Headlines lead to memories - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Two obituaries in last week’s issue of The Citizen caught my attention, and I realized that, since neither lived nearby, many younger people would probably not have read them.

 

One was for Bernice Passchier of Palmerston, who grew up on a farm north of Blyth and worked with me at the Blyth Festival years ago. The other was for Fred Tilley of Seaforth, former owner of the Canadian Tire store in Seaforth, when there was one, and later owner of a variety store in Blyth, just a couple of doors away from our office at The Citizen.

 

Thinking of them brought back a memory from my part-time English teacher way back when I was in high school. Retired himself, he said the first page he always turned to in his morning daily newspaper was the obituaries, where he would see someone had died who was his age or younger and he’d chuckle that he had outlived them.

 

It made me think about the situation which is different from that old teacher (actually he was probably younger than I am today). I am many years older than Bernice will ever be. I touched on only a few moments of her life, but those memories are what I’ll remember her by.

 

I’m many years younger than Fred Tilley, who lived to be 96, and I remember seeing him delivering supplies to the store, shopping for rental movies in his store and how he gave my then-teenaged son (who recently turned 50) a job.

 

This is how we live our lives, each having his/her own memories; each of us having a world of our own. Jill and I were reminiscing the other day about our growing up years, she in Scarborough, me on a farm north of Lucknow. She remembers her father having to borrow a car from a neighbour to go to the hospital to pick up her mother after the birth of her younger sister (now more than 70). A neighbouring child teased, wondering why did they had a driveway if they didn’t even have a car.

 

We had a car at the time because, living on a farm, it was hard to get around without one. The car we had was old and rusted out, however, and you could nearly choke to death from the dust that entered our car from the gravel road on which we lived.
In general, even if they didn’t have a car at that time, Jill’s family had a much more prosperous life than we did, as my parents struggled to pay the bills on a farm that didn’t produce enough revenue. Jill can’t remember when they got their first television. We got ours in the late 1950s when my older sister who, by then, had a job in Toronto, bought one for the family at Christmas.
We didn’t, unfortunately, have TV the year previous when I spent the winter in bed, a victim of rheumatic fever, a disease unheard of today because of modern, miracle drugs. My mother cared for me at home because it was before the time of medicare and they couldn’t afford the hospital bills. 

 

Though the doctor thought I had escaped heart damage from the disease, a few years ago I had to have open-heart surgery to replace a heart valve which was probably damaged by my childhood disease. The idea of replacing a heart valve was probably unthinkable to my childhood doctor.

 

Each of us, no matter what age, is filled with our own memories. I understood only a fraction of my parents’ memories. My father served with the army artillery in Italy and Holland during World War II, worked hard on our farm and finally had to take off-farm work. My mother grew up in a substantial family - her grandfather had been an early Warden of Bruce County - she had one leg amputated because of circulation issues, and lived in poverty in adult life after her marriage, but worked hard to overcome it.
Jill, too, has her own memories as the daughter of an air force veteran and a mother who worked during the war before marrying and building a house in Scarborough.

 

We each carry on all these memories;  memories that will cease to exist when we do. I know a tiny fraction of my parents’ lives. Our kids know a tiny fraction of their parents’ lives. We know little of our neighbours’ lives. And what we do know will die with us.
When I was growing up, we had all sorts of things that brought us together with our neighbours: open receptions after a neighbour was married, weekly Farm Forum meetings every winter, Women’s Institute for the women, party lines on the telephone. So much has changed and it often meant that we grew apart. Think about cellphones: we seldom know the numbers of people we aren’t close to.

 

Even newspapers are threatened, without which I’d never even noticed the death of these two people whose lives touched mine briefly years ago. But humans are human. We need human connection. We can’t survive without it.