Posted: March 3rd, 2007
© 2007 By C. Barker
I remember back when seatbelts in cars were usually tucked under the seat so they were out of site. I mean, heaven forbid, they were too uncomfortable to sit on you know!! Besides, I used to like to sit in the middle of the back seat (back in the day, the cars always had a hump down the middle for the transmission and connecting drive shaft to the rear "wheel drive"!) and I'd dangle my arms down the front seat between my parents (the front seat of our 57 Meteor and 60 Dodge went right accross - no bucket seats). My older brother on one side, and my younger brother on the other. Our youngest brother wasn't born yet as it was about 1967. I think we had traded the Meteor, which was "three-toned" (Black base, yellow middle, and white top) in for the 4-door hardtop Dodge which had high fins and very stream-lined profile. I think the old Meteor had a notch in the middle of the front seat? Anyway, just thinking about how on Sundays we would go for drives up and down the roads site seeing....I'm not so sure there was too much to see back then except old farms on dusty back roads. Each farm would have a wooden platform beside their gate where the milk cans would be placed each day.
I used to love looking at all the unpainted abandoned farm houses - no doubt about the time that larger farming operations bought up small time / old time farmers who had retired and moved into the new subdivisions of the town. It was our centennial year, and many farms had the geometric maple leaf logo for the centennial on their mailboxes or the "Pearson's Pendant" flag with three blue maple leafs on a white background. I loved the buildings with all their double-hung windows of small pains of glass and each farm usually had an old rusty windmill still creaking in the wind. We would slow down so I could study the detail closer, while my dad and mom smoked end-to-end cigarettes and the windows of the car were rolled down to let out the smoke. The only drawback of that was that most of the dust from the road would come in after we slowed down and would be on our clothes and the interior of the car by the time we got back - I remember the taste of oily dust!! Hummm...I'm hungry!!..NOT!
I remember that not long before this one drive, our teacher had read a story out of a paperback called "Mystery back of the mountain" I loved that story and I was reminded of it when we came across a place where the old trussle bridge floor was out and we had to take a detour through a back road where people lived in shantys and had 10 or 12 children in the yard all playing with a ball and they wore rags. When we slowed down they were curious and it was like they didn't see many people out that way much. It was cool, like a place where time stood still...(or perhaps their bank accounts stood still!?). © 2007 By C. Barker
Take care, sincerely Clay.
Editor's Note: Our red maple leaf canadian flag was only a couple of years old and many old liberal minded farmers were still peaved that the pendant wasn't adopted. Just as a side-winder to this (I always get de-railed in conversations! LOL) I remember in school how we had to have morning assembly with prayer, bible reading, God save the queen (where we held up the Union Jack and pledged our aliegence to the Queen), then we'd hold up the new Canadian flag and say a bit about that - Now it's forbidden to do any of these things in schools! Deef-the-beef wanted the red ensign as the flag so somewhere between having the liberal bands of blue on either side of a red maple leaf and the three maple leafs of the old ensign and Pearson Pendent, we got the flag we have now.]
