Characters: Part 1

Submitted by Blane Després, PhD

Were we to recall all the people that we’ve come across or who have come across our path, what would come to mind? And who would come to memory? In Paradise, a village of say 250 people –give or take 200– a few pop into the rear-view mirror for me.

What motivated me to reflect on those past people of Paradise was the raw reality of a close friend’s sudden descent into a debilitating space. It did pique a dusty and closed-off cubicle of Paradise past and its people. Imagine an old movie of faces moving slowly past the camera. Some of them smiling. Some of them serious. All of them with their own memories especially of Paradise. They had their own parents, places, problems, of course. For me, they made Paradise and growing up there somehow fuller, interesting, and sad at the same time. Here’s a brief biography-lite of some of them. But first, a poem (unpublished):

Pastimes

Growing up inert was not

a pastime of Paradise,

like Carl Ritcey with his

half-ton and beige hound

ever tracking behind,

though much slower

over the years.

“The dog with a hundred

thousand miles,” Dad said

until old Carl drove on

to heaven, truck and all and

dog still chasing;

like when George’s old hay barn

standing Pennsylvania-proud

primitive monument

burned and I could have counted

half the town who came to see

and believed that we

could show the world

a picture of our village

on a commemorative stamp;

like Parkinson’s store with soda bar,

7 cent pop and grunting bulldog

sniffing adult spaces and kids’ faces

in one snorting breath;

like secretive August night raids and shirts

that bulged with Annapolis gold:

those Macintosh and Gravensteins

for mom and pies, we were such heroes;

like plodding over snowy pastures

to hidden ponds to skate

in the light of tires

burning like solstice rituals;

growing up those endless days

took us forever.

Carl and Mrs. Ritcey (Paradise elementary school teacher) lived across the used-to-be field next to our house on the west side, and across from the Paradise Post Office. There’s was a large house on a larger property that had a hay barn behind the house and a two-storey warehouse of sorts further back on the land. Once a day, every day, ol’ Carl would go somewhere in his half-ton truck and tagging along was their hound simply known by us as “the dog with a hundred thousand miles.” Carl would drive away. The dog would chase after, not at break-neck, world champion speed. We’re talking old dog at a modified walker pace. Later in the day, Carl would return home and later still we would see the high-mileage dog return. I never saw that dog in the back of the truck or even on their lawn. It just appeared out of nowhere. Carl, dog running down the road, return home later. The pair had a single errand and daily schedule, and they performed it flawlessly. Where did you go, Carl and hound? Were you reporting on something, somewhere, away from prying eyes? Or was that your way of taking the dog for a walk? Dang, what was make of that truck! Pretty sure it was an early 60s Chevrolet.

Mrs. Ritcey, mentioned in an earlier story, helped me one summer to learn math. Summer. Math. Sick! Fortunately, no one else in Paradise knew that. Somehow, for about a week –I was in grade 1 or 2– I was at the dining table in their house, mesmerized by a short, stuffed alligator (because we don’t have crocodiles in Nova Scotia). Perhaps she saw in me an opportunity to coach a budding math Olympian. In my dreams. She was that kind of person –that kind of kind teacher– who decided to protect Paradise from me rampaging the village and take me in to school me in the finer arts of being human. The alligator definitely helped. I was calmed in a minute. And math took over. Thank you, Mrs. Ritcey. You made things click and math became an easy skill.

The Ritceys had a younger Ritcey named George. He was an entrepreneur. That’s what we would call him today. Back then, he was “unsettled” and had many jobs. He had a store across the street from my house, on the corner of Paradise Lane, opposite Parkinson’s Store. My mother worked there for a season. It was a weird store. Filled with industrial bags of buttons: white ones, coloured ones, black ones, big ones, small ones. To an 8-year-old boy, it made no sense why people would need that many buttons. In Paradise. Call me crazy.

