Reigning cats and dogs (and birds, and fish and rodents) - Part One.

It all started with Smoky. I’m not really sure where Smoky came from in the first place, and I’m even fuzzier about where he ended up.

I was five years old when Smoky came into my life. He was my first kitten. He was small, all-black and had those little bright kitten-eyes that win you over along with those irresistible squeaky mews from a little pink-tongued maw.

From a very early age, I exhibited a love of animals. At the Sacred Heart Day Nursery where I spent my happy pre-school days, I was known for my commanding performances of “Clarence, the Cross-eyed Lion” from the television show, “Daktari”, which of course involved crawling around on all fours and roaring.

I also loved to visit the animals at the small zoo at High Park in Toronto and feeding the ducks of adjacent Grenadier Pond was the highlight of my days.

That's me!

The very first movie I was ever taken to see in a theatre was the 1966 flick, “Born Free” about George and Joy Adamson and their pride of lions. I was five years old and it made a huge impression on me. So much so, that I wanted nothing so much as to have my own cat. That was when Smoky came on the scene.

All I can recall about the little black fella was that he loved to scale the drapes and secret himself away in the T.V. set to sleep beside the nice, warm tube. I have no idea how or when Smoky disappeared from my world, but he did! What I rather suspect is that there was some sort of overheating issue inside the old G.E. that nobody told me about.

In any case, we moved from Toronto to the suburbs and it wasn’t long before my whinging got to my dad’s soft heart and another creature came to live with us. This was the start of many a phyla to grace our home at 2394 Pyramid Crescent.

After Smoky, the first cat to come calling was a stray. She was a short-haired gingery tabby and she was hanging around our back porch. This had nothing to do with the fact that I was putting out saucers of milk every night. Honest.

I begged to be allowed to keep the stray, but despite my pleas, my mother held firm against the idea. My dad was a bit more pliable.

It was Good Friday and I was at the bottom of the street visiting with my friend, Frances Murray when the telephone rang. Her older sister, Rachel said it was for me. When I took the receiver, I was surprised to hear my mother’s voice say, “Come home, we’ve got a surprise for you.”

Well, no points for guessing what the surprise was. The stray-cat was in our kitchen lapping up a bowl of milk when I walked in the front door. I called her “Tammy”. I don’t remember why.

Tammy had a short and infamous time at our house. Looking back now, I can see it was because my mom had issues with a non-existent condition she believed Tammy had. The cat merely cleaned itself fastidiously, as felines are wont to do, but the excessive licking of her fur drove my mother to distraction and one day, Tammy was swept up and taken to the nearest shelter to be adopted by a more tolerant and deserving family.

(Not Sam)

A number of critters were introduced to erase the loss of poor Tammy from my memory. There was a fish called, “Goldie” or something equally inspired, and a turtle named “Sam”. Why a turtle would be deemed to have such a name is now beyond me, but that’s what I christened him. Perhaps it was taken from one of my favourite books, “Green Eggs and Ham”.

I can still recall the almost tender feel of Sam’s teency claws pinching my flesh. He had a very inauspicious life of floating about in his plastic dish, clambering up his plastic ramp and sunning himself under his plastic palm. It was sad when he made his big break for freedom and dried out under the sofa. Of course you know what happened to “Goldie”—belly-up and the old flusheroo.

When my best friend Jane K., next-door, got a kitten and named it Elsa (after the lion in my beloved “Born Free”), it wasn’t long before I had my dad driving me to the house where they got her so I could pick out one for myself. So began the “Misty” era.

Click pic for Wik source

Misty, was what they call a mackerel-tabby in England. She was blackish grey with prominent striping—a real beauty! She was a lovely puss with a friendly disposition and when she was old enough we got her fixed. Problem is, the “fix” didn’t really take. When the “heat” was on in the Springtime, the local males were still getting a whiff of Misty and coming around to leave their calling cards—a bit of their singular scent along the sides of the house, in the bushes—everywhere!

It wasn’t long before my mother got wind of the situation and started working on my father to do something about it. Before long, Misty was taking that all-too familiar trip down our driveway, and out of my life! I still swear she was sitting in the back window meowing for my help. I cried all night long.

