I just got back from feeding the hens their supper. When I stepped outside, there it was: a weird smell, like lard, faint but clear. There is no obvious source for this, no nearby rendering plant, food processing or food disposal. I only remember smelling it a few times in my life, always faint, always brief.
This happened at about 4:00 pm. The temperature was +2C and the barometric pressure falling. There was a strong wind from the east, which the old timers always said was where the rain came from, and there is indeed rain and snow forecast for this evening. We had 27 cm of snow fall four days ago on what had been almost bare ground. The river is still completely frozen over.
I’m putting this here so the next time I smell that strange odour I can check to see if it is under similar conditions. I realise I may have just tipped over into “old timer predicts the weather” category.
60 years ago tonight, Cassius Clay beat world heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston at a match in Miami Beach. Soon after that fight, Clay would take the name Cassius X and then Muhammad Ali.
A few days earlier, the Beatles returned to England after a successful short tour of the US, the start of Beatlemania on this continent. They appeared three times on The Ed Sullivan Show, the biggest variety program on American television, watched by tens of millions each week. Their second appearance was broadcast live from Miami Beach on February 16.
It just so happened that my parents, Harold and Vivian, took their first vacation to Florida in February 1964 and were in Miami Beach on February 16. They were both 41 and had been married for 19 years. They had worked hard to build up their general store business, so were overdue some fun and relaxation. They travelled with my mother’s cousin and her husband. By all accounts, they all had a marvellous time soaking up the sun and seeing the sights of Miami and Daytona.
Harold and Vivian Phillips, Miami Beach, February 1964. They obviously had a snazzy TV in their room, but my mother doesn’t remember if they watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan on February 16. With few stations on the TV, my guess is they did, but she was more a Perry Como fan and never really got the Beatles.
Bill for nine nights at the Golden Nugget motel, Miami Beach, February 1964.
My father lugged his 8mm Kodak film camera with him, taking plenty of shots of palm trees, orange groves, alligators and swimming pools. He took some footage of BOAC and KLM airplanes outside a terminal somewhere along their Summerside>Moncton>Montreal>NYC>Miami route.
BOAC and KLM planes, 1964
Their handwritten tickets listed their NY airport as IDL for Idlewild, except Idlewild had been renamed JFK in December 1963 just after the assassination of the US president, but obviously the change had been recent enough that no one was used to it.
Moncton to Miami $132.99 return via Tran-Canada and Eastern airlines.YSU (Summerside) to YQM (Moncton) $14.00 return
One day, the four travellers hopped in their rented convertible and drove around the Miami area, my father aiming his camera at the passing buildings and advertising banner towing planes. When we watched this reel when I was a child, this short sequence would just slip by, but when I had the film digitized, I was able to pause it and have a better look, and quickly fell down a rabbit hole of early 1960s popular culture.
Miami Beach, February 1964, showing advertising banner towing planes, Sonny Liston’s training headquarters at Surfside, Florida, and Hotel Deauville with Mitzi Gaynor on the marquee.
I knew who Mitzi Gaynor was from her movie roles and appearances on television variety shows when I was a child. I looked up the Hotel Deauville and learned it was where the Beatles had stayed in Miami and where their second Ed Sullivan appearance had been recorded, a show that also included Gaynor. Then I read about Sonny Liston’s training camp in Surfside, just north of Miami Beach, and of him appearing on the Ed Sullivan show the same night as the Beatles, and the Beatles also meeting Cassius Clay and posing for a famous photo, and the February 25 boxing match. So much was going on!
The Beatles meeting Cassius Clay/Muhammed Ali at the 5th St. Gym, Miami
I’ve done a few presentations about my father’s film footage to local groups and have used this little clip to encourage people to look at their own photos and videos and to save, document and share what they have. It might take many years before something becomes important or interesting, but if you haven’t saved it, you’ll never know.
What my father filmed isn’t as important as footage of the Beatles or Liston or Ali or even Mitzi Gaynor would be, certainly, but he did capture a few seconds of a time in US history when the country was still trying to come to terms with the assassination of their president only three months earlier, square old Ed Sullivan was kicking off Beatlemania using the huge influence of his television program, and Clay/Ali was on his way to becoming an important sports star as well as a towering figure in the black power, civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements.
What do you have in that cardboard box in your attic or closet? Nothing much? Look again.
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.
