My Lefthanded, Backwards, Upsidedown Life & Assorted Short Stories

By John F. Gardiner

My Lefthanded, Backwards, Upsidedown Life & Assorted Short Stories contains a memoir describing author John Gardiner's growing up and coming of age years in the small Ontario town of Hanover during the 1950's, 1960's and early 1970's - a time of significant social change in North American society - especially among young people. The book is written as a series of mostly humorous vignettes delivered in a stream-of-consciousness style that follows Gardiner from the day he is born on a stormy winter day in the early 1950's, through to when he marries in the mid-1970's. From the time he joins the Hanover Musical Society at age 4 on clarinet, to the point in his life where he marries in the mid 1970's, his life is sort of ordinary, but also sort of not ordinary. Playing in rock bands, starting a school newspaper, dabbling in the hippie drug subculture, shooting pool, roller skating and falling in love...all part of his young life - and events that most people of that era can identify with. Gardiner calls his short stories "emotional thoughtscapes" because of the vivid emotional images they are intended to create in the reader's mind. A young boy gets his first bike...a homeless man gets cursed by an old crone....a young guy gets involved with drugs to expand his mind but with tragic results...a conversation with a rabbit ends a teen's hunting career...stories about ordinary people struggling with the stuff of life - Gardiner's stories will make you both laugh and cry, sometimes within the same story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667804392

John F. Gardiner

John Gardiner has been crafting emotional thoughtscapes for most of his adult life. After launching his high school newspaper, he spent nearly forty years as a community newspaper editor. John is part of a blended family that includes four children and seven grandchildren. He currently resides in Wallaceburg, Ontario, Canada.

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Title

Copyright 2021

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used

in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher

except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-09839-998-6 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-09839-999-3 (eBook)

This book is lovingly dedicated to:

My Mom

My siblings:

Brenda and Mike, Brian and Sue, JoAnne and Bruce

My wife, Carol

The kids:

Joanne and Jim, Chad and Lynn, Jason and Daniela, Becca and Zach

The grandkids:

Mitchell, Sophie, Ashley, Isaac, April, Emmalee, Tomas and Olive

And everyone else who has shared this journey

aboard Spaceship Earth with me…..it’s been a great ride…..

FOREWORD

To dream or not to dream; that is the real question….

For those who dream are forgotten today,

but remembered tomorrow;

While those who do not dream are remembered today,

but forgotten tomorrow…

Feeling pretty fortunate to have the chance to get another book out. When I published the Memories for Sale collection, I thought it would constitute the sum total of my publishing efforts. I would say that Memories for Sale was a critical success, based on the many, many wonderful things both said and written about it. In fact, a number of people said it was one of the best books they’d read and, indeed, there have been a ton of really kind comments about it. However, based on the fact that I was only able to sell about 450 copies over the last four years, the book was obviously not a popular success. Even the four tiny royalty cheques weren’t proof the book was popular.

Memories for Sale was a totally fictional work, the short stories and Gawd Book containing figments of my real life, but seriously fictionalized. This book, My Lefthanded, Backwards, Upsidedown Life and Assorted Short Stories, differs from that because it contains a significant portion of a memoir I’ve written about my growing up and coming of age years in my hometown of Hanover, Ontario, Canada. I grew up and came of age during the 1950’s and 1960’s and both of those decades saw massive changes in small town Ontario, as I’m sure was the case in small towns everywhere – at least in this part of the world. My memoir reflects that. When my life began, it was sort of like a combination of Andy of Mayberry and Leave It To Beaver, and, when I got older, it was more like Happy Days. Sorry to use the TV metaphors but most folks of my vintage will totally get it.

I almost called the memoir, Me and Glen, because, as was the case in Memories for Sale, my good friend, Glen Pupich, figures prominently throughout. He was the one guy who did the most to open up my world when I was young - in many, many ways. To me, he was a towering figure in our local counter culture in ways I’m not sure even he understood. I will love him always and hold him close to my heart.

