HUMAN WRECKAGE

Boom!

Della, our neighbour two doors up, is the mother of four boys, a matching middle set of twins included. When Della was pregnant with her fourth son she somewhat despondently asked Ann, “Do you want a baby?” Until the pandemic walloped our world as we knew it, Ann and I had been patiently training Della’s eldest boy as our holiday house-sitter.

Our street has since been overrun by a gang of screeching kids. I love the noise and activity. The black Star Trek Borg cube down the street releases its brood a few times a day. Sometimes the Amazon Prime people in the Cape Cod monster house let their special deliveries off the lot. An activities bubble has formed among these few addresses. The chaos is always overseen by an adult, perhaps the parents draw lots.

Before the first snow fell on October sixteenth, I was puttering around the front yard of the Crooked 9, the garage door was open. Della was marching up and down the sidewalk, one eye on her iPhone screen and one eye on her cabin fevered herd. I asked her what she and her husband and the other families were planning for Halloween because neither Ann nor I are prepared to distribute treats on the blades of hockey sticks. Della said she didn’t know. Della said this 2020 Halloween was shaping up to be the strangest one ever. I disagreed.

“There are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is go on and bleed.” Mister Prime Minister, how far are you prepared to go to ensure public order and safety? “Just watch me.”

The Front de liberation du Quebec (FLQ) was a terror group intent on transforming the province of Quebec into an independent country, a sort of workers’ paradise akin to Cuba albeit with harsher winters. History tells us that it’s highly unlikely America’s CIA would’ve abided that particular political model abutting the Vermont and New York state borders. Active since about 1962, its methods of sedition included bombings, armed bank robberies, kidnapping and ultimately, murder. By October 1970, the FLQ was no laughing matter. Canada’s prime minister at that time was pere Trudeau. Comparing Pierre to fils Justin, our current first minister, is pretty much a similar exercise to comparing John Lennon’s music to his son Julian’s. You recognize some similarities and you’re inclined to grant the kid the benefit of the doubt, but…

By invoking the War Measures Act, Ottawa effectively curtailed civil liberties in Montreal and its environs by granting various law enforcement agencies sweeping powers of arrest and detainment. Fifty years on, the Bloc Quebecois, the federal separatist party (I know, I know), is demanding an official apology for this humiliating manifestation of Canadian oppression and tyranny.

I was ten in 1970 and so I thought people with helmets and guns on the streets of my town was pretty darned neat. It’s important to remember too that these soldiers were not foreign troops, invaders. Anyway, the bigger news story that year was the break up of the Beatles. Almost as big was news that Halloween, like a Montreal Canadiens Stanley Cup parade, would be celebrated as usual. The only caveat was that trick-or-treating had to take place immediately after school let out, in the afternoon daylight, based on the assumption that the FLQ would only murder kids after dark and only Anglophone ones at that.

In those days the major Halloween myth was that evil people inserted pins and razor blades into the in-season Macintosh apples they handed out. So, it was prudent not to stray too far from the street you lived on where you knew who most of the people were. Well, didn’t that fear-informed strategy blow up like an FLQ-infused Canada Post mailbox in 1970?

A member of Quebec’s National Assembly lived six or seven streets over. The premier’s sister lived another block or so from there. These homes were heavily guarded by members of the Canadian Armed Forces. Gee, where else is an unsupervised kid going to go? I’d yet to pick up the habit of habitual swearing and so I can only say in retrospect that those two treat stops were not only eerie but very fucking cool. Those few moments of suspense at those addresses were almost unbearable because while I didn’t want anything bad to happen while I was there, I wanted something bad to happen while I was there.

An invisible disease isn’t quite as fun as a military occupation for kids. Mindful of this simple fact, Ann and I will prepare individual treat bags for the kids on our street. We’ll deliver them early before any activities get started – should they even do. And then lights out. We’re afraid that some strange children might be bringing more home from school than just their homework. Maybe Della’s correct, 2020 will be the weirdest Halloween ever. 

             

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of memoir since 2013. Sign up for e-mail alerts from the Crooked 9, use that thingy on the right. The second wave and winter are coming; you’ll need a distraction.