Where does memory leave off and fiction take over? Some events from those summers at my father’s shop are crystal clear, like memory sign-posts. It’s that area between them which vexes me. I can no longer say for certain what really occurred. My father used to evolve his stories over the years, not letting all those pesky facts stand in the way. I wonder sometimes if I’m just like him.

Let’s take a little trip back to the Junction, back to the early 1970s. Even then it was long past the railway days. It was still dry though – I mean no booze. You had to go west of Runnymede to get a drink. What did I care? I was just a kid. Think of Alumacraft, where dad made windows and doors, as home base. Vacant lot next door. The glove shop across the street. That was grandpa and Nanny’s place, the Queen’s City Leatherworks. Guffin’s Hardware, Sid Fink proprietor. Marsh’s Hardware. Marsh could always make me laugh. Claire Morgan’s Pianos. The drugstore on the corner. Behind the drugstore, a fire escape. We would climb the stairs and slide down the pole as we imagined firemen did. The CPR lunch. Ross’s junk store, where Dad bought me my first record player. Jimmy the Taylor. The burger joint wasn’t there yet. In those days it was a diner called June and Bill’s. Coffee and tea to go in paper cups, milk and sugar in the tea, teabag left in.

We played a game involving spray paint cans salvaged from the garbage of some business or other. The kids from the lane would stand in a circle around the spray can, and take turns pelting it with rocks and chunks of cement. The winner threw the rock that punctured the can and made it dance, spraying the last bits of paint around the lane.

We also played conkers, a game of battling chestnuts. We would drill a hole through a chestnut, feed a shoelace through the hole and knot the end of the lace. Then we’d challenge one another to chestnut fights.  The idea was to take turns whacking each other’s chestnut with our own. The winner was the one left with an intact chestnut.

Jimmy J didn’t mess around with kids games. He was already into his life of crime by that time. His criminal career began with small fires and ended in the Big House. Somewhere in between Jimmy J let all the cattle out of the stockyards.

I remember or I think I remember or I imagine I remember the day it happened. Cattle wandering down Ryding Avenue and Maria St, cattle on Runnymede, on Keele, cattle on Dundas. I remember or imagine I remember green pick-up trucks with modern day vaqueros standing in the back – buckeroos – reata-men. Cowboys wearing construction boots, white, blood-stained smocks and blue bulging hearing protectors, swinging their lariats, herding the cattle back to St. Clair, back to the abattoir.

Woop-ti-yi-yo, git along little dogie.