My Lefthanded, Backwards, Upsidedown Life is intended to be a mostly humorous look at my growing up years. Because although I suffered many difficulties during my adolescent years, caused by sometimes serious bouts of mental illness, I have almost nothing but fond memories of the old days…..back when we were famous…or we thought we were. It is my hope that the people who take the time to read this work will understand how much incredible hope there was back then. My generation of young people really and seriously thought we could change the world – and for the better. We have indeed changed the world – in a huge number of ways – but it would be hard to argue we have made things better. Most of the problems faced by humanity in the here and now were well known in the old days. But rather than solve them to make the world a better place for our children and grandchildren, we seem to have failed on a truly grand scale.

I have included a number of short stories in this book. They are what I do best so I thought I’d better sneak a few in. I call my short stories emotional thoughtscapes because it is my hope that they create vivid emotional images in the mind of the reader. I tend to write short stories about ordinary people dealing with what some people might think are ordinary situations. But the real drama in life often comes from dealing with the real stuff of life. And so my characters deal with poverty, aging, illness and coming of age, while all the time struggling to somehow figure life out – to somehow know why they are here.

TABLE OF CONTENTS…

Foreword

My Lefthanded, Backwards, Upsidedown Life

Assorted Short Stories

The Bike

Once Upon a Time in the Summer

Fred Encounters Brother Rabbit

Rock ‘N’ Roll Song

The Great Car-With-No-Brakes Adventure and how the boys handled it

Once in a Lifetime

A Sense of Death

Forget-Me-Not

I Get Cursed and Find My Heart

When I Laugh in the Night

MY LEFTHANDED, BACKWARDS, UPSIDEDOWN LIFE

I am born….and so on…and so on…and so on…..

I was born on a stormy winter’s night two days after Christmas in 1952… sort of at the end of the baby boomer cohort. My mother, whose own mother had died giving birth to her, had for some reason, not considered that her newborn child might be a boy. And she and my father were so uncertain how to handle the situation of having a manchild that I laid in a bassinette for the first few days of my life with no name and a couple of frightened parents. Finally, my great grandmother came to check me out – she was aghast that I had not received a name and that my parents seemed to be unable to really get me started on my journey through life. She gave them $10 to name me after her father, Johanne Friedrich Adler, so I became John Frederick Gardiner. My parents used the money to buy me something called a bunting bag to keep me warm during the winter and I was off and running.

In those early days, my mom and dad and I lived in the back of my mother’s stepmother’s house in a small apartment. I don’t remember much about it, but there is one thing that stands out in my mind. When I was maybe two or three, my Dad caught a mouse that had been foolish enough to come into our house. I followed him as he took it around to the back of the house. Once there, he took a piece of 2x4 and gave that little bugger a terrific whack, causing its tiny eyes to bulge clear out of its head. It was a lifelong lesson for me about what happens to things that get caught in traps. Watch out for those traps in life.

Another thing that stands out from those early days was going over to my aunts to watch a very early television set. Most people, including my parents, didn’t yet own their own TV, so we would gather at Aunt Vi’s on Sunday evening to watch whatever the lineup was back in those days. Ed Sullivan and Bonanza would come later. But we wouldn’t get our own TV until I was much older. Then, when we did finally get a TV, for years we only got one station; the local CBC affiliate. But we watched it in awe and couldn’t believe the technology. When I was a little kid, I was always convinced that there must be little people inside the television box….even today, I have trouble even beginning to understand the simplest pieces of technology…televisions were ‘way beyond my scope back in those days.

Life was a tough go for my parents in those early days. My Dad didn’t make much money and worked two jobs…..he worked at Peppler’s Furniture during the week and then at a nearby creamery making butter and ice cream on the weekends. The neat thing about this was that although my Dad didn’t make a lot of money, we seemed to have an endless supply of butter and ice cream – which was pretty cool for a little person. I mean who could complain about endless ice cream.

