Today my Baba would have turned 99. We spent so much of our lives with her, and I miss her every day. She was not a typical grandmother - she didnt bake cookies, in fact she hated to cook, but she liked to swear. She talked non-stop to anyone who would listen, and had absolutely amazing stories to tell. Her memory was astounding, and her mind was razor sharp right up until the end. I spent a lot of time with her over the last 10 years of her life, and was able to document many of her stories on film and in writing. One day, I took her to 7th Street north, in the Flats of Brandon where she grew up. I parked the car, and just let her talk about every family who lived in every house on the street back in the early part of the century - while I captured it all, verbatim. The result was a stream of consciousness that captures Babas spirit perfectly. This is just one small, hilarious example of what I documented that day... Below Holowicz’s was Bonk’s – Dobie Bonk. The oldest one was Dobie til 99 years, his name was Walter. Then there was Nelly and she used to break out at night looking for boyfriends. So they put her in the mental. They thought she was crazy. When you wanted to get rid of someone – like an uncle or something –you signed them to the mental. Then there was Annie. And she’s the one that brought that baby in the middle of the night from Winnipeg. And Stella and I watched the taxi and she went in with a little bundle and we got Rogene. Her son is the head of all the banks in Toronto. She was white trash, and none of the English boys from town would go with us girls. And then that Nelly they put her in the mental and then they released her and she couldn’t cope with the outside world, so she readmitted herself and died there. The reason they put her in the mental – her father was the one with the peg leg that gave you the seashell – the mother took one of those razor strops and hit her. And Nelly got so mad, she took that strop out to the back and chopped it up with an axe so they couldn’t use it. That’s why she went to the mental. They were both pretty girls, especially Rogene’s mother. That guy worked in the bank, and the parents didn’t like her, and he gave her a kid and bye bye. That’s why I never had anything to do with the guys downtown – they just took a girl out for one thing.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 01:44:26 +0000
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