Born Into It

My House, I planted that tree in 1952





My School, Balacava Street School










We are born into a life.

The life is waiting there.

We don't pick it, we stepped into it: parents, first-born or last, that part of the country, this part of the world, and our appearance, the efficiency of our brain.

Then comes a time when we realize that we also have choices. So we start the task of building our own life - an impossible task if you consider the number of days we are given to complete it since our awakening to this statement of fact.
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I was a single child born into a post WWII home in a small town. My mom and dad worked for the local utilities company. That’s where they met. After I arrived on the scene my mom stayed home with me for about five years.

My mom went back to work when I was five, but only after some discussion with my father, because after all, no wife of his was going to work. But she did, and life went on. Baby-sitters were the order of the day, especially during the summer months. We lived in a two-bedroom house on a street full of two and three bedroom homes, all built posthaste at the end of the war. Our town had a Saturday market (Horton/Manitoba Street).

There were no large supermarkets to speak of until the A&P Store opened on what was once a park and then all the other major stores followed and the town was transformed from sleepy rural to quiet backwater. The focus of the townspeople’s lives centered around what happened on the railways, the town’s major employer. (This photo is of the New York Central Railstation taken from the parking lot of the now defuncted A&P Store.)



There were seven different railways as I recall. Who was being bumped on which seniority list or who was or was not on which spare board were all current topics of discussion over coffee or over clotheslines on Mondays. Monday was always washday. That was just the way things were.

The local newspaper measured big events, ‘who’ was who and ‘how’ they were doing was reported weekly in the Hatched, Matched and Dispatched column on Saturday. You could always find out who was visiting whom and who was away on holiday and where they could afford to go. It must have been a burglar’s fondest dream.
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However, and this is the significant part: it is less important for us to complete the task of building our life than it is to recognize that we must begin.. Remember it is not a race.


NDT:I extracted part of this from my Step Four and Step Five Guide ... Publisher Bright Star Press and available at Amazon.com ... this was really the start of my journalling ... someone said ... tell your story and this is how I started it ... sans photos of course ... Lynne and were visiting there in 2004 and she took a ton of photos ...