You do get over these things and it really helps when your dad lets you get not one, but two budgerigars in their own fancy cage with perch and seed feeder and some sort of bone-thing to sharpen their beaks. Of course, being from a Catholic family, they had to have saints’ names (that’s the rule, didn’t you know?) and so they were called Peter and Paul(ine).

Budgies are fun. They are noisy and chipper, they sing sweet songs and you can carry them around on your index finger or your shoulder or even on your head. My birds were a beautiful cerulean colour with black and white striped heads and long tails. They had a good life. We treated them well, kept their cage free of their grey poop and fed them all that birds love to eat. Everything was just dandy until … my dad thought they might like to go outside in the backyard for a bit to get some fresh air. He carted their rectangular cage out the door, through the garage and into the backyard and rested it on a chaise longue.

The fresh air went to P & P’s heads because they went mental! Somehow, one of them sprung the latch on the door and the other one beat it open. Off they flew, never to be seen again. Well, at least one of them was never seen again. The other one ended up on a neighbouring street in the house of a girl who lived across from my one of my school-friends.

I was visiting Jane T. and we were playing outside when this girl started talking about how they had found this blue budgie outside and now it was in her room and she was keeping it. It was hopeless to explain; she was never going to give it up and how could I prove it was my Peter, or Pauline?

So, we went back to cats. We’d just come back from a vacation visiting my mom’s family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and I got the notion to have another cat. There were lots of kittens at a farm near my cousin’s cottage in East Bay and I came back from the trip with a bee in my bonnet. My father, helpless against my pleas/tears gave in and we got a gorgeous silver tabby and called him Fourchu (sounds like For Sha) after a small town in C.B.

Fourchu was a real charmer of a cat. He was cuddly, loving, fun to play with and would let you do anything to him. Sadly, he didn’t live too long because he developed a urinary problem that plagues many male cats and at the time, we (and apparently vets) knew little about how to treat it. It was recommended that we add tomato juice to Fourchu’s food, but I know now, that’s probably what did him in. After a hellish time, he had to be put to sleep.

One of my memories of Fourchu was how he used to sit atop the aquarium that housed our gerbils. My dad outfitted the glass case with a wood-frame, wire-mesh cover and Fourchu would lie on the mesh and make whimpering noises while the inhabitants bounced up and down and bumped his belly with their nubby noses.

Fourchu keeps tabs on the wee ones.

In fact, that may be how Sneezer got his nose infection. He used to rub his nose furiously with his front paws until it bled, scabbed over and then he would start again. He was one of a trio of gerbils. My dad named them, “Caesar, Beezer and Sneezer”, partially after one of his favourite off-colour ditties from his British Army days. I googled it and can’t find any reference, so maybe he made it up. It went something like this: “Julius Caesar lit a beezer, off the coast of France”. I don’t know anything beyond that because whenever he started to tell it, he would end up gasping with laughter and not being able to go on. It was his little private joke.

In any case, Caesar, Beezer and Sneezer were so-monikered and they became playmates for me and my sister, Nancy. We didn’t buy plastic runnels and pods for our pets—no! We made them from scratch with empty tissue boxes and toilet rolls and our sleeves and pant-legs. If you’ve never had a gerbil run up your pant-leg (minds out of the gutter; we’re not talking Pet Shop Boys here!) then you’re missing out! It’s tickly and it makes you giggle and as a kid you actually believe the gerbils are having a whale of a time, but that’s probably just sheer panic that’s making them run like the devil, isn’t it?

Our poor trio came to bad ends. We had switched their abode from the aquarium to a nice wire cage with spinning wheel and Caesar got his foot caught and had to bite it off to free himself. He bled to death on the floor of the cage. We found him on Sunday morning upon returning from mass and running downstairs to check on our pack. I don’t know how many times he went around on his last ride; it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Beezer didn’t fare much better. My sister took him and Sneezer to school so they could be observed by her classmates and some bright spark of a thug-child dropped the brick that was holding down the lid right onto poor old Beez. I’m so glad I didn’t witness that.

