Sometime this year, I watch a CBC ‘music video’ of Jim Lowe’s Green Door on the ‘Cross-Canada Hit Parade’ TV program.
I must have found something really fascinating about it to remember it all these years later.
JUNE
I pass Grade 3 at Wellesley Public School.
SUMMER
Dad tells us we are soon going to live on another air force base, this one somewhere in Nova Scotia.
4 SEPTEMBER
Tuesday
Once we move to Nova Scotia, we live at a Kingston trailer court for a short while until a place becomes available for us.
I still remember the smell of propane gas that lingered in the air around this place which, although I’m not certain, might have been renamed as Yogi Bear’s Camp Resort.
Eventually, we get a house in the PMQ’s at R.C.A.F. Station, Greenwood.
There has always been some disagreement about what the ‘P’ in P.M.Q.’s stands for: ‘Personal’, ‘Permanent’, or ‘Private’ Married Quarters. However, to my knowledge, they are currently known as R.H.U.s—Residential Housing Units.
Residence:
Second Crescent
Greenwood, Nova Scotia
SEPTEMBER
I enter Grade 4 at A/V/M Morfee Elementary School.
Florence Quinn is my homeroom teacher.
One day, after I hear that my class is going to present a western play, I show up for the first rehearsal dressed in a cowboy outfit. Amused, the teacher tells me that it’s a little early to dress up for it. But she admires my enthusiasm for the project.
Dad obtains a record player and I begin to listen to his collection of 33⅓- and 78-rpm record albums —gospel, classical, opera, and musical theatre. In addition, he buys my sister and me some Walt Disney records that we play repeatedly such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy in Aladdin’s Lamp; and the story of The Princess and the Pea.
Once they notice my keen interest in music, my parents register me for singing and piano lessons.
Many years later, as a young adult, I went to sign up for some piano lessons. After listening to me play something, the instructor said, “You don’t need lessons; you just need practice.”
