BBQ Chicken In A Foil Bag.

Even though over a half century has past I can still vividly recall most of my life’s early memories while living in Lawrence Heights. I have always said that the seventies decade good or bad molded me into the person I am today.

I have absolutely no doubt about that.

For the ten years while I lived in Lawrence Heights, I was a Jungle bunny. My life was so much different, so much better than when I was living at my grandmother's house in Willowdale. Most importantly I had so many friends now that I was allowed to associate with. It was like going from famine to feast in a very short period of time.

It sure seemed like we were always visiting friends or friends were at our apartment visiting us. My mother was always baking banana bread or a coffee cake and the kettle was always on. Since becoming a Jehovah’s Witnesses my mother had now provided the three of us with an abundance of friendships that we never had while living on Byng Ave. Living in Lawrence Heights meant that many of our newfound friends were also living in our neighborhood.

We were all Jungle bunnies.

As I reflect back on those early days we literally had next to nothing in the way of material possessions. I never complained or asked for things I wanted because I knew we had no money. I always knew in my heart that eventually things would get better for us. Although, for the first few years we had nothing but the basic necessities as my mother always called them. We always had a roof over our heads, we never went hungry and we always had clean clothes to wear.

What else did we really need?

I never remember having much of a wardrobe or various clothes that I could choose from. My mother was constantly doing laundry and to save an extra dime she rarely used the clothes dryer. There were always racks of wet laundry hung up to dry in our bedroom. I can never forget that nauseous chlorine smell from all the wet laundry and the smell would slowly dissipate as our clothes dried.

It was not to long after we moved into Lawrence Heights before our new friends from the Kingdom Hall would be sending over garbage bags of used clothes. My mother would take out what she thought we could use and very rarely she would add any clothes that we no longer wore or had outgrown. The bag would then be passed on to another needy family. Thanks to our many new friends at the Kingdom Hall, my closet and dresser drawers now had a few more items inside.

I now had choices.

My mother always cooked our meals and she never bought any convenient pre-packaged foods. Our menu was basically the same week in and week out. Our dinner staples would consist of my mother’s homemade meatloaf, pork chops with rice, baked macaroni and cheese, chile and chicken legs with Shake n’ Bake. There were a few other items including my least two favorites, creamed salmon with green peas on toast and tuna noodle casserole. I didn’t really like either of those two fishy meals, but I always ate them since it was either that or go hungry. Canned salmon and tuna must have been really cheap back then because we sure seemed to eat an awful lot of it.

And how could I ever forget our regular homemade broiled K-Tel Patty Stacker hamburgers. I always loved those. My mother also made a lot of homemade soups and the Kraft boxed pizza kits were pretty popular in our house. We would make our own crust from the bagged flour/yeast mixture included in the box. After spreading out the spicy canned pizza sauce we added our own toppings. I never remember ever having a pizzeria pizza delivered while living in the Jungle.

I enjoyed the banana bread and peanut butter cookies my mother would always bake. There was always Jell-O in our fridge for our desert. My mother was always buying those little frozen Sau-Sea shrimp cocktails when they were on special. They were sold in packages of three in little glass jars. She would always save the glass jars and use them for our Jell-O. We easily had well over a dozen of them always in our cupboard. If we were not eating just plain Jell-O, we were eating Jell-O with fruit cocktail mixed in. On special occasions we would have Jell-O mixed with powder milk crystals then whipped up with the electric beater. I called that desert our Jungle mousse and it actually was pretty good.

My mother would only buy the powdered milk once we moved into our apartment on Flemington Rd. It was so much cheaper than buying the jug milk everyone else we knew drank. I hated drinking it and I would always mix in some Nestle Quik to make it a bit more bearable. Seriously, we were the only family I knew who drank powdered milk during all my years living in the Jungle. Every other family bought the big one gallon jug of homo milk in the reusable plastic jug. Needless to say, I never became a milk drinker.

The Dominion store at the Yorkdale Mall was the closest supermarket to our apartment. Since we had no car and had to walk everywhere that is where we shopped every week. It would be my job to lug our heavy bundle buggy full of groceries the half mile back home. And just like my grandmother, my mother always bought a lot of canned products so the buggy was always heavy. My mother was a good packer and she always got every single last can she bought into our buggy. I was now too tall for pulling the buggy and I would have to arch my back awkwardly all the way home.

Grocery shopping was always a painful experience for me.

On one of our shopping trips I was in the store at one of my usual spots while my mother shopped; the self-serve bar-b-que chicken rotisserie. Sometimes I would watch the live lobsters in the tiny freshwater tank by the meat counter. You could smell those bar-b-que chickens throughout the whole store.

I think the smell is what always drew me over to them.

I had never experienced the sheer joy of taking one of the chickens off the rack and putting it inside a foil bag. I had never experienced the sheer joy of eating one of those chickens right from the foil bag. My mother always said they were too expensive. Oh, how I would dream of devouring one of those chickens. I would devour it exactly like Wile E. Coyote dreamt of devouring the Roadrunner on the weekly cartoon show. But just like the Coyote I would forever be licking my chops wondering what might have been.

On this day an elderly lady tapped me on the shoulder; she asked me if my mother was in the store. After replying that she was the lady asked me to take her to my mother. My mother was over in the frozen food aisle and the lady followed right behind me.

