| Sunny Side Up! March 21, 2001 Copyright 2001, Kathleen Gibson A Good Place to Grow Up A good place to grow up, it was, even if it was on the other side of the tracks. A brown corduroy-shake house in the city of Port Moody, on the shores of Burrard Inlet, at the edge of Rocky Point Park, on a street named Murray. The houses had mothers attached, and the fathers went to work each morning, returning just in time for dinner. We were rich. I had two parents, too many brothers and sisters to count, a dog, and a nickel for the ice-cream man occasionally. We were poor. Our father was a janitor, I wore hand-me down, down, downs, our mother took in foster children, sewed late into the night, and worried about money. The deep bellow of the foghorns in the harbor was our winter alarm clock; from spring onwards it was the robins in the whispering walnut outside my attic bedroom. In winter we skated in our boots on salt-water pools that froze before the tide could sweep them away, in summer we played on shipwrecks, pretended we were being held captive, wrote HELP long and wide in the sand, waved red handkerchiefs at small planes that tipped their wings at the upturned sunburned circles of our faces. It�s gone now, the old house. My sister and I came back to look for something, anything that proves we were here. We brought focaccia bread, apples and one rum ball to share - for after. We knew we�d need it. The park remains � more developed now. The salty tongue of the Pacific still laps the sand at the water�s edge. Children�s voices still call, �Mommy, look at me!� Whenever I�m in Vancouver I try to spend time here. This ground, changed though it is, is part of me. I love my prairie home, but the places of my greening years hold me like the tight tendrils of the morning glories that once grew in our privet hedge. If the hedge was uprooted, transplanted, the wiry springs held on. If it was pruned, the tendrils went along for the ride. Our home housed a peculiar combination of faith and worry. Worry that the job wouldn�t last. Faith that it would. Worry that the car wouldn�t start. Faith that it would. Worry that the child wouldn�t come home. Faith that she would. Worry that the garden wouldn�t produce. Faith that it would. Faith usually won. The house is gone, but the household lives on. The baton of faith was passed down, and some of the worries, too. That�s my heritage. Salt and vinegar. I wouldn�t have it any other way. Real people lived at 2910 Murray Street, not saints. We sit in the van, my sister and I, watch the children play and the mommies talk. We eat the focaccia bread, cut the rum ball raggedly in half with one of her keys, and eat it too. And realize that we carry daily, in our hearts, all the proof we need that we were once here You can respond to this column at [email protected] |