OUT OF THIN AIR

the truth. His good ladder had been quietly spirited away and the sides used to make aerial poles. As Grandfather and the neighbours stood there, wire, poles and even part of the chimney clattered onto the street below. These “poles” fashioned from my Grandfather’s good ladder were the first of many communications towers erected by my father— landmarks in his life and in the development of radio on Prince Edward Island.

When he was eventually found, Dad received one of the sternest lectures of his young life. It began of course, with the familiar “Nothing good will ever come from this wireless nonsense, Keith.” Only this time it ended louder and sterner with “The insurance business will give you a good living. And you can start learning it by working down at the office after school every day from now on.” And donning his coat and hat, Grandfather slammed out of the house, satisfied that he had settled the wireless nonsense for good and headed down to The Charlottetown Club (locally called “The Gentlemen’s Club”) for his nightly game of billiards. But his warnings, threats, and predictions had fallen on deaf ears.

Like a spider reassembling a wrecked web, Dad scurried back to the apparatus he had been working on as soon as his father was off the front porch.

He needed coils. So he raided his mother’s pantry for round oatmeal boxes because they made excellent coils if you wound copper wire tightly around them. The contents were dumped unceremoniously into whatever dish was handy. He already had his ground, the lead pipe in the bathroom. But he needed brass screws.

No doubt Grandfather was at the club convinced that Keith was at home contrite and reflecting on his follies. Not a bit of it. Instead, he was methodically removing every large nut and screw from his parents’ large brass bed. He intended, of course, to put them all back before Grandfather returned; so he very carefuly left the bed standing— precariously, in limbo.

Now, as it happened, billiards like the rest of the day had not gone too well for Grandfather and to Keith’s horror he heard the front door bang followed by his father’s heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. A tired man threw himself on the bed. The bed collapsed, shaking the house and knocking the plaster off the ceiling below and filling his mother’s cherished carpet with lime. A litany of curses, hitherto unheard of in that sedate home, arose from the debris along with cries of anguish

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