iPad covers most of the display, but I kind of prefer that as I’m not constantly watching the time tick by, and the iPad can be easily lifted if need be.
Added bonus I hadn’t anticipated: the touch features of the screen are usable through the sheet, which might also come in handy if keeping an iPad clean in the kitchen.
I might replace the tape with something like conduit clamps, attaching them by drilling carefully through the plastic console, but the tape seems good enough for now.
I now hope to walk and walk and walk to 100 while watching cat and DIY videos.
Gorilla-brand duct tape is kind of expensive, but it is super sticky and super strong.Easy access to controls.Easy to slip the iPad in, but doesn’t feel like it would fall out (something I don’t wish to test!).
Ever hear an upbeat song you’ve known for a long time, but then really listen carefully to the lyrics, and find yourself thinking wait, what? Well, you just heard a sad banger.
I recently discovered (or, rather, Siri kept suggesting I might like) the band Foster The People, who had a hit a decade or so ago called Pumped Up Kicks. I loved it right away and listened to it a lot without really taking in the lyrics. It has an interesting, catchy musical structure, and it’s about gun violence from the point of view of a teenager who wants to shoot everyone. You better run, better run, outrun my gun. Oh.
Here are a few more sad bangers from my collection (I’ll keep adding to the list as I discover more, or actually listen to the lyrics of songs I already know!):
Luka – Suzanne Vega
Leader of the Pack – The Shangri-Las,
Mississippi Goddamn – Nina Simone
Alone Again (Naturally) – Esther Phillips (the original was decidedly not a banger)
Semi-Charmed Life – Third Eye Blind
The Way – Fastball
That version of Alone Again (Naturally) could also be on a list of “songs that contain flubs” because Esther sings “eighty sixty-five years old” instead of just “sixty-five years old” in the last verse and they left it in. I imagine it being the last song of the recording session, the people in the control room asking for another take and Esther saying “That’s good enough, I am not singing that dumb song again!” and heading out the door. Didn’t matter: she’s amazing, it’s a lovely cover and the flub is charming and I love hearing it every time.
The only other flub I can think of off the top of my head of is Ella Fitzgerald forgetting the lyrics to Mack The Knife. She won a Grammy for that oopsie and had to sing the improvised lyrics for the rest of her career, a perfect reminder to not be too hard on yourself when you make a mistake.
The title of this notice in the January issue of The Buzz, PEI’s arts and culture magazine, caught my eye:
Meet and squeak? Yes, please!
I played the trumpet in concert and jazz bands throughout junior high and high school, as well as a marching band for a few summers, and the pinnacle of my six-year career was playing for a couple of seasons with the PEI Symphony. I completely stopped playing trumpet when I went to university, and though I continued to play the guitar and a bit of piano, my music making has waned in the past few years.
My silver Stradivarius Bach trumpet sat mostly untouched in our basement for four decades until this past summer, when I saw it on a shelf and wondered if I could still play it. I gave it a good cleaning and oiling, pulled out some music, and it turned out I could still play, and with some regular practice, my range, tone and endurance improved.
Practicing on my own is fine, but the real fun is playing with others; I wasn’t sure that would be possible where I live, so the idea of a new community band is exciting. My caregiving duties make committing to joining a band 45 kilometres from my house probably impractical, but I’m determined to at least make that inaugural meeting just to have the chance to squeak along with other former band nerds.
Our internet connection was upgraded from dial-up to 1.5 Mbps at the very end of 2009, and we could finally stream audio and video. I immediately moved my radio listening habit from CBC to BBC, mostly Radio 4 and Radio 2.
I was doing the dishes at the kitchen sink one night in January 2010, listening to a BBC Radio 2 music show. The host was reading out messages from listeners across the UK, and it was thrilling magic to be able to hear this live from so far away.
I looked at the window in front of me, my own reflection staring back in the black window, blurry in the steamed-up window. There are no outside lights or houses close enough to see, so at night there is only inky darkness beyond.
For a few seconds, I was the me who had stayed in England, who never returned to Canada after I lived in London for a while in the mid-1980s. That version of me wasn’t any clearer than that, just as murky and dark as the view out that nighttime window, but she was there, somewhere in England, doing the dishes, listening to the BBC. And then she was gone, and I was where I was.
