was my sister. She was a year and a bit older than I, but she died a few years ago and I caught up.
We grew up in a little town in Ontario, the inaugural home of the Mariposa Folk Festival. Dad was adamant that we stay away from those going-ons as he called them. Patsy and I weren't too sure what he meant so we went downtown to find out. It was absolutely glorious. There were masses of people roaming up and down the main street, cars too. They were mostly convertibles filled with very interesting people of every description. Some had big wild bushy hair festooned with feathers and what looked like jewels, some more modest but with painted faces. We had never seen anything like it in good old staid Orillia where you couldn't even wear shorts downtown or face getting arrested. If these were going-ons, we wanted to get going.
The Festival took place over a weekend, from my recollection, but the talk about it lasted quite a bit longer. We heard Dad tell Mom that he had heard that several young women in town had likely been impregnated in the field opposite the Schmidt farm where some of the Festival festivities were being held. Patsy and I weren't too sure what impregnated meant but it sounded dire, according to Dad. We were young but not yet women, so we thought we'd be alright.
The biggest affront to the town was to the Samuel de Champlain monument which had been standing in Couchiching Park for many years. Some rogue had placed a bottle of beer in old Champlain's hand. There was quite the uproar about that deed. Why, I do not know. Dad always had a bottle of beer in his hand.
Patsy had a friend, Carol, who lived across the street from us. Carol didn't care much for me but I was often with Patsy so she put up with me. Carol's Mom, Dot, was a bit of a gadabout. She dressed up in outfits of many colours, all with matching high heeled shoes. With her blue dress, she wore the blue shoes, with her purple dress, she wore the purple shoes, and so on. Patsy, Carol, and I would parade around Carol's house in the many coloured shoes when Dot was out. It was so much fun, clumping around in those beautiful shoes, although they were too big of course.
Mom didn't have much good to say about Dot. I heard her tell Dad that Dot ran around on Aiden, her husband, but I'd never seen Dot running, certainly not in those high heeled shoes.
Patsy and I got a paper route together. We talked Dad into it and it wasn't easy. He said two twerps like us had no right to be paper girls, and he was right. We were the worst. We left the papers outside in the rain. We threw away the wettest ones. We didn't deliver the dry ones to anyone we didn't like. When we collected the money, and some of them wouldn't pay because they hadn't received all the papers, we spent it at the Dairy Queen. We were fired eventually and we were glad, although Dad was a bit mad about the whole thing, and nagged about it for many weeks, or was it months.
Patsy, Carol and I went to high school together. One of us had been in the speeder class and therefore was one year ahead. It must've been me because I was younger and we three attended high school the same year. Carol and I were in the same class because we both wanted to type our way into a career in an office. Patsy took another class. She had no interest in typing. Carol and I hung around together between classes. She put up with me because no one else liked her. I was better than nothing.
We all grew up, as people tend to do. I got a job at an insurance agency in town. Patsy, I believe, worked across the street at the Fish and Chip place, and Carol managed to obtain a clerk job at a somewhat posh dress shop a block away on the main street. I kept to insurance for the rest of my working life, Carol remained interested in beautiful clothes, but Patsy changed direction and began to run a Dry Cleaning outfit in town. She did well there and organized the business into a prosperous, well-run one. Patsy had always been a bit bossy as a child so that held her in good stead in the Dry Cleaning business.
Being young women, the three of us started to cast our eyes around for young men. Slim pickings in Orillia until two handsome mounties came on the scene. They lived in a flat upstairs from the insurance agency where I worked so I had ready access to them. Nothing came of that access, but we did become friends. A few years later, I moved to the city and started a new life there and never looked back to good old Orillia. Carol married some unsuspecting individual but it didn't last. Patsy was the lucky one of we three. She met a handsome bus driver in town and eventually they married and lived happily ever after. One out of three isn't bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment