Conflicts, Points of View & Beliefs
Everyone is unique. Nobody else thinks and feels like I do or like you do. But, how can we possibly all live together in harmony – all creatures like insects, birds, mammals and, yes, reptiles – if every living creature responds to the stimuli in our surroundings in its own special way?
There is a mystery here, and these stories will attempt to plunge into its curious depths to unravel some of the questions of the ages, or, at least, of the previous few centuries. Going back to the beginning of time or even to recorded history remains a challenge too far to navigate.
Those Early Years – Out of the Cradle, but still Groping
When i was still a child adapting to the sounds, odors, sights and surprises in that small but comfortable, second story tenement apartment in Lowell, Massachusetts, not far from the Merrimack River’s Pawtucket Falls. Maybe, these homey events, listed below, will serve as a touchstone to this reality of a decades ago,
Baseball: Bob was a Yankee fan & I liked the Red Sox
Mom versus Dad: Gentle vs. hard; Smiling vs. stern
a) “It’s a dog-eat-dog world” – Dad
b) Life is hard, but “someday, my ship will come in”
Pépère Charbonneau: “Politics is dirty business, my little one.” – he had said this to her in French when starting his milk delivery business in the 1920s. Canadian French (more on this later) was the “lingua franca” of his world, but he did get along in the English of the times.
Dad: “You like peaches? Kiss my ass, it’s a peach.” – Note: My father never claimed any lofty or poetic status as one of the thousands of Lowell’s factory workers, who were barely eking out a living as “mill rats” employed in Spindle City’s eleven huge manufacturing centers.
Aunt Florence: “Gérard, arrêtes d’agacer les enfants. – “Gerry, stop teasing the children.” – Although this couple had no children of their own, there was many an evening throughout the year when they were chatting with my mother (my father usually was working at one of several part-time jobs) at our kitchen table while enjoying a cup of hot tea and a piece of today’s freshly baked pastry. Uncle Gerry was quite a teaser, which exasperated my Mom but, usually, she only pleaded for him to stop. Decades later, she told me that she might have been wrong in encouraging these constant visits. I was a bit surprised when she told me.
A cousin : “Maybe, Uncle Gerry has been firing blanks.” in reference to Aunt Florence never getting pregnant.
Mémère Bolduc: “Ah, mon ti-Paul” – “Oh, my little Paul.” – My grandmother lived with us on Endicott St. for about five years until shortly after my uncle Maurice died in an asylum in early June of 1944. She and I had been pals for all that time.
Ignace: “Je veux le tuer, ton fils” – “I want to kill your son.” – Our neighbor from across the street on Ludlam took a deep dislike for me in the early 1950s when he discovered that I was the culprit, who had innocently been spraying his large, grassy, side yard with street gravel in an amusing game of baseball practice.
Using an old, burlap, newsboy’s sack. I would lob a chunk of gravel or tar into the air near me and then attempt to sling it across the road to the granite mini-mountain to the left of his grassy paradise. This was quite a challenge for a young man still learning the ropes about slingshots and catapults. Often, the pebble went only 3/4 of the way to its intended designation and dropped instead into grassy mall.
Mom: “Je vais cuir des cretons pour le déjeuner.” – “I’ll cook some cretons (AKA gortons) for breakfast.”
Mom: “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, dormez vous?”
Bob: “General Motors is a going concern.” – Bob was particularly impressed with GM products even as a young boy. “There goes a 1951 Buick up West 6th St. going to Dracut.” Cars were his passion even before his First Communion.
In contrast, my interests, a bit later, were more focused on academic matters like proving that miracles are real and on theological arguments about a “First Cause”, and syllogisms. This made me a bit weird since. at that time, my best friends, George, Roger and Richard, were soon to display a visceral conviction that girls, beautiful girls, were the reason for for it all. For me, that attraction was also there, but these decisions needed more life preparation, and, especially, a means of making a decent living doing something that I really like. Following in my father’s footsteps was not in my plans. That was certain.
Mom: “Who is afraid of the big, bad wolf?”
A cousin: “It’s not what you know, but who you blow that counts.” – His keen insight into human behavior far outstripped my naive impressions. He came from the tougher part of town called “Le petit Canada” – “Little Canada.”
Moody Street, Cabot Street, Austin Street and Aiken Avenue at Merrimack were the training grounds for savvy street urchins and kids, who ran the numbers for the neighborhood gamblers. Yet, many indigent French Canadian families managed to survive the economic and psychological torments of the times through a sense of joint, communal distress and the influence of the priests at the Saint-Jean Baptiste Church plus the teaching brothers at the College St-Joseph on Merrimack near Aiken.
I managed to obtain a solid high school education (algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, general science, world history, French, English and Latin plus religion) there through hard work and the disciplined efforts of the Marist Brothers. Little Canada had a local reputation for being a mini-diamond in the rough, but its many disadvantaged persons somehow managed to sustain a lifestyle not too different from the distressed townships of lower Quebec Province. Here, a displaced “habitant” from the old country up north could effectively attain the quality of cultural, culinary and religious life that his/her grandparents were fiercely holding onto through the so-called “survivance” movement. More on this concept later.
Priests: “Birth control is a sin.” “Not attending Mass on Sunday is a sin.” “Lustful thoughts are sins.” “Not obeying your parents is a sin.” – There were ample opportunities to find oneself on the sinful side of any issue. The Quebec flavor of fervent Catholicism was not for the weak of heart.
Aunt Lida: “It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.”
Observer: “it’s a rat race, and the rats are winning.”
Mom: “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” – a favorite expression from the days of the Great Depression.
