Frank White - That Went By Fast: My First Hundred Years

That Went By Fast

That Went By Fast

MY FIRST HUNDRED YEARS

Frank White

HARBOUR PUBLISHING

Copyright 2014 Frank White

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, info@accesscopyright.ca.

Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0

www.harbourpublishing.com

Edited by Howard White

Photographs courtesy the White family unless otherwise noted

Text design by Mary White

Dustjacket painting by Kim LaFave

Dustjacket design by Shed Simas

Indexed by Nicola Goshulak

Printed and bound in Canada

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978-1-55017-668-1 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-55017-669-1 (e-book)

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Preface

I Become an Artifact

G etting old isnt all its cracked up to be but it has some plusses. When I trundle down to the shopping centre in Madeira Park people I dont know greet me like a long-lost friend. Ive lived in Pender Harbour sixty years and never did feel part of the place before, but now they treat me like a local hero. When I put out the book about my early years in 2013 they put on a do for me in the old ranger station and half the town turned outthe good half at that. I guess what has happened is that at a hundred I have outlived all my enemies. Everybody thats left always seems to be glad to see Ive lived another day. I guess thats good, I dont know. Its something.

When I was fifty and still had most of my marbles, all people wanted me to tell them was why their car stalled at the intersection. Now that everything is starting to get hazy, theyre not satisfied unless I can tell them the meaning of life. Luckily that has become easier. I just look wise and say no matter what happens, the girls are just as pretty as they ever were. If Id said that back when I was only seventy, they would have called me a dirty old man, but at a hundred it goes over big.

The next thing, they want to know all the changes youve seen. The biggest one. I say, Oh, girls are harder to fool now. They laugh like Id cracked the joke of the century. But the truth is, I was never able to fool any girls then or now.

When I was a young fellow I was pretty sure I was going to be a great man and go down in history. Then when I saw how tough that was I decided to settle for just making a lot of money. Then when I saw how hard that was I settled for just earning a living and keeping my wife and kids fed and clothed, and even that was touch and go at times. Id got used to thinking my life hadnt amounted to much and it seemed most people agreed with me on that. Now its, Oh, you rode in a horse and buggy? You worked on a steam donkey show? Your girlfriend was a flapper? You ran a cable shovel? You hunted basking sharks? You sold gas at forty cents a gallon? You should write a book!

For a good part of my life I had the sense of being a little behind the times, then completely out of date, but by hanging on as long as I have it seems Ive gone right off the scale and become an object of historical interest. And, you know? It was the easiest thing I ever did. All I had to do was wait.

To tell the truth, when I try to think whats changed not all that much seems different from when I started. I feel lucky. It seems to me I have lived in one of historys good stretches where nothing too bad or too crazy happened. I have to remind myself Ive lived through the two greatest wars in history, the deadliest plague in history, the worst depression in history, and Ive seen them go from the horse and buggy to the Mars rover. But you have to stop to think about that. You dont really notice history when youre living it. You dont really remember that most homes had outdoor plumbing or that women wore skirts down to the ground back then. Looking back, its not the wars and the plagues and the revolutions in taste and technology you remember but the personal things. Dumb things.

You still feel bad you never kissed the cute girl from down the road when you were five. I still feel a rush of fresh panic thinking about that stupid damn stunt I pulled as a kid that almost killed a man, ninety years later. You remember your first daughter taking her first step, all the promise that seemed to represent, promise you somehow feel you missed out on because you were too busy chasing your tail. Now that daughters children have children and it all seems just the blink of an eye. I see peoples faces crumpling with age like scraps of paper in a fire. Where did the time go? All my life Ive been putting things off, especially the good things, the things I knew were most important but I thought could wait. Now at a hundred the hardest thing to get used to istheres just no time left. Youre forced to look at all these dumb damn things youve done and say, well I guess that was it. I guess that was my life. There is nothing like an ending to make things fall into place.

Frank White

Madeira Park, BC, May 10, 2014

Valley Boy

B efore I get into the meat of this book, which covers the stumbling around I did between the ages of thirty-five and a hundred, Im going to take a quick spin through my first thirty-five years even though I wrote about it at excessive length in my first book, Milk Spills and One-Log Loads. I dont like to repeat myself but since only .00005 percent of the Canadian population read that other book, I guess I cant assume everybody knows what was said. Luckily my recollections are inconsistent enough that the second telling might seem like entirely new stories, but those who cant stand the thought of hearing them again are free to start at Chapter Two.

I was born in Sumas, Washington, in 1914, just as the First World War was about to begin. My parents had a farm in Aldergrove, BC, and Sumas had the nearest hospital, so I became an American of convenience. People have told me I could claim US citizenship and double up on my old age pension but I never got around to it. My Canadian one creates enough paperwork to drive me nuts as it is. For years now they have been claiming I owe them $40,000 because I got married without asking their permission or something, but I hope to die before they show up at my door to collect. Then they can have anything they find, I wont care.