Not really sure what happened to Sneezer. He probably just expired from sheer loneliness, or maybe his nasal infection finally killed him.

*Stay tuned for Part Two where the Davison Family gets a lucky dog.

Kat Mortensen©2009

A Room of One’s Own

 

As a child, I was fortunate to have a father who had a good job and a mother who had good taste.  This facilitated a number of things to my benefit: plentiful food on the table, a charming and well-appointed wardrobe and a lovely big bedroom in the bungalow on Pyramid Crescent.

I was an only child until the age of nine. This put me in quite a position to be spoiled by mother and father.  I was Daddy’s little girl and Mommy’s little angel.  I had lovely ringlets and big green eyes and was not shy with it, so people were generally drawn to my chattiness, my sweet demeanour and my little coquettish smile.  My grandmother apparently thought I was too fussed over and even my aunt warned my mother that she spent too much time worrying about me and not letting me be a kid like my cousin, Janis.

For most of my childhood, youth and young adulthood, I had the most wonderful bedroom. In it, I spent many happy hours reading the likes of the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie, colouring in my bird and animal colouring books, playing with Barbie and Dawn dolls and later doing homework, dressing up for dates and gearing up for nights out on the dance floor.

Mine was no ordinary little girl’s room. When we first moved to the brand new house in the 60s subdivision of Sheridan Homelands, I had the big back bedroom with the hardwood floor and a large sliding window with a view to the backyard and the public junior high school beyond.  Many mornings I woke to the sound of my favourite birds: the robin, the cardinal and the blue-jay. I would watch as the buses pulled into the schoolyard each morning, just before I headed up the road to St. Francis of Assisi, Catholic school, on foot.

The decor was not typical for a child. There was no ornate, girly white furniture, like my friend Jane T had in her bedroom.  There was no captain’s bed with storage underneath.  My room was furnished with twin beds handed down from my cousin.  They were serviceable, Colonial-style, stained-wood with box-spring and mattress and my mother kitted them out with funky, floral sheets and cherry-red whaled corduroy bedspreads.  The walls were papered in pink and white stripes and the window was draped in the most unique fabric of heavy cream linen with brush-stroke pink and navy-blue women’s heads in stylish hats. I spent many moments staring at those heads and imagining myself in those hats.  Perhaps this is why I love hats so much today.

Click pic for Flickr source.

Artwork was also a feature in my fantastic bedroom.  Those ubiquitous doe-eyed girls in harlequin and ballet costumes framed in narrow rectangles were paired up on the wall of my room.  I had a favourite grey-wood framed,  faux-oil of two cats with sad eyes in pride of place over my bed. Always, there was a frond of dried-up Pascal palm tucked in behind the frame to keep me mindful of my faith.

When my three-year old adopted sister came into my life, I soon realized that I would have to share my bedroom with her and I was not a bit happy.  Pretty soon, she was in the bed next to mine with a collection of new stuffed toys to rival my own menagerie of Teddy, Doggie and Pinky the pajama-bag poodle.  Then it was a trip to Hanover, Ontario to Smitty’s furniture where we picked out a huge royal blue painted modular dresser with matching cube night-tables in blue and white and matching blue and white ladder-back chairs. 

It sounds awful to admit it now, but I was not a very nice new sister.  Once the novelty of having her around had worn off, when we were in the privacy of my room (because I still thought of it as MINE) if she were making funny noises and I couldn’t sleep, I would pinch her nose to get her to close her mouth.  (This doesn’t work with husbands.  I don’t recommend it if you think your mate has Sleep Apnea – get a CPAP, or better yet, move to another room.)

It turns out, my sister had adenoid problems and she had to go into the hospital and have them removed. (Well, at least I had MY room back for a spell anyway.)  She did come back though and so we had a few years of tussles and sibling scuffles for a number of years until we were teenagers and she moved into her own room next-door with the big double bed reserved for my grandmother when she came to visit from Cape Breton. I got MY room back.

