STELLA - ROSE

I could never understand her poetry, so I stopped reading it. 

If truth be told, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. This is probably the more accurate depiction: I could never understand her, so I stopped trying.

Back in the heady days of first love, I was attracted to her ‘alternative’ vibe. Stella-Rose was fifteen when we met. She was already hanging out in the booze cans of Yorkville, reading her stifling poetry at open mikes, chain-smoking French Gauloises and falling for a Montreal poet named Leonard Cohen, whom she loved but had never met.

Stella-Rose’s parents always thought their precious daughter – odd though her clothing and hobbies were – was staying over at Mercedes’ house. In their innocence, they never thought it unusual that every Friday and Saturday night during the summer of ‘62, Mercedes held a ‘sleepover.’

Mercedes’ parents never thought to check with Stella-Rose’s parents if their daughter was staying there for the weekend. Both young women played their parents’ innocence beautifully.

September to June, they’d change into their Yorkville costumes in the locker room at school on Friday afternoon, hop the 4:15 Go train to Union Station, then walk or bus the fifteen blocks north to Yorkville. The summer of ‘62, they’d change in the restroom at Union, stow their suburban girl gear in a locker, then head uptown. 

They had the entire process dialed in. It never failed them until it did.

In the summer of ‘62, Stella-Rose babysat for the McIntyre’s – our next-door neighbours from Monday to Thursday. Both parents worked, so Stella-Rose had the run of their place provided she kept a serious eye on the two younger McIntyres – Sofia, age six and Henri, age four. She did an excellent job of it, I must say. She’d give them crafts to do out by the pool while she sat under a large yellow umbrella, writing her terrible poetry and strumming tunelessly on an old beat-up Martin she’d found at the United Church rummage sale back in March.

That summer, I was home recovering from mono, so I’d slip over to the McIntyre’s pool and listen to Stella-Rose’s angst-filled prose that she read aloud to ‘better catch the rhythms and passion of my words.’

I could never figure out what the hell she was trying to say in her lines. But it didn’t matter because Stella-Rose loved her words and thoughts more than enough for both of us.

I want to tell you that Stella-Rose and I were going steady back then. I loved her as only a fifteen-year-old, hormonally super-charged boy could. But for Stella-Rose, I was only an asexual audience of one for her poetry, music, and shared fantasies of a sexually steamy life with Cohen or sometimes Dylan.

Of course, her black, two-piece bathing suit that left just enough for my youthful imagination to feed on – well, let’s say that it wasn’t her stupid poetry that made me love her; it was my out-of-control fantasies of that black bathing suit that drew me to her. Like a summer moth to a bright, hot flame.

One Saturday evening, it all ended.

Unknown to Stella-Rose and Mercedes, Stella-Rose’s parents were attending a client dinner party at the Intercontinental on the evening of September 15^th. While waiting in the hotel lobby for Mr. Roxton’s clients to arrive, Mrs. Roxton happened to see her daughter stroll by on the arm of a bearded, beaded and bombed-out-of-his-mind beatnik kid of indeterminate age.

‘Oh, my god, that’s our Stella-Rose out there,’ shouted Mrs. Roxton.

‘What in hell is she wearing? Hey, wait a minute. Isn’t that Mercedes with her? Shit, Roger, this can’t be happening to us.’

But it was.

The client’s party was missed. A lucrative business opportunity lost.

For the girls, their Yorkville gig was up.

Of course, there was a scene when a frantic Mr. and Mrs. Roxton rushed out onto the sidewalk in front of the Intercontinental and snatched their daughter from the arms of that dissolute man-child.

I’m told it was epic as such ‘rescue’ scenes go.

Someone called the police. There was a lot of shouting, swearing and impossible threats. Stella-Rose apparently kicked one of the officers trying to restrain her. The girls ended up in back of a cruiser on their way to a meeting with a grumpy Sergeant at 53 Division. A totally pissed beat cop angrily ordered her parents to ‘find your damn car. Get your asses over to the 53. It’s on Eglinton, just west of Yonge. Obviously, we’ve all got some serious sorting out to do.’

