A visit with Charles Nichols

My stepfather's brother, Charles Nichols, was the editor of the old Toronto Telegram newspaper. My interest in reading began with Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and Charles sent me copies of the newspaper with excerpts from a then new Bond novel. Anyhow, my mother and I were driving to Woodstock, Ontario and stopped to visit Charles at his Yorkville home in Toronto around 1968. Everything was run down. We sat in the backyard, the grass uncut, and for supper he brought out a tureen of lukewarm soup; there was a butter dish and my mother whispered to me that the butter was rancid. Then Charles recounted that as a reporter he had visited Hitler's bunker at the end of the War and that there were Christmas cards for Hitler lying on the bunker's floor. Then he commented that he wasn't too impressed with hippies, they annoyed him; he said they hadn't earned their beards. What would he think of today's hipsters? These two comments of his have stayed with me all of these years. It was a rather strained visit made more so because when we prepared to leave our car wouldn't start and we had to stay the night. I remember paint peeling from the ceiling in the upstairs bedroom where I slept that night.

Childhood days at St. Joseph's Oratory

These 15K year old caves below an area in Montreal are an incredible discovery. Photographs of the caves make it look like the walls are lined with brick, but this is stratified rock as I learned in high school geography class (Mr. McGee?), and the ceiling looks as though it was carved out by people. This also reminds me of when we were kids and used to take the bus to St. Joseph's Oratory, a few miles from where we lived, and we'd walk around looking at the thousands of crutches that belonged to people Saint Brother Andre (he's been made a saint) healed, the smell of candles and incense, Brother Andre's heart in a container in a separate room and the heart was stolen by someone and returned many years later, Brother Andre's corpse (minus his heart) lay in a black granite casket with little notes folded and squeezed between the cracks of the casket with requests for healing of various sorts. What a great place to grow up! You won't find this in white bread North America! But I also remember that one winter we discovered man-made caves located, I believe, to the left of the Oratory building, below where the garden of the Stations of the Cross was located, as you stood looking up from Queen Mary Road. We would enter these "caves" and walk around exploring. Always exploring. Our parents didn't know anything of our adventures because we never thought to tell them and would they really care? Probably not, we weren't yet filled with the fear of predators, clowns, deviants, or pornographers. After time spent there, when it was dark at 5 p.m., we'd take the bus home with frost bitten toes in the short dark winter days.

Images of St. Joseph's Oratory, Montreal: