Finding 35

7. Pre-School

In my pre-school kindergarten years – yes years – I went there for two years (ages 3 and 4), my Aunt Lorna often looked after me.  She is my mother’s youngest sister, and the baby of her family.  The one story that is recounted to me, for what seems like every time I am with Lorna and someone new, is how she used to pick me up from day care everyday at lunch, and well, one day she was late.  It was probably about 10 minutes or so, but apparently I went on for ages that she forgot about me!  I was forgotten about and left to fend for myself.  Either I made it a really big deal of it, or Lorna likes to over dramatize my experience of loneliness and abandonment at the age of four.  Either way, it is just one of the two big stories that connect Lorna and me. 

Lorna would have been a real hippie I’m guessing, and from the pictures I’ve seen of those days she was, long hair with flared jeans and flowers.  She even drove a Beetle!  I think I considered Lorna my girlfriend.  When she got married to Mike the Biker, I was so angry!  I was about 5 years old, and I couldn’t believe she was in love with someone else!  Who was this guy?  He was big and burly, loved motor cycles, and worked for the coast guard.  Mike was a lot of fun though as the years went on, a cool uncle, but at the time, I couldn’t believe he was marrying my Lorna!

I’ll never forget their wedding, and I have the scar to prove it.  I recall it was a hot summer day, the sun shinning and barely a cloud in the sky.  We had parked our white Peugeot on the side of the street and had to walk up a small hill to the church.  I don’t remember the wedding ceremony at all, but I vividly remember the events after.  Leaving the ceremony, I was angry that Lorna got married, and I started running back to the car in burgundy shorts, a white shirt and some sort of jacket.  I was running away from everyone as fast as my little 5-year-old legs could carry me.  Downhill I ran, faster and faster, gaining momentum until I tripped and stumbled and down I went.  I must have cried like a banshee, as I cut my knee on a rock and blood was all over my leg.  Ok, so it was a little pebble, smaller than a pebble, more like something the size of a grain of rice, maybe smaller than a grain of rice, but it hurt like heck and blood was running down my leg.  And that’s all I remember of that accident, other than being in the car with my mom applying pressure to stop the bleeding, and dealing with my screaming.  For what seemed like months later, the scab was constantly being picked.  My mother picked at it with a needle, and discovered the pebble had gotten lodged underneath the skin and it had to be dug out.  I remember sitting on the sofa in our living room and my mom performing surgery on my knee removing a rock from underneath my skin with a sewing needle, I mean a real needle that she used for real sewing.  Didn’t we have hospitals back in the early 1970’s?

With much squirming and after several attempts made by my mother, the rock came out and the scab finally healed.  I still have the scar.  That would be my first of many scars from unfulfilled love.  Lorna and Mike would settle down to live in Dartmouth, not to far from our house, and Lorna would be one of my mom’s closest friends.