In my teendom, I outgrew the pink stripes and the red spreads.  I had seen mural wall-paper in a magazine and I really liked the look of an autumn forest.  I convinced my dad to buy it and to redecorate my room.  It was fantastic!  It covered one wall completely and the rest of the walls were painted in a neutral taupe colour.  I loved to lie and look in wonder at those paths through the gold-leafed woods.  Not surprisingly, I often thought of Frost’s “Two roads diverged…”

The clunky cube furniture moved next-door with my sister and I reclaimed the old "silver-mink” mirrored dresser and upright dresser for my own.  It just went much better with the woodsy look.  I now had long, dark brown heavy drapes that kept the winter winds at bay with their rubber lining and the hat-ladies, sadly, went into storage in a wooden box in the basement.

There was one really strange thing about my new mural.  Lying on the bed one evening, I happened to scan the photo and my eyes came to rest in the top left-hand corner.  There, I could make out the image of a dark-haired, moustached man in a white shirt with a wide, dark tie.  I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but looking more closely, I could not deny that he was there.  Who was this fellow? I mused. Could he be the photographer putting his own image into his work for posterity? I’ll never know, but it was a little disconcerting to have this man who looked not a little like the Führer peering down at me from the top of my wall.

It seems I was never really meant to have a room of my own, after all.

Kat Mortensen©2009

What’s that buzz?

It’s August--my least favourite month of the year. Why? Well, I’ll tell you.

It isn’t just the fact that August brings waves of heat and humidity. No. It is also the peak season for one of my worst fears: the dreaded wasp.

I have a few phobias, that’s a fact. I am fearful of fire – I don’t light matches. I am fearful of needles (ever since the Nazi-nurse gave me a booster shot in kindergarten and my arm swelled up like a balloon). Of all my phobias, however, the most enduring and undiminished fear is that of stinging insects.

As a child, I thought bees were cute, fuzzy and soft. I watched “Romper Room” and we sang that little song, “Do Be a Do-bee”, remember? What was not to love about bees? They made that lovely buzzing sound, they made yummy honey and they populated and pollinated all the pretty flowers.

I went blithely along for years, not fearing those black and yellow insects, until one summer when I was on vacation in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. We were visiting my great-aunt, Clara, in the town of Glace Bay where my mother grew up. We loved to visit Clara because she was such a sweetheart and always gave us vanilla ice-cream with home-made runny, strawberry jam drizzled on top. I loved her yard because she had a fantastic flower garden filled with sweet peas and tiger lilies.

My cousin Janis and I were out in the front yard exploring while our mothers had a visit in the old house that had originally belonged to their grandmother (or “Other Mama” as she was always known). We were playing hide and seek and Janis hid beside the white-painted, arched trellis that led to another part of the garden. What she did not know was that a wasp-nest must have blown from a tree or somewhere and come to land at the foot of the trellis. Janis stepped right on the nest!

I had my back turned when I heard her screaming! Buzzing, dive-bombing insects were swirling about her leg and she was shrieking at the top of her lungs. She ran away from the trellis, but they were following her. I steered clear of her path and ran to the back door and pulled the old wooden screen-door nearly off its hinges. Racing into the house, I cried, “Mom! Janis stepped in a bees-nest and they’re stinging her.” We could hear Janis wailing in the yard.

By the time we got to her, the wasps had retreated, but my cousin was in a sorry state. Her face was red from crying and her legs were covered in wasp-bites. I was petrified.

When we went back to East Bay and the cottage where they spent the summer, Janis lay on the couch in the living room with ice, wrapped in towels. She was in rough shape for a couple of days. Fortunately, she wasn’t allergic to bee or wasp-stings as is so often the case these days. There was no need for epinephrine; if there had been, I fear we might have lost her.

Although I, myself, was not stung in the incident, witnessing the horror was enough to traumatize me for life. I developed an absolute phobia of anything remotely resembling a bee, wasp or hornet. Horseflies on a lake when we were swimming terrified me, large mosquitoes put the fear of God in me and even the common housefly caught at just the right velocity and in a certain light could dupe me into believing I was being pestered by a malicious stinger.

This fear, generated on the east coast, followed me back to Southern Ontario and our suburb of Mississauga. No more relaxed days in the back yard, swimming in the 3-ft. deep above-ground pool or eating bar-b-ques at the wooden table on the patio. No more leisurely roadside picnics with the Coleman stove.