When I was four years old, my Dad built a tiny house on a lake that was several miles from town. And in those days, it was like living in the wilderness. We had no phone, a hand pump in the kitchen for water and heating was provided by one small oil space heater that sat in the middle of the house…meaning there was zero heat in the bedrooms – even in the dead of winter. We had an outhouse for a washroom, except in the really cold weather when my Dad set up something called a chemical toilet in the house’s one empty room. I don’t remember much about having to use an outhouse – can’t say that it scarred me for life – but I must have used it. I also don’t remember using old Eaton’s catalogues for toilet paper, although I’ve heard lots of those stories from the old-timers over the years.

I remember sitting with my Dad in the little lake house and watching hockey on the tiny, blurry TV that had been purchased. It was, of course, not just hockey we were watching…..it was the Toronto Maple Leafs and they were somewhat sacred back in those days. I learned watching hockey with my Dad on that tiny TV, and I learned to love the Leafs, and that was something that stayed with me through much of my adult life. Even when I was a teenager and was out partying all night, my Dad would leave me a synopsis of the game and the score on the kitchen table before he went to bed on Saturday night. I regret now that I didn’t stay in and watch more Leafs’ games with my Dad in those days. I guess I took it for granted and didn’t really understand how important it was. Now that I’ve had my own kids and had them find their own lives, I know how disappointed my father must have been not to have me stay home to watch the games with him. It’s a grim reality in life that most people don’t recognize the important stuff until it’s too late. And another grim reality of life is that there’s no going back and there’s no turning back. Life is linear – you go from one end to the other and there are no places to get off along the way – and there’s no way you can slow it down. Life runs by its own clock – you’re just along for the ride.

I started school when I lived at the lake…..I started when I was four years old because my birthday was in December. And while many people joke about having to walk a mile to school through snow drifts waist high back in the old days…..that’s pretty much what I did on some winter mornings those first couple of years. In fact, because we lived down a road with no winter service, which meant that the snow plow didn’t come down, my Dad and the few other men who lived along our road would sometimes get up really early in the morning after a snow storm and shovel out the road up to the bigger road.

We had a bunch of adventures at the lake. I learned to swim and skate really well because our front yard was filled with a swimming pool in summer and a skating rink in winter…..by the time I was six or seven, I could both swim and skate really well. And my parents got to know a guy who had a cottage at the lake, so was only there in summer. And he had a pretty big motor boat and he and his family and friends were big water skiers – there was even a ski jump out in the middle of the lake. Now Mr. Sternel – that was his name – had a small, black dog and in due course he built a special water ski with a small wire basket on the front…and he would ski around the lake and the dog would sit in the wire basket and have a ride. This was a great delight to the other cottagers who would sit out on their boathouses and cheer the man and his little dog.

But Mr. Sternel wasn’t done performing circus tricks for the cottagers yet. And, as it turned out, my circus career was just about to begin. And, so, Mr. Sternel would get me up his shoulders and the little dog on the front of his special ski and away we would go – around the lake the three of us would go while everybody cheered and clapped. It was the start of a long life in performance. I didn’t know that then, but it was the way it was going to be and it was the way it was…..

There were some other kids whose parents had decided to rough it on the lake all year long in those days. So, there were playmates for me and we hung out around the lake and in the lake and on the lake and we had no end to good times from what I remember. One remarkable thing that happened while I lived at the lake involved my friend, George…..We were out horsing around in the farmer’s fields one day and George had a sudden urge to poop. So, rather than go home, he just went over behind a tree, dropped his drawers and let her go…..After he’d finished, he called me over to admire his pile of poop – that’s the kind of thing kids used to do. And the remarkable things about his poop is that it had ended up looking exactly like a Dairy Queen soft ice cream cone, all swirly and such. We stood and admired it for a couple of minutes amazed that something like that could happen. It’s a strange but true reality that I’ve never seen anything like this again in my life. And George is dead now. And that’s that.