Stella-Rose never returned to our school. Her father accepted a transfer to the Winnipeg office, so the family left our neighbourhood within a couple of weeks.

Of course, many stories were flying around school for weeks about what happened that night in Yorkville. Mercedes knew, but she wasn’t talking. Her silence just added to the delicious mystery of it all. And that’s just how she wanted it.

Many years later, I sometimes wonder what happened to Winnipeg’s Stella-Rose.

Is she still writing poetry?

Poetry I could never understand back in the sixties. Probably not even now.

First Published. May 4, 2023, in the Canadian e-zine CommuterLit.

The Backstory. I spent my teenage years in Clarkson, a small bedroom community just west of Toronto. The hippie culture of Yorkville in the city's downtown was in full cultural bloom. It was a magnet for teens and others from all over Canada.

Later, when I was just about all grown up, I worked for a child welfare agency. On my caseload, I had a fourteen-year-old girl who was a parent's worst nightmare. She constantly ran away from her group home, and I'd have to go on a hunt to find her in some of the worst flop pads in our town.

It is this outrageous young woman on whom I model Stella-Rose.

Legal Rights. 

SOMETHING DROPPED FROM THE SKY

Arnold ‘Bird’ Swicker dropped silently from the sky precisely between his father’s new Case corn planter and the open barn door.

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.

Bird and I’ve been friends since pre-school. Back then, it was that magical summer space between graduating public school and starting Saunders Secondary an hour away in the rust brown-yellow bus driven a tad recklessly by Bert Goodwin, brother of the mayor, relative-by-marriage-then-messy-divorce to Grace Longdon, Chairwoman of the Temple Lake School Board.

Arnie first believed he should be able to fly – ‘just like that ol’ red-tailed hawk that flies over Foster’s barn looking for a quick meal of chicken wings’ – when we found a plump dead pigeon under my parent’s backyard feeder.

We were ten.

‘We should bury the poor thing,’ I said to Arnie. ‘Give it a decent burial.’

‘Hell, no, Twix, I’m going to take it apart. Figure out what makes it tick. Look at all those feathers on its wings. I’m taking them home to look at under my Doc Evan’s microscope.’ And so he did.

After about a week, Arnie’s mom, looking for the source of a putrid smell coming from Arnie’s room, discovered the rotting, wormy pigeon carcass on the window sill behind the pulled-down blind where Arnie was hiding it from prying eyes. He was grounded for a week and lost the pigeon. But his autopsy on that dead pigeon ignited my friend’s passion for flying.

I remember Arnie asking the school librarian – a Miss Lopo-Suarez – to find him all the books she could that dealt with flying. As I recall, she found four on the library shelves and brought one from home – The Wright Brothers by Fred C. Kelly. ‘My husband’s a pilot,’ she said by way of an explanation which wasn’t.

From then on, flying was all my friend ever talked about. It didn’t take long before everyone started calling him ‘Bird.’

High up in the hayloft of his barn, Bird began putting together his first set of flight ‘wings.’ ‘No point startin’ with the fuselage, Twix. I need to learn what it feels like to fly solo with some homemade wings.’

‘But you can’t ever fly like that ol’ red-tail, Bird. Not ever gonna happen.’

But Bird was set on it. I helped him secretly construct a set of wings from salvaged wood from the cut-offs pile out behind the barn and taped together cardboard sheets we cut from boxes ‘liberated’ from the liquor store and Foodmart in town. On our bikes, we’d carried a lot of flat cardboard boxes from town out to Bird’s farm.

Bird personally cut his ‘flight feathers’ from the cardboard sheets, using a design he drew up in his room at night when his parents thought he was fast asleep. Using some paste-type glue he found in his Dad’s machine shop, Bird carefully anchored each stiff cardboard feather to the left and right side wooden frames. Old leather belts from the bottom drawer of his Dad’s dresser strapped a feathered wing frame securely to each arm. Up in the loft, Bird practiced flapping his wings in a rapid motion he roughly patterned off of the wingbeats of the Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds that were so plentiful in his family’s ‘Victory’ garden.

