When Fenelon Falls. Dorothy Ellen Palmer
accuracy that Derwood did from his extensive collection of baseball cards. I hesitate to think it, but it’s true: they had something in common. Obsession knows no gender.
On weekday mornings, I followed Jordan up to our battered tin mailbox, the one connection to the city and our other life. It leaned precariously sideways on a splintering post across from Yogi’s cage. We’d gather dandelions for her breakfast and then Jordan would lean against the cage and wait, sunshine-yellow thank-you notes to the Chart Brigade in hand, for Not Overall Boy, Hezzy’s postal son, permanently rechristened in March as NOB. You raised the flag if you had mail for him and she always did. He’d drive up, open his window and exchange letters, but never a word. There was much discussion in March about whether or not NOB could talk. (He was a mouth-breather.) Derwood’s father, Uncle G, said every village has its idiot. Grandma said whether or not the youngest Mr. Gale could speak, he could read demonstratively better than Uncle Gavin. Ouch. When she wanted to, Grandma could truly cut to the wood.
I remember the CHUM Charts so eagerly pulled from the mailbox at the start of that summer. All variations on a theme: a black-and-white photo of a DJ with coloured sound waves radiating from his head. Gary Duke, ‘Boss of the million-dollar weekend,’ emanated green sainthood. You could ‘get Weaverized’ with Hal Weaver in Easter purple, and a psychedelic orange Jay Nelson invited you to ‘Bet your sweet bippy.’ Jordan read them aloud on the walk home, made her quilt and eventually put them to bed in her improvised record case, an ancient round red suitcase that sported a red and white relief drawing of two red-slippered feet poised in pointe. Obviously born to hold ballet shoes, something Jordan would never own, it had been kicking around as a Barbie case, and then as a record case, for as long as I could remember.
For Saturday’s drive north, it got stashed under protest in the trunk, nestled between Jordan’s equally precious homemade diaries – two industrial-size binders, reclaimed from Dad’s work at the order desk of BA Oil. Jordan worried the heat would warp her precious 45s. Her singles. In 1969 a single cost sixty-nine cents, that’s sixty-six cents plus three cents tax, and I hoped the trunk would liquefy every cent. Let’s cut to the chase. For a smart girl my sister had the musical taste of a puke Twinkie. Donovan, Simon and Garfunkel and Mr. Lightfoot had my grudging respect. But Neil Diamond, Tom Jones, the Cowsills and the bloody Bee Gees could improve the music scene only by contracting the Black Plague and popping their buboes in the face of every known fan and genetic relation. When I said her collection lacked seriousness, she played the Monkees, ‘Daydream Believer,’ her first single. She was twelve, but that’s no excuse. The schlock remains the same. What the cluck did girls ever see in that scurvy midget Davy Jones? When I said no sane person could dig both Iron Butterfly and Bobby Sherman, Steppenwolf and Andy Kim, she sniffed, ‘I can.’
Error. Teens live and die by their music. It’s who we are and who we aren’t. You know exactly who someone is when they say, ‘I listen to blank.’ If you like blank, you like them. Solid. If not, walk away. It’s a matter of pride to be consistent. I tolerated folk, loathed pop and loved rock. I liked bands that weren’t Canadian, the Stones and Procol Harum, but thanks to Canadian-content legislation and arts spending on Ca-na-da after our 1967 Centennial, I was also the first generation able to claim that most of my favourites were homegrown: Three Dog Night, Motherlode and Blood, Sweat and Tears. It’s just plain dumb luck that I got to be a teen in the late sixties, when for a few short years they played the best music ever written. Consider it: I still played my Christmas present every day, a little LP called The White Album. By June, Rocky Raccoon, Bungalow Bill, Sexy Sadie, Molly and Desmond and their barrow were all close personal friends.
