It's 1958 and a Harmony Guitar offers hope

For those who have been following Gate Lepine’s story, you've undoubtedly noticed that the timeline of the series is all over the map, in no particular order. Today we’re in 1958, next week we might be in 1967. That’s how Gate’s book (Hard Knock Graduate) is laid out - in no particular sequence. I read each chapter like it’s a short story.

Some day I’d like to publish this in book form. Before that happens, I will have to seek advice on how to sequence the storyline. If you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.

I also welcome your comments. I leave that open ended so anything you’d like to say, I’ll read it.

Chapter Twenty-four – The Guitar

Now back to Wendy Avenue and 1958. Jean is regaining some of her strength and she eventually returns to work at the Bon-Air Motel. We now have a son. Jean’s Mom and mine take turns to care for him.

Then there’s Jean’s younger sister, Pauline, who almost lives with us now because she’s baby-sitting a lot. We get by financially with me working steady at the gold mine even with the bills piling up and the hospital hounding me to pay.

(Hospital and doctor’s bills weren’t yet covered by Canada’s social medicine system.)

From one finance company to another, to another, Jean and I keep these bills paid up while we keep getting in debt over our heads due to their high interest rates.

Now you can see how I fell in that trap. We didn’t know Jean would get so sick and things snowballed on us. The unforeseen! Again! It’ll take many years to escape the clutches of these Finance companies. Forget the banks. They wouldn’t lend us anything. No car, no home, no collateral and a “good name” was not enough. We tried but we were refused, even when we tried to buy a house. So we stayed with the finance companies and paid and paid some more. What else could we do? We were trapped.

Now the guitar. That Harmony that I bought a few months back. Now I play it regularly and I know quite a few chords and I begin to sing different songs. I even try my hand at composing some. The guitar holds my sanity together. I just love to pick and sing songs and even write some now, every chance I get.

Not a day goes by without me grabbing my guitar. Each day I begin entering some ideas into a huge notebook. I’m soon keeping a catalogue of all the songs I learned to sing along with some of my own songs in there. It’s a habit that I’ll keep doing to my dying day. All the hits that I loved so, the old Jimmy Rogers and Hank Williams songs, everything. I kept buying these huge notebooks and I had close to a thousand songs listed in them within a few years of starting this habit.

Gate’s apartment in Ottawa today - His life is oranized around his songs

Then my own song creations are growing to the point that I start entering them separately in another book. The guitar is a lifesaver for me. We have no savings and maybe just a couple of bucks left on paydays. We owe so damned much but I’ve got my guitar and I can sing and I can compose.

The dream is seeping into my mind, like the one I used to have about being a hockey player. Now I want to sing in front of people. I dream of recording songs one day or just get some of my songs recorded by a popular artist or a star, somehow, so I can pay these debts off one day and maybe even get out of the mine. Dreams keep you going. Sometimes.

That’s the way it goes on Wendy Avenue in 1958 and 1959. By 1960, things turn around for me again such as it will turn around for a few years in the future. I sat down one day and, just for fun, counted the number of jobs I had worked at. There were thirty-seven of them. Thirty-seven different places. Some I did for a couple of years, others for a few months, some for one month or just one week.

The shortest job I ever held was two and a half hours, digging a huge hole in clay for a construction company, in the rain with a shovel, my boots full of clay. I’m slipping and sliding away when this prick of a boss comes roaring in with, “Get your ass moving! They’re coming in with the tanks!” We were installing gas tanks. I threw the shovel toward him, climbed out of the mud hole and started running after him until he disappeared in a trailer leaving his white hat in the mud. Don’t ask me if I was happy.