Winnipeg Tarot Co.

I love skating on the river.  The freedom of the blade cutting under my feet, the breeze (hopefully not the cutting wind) around me, the sun shining and not too, too cold (-10 being almost ideal).  My sister and I had some joking debate as she lives in Ottawa and they have the canal and it is wide.  I say yes, but our narrow path is longer, my sister. We hold the record.

With family and work commitments in the ‘peg, I look forward to every visit. I can feel the city breathing it’s culture through it’s defining wind. The sandstone buildings downtown are my reminders of how grounded Winnipeg is and will always be.

When I was in art school in Alberta 17 years ago, we never heard any art or cultural activity happening anywhere else on the prairies. In fact, my friends and I used to say that Winnipeg must be the Mecca, because no one ever said anything about Winnipeg at all, and we all assumed that everyone there was trying to keep it a big secret from the Albertans who would come spoil everything.

It was 9 years before I finally had a chance to travel to Winnipeg, after I had moved to Saskatchewan and found out that indeed Alberta was being held out on by Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Even though I had high hopes, Winnipeg met and exceeded my expectations in every way! Yay Winnipeg!

On one of my first days after moving to Winnipeg I was having my very first malted in the basement of the Bay. It was delicious and as I was strolling around eating it a man walked very close to me and under his breath said, “sodomite”. Wow! I had never been called a sodomite before. It was very strange.

Thanks for the reading. It was awesome.

I had lived in Winnipeg from September 1975 to August 1977 and was sadly moving to Ottawa in the final months of an unhappy marriage. My dear friend lived half a block away from me on River Avenue and we spent a sad final evening together before my departure. A few months before that evening, her cat had run away and we never expected to see it again. As I shouted a final goodbye to my friend before we each entered our separate apartment buildings, a cat came running up the middle of the road towards me - it was the missing cat, come to say its own farewell. It meowed up at me several times, rubbed against my legs, and ran off into the nearby park. It seemed an appropriate ending to my time in Winnipeg.

I was working at Boeing.  The snowstorm I had driven through to get to work had turned into a full blown blizzard even knocking out the power so it was decided to send everyone home.  On the way I stopped at Safeway and bought a cooked chicken and patato salad.  My son and I were sitting in our cold dinning room with our coats on eating the chicken and salad when there was a knock at the door.  To my surprise the person at the door was a cheerful mailman who handed me mail and continued on his rounds.

My parents met in the late 1930s. My mother lived with her family in the North End; my dad was a new city dweller who left the family farm in Garson where his widowed mother worked relentlessly on a small and financially unsustainable acreage. He lived in various rooming houses on Main Street and on Sherbrook during those difficult Depression years as he worked to send money home to his mother and siblings. Eleven years her senior, my dad was much more worldly than my mom and consequently she resisted his advances for several years. But he fell in love, hard, and patiently and persistently courted her. During this time he had other casual girlfriends. Once as my mother waited for a streetcar in the middle of Portage Avenue, he happened to be driving by and had to stop at a red light right next to her with his girlfriend in the passenger seat. Awkward.

My memory is starting to fade but this was one memorable night.  Some friends and I were celebrating our friend Wanda’s birthday and we were at a local club.  The weather was starting to get blustery and we headed back to Wanda’s place in Wolsely to do a bit more celebrating, unaware that a massive storm was on its way.  It wasn’t long into the night when we looked outside and saw the drifts had built up so high that the street was completely blocked.  Apparantly our party was going to last all night and into the next day as well.  I don’t remember how many of us there were but I do remember it was a small apartment and there were a fair number of us.  We had a gigantic magnum of Henckel Trocken and an other substances that kept us all quite happy into the night. We were stocked up and socked in….it was a party to remember!!

As a young boy growing up in Northern Manitoba, I would always look forward to the rare weekends where our swim club would make the long nine hour trek to the Pan Am Pool for provincial competitions.  What was so magical about the Pan Am then was the Aquatic Museum.  A veritable treasure trove of sports memorabilia which at that time would boggle the mind of a ten-year-old Thompson boy.  Even when I moved down here, the Pan Am would still have new stuff for me to discover.  Especially with its renovation before the ‘99 Pan Americans.

But now, the Aquatic Museum is gone from the Pool, housed in the unglamourous environs of storage, somewhere.  And the aura of the place, my Pan Am Pool, has faded to a dull patina.  I’ve wandered the halls less and less, with the walls and buildings that now have the charm of a military bunker.  It’s sad, really - memories that were so strong of a place held dear in your childhood packed away in storage boxes to be unearthed by people with little understanding of what they’ve found.

Hopefully those people will find the magic that I found.  And put it back where it belongs.  That’s such a Winnipeg feeling, isn’t it?

Karl E.

Who knew life would start out like this??!!!  I was supposed to born earlier in the year but decided to choose the most memorable day possible.  My mother, who is a smart woman, decided to go to the hospital the day before I was born.  It was a good thing she did for the next day it snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed.  The day I chose to be born was March 4, 1966.  It is one of the worst winter blizzard days in the history of Winnipeg.  Of course I don’t remember the day but I do hear stories from other people and read the news archives.  Happy Birthday to me..