Many family thoughts and impressions pass through my head, as I walk back home from school. This is the same St-Joseph Boy’s High School – le collège St-Joseph – where my paternal grandfather, Paul Charbonneau, and my own father, Alexander (Ben) Bolduc, received their secondary school training. In their days, a solid high school education meant possibly the start of a successful occupation in the mills, or in retailing. Possibly, it even meant the start of a family business.
The courses focused on English grammar and reading, American history, geography, math through beginning algebra, and Catholic, religious instruction, of course. Quebecois French, le joual, also played a cultural and linguistic role in the scholastic mix.
With a weighty load of textbooks, neatly tucked away in my knapsack, a resurgent confidence and a certain pride fill my eager steps, as I stroll down Aiken Street toward Moody Street. This is the same Moody Street that Jack Kerouac (“On the Road” and other titles) made famous in his novels. The tempo of a new set of learning adventures beats within me. Yes, those elementary school years are over. Today entering high school, everything is new, exciting and possible.
My walking reveries continue, as I wend my way over the only Lowell canal bridge on my route back home. Years later, it was named the Ouellette bridge. How is it possible that energetic, teenage boys living in those clapboard, rat traps could dive from the roof of one of these tenements into the uncertain waters of the adjoining canal below? Often, the canal itself was used as a refuse dump by the local residents. This diving feat means a free-fall drop of about 34 feet from rooftop to water level. Quickly, my brain goes into a number crunching mode. This estimate allows for a building height of 30 feet and a canal water level located four feet below the ground surface. With a little initial forward momentum, some luck and a secret prayer, a boy’s body could avoid a disastrous impact with the canal’s granite wall at the base of the housing structure. However, there remains little room in this calculation for operator error. It’s tight!
Benignly, my thoughts rapidly switch to other concerns and issues. Walking has this pleasant effect. A certain melancholia surrounds me as I proceed. Sadness is part and parcel of daily life. Now, the feeling is real and strong. Parents don’t live forever or even long enough, it seems. Dad died last January only nine months ago. In the end, his ulcerated stomach could no longer sustain his gangly frame and his grueling work load.
It was on January 6, 1953, in the early morning hours, to be precise. He had not appeared sick or feeble in autumn, or in early winter. One Sunday evening in late December, while babysitting Denise, Michelle and Bob, he vomited up a big chunk of his stomach onto the kitchen floor. Aunt Florence and Uncle Gerry, who had been visiting, later told my Mom and me that he collapsed by the yellow-enamel, cast iron stove. He just fell to the linoleum floor, like a blackened, soot-covered, red brick.
Thump, clunk and ka-plunk!
It was quite a mess, but Florence and Gerry had already cleaned up the pool of blood, by the time Mom and I returned home from evening vespers. Aunts and uncles can make a real difference, in the comfort level of their young nieces and nephews. Gerry and Florence were nice to have around.
What a way to celebrate the blessed season of Our Lord’s birth! I was only thirteen at the time, but I must admit that Dad really had seemed even more skeletal, than normally was the case. What a contrast! And, these are the loving days of peace and joy!
It’s hard to relax and enjoy the holidays for a mill worker, who regularly gets laid off, from Thanksgiving to New Year’s day. That’s the dead season for the sale of raw, cotton fabric and cloth. Christmas dresses, scarves, gloves, coats and jackets are all packaged and shipped to stores, by the clothing distributors in mid-November. So, for seven weeks, starting in late November and through early January, he was without his main income. This was the annual challenge that he faced. Perhaps, this is the reason why Christmas joy never glowed brightly on his face.
This layoff period must have been hard on his spirits, and on his personal sense of value. What is a man worth, if he can barely feed his family? Naturally, he would never admit defeat. Maybe, he could get a few extra hours at Mr. Pinard’s market, working as a butcher. There’s lots of chicken, pork, beef and veal to be hacked up at Christmas time. It’s a meat eater’s gala festival! That’s the good news.
Perhaps, more people than usual will be taking cabs to restaurants and churches, during this national holiday season? Again, he is a lucky guy. The owner of East End Taxi, our neighbor, Spike Beauparlant, likes Dad a lot. Dad is a hard worker, steady and dependable. Surely, he could look forward to more, temporary employment at Spike’s taxi stand and, yes, even earn those wonderful Christmas tips as a cabdriver, in the big, bustling city.
But, what about unemployment compensation? An excellent question, for sure. The Social Security Act of 1935 set up a national program of unemployment benefits for many – but not all – American workers, in different fields of endeavor. However, there are many disqualifications for various workers within the economy. Really, for all practical purposes, those financial benefits did not exist for Mr. Alexander Bolduc, during his lifetime. The holidays meant additional belt tightening and forced, Christmas smiles for our family and all other mill worker families in town. A passing stranger might hear a melody like “White Christmas” being hummed aimlessly in the neighborhood – le voisinage. These routine aspects of the season got us through mechanically, at least.
“Merry Christmas, everyone! Hope and peace for the New Year!”
The numbing rote of it all could easily harden tired human spirits. Where are you, Charles Dickens, when we need you on Ludlam Street?
Still on Aiken Street, as I slowly approach the creaking, dilapidated, gray, three-story, tenement blocks deep within Little Canada, new pictures, memories, puzzles and questions cross my mind. How fascinating it seems that the mind can make these leaps across canyons of dissociated material.
Yesterday, I heard on the radio that Stalin conducted public purges in Russia, many years ago. Kangaroo courts, we now call them. There is always someone eager to send enemies of the state to prison, or even worse. How lucky we are, here in America. As I read in the Superman comic books, our country is for truth, justice and the American way. Nobody is unfairly picked on, in the land of the free, and the home of the brave. At least, Arthur Godfrey will tell you these words on his morning TV show. But, sometimes, on the television news programs, I see Senator Joseph McCarthy holding hearings in Congress about spies, traitors and Communists in the U.S., in our government.
Last week, I heard him say:
“One Communist in the State Department is one Communist too many!”
My mother watches these televised hearings at home in the afternoon. She loves the Senator from Wisconsin. He is a good, devote Catholic and a no nonsense kind of guy, when it comes to dealing with Commies. It’s good to see that someone out there cares enough about our democratic way of life to make a fuss and get some action! The Wisconsin Senator says President Eisenhower – I like Ike – just might also be a Commie.
This is quite upsetting for my mother, and for me, too. Eisenhower helped America win the war in Europe, against the German Fascists, when he was Supreme Commander in the Army. He can’t possibly be a Commie! But again, I am very glad that, in our country, we don’t have those big, public show trials, like Stalin once ran in Moscow. In that case, many Russian generals and unwanted politicians were sent far, far away to Siberia, to the gulags. Russia is such a far-off land in a world of strange music and scary ideas.
Fortunately, my family and I live quiet, French-Canadian, Catholic lives in good, old, Spindle City, Lowell, Massachusetts. It’s great to be alive and a Canuck. It’s good to be a free American!