It wasn’t a sad or happy feeling, more a neutral “hello, you” acknowledgment of the choice I had made to return to Canada, the alternative path I hadn’t taken. I went on to move many more times around Canada, making new friends, living new lives, looking out new windows, until now finding myself back exactly where I started.
The “what if” game is almost always a dangerous and pointless pursuit, and I used to do it a lot. If I edge toward it now, I try to look back and see my younger self moving through the world, equipped only with the information I had at the time, and marvel that I made as many good decisions as I did. I have become kinder to past me than I used to be, and that is freeing.
Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past.
(Origin of quote unclear, and attributed to nearly everyone on the internet.)
I’m a couple of weeks late marking the 50th wedding anniversary of Tom Connors and Lena Welsh, and not even sure now how that milestone came into my mind. Tom was a singer/songwriter known as Stompin’ Tom. He was born in Saint John, New Brunswick and adopted by a couple who lived in Skinner’s Pond, PEI, where there is now an interpretive centre to showcase his musical talents and life. Tom died in 2013, but Lena is still alive, as far as I know.
He wrote and sang, in the classic country and western style, about working people and places he visited while criss-crossing Canada numerous times. Every Prince Edward Islander who attended elementary school in the 1970s and 80s probably sang in choir and can still remember every word to the song of his that is most connected with PEI: “Bud the Spud”.
Why do I remember when he got married? Because we watched it on television in school. I was in second grade, and we sat on the floor, gathered around what was probably a black and white television, on Friday, November 2 to watch Tom and Lena get married on the CBC Television program Elwood Glover’s Luncheon Date. I don’t remember Glover, and only have dim memories of watching the wedding, but I knew it was a Big Deal because television was still viewed as slightly unedifying in 1973, Sesame Street be damned, and wasn’t used in our primary education, with only a few exceptions.
Original Toronto Star caption: Happiest moment of my life, says Stompin’ Tom Connors as he weds Lena Welsh, 26, Magdalen Islands barmaid, on Elwood Glover’s TV show, Luncheon Date, today. Here, Glover, left, congratulates bride and groom after an estimated 2 million viewers tuned in on the formal, 12-minute ceremony. The 36-year-old folk singer is from Skinner’s Pond, P.E.I. Wedding was a first for TV in Canada. (From Toronto Public Library Digital Archive. Copyright Toronto Star, photographer Frank Lennon.)
When you are seven years old, experiencing things for the first time is commonplace, so I had no idea that famous people didn’t get married on television all the time. The only other non-royal person who had their wedding televised, that I can think of, was Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki, but I was only three when that occurred, we wouldn’t have received the US station it was broadcast on, and Tiny Tim terrified me, so I would have avoided it: if you want me to give up state secrets, just play him singing “Tiptoe Through The Tulips” and I’ll tell you everything.
Stompin’ Tom possibly wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but Islanders LOVED him to bits. When Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited PEI in the summer of 1973 to mark the 100th anniversary of our province joining Canada, a concert was held in Charlottetown to mark the auspicious occasion. Family friends were visiting us from Toronto, and one of our guests was a woman who had recently moved to Canada and had grown up in a unionist household in Northern Ireland. She loved the Queen, and was thrilled we would be able to watch the concert live on television.
I don’t remember watching this show, but the family lore is that the broadcast began with the usual pomp that accompanies the arrival of a royal. The audience, in all their Charlottetown finery, politely applauded to welcome the royal couple. There were speeches, and I would bet Anne of Green Gables made an appearance. Our Irish friend watched with great interest.
And then Stompin’ Tom took to the stage with his guitar, undoubtably in his trademark black outfit and cowboy hat. Don’t know what he sang, but it would have been something twangy and foot stompin’. The crowd, who had given the royal couple a suitably dignified and muted welcome, erupted into hoots and hollers and thunderous applause for this tall skinny fellow who looked like a bad guy from a Hollywood western. Our friend couldn’t understand how he could get a bigger reaction from the audience than the queen did, and my mother said she watched the rest of the broadcast with a slightly bristly reserve.
I met Tom once backstage at the famed Toronto music venue, Massey Hall. The Stompin’ part of his stage name came from his habit of stomping his left foot so hard he would make a hole in the stage, to the displeasure of venue owners, so he started using a small piece of plywood to stomp upon, holding it up at the end of the performance to let the particles he dislodged with his heel drift to the stage.