George also seemed to do things in that warehouse, behind his parent’s house and hay barn, related to the junkyard that was piled around it. Now that was the coolest place in Paradise! There were old military things there, including the hulk or frame of a small helicopter. A few of us young kids would scavenge around that yard, pouring over old, military-green, derelict, metal objects complete with the smell of old oil and grease and burnt tires or engine hoses. The pièce de resistance, however, was the discovery of a hand grenade. It was a treasure to behold. We passed it around as if we’d found the Holy Grail. We lobbed it and yelled out the sounds of an explosion: kapouffffschhhhh! Or it could’ve been boom. The grenade found its way into a parent’s hands and within a day, my mother instigated a campaign of heroic proportions to rid Paradise of the junkyard. “That thing could go off and kill someone!” she kept telling the village, the papers, the CBC, the International War Crimes Bureau of Investigation. It made the front page of Junkyard Magazine. But that grenade had no pin. It had no innards. It was a dull green, grid-formed hunk of peach-sized heavy metal. It would land with a thud after one of us threw it. That caused no little excitement. Until the novelty wore off and we went back to counting buttons or something.

Alas, the junkyard disappeared about the same time as the Berlin wall went up. Perhaps they needed scrap metal? All I remember is one day it was there and the next day it was all gone. George’s button store folded, and we never heard much about him after that.

Across the street from my house and west of Parkinson’s store lived “Mr. Somebody.” I think it was “ol’ Mr. Bishop,” the father of Alan? Three of us boys (pretty sure it was Kerry, Dave Currie, and me. It was definitely me there, because I remember and I’m telling the story) bothered him one day for some thin, long pieces of wood so we could make a kite. He obliged. Why we picked on him, I don’t remember. I think it was because we knew he had a table saw. And we knew that…how? Classified information, which is a euphemism for “haven’t a clue.” We struggled to make a diamond-shaped rectangle covered with paper and a string attached to one of the points. Off we went to pull it up into the sky to compete with those other kite-building-flying folks across from the school. We would show them!

Ol’ Mr. Bishop was a great help providing wood. He was no help in building the kite. We didn’t ask him. Good on him to let us rediscover failure. Our kite flew like that hand grenade I described earlier: same weight, same trajectory, same thud. It didn’t matter how hard each of us ran holding onto a long piece of string while one of us ran behind them with the kite in hand to launch it into the air. If it didn’t nose-dive immediately, it would lifelessly fall to the ground and drag along like one of those furrowing machines that the Pearle’s had. I’m sure they had one. My story, remember? We furrowed my yard for about half an hour before deciding the broken remains of whatever it was that we were trying to get into the air was not a kite. It was wood with paper. It had no tail. We tried to attach something to act as a tail: one of the cats or something. That made it worse. Paper torn, kite-wannabe ribs broken, our engineering spirits completely squashed, we conceded defeat. To placate our sorrows, we headed over to George Ritcey’s former junkyard in search of a used grenade. No grenade, no junkyard, no flying kite, and we never bothered ol’ Mr. Bishop again.

So, the other option was to “raid apples.” Summer in the Valley meant the orchards would have apples. We had bicycles. And we could tuck our shirts into our pants thereby creating a “sack” in which to stuff those apples. There were a couple of worthwhile orchards within biking distance. Yes, we helped ourselves to some apples. No, we did not ask for permission. Yes, it wasn’t very nice to take someone’s apples. About a dozen. About twice a summer. We felt guilty but exhilarated to nab apples. We would eat one and then give the rest to our mothers or someone in need. Like ol’ Mr. Ritcey and his dog. He declined.

There were many others who pop into my brain as I think back: the “purple-haired woman,” Ronnie Brinton, the Currie’s with their funky VW Westphalia, the King’s (they lived with a bunch of chickens and kids behind the church), the Logan’s, the Durling’s, the Bent’s, the Covert’s, the Beard’s, the Pearle’s, the vet…that’s it, I think. Small village. Actually, there were more. We loved them especially during Halloween. Beyond that and the occasional “hello, would you care to buy a box of All Occasion Cards?” the lives that criss-crossed mine may be tangled in the fog of long-ago memories, yet as I take some moments to reflect, I can see their faces and homes and still wonder, “What could we have learned from them?”

From 1960-1973