December 2, 2020

Dear Desmond, Corban, Jaxon, Rowan, Ember, Jasper, and Eve;

I miss you all! You are all my grandchildren, and I am your Grampa.

Janet Diana Heron, my Daddy as born in 1928 and his name was Kenneth David Brand. They were married in 1956.

They had 4 boys and 1 girl,

1. Glenn Richard
2. John David Alexander
3. Andrew William
4. Laurence Douglas Charles
5. Diana Elizabeth

Us four boys were born in Calgary, Alberta and my little sister, Diana, was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba

Can you guess which one is me?

No, I have a question I’m hoping you can help me answer. First of all, living in a large family can be hard, especially if you always want things to be fair. But, really, I just want to know why does Diana get to have four brothers and I only have three brothers? it just doesn’t seem fair to me!

My MUM was going to be a nurse, and was even in school to become one, but then she met my dad, fell in love, and a different plan emerged. They decided to re-populate the earth instead!

We moved from Calgary to Winnipeg when I was six years old, in 1968.

I have some memories of Calgary. I can almost remember the neighbour who lived two doors down from me. I will call him Rusty for now.

The street we lived on was pretty ordinary, I can’t remember the house number, but I do remember the street, it was 30th Avenue, Southwest, Calgary, Alberta.

Our local school was Glenbrook Elementary school, and my kindergarten was a separate building across the street. It was a log cabin! and Beside an outdoor ice rink in the winter time, that was just a grassy field in the summer for some reason.

Our house had no driveway in the front, and the back alley that took us to our rear driveway. On one side of the driveway, which was gravel, we had a wooden fort. Yes! Picture log standing up and down, with a doorway but no door, a ladder that went up to a second level.

My friend from two doors down, Rusty, had an idea! Dirt bomb! Yay! Of course we were smart enough not to ask her parents permission, they always say no! So, we put dirt in a jar, put on the list, and Rusty went upstairs in the Fort, which has a clear view of the ground below. I stood on the other side of the driveway.

Vicky! I remember his name I may be an old person but I remembered! So Vicky through the dirt bomb at me, it missed me, it shattered on the cement sidewalk and I shielded my eyes at the last moment, so when the glass shards flew in all directions…

I still have the scar from the stitches!

A big shard of glass in bedded itself in my right forearm. So, my dad, he usually was looking after us all, while my Mum was at work, at Super-S drugs, was not very happy about this, even though my eyes were ok!

I had my first time experience with Dettol,

I wonder what happened to Vicky?

Another memory I have was chasing my older brother John around our house, outside in the yard. They were gates on each side of the house going from the front yard to the backyard. John ran through one of the gates, and then slammed it closed! In my face! And so this nail that was sticking out of the gate it’s just my height, went in and out of my forehead! All I remember about this after that is of course, that hall but, also, standing in the bathtub with water running while my dad spanked my brother, I could hear at all.

That same bathroom was on the bedroom level of our split level home. There’s two stories about that bathroom.

1) The Eggo shampoo bottle the dared to brag that it was unbreakable

• I guess I was a pretty intelligent kid because I remember reading on the label of the huge plastic jug,
• NEW! UNBREAKABLE BOTTLE!
• Well, I just had to find out if this was true! So somehow I got a kitchen chair to the bathroom. Climbing up on it, I lifted the shampoo bottle into the air, (over the sink of course!) And I dropped it! Lo and behold it didn’t break! So then I climbed up on top of the counter and I dropped it from a little bit higher… I don’t know how many trials I gave it but eventually I got it high enough in the air that I proved that it was all a lie! And then I realized… as I watched the shampoo going down the drain from the totally destroyed bottle, that my mom and dad would probably find out. That’s all a blank now.
• 2) And the door lock that I figured out how to lock without locking it.
• Our bathroom had a lock on it where are you turn the knob on the inside counter clockwise, and then pushed it in to lock it. I noticed one day that if you held the outside knob steady, that the door didn’t lock when you closed it! So I tried again, and still didn’t, then again and again and I guess at some point to things happen. I was on the outside, to test if it was locked of course, and I let go of both. When I told my dad that the bathroom door was locked I remember him trying to open it and telling me to “get lost”. So I went and found my oldest brother Glen, and asked him what that meant.
• What do you think it meant?
• My mom always bake bread, so of course I want to try it! What better place than under the house in the crawlspace! I have flour, water, and well… It didn’t turn out. But Lucky for me my mom and dad never could get in there them being too big and all.
• My brother Glen was there and always has been an inventor. So one day he took apart our little race cars, and attach the propeller to one of the axles and hooked up the battery and showed me! Wow! What a better idea but to see if I could stop in with my chubby little sausage pointer finger!
• Did I stop it?
• There was a lot of blood, and I don’t recall if my parents were told, we were in the basement work room.
• We had a border who had a little boy about the same age as me. A border is someone who pays money to live in your house with you. The border slept in my room and her little boy slept in my room but in a different bed. The first couple of weeks maybe he would cry and cry until I sleep. Then one night it happened no crying! Well, by this time I gotten used to him crying, so… I got up and punched him and went back to bed, and he cried until we both went to sleep.
• In this last to hear there’s another big word coming up!

• COSMETICS

• I don’t know what those were but our border sold them, and when she would get an order if she would use these boxes that she had to put them in. We had also gone on a trip to Vancouver that past summer and so there was this whole collection of pinecones! It turns out that one of us kids Glen, John, Andrew or Lawrence noticed that these cosmetic boxes, which were all flat and in the stack, in our borders bedroom, We’re just the right size for those poor, lonely, frozen, homeless pinecones! So, one of us put each pinecone into their own little box. Then the nosey little border just had to go and tell my father, but she didn’t know who did it. My father didn’t know who did it, and three of my brothers didn’t know who did it, but since my dad had a strap in his hand while he was asking us there is no way that I was going to be some kind of idiot and tell him that it was me! He’d spank me My last-minute plan kind of backfired on me though, we all got spanked and for some reason my brothers weren’t very happy with me that day.