My outdoor days were forever to be hampered by this inner terror.

The worst thing for me, was if something landed on me. I would freeze, clamp my eyes shut and begin saying the “Hail Mary”, only peeking every few seconds to see if the killer bug had flown off. (I still do this, actually.) I hated when my mother would send me out to take clothes off the hoist-clothesline because inevitably a yellow-jacket would be sunning itself in the folds of a sheet and catch me off-guard. I would release the sheet into the wind with a yelp and go tearing off around the side of the house. This was a drag because the folding part of this exercise really appealed to my type-A personality.

So, my life from that point was lived mostly indoors, avoiding the spitfire aces that dove in my backyard or anywhere else, for that matter. No, I did go out in the summertime, but I had my eagle-eyes trained for whatever might be lurking on plants or in the skies, or even on the sidewalk.

One of my most terror-filled encounters took place while on vacation in Florida, in July. (I know. Who goes to Florida in July, in a non-air-conditioned, dark-blue vehicle no-less?)

It was at a theme park in Orlando. We had got tired of Disney World, I guess, and my dad got the bright idea that we would love a trip to The Gatorland Zoo. Yeah, right! Never mind the fact that in the 70s safety regulations must have been pretty lax, because those gators were in a 3-foot deep pool surrounded by rubber matting and we were allowed to walk around it as long as we “steered clear of the snappers”. What?!!!

For me, that was not the worst of it. The matting was framed by a cement walk and at each corner was a large tin trash bin. To get around the pool you had to go around the walk and to get around the walk and make an escape you inevitably had to pass those bins, every one of which was surrounded by a battalion of bees, wasps…all my nemeses! I was paralyzed with fear and although I was 14 at the time I cried until my dad rescued me and we got the heck out of that death-trap!

Another fear that I had was of being confined in a small space with one of my adversaries. We were driving along in our Ford Galaxie 500 (undoubtedly en route to NS) when a bee flew in the window and onto the dash. Panic ensued. My mother reacted in her usual fashion with an “Ooh, Bill! Stop the car!” I thought about jumping out onto the highway, but realized my chances of survival were probably better with the bumblebee. Instead I just shrieked and tried to get under the seat. Eventually, my dad pulled over, we all got out and my dad opened all the doors until it flew away (this despite my vote “Kill it, Daddy! Kill it!” which fell on deaf ears).

Unfortunately for my younger sister, a couple of encounters with hornets and wasps were to add to my entrenched phobia.

We were sitting at the dinner table in the cottage at East Bay, Nova Scotia. We were having a lovely meal, prepared by mom’s sister, Joan (Janis’s mom). My sister, Nancy was sitting across the table from me and we were all just carrying on as usual—you know, “Pass the potatoes.” “Would you like more gravy?” “Who wants pie for dessert?” -–that sort of thing. Suddenly, somebody (I can’t remember who –it’s all a blur from this point except for the yellow and black thorax, the striped abdomen and the stinger resting on my poor unlucky sister’s forehead); somebody said, “Don’t move, Nancy!”

My sister was still as a corpse, BUT (and here’s one of the reasons why I live in terror to this day) the wasp stung her anyway! She had a huge red swelling on her head that looked like an Easter-egg –okay, I may be exaggerating a little bit, but it was big!

With this in mind, is it any wonder that a few years later when we were driving home from somewhere and my sis and I were in the backseat, with my folks up front and ANOTHER wasp landed on her head, that I actually opened the car door and jumped out without any hesitation? Granted, we were in a research complex near our neighbourhood and the car was only going about 30 mph, but that did nothing to ease my parents’ minds when my sister shouted, “Kathleen’s jumped out of the car!” and they turned around to find me not only out of my seat, but also standing about 100 feet back down the road on the grass verge. I got in trouble for that, let me tell you, but it was worth it. Admittedly, my sister did not get stung this time, but she could have.

