Too Close to the Falls: A Memoir
(eBook)

Grouping Information

Book Cover Information

Hoopla Extract Information

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(
    [year] => 1999
    [artist] => Catherine Gildiner
    [fiction] => 
    [coverImageUrl] => https://cover.hoopladigital.com/ecw_9781554902330_270.jpeg
    [titleId] => 13629984
    [isbn] => 9781554902330
    [abridged] => 
    [language] => ENGLISH
    [profanity] => 
    [title] => Too Close to the Falls
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    [pages] => 350
    [children] => 
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                    [name] => Catherine Gildiner
                    [relationship] => AUTHOR
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            [0] => Biography & Autobiography
            [1] => Women
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    [price] => 1.83
    [id] => 13629984
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    [synopsis] => Heartbreaking and wicked: a memoir of stunning beauty and remarkable grace. Improbable friendships and brushes with death. A schoolgirl affecting the course of aboriginal politics. Elvis and cocktails and Catholicism and the secrets buried deep beneath a place that may be another, undiscovered Love Canal - Lewiston, New York. Too Close to the Falls is an exquisite, haunting return, through time and memory, to the heart of Catherine Gildiner's childhood.
And what a childhood it was ... CATHERINE GILDINER has a Ph.D. in psychology and has been in private, clinical practice for seventeen years. She writes a psychological advice column for Chatelaine Magazine and has written numerous newspaper articles. She lives with her husband and her three children in Toronto, and is on a competitive rowing team. Too Close to the Falls is her first book.
Over half a century ago I grew up in Lewiston, a small town in western New York, a few miles north of Niagara Falls on the Canadian border. As the Falls can be seen from the Canadian and American sides from different perspectives, so can Lewiston. It is a sleepy town, protected from the rest of the world geographically, nestled at the bottom of the steep shale Niagara Escarpment on one side and the Niagara River on the other. The river's appearance, however, is deceptive. While it seems calm, rarely making waves, it has deadly whirlpools swirling on its surface which can suck anything into their vortices in seconds.

My father, a pharmacist, owned a drugstore in the nearby honeymoon capital of Niagara Falls. My mother, a math teacher by training rather than inclination, was an active participant in the historical society. Lewiston actually had a few historical claims to fame, which my mother eagerly hyped. The word cocktail was invented there, Charles Dickens stayed overnight at the Frontier House, the local inn, and Lafayette gave a speech from a balcony on the main street. Our home, which had thirteen trees in the yard that were planted when there were thirteen states, was used to billet soldiers in the War of 1812. It was called into action by history yet again for the Underground Railroad to smuggle slaves across the Niagara River to freedom in Canada.

My parents longed for a child for many years; however, when they were not blessed, they gracefully settled into an orderly life of community service. Then I unexpectedly arrived, the only child of suddenly bewildered older, conservative, devoutly Catholic parents.

I seem to have been "born eccentric" - a phrase my mother uttered frequently as a way of absolving herself of responsibility. By today's standards I would have been labelled with attention deficit disorder, a hyperactive child born with some adrenal problem that made her more prone to rough-and-tumble play than was normal for a girl. Fortunately I was born fifty years ago and simply called "busy" and "bossy," the possessor of an Irish temper.

I was at the hub of the town because I worked in my father's drugstore from the age of four. This was not exploitive child labour but rather what the town pediatrician prescribed. When my mother explained to him that I had gone over the top of the playground swings making a 360-degree loop and had been knocked unconscious twice, had to be removed from a cherry tree the previous summer by the fire department, done Ed Sullivan imitations for money at Helms's Dry Goods Store, all before I'd hit kindergarten, Dr. Laughton dutifully wrote down all this information, laid down his clipboard with certainty, and said that I had worms and needed Fletcher's Castoria. His fallback position (in case when I was dewormed no hyperactive worms crept from any orifice) was for me to burn off my energy by working at manual labour in my father's store. He explained that we all had metronomes inside our bodies and mine was simply ticking faster than most; I had to do more work than
    [url] => https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/13629984
    [pa] => 
    [subtitle] => A Memoir
    [publisher] => ECW Press
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