At some point he started auctioning off the boards for charity. In September 1999, he decided the Daily Bread Food Bank would get the money from the board auction at his Massey Hall concert and although I wasn’t the PR person for our organization, I was the token PE Islander on the staff (an exotic creature!) and given the opportunity to attend the show and accept the donation.
It was fantastic to finally see Tom live and even more wonderful to be in an audience of true fans, many of whom were also originally from Atlantic Canada. We sang along, and cried with him as he became overcome with emotion while singing “Confederation Bridge” and couldn’t continue the song: “And it’s calling, calling me over, the blue water’s rolling and soon I’ll be strolling out there. Down by the ocean, where the Island devotion to friendship is found everywhere.”
Illegal and very poor quality flash photography by me (a former theatre usher and stage manager who knew better), Massey Hall, Toronto, September 18, 1999. I swear that’s Tom.
The board auction was held during the show, and the winner was able to meet Tom after the show to get his board signed, and I was present to arrange to get the money, a very generous $5,000. I first met Lena, who was lovely when I told her I was from PEI (she’d likely met everyone from PEI by that point), an elegant, quiet lady. Then Tom came into the green room, bigger than life, holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in another, greeting each person one by one.
When it was my turn to speak to Tom, I thanked him for supporting DBFB and then told him my father often spoke of the night sometime in the 1960s at our local community festival when the organizers heard that Tom was in the audience. My father, acting as emcee for the evening, asked Tom up on stage to sing a few songs, which he agreed to do. The roof nearly came off the rink with the audience response, and as he headed out into the night, they gave him a big feed of cooked lobsters. He slapped me on the back and said he remembered that night, though I wonder if he really did.
Hugh Gillis, the man who bought the board that night at Massey Hall, drove to PEI four years ago to donate it and two others he bought over the years to the Stompin’ Tom Centre. He apparently has no connection to PEI, even though he has a classic Island name, but just seems to be a wonderfully generous man.
The other reason I remember September 18, 1999 was that when I got home from the concert, there was a message on my telephone answering machine from a fellow I had met at a birthday party the week before, asking if I wanted to go out on a date some time. I did, and we did, and now we are married, like Lena and Tom.
Stompin’ Tom celebrates the $5,000 his Stompin’ Board Auction bought for Daily Bread Food Bank from bidder Hugh Gillis. Here Hugh (on left) and a friend enjoy a laugh with Tom. Taken backstage at the Stompin’ Tom Connors “Meet and Greet” after his show at Massey Hall in Toronto on September 18, 1999. (Photographer: Barry Roden – Credit: Library and Archives Canada)
I happened upon an historic moment while driving home the other day: the painting of the Williams barn in Poplar Grove. Built around 1865, it is certainly one of the oldest barns in our area, if not the province. It was built by my great-great grandfather, Robert Williams, and is owned by his great-grandson Robert, known as Robbie. Robbie and his wife, Sandra, have taken loving care of both the original house and the barn.
While the survival of the barn is notable, the fact that it is still being used for more or less the same purpose as when it was constructed is a miracle. Robbie has harness racing horses, at least two at present, and also keeps chickens, and it is almost certain old Robert would have had both types of animals as well, and probably also a cow and pig. Many old barns and outbuildings are no longer used for animal husbandry, so it is lovely to see the barn still proudly fulfilling its original purpose, and it shines now with the new coat of paint.
Perhaps I should have stopped closer to the barn to take the photo, but I like the idea of seeing this from afar, through time. Take away the light poles, wires and pavement and you could almost imagine this was 100 years ago.
Another recent project in the area caught my eye a couple of years ago, and led to another from-the-car photo. An industrious man who lives not far from us builds small hip-roofed baby barns to sell, and nearly always has one on the go in his front yard. In 2022, I noticed a concrete pad had been poured near his vegetable garden and wondered what he was going to build. A portable saw mill arrived and was placed on the pad a few weeks later, and soon he began sawing logs into lumber.
A mill is better preserved and more useable under cover, so how do you build a building for a sawmill? You saw the logs yourself, of course, and build it around the mill.
