Continued from Legends of Myself 133 134. Prince Rupert and Vancouver, 1965-66: The Last Journey There was a little hole in the window to our room at the lower right corner of the glass which the kittens liked to poke their noses out of occasionally. I stood at that same window often to look out […]
January 29, 2020
Continued from Legends of Myself 131 132. Prince Rupert, 1965: Truant and Skeptic I seriously dislike it when someone wastes my time. If I’m to waste my time, I prefer to do it myself. In Prince Rupert I could read the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (45 cents or 50 in the back-corner rack at […]
August 17, 2014
Continued from Legends of Myself 93 94. Prince Rupert, 1961: Suddenly Family And yet I can’t help but wonder whether the fire that burned down our shack in the Boneyard didn’t lead to what followed, and whether—ultimately—that was a good thing or not. What followed, in the course of things, was a misfortune, a kind of […]
December 1, 2013
Continued from Legends of Myself 85 86. Prince Rupert, 1961: The Wrong Child Prince Rupert also meant Pop. When I returned, he still lived in his room in the grey-lumbered apartments on 8th Avenue, and I expect I crossed the ridge back of downtown to visit him there as I had before. But one day he […]
November 27, 2013
Continued from Legends of Myself 84 85. Prince Rupert, 1961: Comics and Canary Wallpaper When I returned to Prince Rupert in the spring of 1961, I also returned to Roosevelt School, to finish grade five where I had begun it. It didn’t feel like a return particularly. I wasn’t placed in the same class, and I […]
April 26, 2013
Continued from Legends of Myself 72 73. Prince Rupert, 1960: Caretaking by Proxy Once he had established me in school, my father returned for one more month of fishing at the Boneyard. He left me under one of the strangest caretaking arrangements I had so far encountered. I’m not sure how my father imagined the arrangements […]
April 20, 2013
Continued from Legends of Myself 71 Prince Rupert, 1960: A Book in a Day August ended, and the summer holidays, and I had to move out of the dynamite shack in the Boneyard. My father brought us into Prince Rupert, to the rooms above the Grand Café again, to enroll me in school. School was Roosevelt […]
April 11, 2013
Continued from Legends of Myself 70 71. The Boneyard, 1960: Fifty-Three Falling Stars The Skeena is rightly “the river of mists” as the original Tsimshian form of the name suggests. Mist, cloud, rain with splashes of blue overhead. It was not a place to breed stargazers or astronomers, one would think. But I must have looked […]
January 29, 2013
Continued from Legends of Myself 58 59. Prince Rupert, 1959: Totem and Capitol When I returned to Prince Rupert, I still regularly climbed the ridge at the back of downtown and over the hill to where Old Pop stayed. My grandfather still lived on the same floor at the front of the same old unpainted building […]
January 23, 2013
Continued from Legends of Myself 57 58. Prince Rupert, 1959: The Grand Café My departure from Port Essington in 1959 was the final one for me. I stood many times in view of it. I gazed at it across the river. But I never again crossed the Skeena while it continued to exist, which was until […]
February 16, 2020
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