Angels on My Shoulders

By CatherineAnne Ball

Catherine Anne Ball is the pen name of former Alliston Herald journalist Cathe Douglas. Cathe is also a graphic artist, poet, photographer and videographer. She is currently working on two other books, one tentatively called "K.I.A." (killed in Afghanistan) about one tragic day that saw a great loss of life for both the United States and Canada. Another is tentatively called "Shelter Girls," about life in the Elizabeth Fry Society Shelter in Barrie, Ontario.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewsHooks2NewsBooks
• Release date: Nov 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311084491

Book preview

Angels on My Shoulders

By Catherine Anne Ball

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright Catharine Anne Ball, 2014

Published by NewsHooks 2 NewsBooks, a division of Frost Communications

Dedication

For my mother, Marie Venette Esther Bourgoin

And my children Heather Emily Rayne and Kody Sebastian Keir

Three of the greatest loves in my life

Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we did not have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents. Without a prison, there can be no delinquents. We had no locks or keys, and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he could not afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We did not know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore, we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were in really bad shape when white men arrived. I don’t know how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.

From Lakota Holy Man Tȟáȟča Hušté a.ka. John Fire Lame Deer, American Native Chief

The Natives of Turtle Island had the land for thousands of years before the white man came along four centuries ago. These fraternal men have been the ruin of our society, our cultures, the lands that belong to the Earth, and have left a path devastation and suffering wherever they have sought domination. The time has come to end the very corrupt rule of these evil men. They have painted me as a violent criminal, yet I have never committed a criminal act, nor have I done anything criminal. Surely not as criminal as my accusers. Without the due process of law, and because I have spoken out, I have had years of research taken away from me, my pets were stolen from me, my furniture, my artwork, my books and my bed. The Calgary Police have made me homeless as a result, in particular for speaking out about the murder of Corey Peeace.

On June 10, 2011, I was a happy, healthy individual who was a contributing member of society working in the fast-paced environment of the Distribution Centre of the Calgary Herald. That is the night I saw a story come of the press that reeked. Police had shot yet another man to death. I investigated using official statements from the press and two extensive interviews with the family of the man. Since that time, I lost my job of 4 years; I lost my home and most of my possessions, including hundreds of hours invested in my artwork. I have been homeless in more than 14 months, living in shelters, tents, and sleeping in other people’s chairs and floors. I was able to write this book, which looks like it may be part one of a trilogy, while a resident at a women's shelter. While homeless, I have also started work on two other books that I hope to have written soon. One book is partly about a journalist who worked for the Calgary Herald and the other is tentatively called, Shelter Girls. Shelter Girls, while based on true facts will be fictionalized to protect the identities of the women I met while in shelters.

This is my story.

Chapter 1

My mother, Venette told me that I was born on May 27, 1956 at 4:32 p.m. in Toronto General Hospital on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in late May while an Orange Lodge parade was marching up University Avenue towards Queen’s Park, home of Ontario’s legislative buildings. She often attributed my love of music to the marching band playing at the time of my birth, but I can tell you that I remember something quite different. If I did hear the music it was overshadowed by my other memories of the event.

Okay, so I heard that.

You do not believe me when I tell you that I remember being born. It took me a long time to identify the memory with being born, but when I finally did, it made sense.

You see, I became alarmed when my head felt cold. It was my first traumatic event. I wanted to go back under the warm wetness, to that place of safety, but my struggle was for naught as the cold soon enveloped my entire body. I was leaving the only home I had ever known.

I was so unhappy that I cried for the first time in my life. Dr. John Mann didn’t have to take me by the feet and smack my bottom like he did to my older brother, Brian. I stopped crying when I heard the strange sound coming from me. It almost frightened me. I remember lots of hands touching me. I felt soothed by the warm water running over my body as they bathed me clean, dried me off and wrapped my body in a warm blanket.

I was laid into the arms of my mother who told me everything was okay and I fell asleep. I don’t remember the music at all.

My mother had traveled to southern Ontario in 1953 when she was just 19 years old. She was born during the Great Depression, the eldest daughter of William and Rose-Aimee Pelletier Bourgoin of Grand Falls, New Brunswick. Their families rooted back to the first French settlements.