The building soon had a roof, an opening at the front to roll the logs through from the stand you see in the photo, and a door for the operator to use. The baby barns are now being built using some of his own lumber, in the old way. The family sadly had a fire in their house and have been under reconstruction for the past year, so no doubt the sawmill has come in very handy for that project as well.
When did people start carrying cups of coffee around with them all the time? I can’t remember, though I know it happened in my lifetime. It certainly wasn’t something my parents did. I started drinking coffee in my early twenties, so in the late-1980s, but don’t remember walking around carrying a coffee cup everywhere, and never really got in the habit of doing so.
I’ve thought about this a lot: when did we go from being people who drank coffee at home, and in coffee shops or restaurants, to people who move through the world tethered to coffee shops like Tarzan swung through the jungle, swinging from shop to shop? Visiting Tim Horton’s has become a quasi-religious act in Canada, the doughnut and double-double the Eucharist. Father, son and honey crueller. If you don’t drink Timmie’s and watch hockey, are you really Canadian?
In the “Things Have Change But I Can’t Remember When” category is the impression I have that the Christmas season starts earlier and earlier each year. I think that when I was a child, people were sensible and talk of Christmas only started on December 1, but I realise that’s probably a false memory, or wishful thinking that we could revert to living only in the season we are in: enjoying the present, not anticipating the presents!
Proof of my false memory is found in an October 15, 1948 ad heralding the opening of Toy Town at the Summerside department store, Smallman’s. They couldn’t resist sticking Santa on there, his happy grin silently but powerfully sanctioning the quality of the store’s offerings.
Smallman’s was still in business when I was a child. We shopped mostly at their larger rival, Holman’s, just down Water Street, but sometimes we ventured into Smallman’s for sales or to visit their lunch counter. My father had worked in their warehouse before the Second World War when it was called Sinclair and Stewarts, so he especially liked going back.
Their main floor was one huge room, with office windows overlooking the sales floor. When you wanted to purchase something, a handwritten bill of sale was created, you gave the sales clerk your money, and a copy of the bill, along with your cash, was put into a small box that was put on a little railway-type system that took the money up to the cash office. Any change required was put back into the box, along with a receipt marked paid, and it clattered back down to the clerk. The fun of watching the little boxes zipping up pillars and along the ceiling was endlessly fascinating, really the best part of going there.
My 2020 Chevrolet Bolt EV was part of an August 2021 recall by General Motors to address battery fires. I waited patiently for my new battery only for GM to announce in June 2023 they were ending the battery replacements and would instead be installing enhanced monitoring software in vehicles that hadn’t yet had the replacement completed.
I’d heard George Iny from the Automobile Protection Association on the local CBC Radio noontime show many times, so I wrote to the APA after hearing about the change in recall and was surprised to have a response from Iny himself, who asked if he could use my email as part of an article on the subject, which I said would be fine. I sort of forgot about that part of our exchange until I did a search tonight for the latest information on the recall and found the email (attributed to T.B., cough cough) as the basis of a MoneySense article.
One thing I thought of after I emailed the APA was the potential hit in resale value I could incur. There seems to have been no rhyme or reason as to which cars did or didn’t get the battery replacement, so other 2020 Bolt EV owners did get the new battery and the 8-year warranty that came with it, while I get nothing but software. When it comes time to sell or trade my car, I would expect it to be worth less than a 2020 that had the new battery and warranty, and there will be no compensation from GM for that loss.
I’ve gone from being impressed by GM promising to look after all their Bolt EV customers to being pretty sour. I had only owned one other GM product in my life: an ancient quarter ton pickup I bought from my car-dealer cousin, Warren, to use while our house was being built, handy to pick up supplies for the carpenters and keep construction moving forward, but in constant need of repair so a short-lived possession. Unless GM have a change of heart (which would mean they would have to first acquire a heart), I can’t imagine I will ever buy a General Motors product again. I’m sure Mary Barra won’t be losing sleep over that, though, because I’m old and like to keep cars for a long time, so probably another couple of cars will see me out.
I still like the Bolt EV, think it is well built and have enjoyed driving it, but GM’s absolute disregard for customers stinks like the tailpipe of their stupid Hummers.
Me driving my first zero-emission car, a gift from one of the toy salesman who used to visit to my parents’ general store, 1969. I assume someone stopped me from driving off the step, or was this the inspiration for the final scene in Thelma and Louise?
