Les Sept Ans Perdu of Gabriel Wortman

With many thoroughly francophone relatives and with many more relatives deep into French Immersion, you’d think I’d know better than to type out a headline like the one above.

As at happens I do - its a joke upon myself, for a book I laboured over for many years and never produced.

The seven years lost of Gave Wortman refers to the mystery of just where were Gabe, father Paul and Mom Evelyn for the seven years between when Gabe was conceived (I am thinking in Moncton) and when he returned to enter primary school - (again I am thinking Moncton).

Entering Primary School for the first time being one of those awkward occasions in America where they demand real documents —— documents  like birth certificates and citizenship papers.

We have Paul - in his own words - in places like Fitchburg, Cleveland and Phoenix - sometimes in the real rough parts of those burgs as well.

Shades of “I’ve been everywhere man, smelt the desert air, man, I been everywhere.”

A real hellraiser....

I can firmly place Paul at his parents home at 43 Edgett Avenue, downtown Moncton in the summer of 1966 and again, at 749 Hillsborough Road in the rural part of Riverview in the summer of 1974.

But the good folks at Elections Canada can’t seem to place Paul & Evelyn anywhere in Canada for the 1968 and 1972 federal elections - and in those days, the voters lists were like a mini and public census of all of Canada...

((PS : Do remember the old days, when they stuck the voters lists up on telephone poles- BY LAW - so you could run out and discover that the man at Number 68 worked for a dog food company ?

Can’t do that with voters lists today, of course - it would provoke too many trigger warnings among the vulnerable.

Even the bare piano legs on my piano now have to be covered up with a warning label cloth lest they arouse impure - unkind - thoughts in people like Elizabeth Stuart Bowdler and Mary Whitehouse...))