My grandfather had served in the First World War. Upon his return to Canada, he was given acreage to establish his farm. My mother had three older brothers, John, Edgar and Gerald who helped their father on the farm.

Together they had four younger sisters, Madeline, Pauline, Maryann and Jocelyn. As the eldest daughter, my mother’s responsibilities included gathering the eggs, other light farm chores as well as cleaning the house, cooking and taking care of her four younger sisters.

My mother also helped my grandmother deliver my mother’s younger siblings, including stillborn children, which was quite common in those days in the larger Catholic francophone families. My grandmother Rose, was of both French and Native Canadian ancestry.

My mother walked to school everyday at a nearby convent, a couple of miles from her home. She disliked the nuns that operated the convent. She would tell us how the nuns would carry around yardsticks, not to use as rulers, but used to enforce their rules.

My mother hated the convent, the smell of their incense and the long hours spent learning. Compared to the life my brothers and I had growing up, my mother’s life was definitely more challenging.

Their house was two stories, with a huge room that held a wood-cooking stove that also heated the house and two rooms upstairs shared by all members of the family.

Her fish story always humored me. She would tell us that during the winter after the fire had gone out for the evening that the house would become so cold that the goldfish’s water would freeze. After the morning fire was lit, the house would heat up and melt the water in the fishbowl, allowing the fish to swim around once again.

There was no indoor plumbing, so there was an outhouse and water had to be brought up from the river for cooking, the cleanup of the dishes and themselves.

While my mother did not talk much about the sexual abuse she suffered as a child, she often described a peg-legged uncle who molested her and her sisters.

While her brothers John and Edgar stayed in New Brunswick all their lives, Gerry came to Toronto to start a new life.

Toronto, Ontario has had many nicknames, including Muddy York, Dirty Little York, Queen City, the Centre of the Universe, Toronto the Good, and the most famous Hogtown, relating to the livestock processed by the largest pork processor and packer, the William Davies Company. In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, it was also the scene of a serial killer of women who have never been found to this day and neither has their killer. That worried my grandparents when my mother wanted to go to Toronto, but she was allowed to go on the condition that she live with her brother, Gerald.

Speaking only Acadian French with a few necessary English words, my mother traveled to Toronto to stay with her brother, arriving in a strange new culture, getting by on the little English that she spoke. During her stay with my Uncle Gerry, my mother came to meet my father, Doug who she must have thought was quite the catch. He was the son of a prominent Toronto physician and his wife, Dr. William Mansell and Margaret Ball. He had two older sisters, my Aunties Lois and Phyllis. This grandfather practiced medicine out of the front of his home. He too had served in the military during the First World War. He was given the opportunity to attend the University of Toronto and he took full advantage of the scholarships offered to English speaking veterans. He went on to study medicine, graduating in 1925 before beginning a thriving medical practice at 197 Dundas Street East in the heart of the city, medical license number 8529.

Many of my grandfather’s patients worked at Eaton’s, a point my father used whenever purchasing products from that store. All my father had to do was to engage an older employee in conversation, then tell them that he was the son of Dr. Ball. Automatic employee discounts were given to him and he was able to buy everything from furnishings to clothing using the employee’s discount. As a granddaughter of Dr. Ball, I have to say that I never used his name in this way, nor do I believe he would ever have wanted us to.

My grandfather was a Freemason in the Toronto Lodge. He was kind and gentle man, quiet and astute; he made an impression on everyone who knew him. I don’t think he ever let a patient down. Doctoring was not a profession for my grandfather, but a way of life with patients calling on him, in their time of need, at anytime during the day, night or weekend. He was never the kind of doctor to over-prescribe pharmaceuticals like doctors do today. In fact, if he could avoid it, he would. In league with the pharmacist a couple of doors down from his office, he often prescribed placebos and found that this treatment helped many of his patients. My grandfather did however take vacations at his cottage on Balsam Lake, which is where he got to play with all nine of his grandchildren and virtually the only time I really got to see him other than the annual Christmas dinners at my grandparents home.

