TOMMY COBBLEDICK GOT A PELLET GUN for his tenth birthday. Danny Robertson got a pellet gun for his tenth birthday. And Patrick Thorpe – whose father owned the biggest pig farm in the county and was elected every four years to a township council seat on those grounds alone – got an honest to god Winchester .22 rimfire.
I got an encyclopedia.
It was July 1986. Quintilis, the encyclopedia informed me the month was called, before Caesar was stabbed in the back thirty-five times on the Senate floor. Before the assassins rewrote the calendar in apology. I was almost certainly the only ten-year-old for a hundred miles who knew how many times Julius Caesar had been stabbed. An encyclopedia would have been a good gift if it weren’t a knife in my kidney.
The dog days sweltered the southern Ontario countryside, and the dust-wreathed fan turning lazily on my bedroom ceiling barely stirred the onionskin pages of July, never mind summoning anything that could qualify as a breeze. It was a terrible day to be inside, but I couldn’t bring myself to join the packs of wild children who ran those rural hills. Not unarmed.
In the kitchen my mother whistled tunelessly while making hummus. And so, I couldn’t even entice what few friends I had with a dinner invite. Not one of them could have picked a chickpea from a police lineup. Our table was a foreign wilderness, well trapped.
Toronto-born hippies both, my parents had long since fled the press of the city
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D.F. McCourt became proficient in English at an early age and has relied exclusively on that one skill ever since. He chooses to live in the French-speaking parts of Canada.