On the morning of the second Wednesday in August, Bird announced that he was ready to try out the wings. His father was out harvesting in the backfield, and his mother was in town with the United Church women planning their annual Fall fundraiser. There would be no parents around to get in the way.

‘Just you and me, Twix. It’s gonna be fun.’

‘I’m going to launch from the barn peak up there and glide over to the driveshed.’

He pointed out at the shed, easily a half-football field away. It was a crazy idea, but I’d learned a long time ago there was no luck trying to talk sense to Bird when it had anything to do with flying.

I nodded, ‘Good luck,’ and headed down from the loft to a position halfway between the barn and the driveshed.

Bird had practiced climbing from the hayloft onto the edge of the barn’s tin roof and carefully wiggling his way to the peak about twenty feet higher up. Lying on his back alongside the ridge, he unhooked the wing frames from his backpack, then shimmied his way into each wing, cinching the belt straps tightly to his arms.

Once strapped in, Bird made a slow standing motion until he was slowly swaying upright at the peak, wings extended out like that Christ statue hanging from the cross above the main doors at Lady of Mercy RC church across from City Hall.

Flapping his wings in a modified up-down Hummingbird motion, Bird leaned way out beyond the safety of the barn roof peak.

He launched himself into the swirling air currents.

Bird dropped like a giant, brown feathered turd to the barnyard at least fifty feet below. His arms were still beating as he hit the ground in a slow side roll to the left, Bird’s strong side. It was the beating of his arms that saved him.

The left wing hit first, shattering the wooden and cardboard frame into chunks and Bird’s arm and shoulder into three distinct pieces. Followed by three ribs cracking on that side while his forehead bounced off the grass and rocks in front of the Case planter. Somehow, Bird’s right wing and arm survived the fall. The whole thing sounded like when we threw a watermelon from Bird’s mother’s garden out the hayloft door, which exploded with a deep, watery thwack into the barnyard.

Bird wasn’t moving. Unconscious. His left arm and wing frame were twisted in odd shapes over his body. Blood was beginning to trickle from his nose. What appeared to be one of Bird’s front teeth was lying just in front of his open mouth. He was a mess.

I ran into the farmhouse and dialed 9-1-1, yelled the situation into the phone and ran back out into the barnyard.

Volunteer firefighters began arriving in their farm trucks, blue emergency lights strobing on dashboards or fastened to driver-side roofs. They made Bird as comfortable as possible and waited for the Firehall ambulance from town.

Bird recovered, but it took the rest of the summer and into the first months of high school. But he never gave up his wish to fly like the red-tailed hawk that soared every couple of days over the barnyard.

I’m sharing this memory of Bird’s first flight with the cardboard wings because I was just talking to him on the phone.

He called from Changi Airport in Singapore. His plane leaves for Vancouver in about an hour.

He’s not a passenger.

He’s the captain: of a Boeing 777-300ERs – the largest international long-haul passenger jet in the Air Canada fleet.

Everyone still calls him Bird. Even his parents.

First Published. April 17th, 2023, in the popular Canadian e-zine CommuterLit.

The Backstory. As a kid, I was fascinated by flight. I wanted to fly high as the birds in my backyard. So I built some beautiful wings of stiff cardboard that I glued onto crudely constructed wooden frames. In front of my friends, I climbed to the top of my parent's garage and jumped. I fell about ten feet, shattered the wings and my dream. I never flew again.

Decades later, I decided to write a story about a kid's passion for flight. 'Something Fell...' is his story.

Legal Rights.  I own the rights to this story. Please don't 'borrow' it from this blog and publish it somewhere without my permission. Ask me. Tell me what you want to do with it. We probably will be able to work something out.