I headed north to Barrie for my third annual Grade 1 reunion. Six of us are meeting for lunch.
In 1946, Carol, Helen, Nancy and I were in Grade 1 together at Midland’s 6th Street School. A fifth, Diane, was in Grade 1 that year in Victoria Harbour. The sixth, Liz, is Carol’s younger sister. Each of us is or is closing in on 84.
As I drive past the hay bales, the tall stalks of corn, the splotches of red in the trees, the car’s CD plays Hits of the 50s and 60s. On the outskirts of Orillia, the Brothers Four sing, “Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh so mellow.”
We will remember those Septembers over lunch in a Barrie tearoom today, as we have one day over each of the last three summers.
There is always a pullback in memory to the places we once loved and the people we shared them with. And so, we now meet every summer when Carol makes her way from her home in Alpharetta, Georgia to her sister Liz’s home in Midland.
We catch up on each other’s lives —sort of. Mostly we look back to the lives we shared years ago and conclude how fortunate we were to grow up in the time and place we did.
This year, Carol brings a collection of memorabilia she has unearthed from those long-ago years — mostly pictures and an old autograph book.
There is a picture of our Grade 11 class, the boys hamming it up, at the end of term in 1957 outside Midland Penetanguishene District High School.
Our home room teacher, Muriel Elliott, sits in the middle of the second row. She would later come to Peterborough after her specialty, Latin, was dropped from the curriculum. At that point, she became the librarian at Adam Scott Collegiate.
We found each other and became friends. She is buried in the graveyard of the historic church of St.James on the Lines in her home town of Penetanguishene, not far from my grandparents.
We study the faces, including our own, in that old picture, working out how many we can name. Which is most. Looking later at the copy Carol gave me, I notice the saddle shoes, white bucks and ankle socks. Also the skirts. No slacks for girls in 1957.
Helen and I talk about her uncle, Charlie Parker, a wonderfully colourful character who ran a Midland dance hall called Parkside. He remains the town's longest-serving mayor — 11 years in all back in the days when you had to be elected every year. He deserves some kind of memorial.
Mrs. Watkinson’s name comes up, as it invariably does each time we are together. She taught Grade 2 and was notorious for her fondness for the strap. She hauled both Carol and me into the dreaded cloak room and strapped us for talking in class. We were seven years old for heaven’s sake!
I worried that my mother would find out. Carol had no chance at all on that score since her father taught at the school. Carol has a picture of Mrs. Watkinson. She is surprisingly tiny and smiling sweetly. Looks can be deceiving.
Three hours later we break up, promising to meet again next summer.
As I pull out of the parking lot the Brothers Four are singing, “Deep in December it’s nice to remember….”
Sylvia Sutherland was Peterborough’s mayor from 1985 to 1991 and from 1997 to 2006. She is a contributing columnist at the Peterborough Examiner.