I have spent the bulk of my life-to-date, ducking out of class-rooms when errant wasps entered transom windows, excusing myself from the middle of church services when bees flew about the congregation, absolutely putting the kibosh on any camping trips or cottage weekends at the height of the summer and avoiding back patios where the chance of an encounter is likely. I did really well at that for a very long time, but one time we made a fatal error that we will never repeat.

Shortly after we were married, my husband and I moved to a small town north-west of Toronto. We got into the habit of checking out local yard-sales in the hopes of accumulating some decent furniture (we were not very well off) and we did pick up a few treasures.

We were living in an apartment above a century home and had a gorgeous space with an original stone wall, a huge bedroom above the garage and a walk-out through sliding doors to a wood-framed balcony. It was a gorgeous place to be.

Kevin had just landed a job with a soft-ware firm in Guelph and I was at home in the apartment, looking for a local job and doing a bit of writing. We had only 3 cats at the time.

One day, I happened to notice there was a wasp on the back glass door leading out to the balcony. This, for me, was a disaster! I can not go near the creatures. A sheer terror rises in my gullet and my adrenaline pumps at an alarming rate, telling me one thing: FLEE!

It got worse. No sooner had I noticed the wasp, then I heard another buzzing behind the woven burlap-style drapes and then another!

I raced into the kitchen and grabbed a few things: my sandwich that I had been eating, a big metal spaghetti pot and some cat treats. Luckily, we had trained the cats to respond to the word “treats” and when I called it out they came after me like rats after the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

I guided them into our bedroom and shut the door. Then I stuffed a sheet under the opening at the bottom of the door. Fortunately, I had a phone in the bedroom, so I called my husband. Bear in mind this was his new job—I think he’d only been there for about a week, but when I told him I was trapped in the bedroom with the cats, a tin pot to pee in and the wasps were taking over our apartment, he understood my fear. He left work and came home to my rescue.

The problem was that the wasps kept returning and, to quote my husband, they were “tough buggers” to kill. After a few days of trying to despatch them only to have them show up on the window time and time again, we called our landlord in to see if he could get rid of them. He determined they must have been coming in the front window above the computer desk, so he sealed it off with some pink foam. That didn’t work either!

I was living in sheer hell. The only time I felt safe was after Kevin had killed off the daily crew and it was dark, when presumably they were sleeping anyway.

One day, I happened to notice one fly out from near my computer desk (I was going nowhere near this space as you can imagine). I called to Kevin to come and take a look. The Ikea desk was one we had picked up on one of our yard sale jaunts. It had legs with peg-holes running down the front and back. It was from these that the wasps were appearing! It seems with our $15 purchase, we had got a hive of activity in the bargain. Wasps were coming out of the woodwork. Literally!

It was with delight that I watched that desk being sprayed and then hauled out onto the back deck where Kevin took it to pieces. We cleaned up all the little carcasses and my life finally went back to normal. Well as normal as it can be for a phobic.

I’ve had other nasty dealings with my foes. The Hyggehus has been taken over by both a troop of fuzzy bumblers and more gravely, by an infestation of wasps. I don’t know how I survived that one!

Can you really blame me for doing all I can to avoid any contact no matter what people think of me? If you have a phobia, you’ll know what it feels like—that panic that envelops you until you can’t function. It will not let go!

Tell me, what are your greatest fears?

Kathleen Mortensen©2009

The Drowning Pool

Pool Party – That’s mom in the middle and I’m the one looking off to the left (in the pink).

Around about Grade Five (in 1971), some bright spark in the education system decided that it wasn’t enough to torture me with physical education classes, but they had to introduce public swimming lessons too.

Now, instead of being fearful of being whacked in the shin with a plastic hockey blade, I could also be terrified of being swallowed up by and succumbing to an inhalation of chlorine and pool-water. Remember, in those days we had no water-wings, or goggles or ear-plugs; it was sink or swim. Literally.

Equally as clever as the big-wigs in the school system, were the Machiavellian maestros in the public-recreation field. Thus, we began our lessons as diminutive “Pollywogs” or “Tadpoles” and graduated as Orcas or Porpoises or some such undersea stars.

I remember as if it were yesterday, the overwhelming feeling of even just donning a swimsuit and rubber bathing-cap in those huge change-rooms with the cold,wet, flecked floors (I still maintain that my plantar’s wart was the result of my sloshing around in the same water as all those other kids).

