The Good Life - Round deux

When he left the Navy, the father joined a provincial police force. A job of integrity and honour?a refuge from the family business. There'd be no "Funeral Directing" for him. He was gonna save the world.

He was first stationed in a small town in Lanark county, Perth, on the River Tay.

He made $2000.00 a year and worked endless hours. When he wasn't working because he had to?he was working because he wanted to. He loved the job. He loved the drama, the adrenaline, the fighting and the brotherhood. He loved being top dog and having people have to do as he told them. He had gone from the safety of his mother's home, to the camaraderie of the Navy to the brotherhood of the blue. Security in male bonding.

Sometimes it was hard on the mother, but most of the time she figured that it was normal. Her own father had been the same kind of a man to a degree?always working or gone playing music for dances all over Saskatchewan. That's just the way things were. She was from the "burn your ass and sit on the blister" era anyway. It's not like she would have said anything if she had thought to.

They lived in an apartment over the local grocery store. Another police officer lived down the hall. So the mother had company of sorts. Even if she didn't like the lady the man was a cop and that should be good enough.

When they first started out they couldn't even afford furniture, so they sat on bundles of newspapers and the baby slept in the bathtub. It stands to reason that when one of them needed to bath the other spent the time holding the girl.

Eventually they bought furniture and settled into family life of sorts.

The mother and the little girl spent a lot of time together because the daddy was always working...even when he wasn't. Besides the daddy got mad easy and it was just better for the mommy and the little girl to be quiet and let him sleep. When he was home the daddy yelled a lot. He believed in "spare the rod and spoil the child"

Once when the mommy was doing laundry the little girl got up on a chair to help. While the mommy was on the balcony hanging the laundry...the little girl tried to put some clothes through the wringer washer but caught her arm instead and hurt herself and screamed for her mommy. The mommy came to the rescue and made it all better, but when the daddy came home he yelled at the little girl and told her to be more careful.

The little girl became very good at saying "I'm sorry"...at a very early age she understood the value of repetition and she actually said it so often it became a mantra. She never knew what she was sorry for...but she knew she'd better be sorry if she knew what was good for her.

Sometimes they had parties and there are still pictures of the precocious little girl in her cowgirl suit with her little Stetson on her head, a beer bottle in one hand and a cigar butt in the other. There are also pictures of the little girl kissing a stand up dolly bare-assed nekid....the little girl that is.

Once the mother came into the kitchen to find the little girl standing on the top of the fridge. No chair or counter in sight. That was when the mother started to call her "Zelda queen of the apes" and it was also when the mother began to understand that the little girl was different than other children. Things just happened around her. Trouble seemed to levitate towards her.

When the little girl was 5 or 6 the mother had to go to British Columbia to visit relatives by train. She went to her doctor for a check up before she left and that Dr said "you can't be planning to spend 3 days and 3 nights locked up in a berth with that little hellion!" So he gave her a prescription for a tranquilizer to keep the child quiet on the trip.

The first day the mother gave the little girl her pills and the little girl bounced off of the walls like she'd been shot from a cannon. (this is when the mother discouvered that the little girl often had "mirror image" reactions to drugs) The little girl ran from the observation car at one end of the train to the dining car at the other over and over and over again. No amount of running, calling, begging, threatening or cajoling would allow the mother to control her.

Late at night, in a brief moment of lucidity the mother put the little girl in their berth, on the inside, and went to sleep. She awoke at perhaps 4 in the morning to the unmistakable sound of the little girl chatting with the car man and peeling hard-boiled eggs. The mother gave up and took the tranquilizers herself.