I took an aisle seat on the number 2 bus that Wednesday morning, surprised that there was an empty seat. The elderly lady in the window seat was neatly dressed, her beige slacks pressed, her grey hair disciplined neatly.
When the bus turned west at Bank and Somerset Streets a number of chatting Asians crowded the aisles and my seatmate became agitated thinking she must be on the wrong bus.
“Where are you going?” I asked her.
“Richmond Road and Churchill,” she answered after checking a piece of paper she had fished from her handbag.
“I’m going to the same stop,” I assured her. “I’ll let you know where to get off.”
I thought our conversation was complete when, suddenly, the lady almost shouted, “I hate macaroni!”
Now where did that come from, I wondered.
“You mean macaroni and cheese?” I asked.
Indignantly she let me know that when she was a kid there was NO cheese with the macaroni, and, she had to fight with her brothers to get the last curls of macaroni to ward off hunger when she was young.
Her story continued …
“I grew up on LeBreton flats. There were fourteen of us. Sometimes my dad told us we were going to sleep at a neighbour’s house that night. We didn’t know why. When we came home again there was a new baby.”
“I never had shoes that fit. When school was starting my mother would bring out a big sack and it had lots of shoes in it. We stuffed the toes with rags and paper.”
Then she was quiet. Maybe she was reminiscing. I was trying to imagine the poverty in which she grew up. I was also trying to think what life would have been like with fourteen kids and no automatic dishwasher!
Suddenly she turned towards me, smiling and confident. “You know”, she confided, “I had a far better childhood than children have today. We had such fun playing with boxes and pieces of wood, somersaulting, jumping and playing tag. I think I lived in a better world then.”
She was correct.
By J Alexander