Going to the Zoo

June 21, 2023 – Calgary Airport

---

Someone once told Grandpa Bob, he would give him a dollar if Bob would shut up for five minutes. Three minutes later his dollar was safe. 

---

Air travel wasn’t a thing when Grandpa Robert Wells and Grandma Eleanor Fallows immigrated to Canada.  Their separate journeys from the Liverpool docks to St John’s, NB, and on to Moose Jaw by train in the early 1900s, took about three weeks.

Bear and I are heading to Calgary airport today.  We will be back where Grandpa and Grandma started their journey in eight hours. 

---

---

---

I do remember Grandpa Bob.  He was a gregarious character, who talked a lot and smelled like pipe tobacco.  When I was eight years old and growing a bit taller, he said to me,

“You will be a man before your mother”.

I was too young at the time to catch the humour, but I never forgot the line.

Grandparents, even ones we never met, have a way of entering our consciousness through family history and folklore.  I didn’t know them well, but Grandpa and Grandma Wells are integral to who I have become as an adult.  The older I get, the more conscious I am of how important those family connections are.

Over the next two weeks we will walk in the footsteps of Grandpa and Grandma Wells, and those who came before them, in their homeland.   For those of you who have a family relationship, I hope that the journey will help you make a deeper connection to your Wells roots.

For those on the outside looking in, it will be like …

… going to the zoo.

---

---

One of my earliest memories of Grandpa Bob involves looking for his teeth in a ditch. 

Grandpa was visiting Harrison Elwood in Arcola in the summer of 1961.  Harrison was driving Grandpa back to the farm after their visit (which may have involved a few beer).  As they crested Tester’s Hill they encountered a motor-grader maintaining the gravel road.  I don’t recall if the car actually hit the grader, or if they swerved violently to miss it, either way the result was that Grandpa was slammed against the door of the car so hard his false teeth flew out the open window. 

The retirees returned to the farm, rattled but unhurt. Later, they organized a search party and we all returned to the site of the incident to scour the ditch for Grandpa’s teeth.

The missing dentures were found, cleaned, and returned to Grandpa’s smiling face.

---

---