BBQ Chicken In A Foil Bag.

Even after 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 and so much better than when I lived at my grandmother's house in Willowdale. Most importantly I had friends; it was like going from famine to feast in a very short period of time because I now had so many friends that I was allowed to associate with.

It sure seemed like back in those early days 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 living on Byng Ave. Living in Lawrence Heights also meant many of our new friends were also living right in our neighborhood.

We were all Jungle bunnies.

As I reflect back on those early days we literally had nothing in the way of material possessions. I never complained or asked for things I wanted because I knew there was no money. I always knew in my heart eventually things would get better for us. Although, for the first few years we really 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.

We had the basics so what else did we really need?

I never remember having much of a wardrobe or various clothes 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 apartment and I can never forget the constant nauseous chlorine smell in our bedroom from all the wet laundry. The smell would slowly dissipate as the 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.

I was also growing like a weed during my pre-teenage years and I always seemed to be wearing pants that were a tad too short. My mother would always let the hem out, but that would only be a temporary solution. I was the brunt of many schoolyard jokes about my short pants. I was called Jethro and some other kids called me Patches because I always had big iron on patches on my knees. Yet, as cruel and mean as some kids could be, I never remember being mad at my mother for sending me to school looking like I did. I just always believed in time things were eventually going to get better for all three of us.

My mother always cooked our meals and she never bought 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 of all time, creamed salmon with green peas on toast and tuna 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. Unlike today, canned salmon and tuna must have been really cheap back then because we sure seemed to eat an awful lot of it.

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

I loved the banana bread and the peanut butter cookies my mother would always bake. We always had 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 containers. She would always save the glass containers and use them for our Jell-O. We easily had well over a dozen of them in our cupboard. If we were not eating plain Jell-O, we were eating Jell-O with fruit cocktail mixed in. On some special occasions, we would have Jell-O mixed with powder milk crystals then whipped up with the electric beater. I always called that desert Jungle mousse and it actually was pretty good.

My mother would only buy the powdered milk when 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 always 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 sole responsibility 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 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.

One day I am 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 out of the foil bag. My mother always said they were too expensive. Oh, how I dreamed 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 a 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 owner of my own foil bag with my own 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. 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 and pop-up goal lights. 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.

We also used our imagination a lot pretending we were bus or truck drivers while sitting at the end of our beds. Our rounded footboards would act as our steering wheels while we shifted our imaginary gear shifts. I picked up and dropped off hundreds of imaginary passengers while driving my imaginary bus inside our bedroom.

For the most part, my only outdoor activity other than riding my bike was playing road or ice hockey. My shins would always get banged up and bruised. For protection I remember having to resort to taping strips of 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 too tight and killed my feet, but I didn't care. I still spent many hours every winter playing ice hockey up at Ranee Field.

I never played 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. I made up teams, a schedule and I kept stats and handed out homemade awards. The awards were nothing but a puck screwed onto a wooden base 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 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. 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 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 screen for about ten minutes before disappearing. I kept the volume very low and always had an ear open towards my mother’s room.

If for whatever reason she woke up, I would quickly turn the TV off and place the black tape on the center of the screen to cover the bright spot. Even when the movie was over I would still place the tape over the spot when I went to bed. On those Friday nights 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 very 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 watched. 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.