My grandmother was a very stern woman and apparently the disciplinarian in my father’s family. She had a nanny to help her raise three children, keeping them quiet whenever my grandfather had a patient in. My father had us in fear of our grandmother and I literally never said a word to her for fear that she would hit me with a broom. She was originally from Scotland with the maiden name of McCormick. One of her sisters, my Aunt Marjorie and her husband Uncle Mel were my Godparents. I rarely saw them and only at family gatherings.

Whenever we were done the Christmas dinner at my grandparents, my cousins and I would be led up to a living area upstairs where I was fascinated with my grandfather’s bookshelves. There were the bookshelves with all of his medical books, which we were not allowed to touch. Then there were the shelves full of National Geographic Magazines, all ordered neatly. We were allowed to look at the books, as long as we did not reshelf them, even though I was quite capable of putting the edition exactly from where I found it and I often did. He had one locked bookshelf with glass doors. Some of the books in it were Freemason books, while others were leather-bound and had the initials R.O.J. I wondered who that could possibly be and why would my grandparents have R.O.J.’s books?

My parents lived on Christie Street just north of Bloor Street, across from the Christie Pits, a series of baseball diamonds. My mother would often take us for walks in the park. Because of its bowl shape, people would often go to the Christie Pits and sit on the hill to watch the baseball games on weekends. My mother was not fond of the house they lived in, renting rooms from the old woman who owned the house. At first, she told us that they thought the walls were a brown colour until they washed them. Then they washed everything else as my mother found the place so filthy. She may have been from a poor French-Canadian family, but one thing she was taught by her mother was cleanliness. My family did not live there much longer as my grandparents loaned my parents the money for a new house, but first, they took a vacation in Grand Falls, New Brunswick. My mother and father took Brian and I to see our French grandparents and the rest of the family still there. It saddened me to know that I was the last grandchild that my grandmother saw as she died on November 26th, 1956, just six months after I was born. My parents bought a house amidst the farm fields in a burgeoning subdivision in Scarborough, just east of the City of Toronto.

588 Bellamy Road North was to become our new home. It was a gray-bricked, single story bungalow with three bedrooms, a fair sized kitchen and a bathroom unlike any my mother had ever seen before. The telephone company had just brought in a new numbering system, changing from the four digit numbers, adding exchanges and area codes. Our new telephone number was 416-273-7989. The backyard was a decent size and complete with a hill that we used for many games including tobogganing in the winter. In the winter, my mother would flood the bottom of the hill for my brothers and I to skate. We would also venture up the street to toboggan on Taber Hill, also known to us as the Indian Burial Grounds. It is also known as the Iroquois Burial Mound. I am aghast now to think that we were so allowed to sled down a hill where our Native ancestors are buried. But then, I have to think that we were educated to believe the Indians were savages who had to be civilized by the white man. It would only be years later when I learned of the atrocities and misrepresentations made by white men and of the slaughter, a quiet genocide of Canada’s indigenous peoples that has gone on for centuries in this country. The First Nations peoples of Canada had lived throughout North America for centuries, in harmony with the land never having the need for trade or commerce like the White Man’s way of life. Thinking about it now, being taught that they were savages in school, only deepens my commitment today for finding out the truth and disseminating the lies we were all taught in school.

When I was two, my younger brother, Jimmy was born at the Scarborough General Hospital on Lawrence Avenue East. Back then, women were made to stay in the hospital for five days. I remember missing her and looking for her, Apparently, to the disappointment of my mother, my first words were, Where’s Mom? Determined to find her, I set out one morning for the hospital, having a kind of knowing where it is attitude. I didn’t make it too far as one of my aunts, coming to take her turn in taking care of us found me wandering south on Bellamy Road in the first adventure of my life. She returned me to my home and without telling my father what I had done, made him a lunch for his workday at Canadian Tire. Apparently my aunt knew how violent my father could get and decided that it was better not to let him know that I had gone from the house. Apparently, he never noticed that I had gone missing during my half-hour trek. My Aunt even gave us baths and read us bedtime stories and had us in bed before he returned home from work.

My father eventually lost his job at Canadian Tire, probably because of his alcoholism. I have to say that