“Would you mind if I bought the boy a chicken?” she asked my mother.

I could not believe what I was hearing. A total stranger wanted to buy me my first bar-b-que chicken in a foil bag. I guess it was the drool running down my chin while watching the chickens turning under the heat lamps that had me reeking of desperation on that afternoon.

“Sure,” my mother replied without any hesitation.

Within five minutes I was the proud owner of my own foil bag with my own hot bar-b-que chicken inside. After repeatedly thanking this total stranger for her kindness, she left the store and I never saw her again. Although every week I continued to watch those chickens, lightning never struck twice and I never got another one of those Dominion bar-b-que chickens again.

But, at least I was now one up on the Coyote.

Meep! Meep!

My brother and I had very few toys or games. I remember we were given money from my grandmother to buy a Coleco Stanley Cup Power Play tabletop hockey game. It was so cool, it had an over the center puck dropper, score tower, pop-up goal lights and there was even a small replica Stanley Cup. We played that game for hours upon hours on our bedroom floor and needless to say I was always the blue and white Toronto team. I must have had a bit of a bad temper back then because I smashed the game and broke it with my hockey stick during an argument with my brother. We had been arguing over the score during one of our games.

I also used my imagination a lot pretending I was a bus or truck driver while sitting at the end of my bed. The rounded footboard would act as my steering wheels while I shifted my imaginary gear shift. I picked up and dropped off hundreds of imaginary passengers while driving my imaginary bus inside my bedroom.

For the most part my only outdoor activity other than riding my bike was playing road or ice hockey and my shins would always get banged up and bruised. For protection I remember having to resort to taping strips of the orange plastic Hot Wheels track to my skinny legs because my mother could not afford to buy me real shin pads. I had also been given my first pair of hand me down skates. They were way too tight and killed my feet, but I didn't care. I still spent hours upon hours every winter playing ice hockey up at Ranee Field.

I never played any road hockey in the summer, but during the fall, winter and spring months I was always outside playing road hockey. There were always enough friends around who also loved playing. Every season I made up teams, a schedule, kept stats and handed out homemade awards. The awards were nothing but a puck screwed onto a wooden base that I had made at school in the woodshop. I used the Dymo self-adhesive gold plastic labels for the names and dates. Looking back during my first five years while living on Flemington Rd, there is no doubt playing road hockey occupied most of my free time.

It would also be at least two years before we had a television. My mother was in no hurry for us to have a TV. She would always tell my brother and me there was never anything good to watch on television. How she knew this I still have no idea since we had no TV. To her television was nothing but a supreme time waster and we should be doing more productive things with our free time she always told us.

Seriously, we were the only family I knew living in the Jungle that had no TV. For a couple years I had to listen to the Leaf games on a crummy little yellow AM radio we had in our kitchen. I can still remember for every game having to rotate the channel tuning knob from my mother’s favorite 590 CKEY at one end over to 1430 CKFH at the other end of the dial.

Our first television was given to us by my nanna and poppy who were my grandparents on my father’s side. I vaguely remember it was them who brought us down the big black & white console television from their home in Aurora. They had just gotten a new coloured television and after hearing that we had no TV they decided to give us their old one.

When we got the television, it was perfect timing for me. Back in the early 70’s City-Tv was channel 79 on the UHF dial. City featured the Friday night Baby Blue Movie at midnight. All the boys at school would always talk about the previous week's movie. And not wanting to look like a stick in the mud, I talked as if I watched them also although I never really did because I had no TV.

My number one mission would now be to watch the Baby Blue Movie on our new hand me down television every Friday night. My mother knew all about the movies and she had already forbidden me from ever watching such filth while living under her roof. The one thing I always had to remember was to have a little square patch of black hockey stick tape at the ready. When our television was turned off a tiny bright white spot would appear on the center of the screen for about ten minutes before disappearing. I kept the volume very low and always had an ear open towards my mother’s bedroom down the hall.

If for whatever reason she woke up, I would quickly turn the TV off and place the black tape right on the center of the screen to cover the bright spot. Even when the movie was over I would still need to place the tape over the spot when I went to bed. After turning the TV off, there might as well have been a full moon in our living room because that tiny little spot was very bright. I would always remove the tape first thing Saturday morning when I woke up.

My mother never once woke up and I watched many of the Baby Blue movies. All those titillating soft porn movies like 'The Swedish Fly Girls'. They would be my first foray into watching naked women and experiencing my own sexual gratification all within just twenty feet from the closed bedroom door of the most devout Jehovah’s Witness I ever knew, my mother. Thank Christ my mother was a sound sleeper. Had she ever woken up and caught me watching those movies, I would have been grounded for years.

Although we now had a television, my mother always controlled what and when we could watch it. On most Sunday nights we would all watch television together. Shows like Walt Disney, The Walton’s, Apple's Way, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Sanford And Son, Columbo, and Emergency were some of our favorites.

I was now able to watch hockey on television when my mother would allow me. I no longer had to listen to games on the radio or walk over to a friend’s house to watch the Leafs play. Back in the early seventies, the Leafs were on television just twice a week, Saturday nights on CBC and Wednesday nights on CTV.

Having our own television simply brought a bit of normality into my life because every normal family had at least one television in their home. As the weeks quickly turned into months, I soon discovered that normalities would become few and far between while living under my mother's roof.