But in the summer of ’69, while Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys sang ‘Good Old Rock ’n’ Roll’ and David Clayton-Thomas belted out ‘Spinning Wheel’ and the Stones rocked down with ‘Honky Tonk Woman,’ I am embarrassed to this day to admit that the most-played record in the case, the song my supposedly intelligent sister walked around all summer humming and, yes, unabashedly singing, the one she subjected us to as Ford and family pulled out of Manilla, was ‘Sugar Sugar’ by the Archies. When I yelled, ‘They aren’t real! They’re cartoons!’ she accompanied her vocals with hand to armpit and rhythmic farting percussion. At that moment, I truly wished I’d come equipped with a gun to shoot off the hands of my rival. When she sang the ‘do do do do – do do’s,’ I sang louder, ‘I’ll kill, kill, kill, kill – kill you.’ Good one.
In her defence, BS could call a hit from one hearing. It wasn’t just Burton Cummings’s mojo that moved her to become one of the first card-carrying fans of some dark-haired boys from Winnipeg who’d seen their first and so far only hit last fall: ‘These Eyes.’ When their new song hit the CHUM Chart July 12, a week before the moonwalk, she predicted, ‘It’ll be a monster hit. Like the Canadian Beatles!’ I figured she’d lost it. With that candy-assed little ballad? ‘Laughing’? Who calls a song that? Well, Guess Who had the last laugh. It sat on the charts longer than a pregnant elephant. Her life-size poster of Burton the Beloved, bought in a special promotion from Sam the Record Man, right downtown on Yonge Street, that was her second hand-held treasure, wrapped in Saran Wrap, sealed against even her fingerprints.
Her final hand-held gem was a handmade Countdown Calendar. Hearts and stars encircled two days: the 17th of August, our Annual Balsam Lake Regatta, and 29th of August, when Burt and boys would play Galaxie, the revolving Coca-Cola stage at the Canadian National Exhibition. Another miracle was stapled to August 29: one GENERAL ADMISSION ticket.
After extended grovelling and a Cinderella’s list of chores to earn the exorbitant ticket price of $7.50, after lectures about a fool and her money, after BS reminding Mom that when she was a girl she’d once gone all the way to Buffalo to see Glenn Miller, MC caved. She even drove Jordan down to CHUM at the crack of dawn to be one of ‘the first fifty at 10-50’ to get a special early-release ticket. In the margin of her calendar, in Jordan’s usual immature open scrawl, was a proverb in tribute: ‘A day to come seems longer than a year that’s gone.’
But I don’t think I ever believed they were really going to let her go. It was the principle of the thing. We always went to the CNE together. Well, more or less. Mom took us down. We’d do the buildings in the morning and for lunch she’d let us loose in the Food Building. We could have anything we wanted – anything that was free. In those days that was everything; we pigged out on Pogos and beaver tails and Tiny Tom doughnuts that left you smelling cinnamon the rest of the day. We saw the afternoon grandstand show with her, and then she handed us off to Dad, who met us after work at the Princes’ Gate and took us to the Midway. And we did all of that in that order, every year, on the last day of the CNE, Labour Day, because no real March ever left the cottage until compelled to do so. What March would drive Jordan all the way down to the city for August 29th? Good question.
I’ll admit to a certain shade of green. I was the one with good taste and she was the one with the meal ticket. How was that even remotely fair? The CNE would host every major Canadian band that summer – Lighthouse, the Five Man Electrical Band and Motherlode – but like the song says, Jordan only had eyes for Burton. Even rolled up, he smirked at me. With all that black hair he could have been a cousin or any paisano from Alderwood, except neither would be caught dead in his pansy outfit: purple bell-bottoms and a hippie-dippy shirt, paisley maroon with – get this – lace, hot pink lace on the sleeves. He lay in the back seat of the car, leering unbuttoned, sprouting chest hair down to his navel. Okay, so maybe I gave her elbow a little push. Maybe I was aiming for his face. Unfortunately, the High-C landed elsewhere.
SWEET CAROLINE
But a reproof is no poison. Like ordinary siblings, BS and I could be at war one second and united the next. Take the car radio, a case in point. That’s where we first heard it that Saturday – the song that sang summer, claimed summer, still is and always will be that summer. We loved it instantly; our parents despised it sooner. No small part of its attraction. At home, we’d negotiated a détente of door closing, but a three-hour ride renewed hostilities because the little yellow radio, Miracle or not, didn’t work in a moving car. So over the years, the car radio ritual – who got it, how and for how long – had become quite the song and dance.
We’d ask