OUCH!!! MORE THAN six decades later, I can still feel that long, black umbrella come down across my back. It was Huntsville, Ont., late 1950s, the dead of winter. My buddies, Eric and Brent, and I had been “hitchin’ ”—grabbing on to car bumpers as they pulled up to stop signs, then sliding along for a block or two before letting go of the bumper and drifting into a soft snowbank. I had barely stopped when the umbrella landed. Winnie Trainor’s umbrella. She had been watching from her little apartment on the corner of Minerva and Centre streets, and she was personally putting an end to this foolishness.
I never quite knew what to make of Winnie. She would have then been in her early 70s. Only a week earlier, she had stopped me on Main Street as I walked home from school, pulled out a folded clipping from the local weekly, the Forester, and began praising me for a hat trick in town-league hockey. She felt a kinship because her sister, Marie, had married my grandfather’s brother, Roy, after whom I was named. My grandfather, Tom McCormick, later chief ranger of Algonquin Provincial Park, had been a fire ranger when Canadian artist Tom Thomson came to the park each spring to paint. Tom McCormick thought Tom Thomson “a lazy bum,” as he seemed not to have real work, swore, drank, and was considered a womanizer.
Winnie visited my family frequently, both in Huntsville and in the park, where my grandparents had a cottage on Lake of Two Rivers and she had one on Canoe Lake, where Thomson’s body was mysteriously found floating in the summer of 1917. I knew only that she lived alone, had never married, was considered very eccentric, and, family lore had it,
