When my father’s work life forced our family to move to the United States in 1962, leaving behind — achingly so — the blissful, protective world of Gander, and of Newfoundland, the cultural adjustment to life in America was not easy, as I’ve outlined a couple of times over the years in this corner of The Telegram.
And I don’t think it took me very long, even with the neurons of perception not yet fully developed — non-fans are invited to swing mightily at that opening — to conclude that as soon as nature allowed me to think and act for myself, I would be on a plane back to Newfoundland to once more take up residence in the only place I had ever really called home.
There were summers spent back here throughout my teen years; my parents, I do believe, were determined to have at least one of their offspring return to Newfoundland to settle, perhaps for no other reason than one of practicality: to have a bed to rest their heads whenever a spell of home-sickness required the antidote of a two-week hit of the pine-clad hills.
It was, in fact, around this time of the year, the summer of 1972, that I landed at Torbay Airport, as most of us called it back then, to begin my second life in Newfoundland.
And those glorious times I was able to visit with my uncles and aunts and cousins in Grand Falls, one vacation after another throughout the ’60s, kept alive that initial sense that I was like a fish out of water in the U.S., and that, like the salmon, I would somehow find my way back to where I somehow knew instinctively I belonged.
It was, in fact, around this time of the year, the summer of 1972, that I landed at Torbay Airport, as most of us called it back then, to begin my second life in Newfoundland.
Why this trip down nostalgia lane?
Well, one of my six siblings was here last week, helping my wife and I move the matriarch of the Wakeham clan, our wonderful mom — 94 years young — into a personal care home, just eight or nine minutes away from our place in Flatrock, and the swapping of yarns about our time in the States began almost the minute my sister and I squeezed the bejeezus out of each other (masks in place, of course) outside a near empty St. John’s Airport.
The bulk of the stories weren’t of a profound nature, though — no heavies about the psychological wherewithal I needed to fight off a degree of loneliness not normally associated with a 12-year-old; instead, we gravitated towards yarns we’ve told countless times, those that invariably provoke a laugh, like the “Dad and the barbecue” incident, as it is labelled in Wakeham family lore to this very day.
Never having barbecued in his life, probably never having even heard the word barbecue (our outdoor meals, prior to leaving Newfoundland, had come wonderfully in the form of grub cooked over a huge fire among the boulders on the shores of Gander Lake), Dad was determined to acclimatize himself to the American ways, to try his hand at an activity that was as Yankified as baseball and the Stars and Stripes.
An ancient and silent “home movie,” shot by me on our first film camera, captures the disastrous and embarrassing outcome as the old man lost his barbecue virginity, in Virginia, naturally enough. Dad can initially be seen pointing with bursting pride at the printed message on his apron, “I’M THE BRAINS OF THIS OUTFIT.” Within seconds, though, Dad disappears in a cloud of thick smoke, the barbecue having caught fire, a blaze so intense it melted both handles on our brand new cooking device. We, the Wakeham offspring, dined out (so to speak) on the “Dad and the barbecue” story forever, much to the skipper’s chagrin. (He never did display barbecuing prowess, traumatized in perpetuity by that backyard fire).
There were other stories last week during our mini-family reunion, as we continued to fight with vigilance in our senior years an increasing forgetfulness that seems to come with the geriatric territory. A close friend and fellow septuagenarian told me the other day that it’s referred in some circles to “having the CRAFT,” meaning, (crudity warning here for the pious among you): “Can’t Remember a F---in’ Thing.”
And, of course, my sister and I couldn’t help but reflect, for a few serious moments, on our good fortune to have moved back to Canada (she and another sister wound up in New Brunswick), and not to have remained in what has become a sorrowful spectacle of a country, a place where a cerebral lightweight with the moral compass of a feral cat continues to foster hate and divisiveness, and, in recent months, has mangled his government’s response to the pandemic crises.
For sure, our own leader, Pierre’s boy, Justin Trudeau, is sinking like a rock in ethical quicksand, reflecting a disgusting level of arrogance his supporters had naively believed was not in his makeup.
But I’ll still take Canada any day of the week, flaws and all.
And, more to the point, I’ll always take Newfoundland.
As I did that summer of 1972.
Bob Wakeham has spent more than 40 years as a journalist in Newfoundland and Labrador. He can be reached by email at [email protected]