The first lesson was stepping onto the side ledge of the pool and learning to jump in the water. This was not too bad, except that I was so small that even the shallow end of the pool rose as high as my mouth and nose and threatened to suffocate me right off the bat.

Click for source

We learned how to stick our faces in the water and then to dog-paddle, which is what most of us resort to now when we’re in the water, unless we went on to become lifeguards or Olympic athletes.

Next, we were given a huge, flat chunk of white Styrofoam. It was rather like a half-surfboard and they called a “fludderboard”. It is only as I write this that I realize it was not “fludder”, but “flutter. I blame it on those skin-tight rubber caps that pinned your ears to the sides of your head and blocked out not just water, but sound as well. That might also explain why so many of us had to have instructions repeated, time and again.

Fluttering, or fluddering was actually quite fun. You would hold the bottom edge of the board out in front of you as you lay on the top of the water, with your face down in it and your eyes clamped shut. You could also lie on the board and kick your feet. That was good. I got nice and secure with my board, but then they took it away! Suddenly, we were expected to float on the water with no support and nothing safe to keep us from plummeting to the bottom of the pool (or so I thought).

As the weeks went on, swimming lessons became more horrifying and I loathed the approach of Thursdays when we would all get in the bus and head to Huron Park pool for our lessons. It didn’t help that I overheard a conversation between my parents and their friends about some guerrilla-school of swimming where they were literally throwing babies into the pool and letting them scramble about until they learned how to do the breast stroke! I was petrified.

At the end of the Tadpole course, what did I have to show for it, besides flat ears full of water, a faded bathing suit and a plantar’s wart? I had a little cloth badge with an ugly tadpole on it that I had to sew on my bathing suit to prove I was ready to be a *ta da!* “Guppy”.

Guppies got to do more fun stuff. We learned how to float on our backs and look way, way up to the high ceiling with the fluorescent lights. We got to learn how to do the Crawl. Was that fun? Not unless you enjoyed taking in copious amounts of pool-water and having it blow through your nose and choke up your throat. Or perhaps you enjoyed getting chlorine in your little eyes and seeing just how bloodshot they could get. Then it could be fun.

After intense guppifying, we would emerge victorious, be given another badge, with you guessed it, a guppy on it and move on to (somebody’s inspiration fell short here because suddenly we were striving to be “Superfish”). What did “Superfish” mean anyway? Well, I’ll tell you; it meant you could learn to tread water.

When you’re 4 foot nothing and you’re wearing a wee polyester swimsuit and your little toes are shrivelling because you’ve been standing on the ledge waiting your turn to jump into the fathomless deep of the deep end and “tread water”, you just want to die. And you nearly do, because someone’s idea of learning how to save yourself from drowning is to make you feel like you really are…drowning. You are forced by some “qualified” swim-instructor – who is really just a sadistic teen-ager with a controlling attitude who yells at you to jump in the pool and start kicking your feet and flailing your arms so you won’t sink to the bottom of the deep end only to be found an hour later after everyone has gone home and the janitor comes in to mop the floors.

Your only hope is that if they see you are going down for the third time the bitch instructor will extend that long metal pole she wields like Poseidon’s triton and permit you to grab on and save yourself.

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As if that isn't bad enough, the next proposed learning exercise is a jump off the low diving board into the deep end. It’s about this time that I start trying to make myself throw up on the tiles, or pass out just to escape the dreaded diving board. Sadly, there’s no food in my stomach to come up, since you know that old rule of never eating anytime within an hour of swimming or you’ll get a cramp and drown, so that’s not an option. Nor is the passing out since I don’t want to hit my head and really get knocked out, so I line up like a wet dolphin doing that tail-stand in the tank at Marineland. I’m smack-dab between the jockette in the new Speedo who loves to not only jump, but wants to dive, and begs to get on the HIGH-DIVING BOARD (does she have a death wish?, I ask myself) and the plump boy with the saggy bathing suit and the overhanging belly (he’s as scared as I am because belly-flops really hurt!)