One of my sisters was born in 1956 – while we lived at the lake. She was my first sibling and I don’t have many memories of her from those early days. My first real memory was when she was three or four and thought it would be fun to lick the big oil tank that stood on the back porch. Now, one of the early lessons you learn in life is you keep your tongue away from cold metal things in the winter. Unfortunately, my sister found that out the hard way. Mom really didn’t know how to solve the problem so my sister stayed with her tongue stuck to the oil tank until my Dad got home from work. He knew the old hot water trick, so he boiled the kettle and poured that water down over my sister’s tongue and the oil tank finally released its relentless hold on her.

Now, Mr. Sternel of waterskiing fame had a daughter and even though I was just a wee lad, I knew this girl was incredibly beautiful. She and her friends laid around the dock in tiny bikinis that even made an eight-year-old weak in the knees. One time, the Sternels had a big tent out behind their cottage. And the older girls invited George and me and a couple of other youngsters in for our first nudie show. It was pretty exciting, even though I’m sure I had no idea why back in that time. Images of those girls have stayed with me to this day. I’m not sure I’d want to say I was traumatized, but things from that day have certainly stuck with me for a really long time. When I got older, I remember seeing Mr. Sternel’s daughter somewhere and she was indeed a Greek goddess….that was for sure.

Some time when I lived at the lake, one of my Mom’s friends, Lucy, came to visit with her husband, Nick. Now, I later heard stories about Nick that weren’t too pleasant, but when he came to visit us at the lake, I thought he was a pretty neat guy and that’s because he came to visit in an amphicar….I don’t know much about amphicars, but they were a real item back in the 1950’s……I’ve seen a couple since at car shows but they’re pretty rare, likely only made for a year or two. Anyway, Nick and my Dad and I climbed into this little red, convertible amphicar and Nick drove it straight down the bank and into the lake….I remember this thing riding really low in the water, so you were sort of sitting down in the water and not really riding on top like in most boats. We toured around the lake for a while, marvelling at modern technology, then drove up the bank and out of the lake. I was kind of dazzled by that when I was a kid.

One day, I was walking single file down the hall at James A. McGee Public School with the rest of my kindergarten classmates when I got pulled out of line by this pretty old guy. He asked me my name, then said, Your grandfather plays in the town band. You should learn to play an instrument and join the junior band. Come to my office after school and I’ll get you started. And that was my introduction to formal music training and Mr. Esser, who was the school janitor and also ran the junior town band. And because he worked at the school, he had plenty of recruits for the music program. I, of course, went down to his office in the boiler room after school. Imagine that happening in today’s world. A four or five-year old kid going into the boiler room with a strange old guy…..

Anyway, Mr. Esser presented me with a song flute, gave me a quick lesson and said he’d phone my parents. And just like that one of the most important things in my life happened and I’m sure I had no idea. From song flute, I graduated to clarinet and joined the junior town band….I was generally third clarinet, but I worked my way up to second after a while. I found that Mr. Esser and his band was affectionately referred to as Professor Esser and His Musical Racketeers…and I was now part of that crowd. I played with the junior town band for quite a few years and because of a shortage of woodwind players, I graduated to the senior town band when I was eight. I used to march in fall fair parades with all the older guys – they had to make me a special uniform and hat because I was so small – and I had real trouble keeping up during the marching. We got three dollars each for playing a parade – that was big money back in those days.

There was a big music festival in Owen Sound every spring – I think it was run by the Kiwanis and they have festivals all over the place. Anyway, Mr. Esser would enter a whole bunch of his band in the different categories like clarinet solo and trumpet duet and we’d go to Owen Sound and compete against other kids from the area. Us guys from Hanover were thought of as the country hicks because we didn’t have uniforms or super new instruments. In Hanover, the junior band players wore their Sunday best and you didn’t get a uniform until you reached the senior band. So we looked okay but not quite as sharp as the Owen Sound bands, both of which represented high schools in the city. In fact, we took home a lot of hardware from the music festival in Owen Sound and we generally won the band trophy as well. We might have looked like country hicks, but it seems we knew how to make music.