Priests and Nuns: “God will provide.” “L’homme propose, mais Dieu dispose.” – Faith in a caring God with loving saints and helpful angels seeped through our everyday activities like the very air that we breathed. Pius XII (Pie XII) spiritually guided our lives from the Vatican like a Good Shepard watches his sheep.
Uncle Gerry: “Ted Williams? He’s a bum.” – Ted left a lot of runners on base while he was at bat in a tight game. My Dad and Uncle Gerry never forgave him.
Michelle: Crying in her bed after Dad died, “I miss my Dad.” Mom was very angry with her at that very moment since her time as a wife had been so hard and all but empty of a deeply caring life partner.
Claire Beauparlant (to Michelle): “You know, your mother could also die suddenly, just like your father.” – This was said atop a four-foot tall, dirty snowbank in front of the Beauparlant front yard on Ludlam St. Michelle was frantic, and for years feared that when she returned home from school that her mother would be there, dead. Children don’t always use
diplomacy, it seems.
Mom: During the Depression in Quebec, people would say: :”Ça ira, ça ira” – These are the words sung by angry, hungry peasants in the French Revolution
Joe, brother-in-law: “Working for a Greek is worse than working for a Jew. But, both work you hard.” Note that it was common to refer to a stranger’s ethnicity as a distinctive qualifier. Did other nationalities also do the same? I did not know since I seldom befriended such a person before my college days.
Mom: “Truman, he’s a vulgar, little man.” – It was very difficult to be loved and admired in my home if Democrat was attached to your political attitudes. Those Democrats were all crooks. The Boston Democrats were the worst!
Mom: “Howard Hughes, he’s my kind of man.” Many women in the 1950s pined, I suppose, for such a handsome, successful inventor and film director, especially, when their own lives offered little romance and, at best, a family trip to the beach like Hampton or Sea-brook in New Hampshire. But since few families had a personal automobile in the early 1950s, such an adventure required the good will of a friend or relative with wheels. It was when the rich Beauparlant family from across the street packed their large vehicle with pick-nick baskets loaded with food and sodas that my sister, Michelle, personally experienced the consequences of income inequality.
Mom: “I like Ike.” – After the war years and Lowell’s economic non-recovery, way into the early 1950s, the former general and, later, the president offered us in Lowell hope that better days would come even when the Communists were scoring victories in Europe.
Mom to Uncle Gerry: “Paul was accepted at Lowell Tech.” – Gerry responds: “He’ll never make it.” There was a deep belief in the minds of American French Canadians within my circle that we could never reach the world of the successful, educated middle class. Canucks did not go to college.
Mom: “Some people think that their shit doesn’t stink.”
High School Friends: “Not worth a piss-hole in the snow.”
High School Friends: “As an outsider, what do you think of the human race?”
Lowell People: “More dollars than Carter has pills.”
Mom: “Lui, il n’a pas mis les pattes aux mouches.”
Mom: “Il est fou comme un ballai” – “He is as crazy as a broom.” Some popular sayings do not translate well.
Mom: “She remembered her step-sister, Marie, AKA, Marie-Caca, and her step-brother, Raymond,
whom she liked a lot. But, in the case of Marie, many past episodes in the 1920s had lead her to believe that her nickname ought to be “Caca”, a scatological inference, which I chose not to translate. This vignette proves, again, that blended families were hard to create even back in the 1920s and 1930s. Some things never change.
Paul: Harry Levin, our Jewish variety store owner across the street, was interested in our Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary. On different occasions, he and I would discuss religious issues. Personally, I thought that he was very brave and entrepreneurial to set up shop in a very French Canadian neighborhood where expressing negative
comments about Jews was almost a daily sport.
Harry even embellished the older store and introduced a cold storage meat display case. Now, he could try to compete with Monsieur Pinard, our own grocer, at Hildreth and Ludlam in offering options to the folks in the neighborhood.
To add further evidence of our developing openness and social generosity, no local issues were raised when a young Greek couple purchased the attractive, two-story, gray and white, clapboard, colonial located adjacent to our house, which was located on the corner of Ludlam and Dana. Thise couple , then, rented the second story of their large house to another Greek couple that was equally ready to be quietly integrated into our French-Canadian (others called us Franco-Americans) portion of the city.
At that time, Lowell’s total population amounted to roughly 90,000 persons, which remained steady into the 1950s. Even as a child and, later, as a young man, I noted that the purity of our Canuck corner
of town had already begun to dwindle a bit since an Irish family lived in an attractive, small cottage at the corner of Dana and Aiken, across the street from our Mountain, and that an Italian couple with three young children, the Antifonarios, had moved into the
second-story apartment in our large tenement house.
Madame Charbonneau, my mother’s aunt through marriage, and owner of this three story tenement rental, had apparently thought enough of this couple to allow them to live in one of her several rental properties. This business move proved a happy one for us, the kids in the region, since three new playmates were so added to our menagerie of players.
It had been, apparently, quite difficult for the city fathers, in the previous decades, to effectively subdivide the city’s acreage into separate and distinct residential neighborhoods with the downtown, commercial portion of the city reserved for large department stores, a Woolworth’s, two Five and Tens, lawyers/doctors offices and a wide variety of small retail shops plus several favorite eateries like: The Epicure and The Copper Kitchen.
This central commercial hub was located near and around Kearney Square where East Merrimack, Merrimack, Prescott and Central Streets plus Bridge St merge.
Large swats of land had been claimed by Irish, Greek, Polish, Portuguese and French Canadian inhabitants decades before my arrival on the scene. In reverse order, the Canucks were usually found in Lower Centalville, Pawtucketville and in the Little Canada portion of the Acre while the majority of the Greek population was found in the Greater Acre extending from Pawtucket Street, near the river, down Fletcher Street, past Broadway and into the popular Market Street commercial region.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX