Richard Pilling - the early years

There were nine of us – two families, really – an older group born in the 1940’s and another group born in the 1950’s. My brother, Richard, was part of the second group.

Where our back yard ended, a lovely, sloped west-facing foothill began, a small one, covered with purple shooting stars in the summer days and fireflies at night. Gophers would pop their heads up first and then their whole boides from their small holes.

A patch of trembling Aspen grew at the bottom of the hill.

In the winter this is the hill where Richard tobogganed. In the spring it was where he tried to fly kites.

The snow-capped Rocky Mountains, eighty miles away, could be seen from our front room window, summer and winter.

Soon after Richard was born, Grandmother Edna and Grandfather Will Pilling moved across the street from us.

When Richard could walk Grandma had her hand in his, taking care of him and he soon knew the way to their house. None of the rest of us ever questioned why he was a regular drinker of Coke over there and we were not.

Richard and Glen liked hot cereal for breakfast in the morning. I remember coming home for a visit and seeing that Wyora made them oatmeal for breakfast. One liked to eat it with blue food coloring added and the other like it with green, so she would make their respective bowls each morning. That didn’t last long, for soon one of them began to prefer Red River cereal in the morning, so Wyora made two pots of porridge – Red River and Quaker Oats. Breakfast at its best.

I have no idea why I mentioned breakfast that Richard loved as a child, for what he really shared with all of his siblings is a love of ice-cream. Ours was a home where ice-cream was a regular treat, freely and often available, no flavour left untested. Doesn’t every family have a spoon left right in the 2 ½ gallon tubs of ice-cream that is in their freezer? Even now we describe the size of serving we wish to have as a “Pilling-sized” bowl, freely acknowledging that though it may not be right, we like to eat it out of cereal bowls that can hardly contain the size of scoops we put in it.

Richard always loved books. When he was young he would spend his allowance on comic books. First there was one cardboard box of them, then two, then more.
“Comic books are fine,” said his dad, when there was hardly enough room in the bedroom to stack all of the comics. “There are worse things a boy could spend his allowance on.”

Richard graduated to reading Zane Grey – not one, but the whole series of them. His love of the books went into adulthood. He is the only person I know has purchased his own set of bound Zane Grey’s – a flashback to his childhood.

When he was young, Richard’s body was a couple of years ahead of how big he was. He had no idea how large he was. One day he came into the front room, and did a somersault onto the couch. He didn’t have a clear idea of where he was going and the heel of his shoe chipped off a piece of the new stereo console that his dad had just purchased that week. It is hard to know who felt worse, Richard or his dad.

Richard was strong and athletic; he played the tuba in the Calgary Stampede Band when it was first formed. Richard was big enough to carry the instrument and smart enough to play it. He marched with that band through Grades X, XI and XII.

Richard’s love of being in the band was only matched by his love of sports.

He played high school basketball and football and had decided after Grade XII, that he would go back for a fourth year of high school to play football for one more year, even though he had successful passed all of his courses and could have gone on to university.

“Hey,” said his brother-in-law, Greg Bates, “I noticed that the university football team is having tryouts. Why don’t you go over there and see if you could make their team.”

And that is how Richard entered university – to get on the football team, he had to take 3 university courses ... and so took five, and his love of reading history began.

More from me greiving the loss of Richard ... later.

Arta