Large Fierce Mammal

Rural Nova Scotia has spawned some strange ditties.

One of the summer jobs I had while attending university was as night watchman at what was then called the “Adult Residential Centre” at Dayspring, Lunenburg County. A vast and rambling structure known locally as “the poor farm”, the ARC dated from darker times when the mentally ill and the destitute, unwed mothers cast off by their families as irretrievably soiled and disgraced, the malformed and the mutated, as well as those who were then referred to as “mentally retarded”, were thrown together under the care of the state. Before the pharmaceutical industry gave us drugs to lock up the mind, physical restraint was the norm, and the building contained a basement and several attics full of thick walled spartan cells complete with heavy rings set at convenient locations on walls and floor. Most of the building was demolished when what is now LaHave Manor was built, absorbing staff and “residents”. What’s left of the old structure is the two sections at its furthest extremities, now employed as offices and meeting spaces by the Municipality of the District of Lunenburg as the Municipal Activity and Recreation Centre or MARC, and an almost forgotten cemetery on the summit of the hill behind.

On one ward that housed most of the lighter needs cases lived an old guy named Albert who was as spry as anything but crazy as a coot. Lovable though, and he’d sing for you, with very little encouragement, a strange ditty I’ve never heard anywhere else. It went like this:

I went to the store to buy a jum,
Knocked on the door but nobody come!
Oh he smashed through the window
And he broke through the glass,
Down came old Jesus slidin’ on his ass!

Never mind what the hell a “jum” is. Albert was from somewhere way out in the woods and singing this never failed to break him up.

Now rewind slightly to the early seventies while I was still in high school and my mother worked at Lunenburg’s Harbour View Haven home for special care. Every Sunday, one of the local clergymen, a different reverend each week, would rotate through conducting services for the residents. At this time, a tiny birdlike toothless crone the staff referred to as “Nanny” kind of fitted the same mold as Albert, only less spry. She needed help to get around. She also had an entertaining way of eating the hard candies she liked that kind of looked like she was trying to swallow her own head as she sucked them into oblivion.

Now Nanny had a ditty of her own, and an interesting sense of timing. One Sunday, while seated with her thin white hair fluffily quoifed amid the flock attending the weekly service, she found herself still bursting with song as the hymn that was being sung ended. So into the silence that briefly existed between the end of the hymn and the start of the sermon she dropped this gem:

Asshole asshole,
Daddy shot a bear!
Shot him up the asshole,
Never touched a hair!

With all due respect to the clergyman of the day, I don’t know how you follow an act like that.