Climbing those steps to the diving board, I know how those poor sailors who were prodded with swords and made to walk the plank must have felt. Speedo-girl jumps off the end of the board, shoots out of sight and then pops up again with a big grin on her face. As she makes her way to the side of the pool where the big black letters read: DEEP END 12 feet, I inch my way out onto the gritty white board. My little toes clench the edge like a doomed mountaineer’s fingers on an Everest crevasse. I can’t do it. Can I do it? No. I can’t do it. Can I? What if I close my eyes, plug my nose and jump? Will I sink and never come up? Will I swallow gallons of water and drown? Can I do it?

I turn and slowly head back towards the stairs, ready to make a run for it down the steps. “No Running!” reads the big white wall at the side of the pool.

Upstairs in the gallery, my parents are looking down at me. My father is calling my name, “Kathleen! Jump!" My mother stands beside him. Her face is tense. She is worried about me. What should I do?

Slowly, I turn and make my way back to the end of the board. I close my eyes and leap off the end, my knees pulled up slightly. In an instant, I make contact with the cool, chlorinated water. I keep my eyes tightly closed as I sink deep into the depths of the pool. I am shooting up now, up towards the surface. I open my eyes and I can see the other people in the pool. Now all I can think is, get out of the water. Get out of this pool and go home.

Click for source

I clamber out of the pool, like an old seal hefting onto a big rock on a shore. I stand up and look up to see my mom and dad smiling at me.

I can claim my Superfish status now; that’s good enough for me. I’ve learned the breast-stroke, the crawl, the back-stroke, how to tread water and how to jump off the low diving board. It’s time to go home. For good.

Mom makes me my favourite after swim-lessons treat: Shredded Wheat with boiling water poured over and drained off, then soaked in milk and sprinkled with lots of sugar.

It feels great to be home and dry.

Kathleen Mortensen©2009

I’ve come a long way, baby!

Poetikat does not endorse smoking, but these girls “came a long way” first.

It’s my one year anniversary on July 29, for Blasts From the Past, so I thought I’d dig up some earlier posts and let you all have a peek at some of my favourites and some that have been well-received.

When I began this blog as an off-shoot of Poetikat’s Invisible Keepsakes, it was to keep my alter-ego separate from my poetry. I struggle with this in any case, since you can often find film reviews and recipes on my main blog, but this blog was started with the intention of exploring merely video clips that were mementoes of my past. I was hopeful that others would find them of interest as well.

What started out as a YouTube fest, soon became a delving into my personal history, the failures and foibles of a somewhat faulted young girl/woman in a suburb of Toronto, Ontario. This took off rather, as it appears my faults and foibles were not unique to me, but also to all of you. When I write anecdotes of my blunders and experiences, you too have similar stories to share and I look forward to every one of your comments so I can laugh along with you and we can all feel better. That’s what this lark is all about, isn’t it? Remembering the pain and knowing we conquered it all; we are triumphant and can look back and chuckle at our childhood angst.

Since the outset, I have realized I am a Generation Jones member, although I still feel a strong affinity for the Generation X set. I can be both, right?

Please have a look below. Maybe read a few (or more) and don’t forget to leave your thoughts.

I now present the Best of Blasts From the Past:

The very first post (just so you can see how much my formula has evolved):

Bugs Bunny – A Whole Lot of Bull!

The introductory post (once I had a sense of the direction I was taking):

You Are Entering a Zone…

An example of a post about a well-known television show:

By Request: Classic Catwomen

Another t.v. show memory:

The Hardy Boys- Hardy=har=har!

Getting a little more personal now:

Burnt Offerings: Why I hate sleepovers.

This one brought an old beau out of hiding!:

All By Myself: Slow dancing at parties

On the sheer humiliation front:

Roller Derby Queen? As if!

Memories of independence:

Trivial Pursuit and a Taste of Freedom

Remembering a longed-for toy:

The Easy-bake Oven Mystery

How dolls defined us:

A Doll’s House

For more Blasts, click on the “Linked Within” thumbnails after each post, or peruse my archive in the sidebar.

Thanks for being part of the journey and stick around; there’s way more to tell!

Kat