Her boobs were big and droopy for a twelve-year-old. She wasn’t very popular and made up for it by being an exhibitionist. She would show off those bare boobs from her bedroom window on the second floor of her red-brick, three-story home in the tony Moore Park neighbourhood of Toronto where I grew up. I was also twelve but very flat-chested and reclusive. I stared up at those two big brown nipples in abject awe. Then she stood up, turned around and shook her bare-bottomed booty at me. I cried and I don’t know whether that was because I was afraid or jealous.

Her name was Diana, and she is one of the memorable characters I grew up with. I lived in the last house on Saint Clair Avenue east of Mount Pleasant. Saint Clair ended at our house and Harper Avenue began. It was perpendicular to Saint Clair. It made for a good area for us neighbourhood kids to play games such as hide-and-seek.

Our house was on a ravine where boogiemen lurked. One time one of the boogiemen came out to the street and lured me and my brother, aged six and seven, to the woods. My eight-year-old sister stayed back a bit. Mr. Boogieman stopped and turned around. My brother and I were right there when he pulled down his pants and grabbed his penis, which was at my eye level,  and said, “What’s this?”

To which I replied, “A dinkylinker,” thinking You dummy. Don’t you know what a dinkylinker is? Right then Mrs. Rowntree, our crabby housekeeper/nanny, came to the front door of our house and called for us. She was about a football field away. We came running.

My parents called the police who interrogated us about what this boogieman looked like, but all I remembered was something long and skin-coloured, round and shiny at the end, sticking out of a bunch of bushy, dark hair.

We liked getting into mischief in our neighbourhood at Saint Clair and Harper Avenue. We played nicky nicky nine doors on the Halls because Mrs. Hall was grouchy. We put dog poo on the doorstep, attached a string to the door knocker, went a ways from the front door, hid behind a bush and tugged on the string a few times to create a few knocks. Mrs. Hall came to the door to find nobody, not even a boogieman. She did find dog poo on her front step. She called our mom who did not get angry. She just said, “That Mrs. Hall, she is grouchy!”

Another trick was getting a roll of toilet paper and holding it up—one kid on one side of the street holding one end and another kid on the other side of the street holding the other end. So, when a car came down to the end of Saint Clair, and had to turn right up Harper Avenue, they were driving straight into a line of toilet paper which we held at about windshield height.

There were a couple of older boys who lived next door—must have been about 16 years old when I was about six. Whenever they saw me, they would yell, “Hello Whothe!” I never really understood why they called me, “Whothe” instead of “Rose,” until later, that is. It is because I could not pronounce my r’s and my s’s, so I called myself “Whothemawee Pawwett” (instead of Rosemary Parrett). Although “Whothe” was supposed to be funny (I think), the fact that I had a lisp was not at all funny. It was the reason I was bullied as a child. I remember smarty pants Susan Wishart, who lived up Harper Avenue, slapped me across the face for no reason, other than I could talk pwopewly.

But my being bullied as a youngster is a whole other stowee detailed in a piece I wrote (and got published) called “Peeface.”