I made my first visit to Toronto while I was playing in the senior town band because each year the band performed as part of Band Day at the Canadian National Exhibition. It was a really big thing for me and because I was so young my Dad was allowed to come along to keep an eye on me. I still remember playing in the giant band shell at the CNE and newscaster Lloyd Robertson was the MC of the show – I remember thinking that he looked taller on television. The one year I went, we won a really giant trophy and were the best band of the day. It was a huge thing in my life back then and music has stayed with me always. I haven’t played the clarinet for a while but have fond memories of when I did. Mr. Esser lived to be over 100 years old and only died a couple of years ago. He was a great guy and taught a whole lot of kids a whole lot of music back in the day.

We moved to town from the lake when I was eight because Dad had allergies and living in the country made his life a misery. I remember he started sleeping with a handkerchief tied around his nose and mouth to keep out the bad stuff and I thought he looked exactly like a bandit most of the time. We moved to the house at 436 6th Avenue and my parents lived there for 50 years. It will always be my home for as long as I live even though I’ve lived other places longer at this point in my life. I’ll always remember the funny little linen or towel cupboard in the bathroom and the tiny trap door in the downstairs closet – somewhere you could hide a special treasure knowing it would never be found.

I liked living in town. Our new neighbourhood was full of kids and it was a really fun time. Most of the guys who lived in the neighbourhood were a year or two older than me and that made life interesting for me. I sort of learned things a little sooner than most kids my age and was always just a bit ahead of myself. One of my earliest memories of living in town were the carnivals we used to hold…..even though I was a junior partner, the carnivals were always held in our backyard. My friends and I would think up all these games of chance – ring toss, guess the number of marbles in the jar – we’d put up posters all over town and we’d pack the backyard on carnival day…. of course, we were really doing this to bilk the other town kids out of their money. Then, we’d take the money and go over to Norm’s Snack Bar and buy ice cream and pop and other stuff that was bad for us. We’d even have a side show at the carnival. Remember one year, we took a giant empty vinegar jug and filled it with water. Then, Frank Fry, who later became a CBC newscaster but is dead now, stood in the window of our old garage and pretended to drink the whole thing down. The kids who were watching oohed and awed and thought this was the most incredible thing they’d ever seen. I’m not sure this would work that well today. Kids somehow seem smarter.

It’s like somehow people weren’t quite as smart back in the old days. I remember watching the gas jockeys at the Fina Station across the road from our house, and they’d often gas up cars with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of their mouths – or they’d set it on top of the gas pump while they gassed up the car and cleaned your windshield. This is a strange but true story. I’m sure people must have kept blowing up all the time because it’s not really all that smart to have fire around gas….but it took a couple of generations for us to figure it out….we’re slow learners most of the time…..

Now when I first moved into town, I wasn’t wise to the ways of the world and early on I learned a lesson for life. I fell in with a bad crowd, about five or six of us, and we’d have to walk up the main street in town to get to school…..we walked really early, earlier than was necessary and I thought this was odd. One morning, though, as we walked up the street past the town’s businesses, we stopped in front of Geddes’ Drug Store….one of our number, perhaps who might be called the ringleader of this group of merry pranksters, pulled a popsicle stick out of his pocket and knelt down in front of the store’s front door, and much to my surprise, he went to fishing around under the door with the popsicle stick. Even more to my surprise was the result. Coins started to appear from under the door and it was then that I figured out that people were buying newspapers from the stack near the door before the store opened – so they’d slide the money for the paper under the door so old Mr. Geddes could gather it up when he came in and opened the store. It was a good plan until some ten-year-old nefarious youngster caught on to what was happening.

And so it went. Every morning we pulled the same scam. And after the ringleader guy had fished out the money, we headed on up the street to Sandlos’ Grocery to buy candy which the leader doled out as he saw fit. Now I must say that I recognized the illegality of the scheme right from the first morning and I never got much candy because I was clearly not a main member of the gang, but sort of a junior member or something like that. Still, I knew it was wrong right from the start and I’d earned my bars in Sunday School and I should have turned around and hightailed it out of there. But I didn’t. I kept in on the scheme and ate my candy so was surely an accomplice.

When you’re a kid, you really don’t give adults much credit