When Fenelon Falls. Dorothy Ellen Palmer
morning, Jordan held three things safe in hand, refusing to consign any of them to Tessie’s trunk, especially not her Little Yellow Miracle. Last summer, on her thirteenth birthday, she got the usual, a little party and a little present: a bowling party for two, her standing request since nine, and her very own transistor radio. A Lloyd’s, sun yellow, the size of a deck of smokes but thicker. It had two gold knobs, tuning and volume, and a plastic wristband, also yellow. I’d be surprised if the parents laid out more than five bucks, but when she opened it you’d have thought it was a brand-new Pontiac Firebird. She squealed. She actually hugged them and they even let her. ‘It’s perfect!’ Queen for a day, she all but danced.
Later she told me it was the only time they got it right – that usually, after hours of deliberating (the kind of hours you have to spend when you’re only getting one thing), she’d give them a page from the Eaton’s catalogue with her wish circled or stand in the bargain aisle of Savette’s and point. Come the 23rd of June, however, deliberation counted squat. She’d inevitably unwrap a close second, something almost but not quite the real thing: a cheaper version, the wrong colour or size. ‘That’s me,’ she shrugged, ‘always silver, never gold,’
The sight of her clutching her Miracle that day elicited my first act of similar kindness that summer. I won’t say what kind. I leaned over Balsam, always plopped down on my half of the back seat as if he didn’t need to share it, flicked the side of Jordan’s head with my finger and whispered, ‘You love a stupid little yellow box more than anyone will ever love you.’
A dead moment. A shrug. She asked MC for the car thermos, full as always of watered-down grape High-C, and with no help from me, poured it straight down the front of her yellow pop-top into a puddle on her new white shorts. I laughed. I said she looked like a walking exclamation mark, like one of the Riddler’s henchmen. When we stopped in Manilla for ice cream, Dad moved to let her out, but MC reached back and locked the door. As we stepped away, we heard, ‘Hey, all you CHUM Bugs out there! Here’s your brand-new CHUM Chart, #648, Saturday, June 28, 1969!’ And when we got back, she was still singing. Dad filmed her through the window, glasses on her head, holding the tiny print of it under her nose:
THIS WEEK >> LAST WEEK >> ARTIST >> TRACK
1 >> 1 >> Desmond & the Aces >> Israelites
2 >> 6 >> Three Dog Night >> One
3 >> 1 >> Blood, Sweat & Tears >> Spinning Wheel
4 >> 12 >> Oliver >> Good Morning Starshine
5 >> 9 >> Paul Revere & the Raiders >> Let Me
6 >> 15 >> Joe Jeffrey Group >> My Pledge of Love
7 >> 5 >> Friends of Distinction >> Grazing in the Grass
8 >> 26 >> Jr. Walker & the All Stars >> What Does It Take
9 >> 20 >> Andy Kim >> Baby I Love You
10 >> 10 >> The Buchanan Brothers >> Medicine Man
11 >> 27 >> The Winstons >> Color Him Father
12 >> 3 >> Henry Mancini >> The Love Theme from Romeo & Juliet
13 >> 2 >> The Beatles >> Get Back
14 >> 8 >> The Classics IV >> Every Day With You Girl
15 >> 24 >> Tommy James & the Shondells >> Crystal Blue Persuasion
16 >> 18 >> The Young Rascals >> See
17 >> 25 >> Motherlode >> When I Die
18 >> 4 >> Elvis Presley >> In the Ghetto
19 >> 21 >> Tom Jones >> Love Me Tonight
20 >> 30 >> Kenny Rogers >> Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town
21 >> 29 >> Jerry Butler >> Moody Woman
22 >> 17 >> Bill Deal & the Rhondels >> I’ve Been Hurt
23 >> 0 >> Brian Hyland >> Stay and Love Me All Summer
24 >> 13 >> Marvin Gaye >> Too Busy Thinking About My Baby
25 >> 0 >> Booker T. & the MGs >> Mrs. Robinson
26 >> 0 >> Roy Clark >> Yesterday, When I Was Young
27 >> 0 >> Life >> Hands of the Clock
28 >> 0 >> Neil Diamond >> Sweet Caroline
29 >> 14 >> Sonny Charles & the Checkmates >> Black Pearl
30 >> 0 >> Cat Mother/The All Night News Boys >> Good Old Rock ’N’ Roll
If my Tin Roof was too good to share that day, if we all turned on her that summer, music was the only thing that didn’t. And, man, how she loved it. The Miracle never left her side until she went in the lake. It lived on her left wrist where normal people wear a watch, attached by a disintegrating loop, now more duct tape than wristband, more dirty silver than yellow. In true sixties style, it rocked round the clock: on the dock when she went swimming, on the deck at supper, on the butt wad in the kybo, under her pillow long past sleep. Up at Mrs. Miller’s General Store, Mrs. Miller set aside Miracle batteries at least once a week.
What was playing? For teens in the Toronto of 1969 there was only CHUM. (That’s a.m. – f.m. was for old people.) If her radio played other stations I never heard it do so. It’s no exaggeration to say that Jordan knew every word of every CHUM Chart hit that summer. She had a disgustingly eidetic memory, memorized whole songs at one hearing. She sang like a chainsmoker smokes, igniting the next with the previous. She kept her CHUM Bug card in her wallet where the rest of us keep our names. Come December, she pooled her babysitting money and took a toy down to the CHUM Christmas Wish. On New Year’s Day, when CHUM played the Top 100, she sang every word. She sang the jingle: ‘C-H-U-M, Ten-Fifty, Toronto.’ She sang the ads. She knew all the DJs and all their time slots: Bob Laine from eleven to three weekdays, Jungle Jay Nelson, mornings from five till nine, and the all-important Top 30 countdown with Chuck McCoy on Tuesday nights. She’d sneak up to the pay phone at Mr. Miller’s and part with a whole dime – she collected them – to call the ‘Twenty-four hours a day, you say it and we play it’ CHUM hotline. On the way she’d sing the phone number, ‘Nine two nine, fourteen eleven.’
Between visiting Yogi, calling her CHUM and cashing in pop bottles, we hit the paved – read public – road several times a day, and whenever we did, she’d ambush me: ‘Lyric Speak!’ Another BS game. We had to converse in song lyrics and, in a rule I’m sure she devised to make me look like a total spastic retard, we could walk only when speaking. She’d get most of the way to the store reciting ‘Love Child’ by Diana Ross and the Supremes as if it passed for conversation. The day it knocked ‘Hey Jude’ out of Number 1 was the only hearts- and-stars day of last winter’s calendar. That summer I came prepared – she called it cheating – by repeating the chorus of the new Ray Stevens hit. This cowboy hero kept rescuing Sweet Sue from every conceivable danger, kept being tall, thin, long, lean, lanky and potentially heroic, until she added a no-repeats rule. She’d be yards ahead, ‘Love Child’ing away and I’d be shuffing my feet like a midget-idget. I’d cave and walk normally. Of course, she never would. When I did, I had to spring for a Dubble Bubble. Jordan got a lot of gum that summer. She could have papered her room with Bazooka Joe.
How did she get weekly CHUM Charts up in the Kawartha Lakes boonies? There were none to be found in Fenelon, let alone Rosedale. Enter BS’s small army of nerdy little browner girlfriends. Must have been a dozen girls mailing her charts. What’d she do with the extras? No such thing in March. She’d lay them out in chronological order on her bed, then in thematic order, by longevity, by unknowable Jordanian orders, until she’d made a CHUM