Large Fierce Mammal

My parents, Evelyn and Lawrence Whynacht, on their wedding day.

My mother was born and raised into her mid-teens in Montreal, Quebec. Her parents separated shortly after the end of World War II with her mother remaining in Montreal while her father moved back to his birthplace in East Chester, Nova Scotia.

When she was fifteen years old, and against her own mother’s wishes, my mother moved to Nova Scotia where she lived with her father and worked in his lumber company. It was because of this move that, a few years later, she met my father. A native of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, my father was the front man and lead singer for a Lunenburg based country band called Slim Major and his Ranch Boys. You guessed it – he was Slim Major.

Well, ol’ Slim and his posse were playing a dance gig in Chester that my mother attended. My father took one look at her and immediately started down a path that previously had never failed to get all the parts of him that mattered into a girl’s pants. Except it didn’t work this time.

And so it came to pass that, as the saying goes, he chased her until she caught him and each considered the other worth the chase.

After they married, my parents moved to Montreal where my father worked days as an elevator operator, my mother in a laundry and dry cleaning establishment, while he attended night school to learn the new and mysterious arts of radio and television repair. I was conceived in Montreal but missed being born there by three months.

I find it an endearing part of life in the middle part of the last century that the first thing my parents wanted to do when they realized I was on my way was celebrate by going out to their favourite night club to dance and drink a lot of booze.

They often told a story of how the bar’s piano player was engaging the audience by asking couples if they were there because they were celebrating a special occasion. When he learn their reason, he smiled and dedicated his next song to them. As the years went by, this became my mother’s favourite arrangement of that fine tune.