Schmengie, you just described my childhood EXACTLY as I remember it.
I grew up in a tiny house. Truth is, it would be considered abject poverty. When my Father's dad (my Grandfather) died in 1957 (months before I was born), my father took in his mother and took on his father's debts. Until I was nine years old, I lived in a one bedroom house. I slept on a folding cot in the living room. My grandmother slept on the couch. The house had no bathroom or bath tub. There was a toilet and shower stall in the basement. Bathing was done in a galvanized steel laundry tub filled with water from a kettle.
But I had NO CONCEPT of poverty. I was just a regular kid and, to the best of my knowledge, my friends saw me as a regular kid. Only much later (probably as a teenager), after my parents worked us out of poverty, did I look back and realize, "Holy cow, we were dirt poor". But in 1965, I though I was living a perfectly normal life.
There was a girl named "Gale" who lived 4 houses south of me. I remember playing with her all the time. I vividly recall that she had a cowboy hat and we would play with our politically incorrect silver cap pistols...firing at each other from cover behind the living room chairs. It seemed 100% normal. Again, I would look back at those times and it wasn't until about 20 years later that I realized Gale had Down's Syndrome.
I played with two brothers who lived on my block. I remember that one had oddly contorted limbs and had trouble keeping up with the rest of us...but it was no big deal. I knew they were Indians (this was long before anybody used the word "aboriginal") but that really meant nothing. Years later, I would come to understand that the one brother in fact had Polio. In 1965, nobody made a big deal about it.
I had a terrible crush on a girl named "Susan". She lived on my street. We went to school together from kindergarten right up through high school. I didn't see her again for 20 years until, by strange coincidence, she ended up moving back to Winnipeg and buying the house across the street from me. As we became re-acquainted, I suddenly realized that she was Metis. Then I looked at her old school yearbook pictures and thought, "Of course she's Metis...how did I not notice?". She's since moved but she's one of my best friends and we've talked on the phone several times in this last week. From 1963 when we met in Kindergarten to high school graduation in 1976, I never noticed she wasn't white.
That's way things were: Dirt poor white trash, the girl with Down's Syndrome, the Indian with polio and the pretty Metis girl.
And we all thought we were exactly the same.
Boy, were we ignorant
.
