Trinidadians learned a lot from the British but one thing that never caught on was forming a line. Apparently the British were very good at it. I was told that if two Brits happened to be standing next to each other a third one would show up and a queue would begin to form. Trinidadians never saw the point.
I can remember being the first to arrive at a bus stop and being the last to get on the bus. It could have been worse. I can imagine being the first to arrive at the bus stop and being the last to try to get on and the bus being full. I would then be left watching the people that had arrived after me through the bus windows while the bus took off. I would then have to wait for the next bus and start to panic thinking of the possibility of my life passing me by while I waited for buses I would never catch. Luckily that never happened.
Another concept was that of “Trinidadian time” which implied some special time system that only Trinidadians knew about that was not synchronized with the world clocks.
Some Trinidadians wore watches but you began to suspect they were only using them to accessorize with their clothes. They never actually looked at the watches; or maybe someone gave them the watch but never explained what the watch was for or how to use it.
(Later on, Marilyn’s younger brother Gerald came to live with us in Canada and he was never on time so I bought him a watch but he never wore it.)
If we decided to go to a movie in Port of Spain – say the 8 pm show – Raymond would putter around as if he had all the time in the world and then suddenly realize at 7:55 pm that we were going to be late. Then we would jump into the car and barrel down the highway at mach speeds arriving about 40 minutes after the show was supposed to have started. Of course the movie would not have started and in fact they would not have yet opened the doors to let people in. That’s because the people that owned the theatre also operated on Trinidadian time and even if they didn’t believe in it, they knew that most of their patrons were like Raymond and would be late so they might as well operate in Trinidadian time.
When they did open the doors (which were quite wide), they would only open them enough such that one person could get through. The stairs leading up to the doors were shaped like a funnel – wide at the bottom and narrower at the top. Once you got into the funnel, you just did your best to stay upright while the crowd dragged you towards the doors. I held Marilyn’s hand but she was often further down the funnel and holding on for dear life. It was a major struggle – mayhem actually – but once you got into the theatre it was often as quiet as a church yard. Weird.
Of course, one could imagine that you and everyone around would learn from this experience and eventually do things differently but of course the next time we went to the movie it would be exactly the same. Amazing.
I did get married by the way – in a Catholic Church in Arima. I promised I would become a catholic and bring our child up as a catholic but I lied.
A major highlight was my sister singing at the wedding. She had a beautiful voice that filled the church.
I didn’t invite any of the teachers to the reception because I wasn’t paying for it. It didn’t matter because they invited themselves anyway – as did a few politicians.
My parents were at the wedding as well. Before the wedding, I drove them around the island and I remember enjoying going around some of the hairpin turns as fast as I could to their detriment but they never said anything. We stopped for a hamburger but I forgot to tell Mom about the Trinidadian hot sauce. That was interesting.
That evening after I dropped them off, I was invited to visit one of my students who lived off a track in the country. When I backed out of their place, her brother tried to give me hand signals so that I wouldn’t back into the ditch. I could never understand Trinidadian hand signals – they were just distracting – so I did back into the ditch and put a 5 inch diameter hole in the side of the car.
The car was due back to the rental the following afternoon. Raymond knew someone who did body work in their back yard so I took the car over there. The next morning, I picked up the car and you could not tell it had been damaged. The only question I got from the rental company when i brought the car back was “the clutch seems a bit soft, why is that”. I just shrugged my shoulders indicating that I had no idea and left without having to pay any extra.
Back to the wedding: for years afterwards my Mom complained about not getting a piece of the wedding cake. “What ever happened to that wedding cake” she would say. I would claim ignorance.
The wedding cake was quite large – rum cake covered over with icing. There was so much rum in the cake that it could have lasted for decades before it went bad. It actually just sat in the kitchen at 39 Green Street for months during which I probably took a nibble every other day.
Did we cut the cake and pass out pieces like people do? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. It’s a bit of a blur.
I’m not sure if Mom thought we would put a piece of cake in a box and mail it to her? Was she aware that the Trinidad post office worked on Trinidad time and that the timeline for international post was infinity? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions.
After the wedding, we lived at 39 Green Street above the Hop Wo Steam Laundry until we left for Canada.
After we moved to Canada we often returned to Trinidad in the summers. On one of those trips, I decided to take a week and go to Barbados. Kim was about 5 or 6 at the time. I got a hold of a travel agent in Port of Spain and told them what I wanted but I never got confirmation back about the hotel. The phone system was so bad that I could never get through to them again but I assumed that they must have booked the hotel so we went ahead. We arrived at the hotel around midnight to find that it was closed and under construction.
One door closes and another one opens if you are just plain lucky which I was and often have been.
Someone walking by came up to us and asked us what the problem was so we explained our predicament. They said that there was a new hotel under development just around the corner. The rooms were mostly completed but the hotel had not yet opened for business. They offered to introduce us to the developer.
The developer let us stay there and it turned out to be a wonderful place to stay. One of the people that worked for the developer liked to cook so the developer let him stay in a shack on the property if he would cook for the guests. The ”chef” would swim out in the mornings with some gear and get the fish which he would cook that night for dinner. To top it off, his mother had come to stay with him from some other part of the island. She and Kim took a liking to each other and she offered to babysit Kim any time we wanted. It couldn’t have worked out better if it had been planned.
Another aside: Choo Kong (Marilyn’s Dad) was from mainland China. He spoke very little english. I liked the guy even though he could never pronounce my name (called me Beer). When I had first met Marilyn I called up one time and he answered. I said “I’d like to speak with Marilyn”. He said “No one here by that name” and he hung up the phone. That’s when I found out that he only knew his children by their Chinese names – Milan instead of Marilyn.
Choo Kong knew I liked cha siu bao (a dim sum) so he would often have it delivered to me at the school at lunch time. Choo Kong was also a good cook so often made dinner for us.
Choo Kong visited us in Ottawa one time. He had never seen a vacuum cleaner so was always vacuuming the place during the time he stayed. He was an interesting man – wished I had known him better.
In closing: Marilyn still lives in the US but her two brothers have since passed away. Raymond had become a successful actor, stage director and producer in Trinidad. You can find some info on him through Wikipedia by searching for “Raymond Choo Kong”.
I don’t have many photos from those days but I’ll include a few in a following post.
WR Foster 